You Eyeballing Me?
Archive for July, 2006
July 28, 2006
July 25, 2006
No More Print Teen People
When I first saw the headlines saying that Teen People was no longer going to be available in print, I thought, “There is a checkout counter god after all.”
And then I thought, “Finally, no more Teen People used as a source in college research papers.” (Yes, when I was teaching a few semesters ago, more than one paper used that rag as a source.)
And then I realized Teen People was still going to be available on the Web.
The really sad thing: It was probably the only source that the students had held in their hands in the publisher’s printed form. That means they a) may have bought some recreational reading material and b) actually had to type whatever content they were quoting from the magazine.
No more. Future issues will be available in electronic format only, which makes the copy-and-paste “research” method the undisputed king of college paper writing.
July 19, 2006
What Phonics Can Teach Us About the Education Debate
To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.
Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”
Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”
The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.
Here We Go ‘Round In Circles
Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”
You know, phonics.
July 18, 2006
He’s a Poet But Didn’t Know It
My kids started swimming lessons at the town lake last week. The kids were in the water with the lifeguards/swim instructors, who were busy assessing each child’s swiming level and then sorting them into groups. After each child demonstrated his or her skill, the lead instructor called his/her name and the group number to which she was assigning the child. “Karen, group 2!”
As one of the youngest kids finished his demonstration, the teacher said, “Omar, group 1!”
And then I heard my five-year-old son, The Duke of Hazard™, who was swirling around nearby say, “Omar. Omar Khayyám.”
I stifled my laughter, confident that the average pre-kindergartner doesn’t know the names of 12th century Pesian poets. Of course, The Duke knows the name not because his parents read him the classics, but because he’d recently watched a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode, in which the daring duo found a Ruby Yacht and returned it to Omar Khayyám (under great duress, I might add).
