Teaching reading. Phonics vs Whole Word

Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg.  Book review in the Wall St Journal.  Unofficial subtitle, Why Johnny Still Can't Read. 
   In today's public schools the debate is over teaching phonics, or teaching the "whole word method".  Surprisingly Seidenberg attribute the "whole word" method to Horace Mann in the 1800s, and phonics to professors of education in the 1900s.  By the late 1900s, when I was parent of three small children, the "whole word" method  was winning.  Granted, whole word is how adults read.  The eye sees a whole word, and by some mysterious, miraculous, and poorly understood power of mind, the word is recognized and everything you need to know about that word, how it is pronounced, what it means, what it suggests,  pops up instantaneously. The eye moves on to the next word.  That's how I read, and how anyone good at reading reads.  Trouble is, the process is poorly understood and cannot be taught.  They never taught it to me, it just came to me after I had been reading for a while.
   Phonics teaches the sounds of each letter, the rules for long and short vowels, and the sounds of common letter combinations like 'th'.  The student is taught to sound out words, letter by letter, sounding them aloud if necessary.  I was taught phonics, and fortunately St. Mary's elementary school  still taught phonics in the early 90s, when my children attended.
   My older two children both learned to read without strain, and went on to successful school careers.  Youngest son had a terrible time learning to read.  I spent a lot of time reading to him, reading with him, coaching and encouraging.  Youngest son lacked that mysterious ability to recognize whole words.  Words were just little black squiggles on the page, all alike.  The only thing that carried him thru was very strong phonics, stronger than I ever had at his age.  He could strike a new word, sound it out, get it (the really hard part of phonics) and press on.  Then he would strike the SAME word, on the SAME page, a couple of lines down, and not recognize it.  He would have to go thru the whole sound it out drill again.  Obviously that whole word recognizer was not working for youngest son.  Happy ending, by sixth grade, things got better for youngest son and his teacher told me "Reads at grade level".  But it was a tough first six years of grade school for him.  
    The point is, children need both phonics, for when they strike a new word, a common occurance at early ages, and the whole word method to become skillful readers.  Whole word cannot be taught, it comes to children after they have been reading for a while.  And to become good readers, children have to read.  Back in my childhood, we had comic books, ten cents, and a trememdous incentive to read.  You wanted to know what Superman was saying to Batman.  All the text was juicy dialog, no boring exposition.   Every kid had a stash, well thumbed, well read, swapped with buddies. Teachers and parents generally disapproved of comics, but we kids loved them. And read them, a lot.  Too bad comics are $5 and up today.  And the Sunday funnies are gone too.
   Another incentive to children's reading is the bed time story.  I read a lot of 'em aloud over the years.  A.A. Milne, L. Frank Baum, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others.  In addition to exposing children to vocabulary and literary conventions,  reading aloud shows the children that Mom and Dad read, and that's incentive for any child to learn how to do it too.    
   

So I watched the Sen Jeff Sessions hearings on TV

It went on and on.  Sessions came across as a decent guy.  Three or four bunches of demonstrators were "escourted" out of the room for yelling and waving signs.  They apparently got into the hearing room as spectators.  I wonder how that happened.  You would think the limited number of tickets to these hearings would go to newsies, politicians, and important citizens. How there were tickets left for scruffy looking demonstrators?   Who knows.
    A number of questions about policy were asked.  I would have answered them thusly, "The attorney general enforces the laws on the books.  If you don't like the current law, and judging by your questions you don't like current law, then pass another law.  But as attorney general I must enforce the laws on the books, not laws you wish were on the books."   Sessions didn't use this reply, which is one reason he is up for attorney general and I am not.  . 
  

Everything gets more expensive, Children and Pets

Two items from the Wall St Journal today. 
1. They figure it costs $230,000 to raise a child today.  That's without allowing for college tuition.  Wow!  I raised three children, all the way to adulthood.  I didn't keep records so I don't know just what I spent, but somehow I don't think it was as bad $230K per child.  Hell, I had to pay $160K per child for college educations.  We didn't scrimp, we sent two of them to Westtown School, and one to Buckingham Brown and Nicholls, we took 'em skiing, sent 'em to summer camp.  Worth every penny,  they all turned out fine, and are a great comfort in my old age.
 
2.  A graph showing US spending on pets, going from just under $30 billion back in 2001 to just over $60 billion today.  Again  Wow!  A second graph broke down 2016 pet spending as $16 billion on vet bills, $24 billion on pet food, and $16 billion on pet medicines and stuff.  I have a cat, very nice beast, and I feed it the $3.50 a bag cheapo dry cat food rather than the $12 a bag fancy dry cat food.  Cat doesn't seem to care.

I have to wonder if either of those numbers is real. 

About that Florida Airport shooter

Apparently the lawyers don't charge anyone with murder anymore.  The Florida shooter was arranged in court today and charged with a laundry list of obscure crimes that I had never heard of, not not murder.  To my way of thinking, shooting five people dead in baggage claim is five counts of murder.  Lawyers of course live in their own little world.  They didn't charge Dylan Roof with murder either. 
  And this perp walked into an FBI office in Alaska and said he was hearing voices in his head.  Now that's gotta be a tip off to even the dumbest cop that this suspect has a screw loose.  So our valiant FBI, instead of dealing with the matter themselves, passes the buck to the local cops, who take the nut case to a mental hospital.  Where some shrink, confronted with a real live homicidal maniac who hears voices in his head, decides he is harmless and turns him loose.  They ever give him his gun back.  I wonder who that highly trained and experienced shrink was.  And why the shrink was unable to recognize a homicidal nut case when presented with one.  If we learned the name of this shrink, maybe the next time the shrink will commit the nut case rather than turning him loose.  It also would be nice to learn the name of the mental hospital involved.  There was a serious screwup here and the society would be better off for castigating those derelict in their duty.
   And a final observation.  If the passengers at Florida have been allowed to carry heat, they would have saved some lives, maybe not all, but enough.  

The paperwork isn't done

So Congressional democrats are saying on TV this morning, regarding the men and women Trump has picked for his administration.  And who need "advice and consent" of the Senate. 
   Of course, the paperwork is never done.  Bureaucrats and Congresscritters  always invent more paperwork.  Was I a democrat, I'd be inventing new paperwork to slow things down and new hoops to jump thru. 

The reproducibility crisis in science

American scientists pour forth a formidable Niagara of scientific papers every year.  Generous federal research money, grants, and the pressure on university professors to publish or perish, help to increase the flow of papers.
  Unfortunately, a high percentage of this flood of papers, cannot be reproduced.  When other scientists attempt to obtain the same results in their lab,  they cannot do it.  The results claimed in the paper simply cannot be reproduced by others. In science, if  the results cannot be reproduced, they must be considered quackery. Not science but B***S***. 
   I experienced the reproducibility problem myself some years ago.  Working on a new medical device product, I consulted the literature looking for ways to do what we needed to do.  I found one, it did what we needed, and I coded it up.  And it worked.  It's just that it didn't work as well as the author claimed.  In fact my realization of the process was exactly 50% low.  The author had claimed twice the performance I was able to obtain in our lab.  Eventually I telephoned the author to ask him for advice.  After a few minutes of conversation, the author somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had left out a factor in his computations, and yes, the algorithm only worked at half the claimed performance.  Damn.  After wasting a good deal of time, I would have done better using the standard Huffman coding algorithm. 
    And, just the other day, the Wall St Journal ran an op ed claiming that all the important medical advances have been made by privately funded research at the big drug companies.  National Institute of Health funding, although ample, had not produced anything of clinical use. 
   Somebody ought to do a study of the effectiveness of federally funded research.  Go back a lot of years.  Tot up the amount of money spent, the number of papers published, and the number of products based on one of the papers that actually made it to market. 

Words of the Weasel Part 50

"Anti-Zionism".  Lefties use this word to describe their feelings about Israel.  But in the real world, it means the same as antisemitism.  Nobody wants to admit to antisemitism in this day and age, so they thunk up a new word that they hope isn't as offensive, while still meaning antisemitism.