Month: October 2024

“Make America HATE Again”

John Merrow Uncategorized , , , ,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity

W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Are ‘the best’ and ‘the worst’ of Yeats’s poem groups of people, or is he referring to the human condition, the internal struggle that each of us wages daily between our better angels and our lesser impulses and temptations, between good and evil? The latter reading fits the current presidential race: Democrat Kamala Harris’s platform stresses joy and positivity, while Republican Donald J. Trump has been stirring up negative passions among his supporters. And while those red hats do not say “Make America Hate Again,” they might as well, because the former president and his enablers have made it perfectly acceptable to wallow in bigotry, hatred, threats of violence, and–far too often–violence.

Don’t dismiss Trump as a clown, riffing and rambling and ranting in his interminably long rallies.  His off-the-cuff references to sharks, windmills, and Arnold Palmer’s genitalia may amuse his passionate followers, but this ‘bread and circuses’ approach should not be allowed to obscure what’s really going on, “laughing into fascism.”

November 5th–the most significant election of our lifetimes and perhaps in our nation’s history–is around the corner, and one candidate represents a clear and present danger to America and the world.

Early in October the New York Times printed a special section, “30 Days Until the Election,” to contrast and compare the views of Harris and Trump on major issues.  “Here’s what you need to know,” the Times’s subhead declared. Because I spent 41 years reporting on public education, I was disappointed to find not one word about education or schools. 

In fact, the two platforms’ positions on education could not be more different.  Project 2025, the real GOP platform, calls for the virtual abolition of public education.  Schooling becomes a private family matter, flipping centuries of tradition out the window.  More precisely, that would mean vouchers and what are known as ‘Education Savings Accounts.’  An ESA means that parents can direct their share of education funding to a private school or whatever entity the family is using to educate their children–including themselves.  Homeschooling your children?  Keep the money and spend it as you see fit to ‘educate’ your children, including trips to Disneyland and athletic equipment!  

The Democratic party still believes in what the former Republican party once believed in: Free public education with a common purpose:  to give all children the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills,  and tools they need to thrive as individuals and as citizens of our democracy. In short, Democrats believe in the importance of community.   Project 2025 would abolish the U.S. Department of Education completely, while the Democrats would emphasize the federal responsibility for ensuring that all children–particularly those from low income families, those with handicapping conditions, the homeless, and those whose first language is not English–are treated equitably.  Basically, Democrats believe that all kids should have access to the resources they need, regardless of which state they live in and their family, racial, or religious status.   Project 2025 would end any federal oversight and protection.  

I don’t mean to whitewash the record here, because Democrats in Washington have done as much damage to public schools as Republicans in recent years.  Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” was just as destructive as George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind.”  But it seems likely that having a former high school teacher as Vice President will bring some common sense to Washington and end the federal overreach that characterized those two Administrations.

W. B. Yeats’s magnificent poem, “The Second Coming,” is painfully relevant today, because our center has not been holding, and that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem is an unqualified, self-absorbed would-be dictator and convicted felon with clearly diminished capabilities.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When Yeats composed ‘The Second Coming,’ the world was in turmoil, ravaged by World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 18,000,000 people. Does that sound eerily familiar?  When we cast our ballots, will our ‘better angels’ win out over our selfish and negative impulses? Do the best of us lack all conviction, while the worst of us are full of passionate intensity?  

We will find out on November 5th.

BEWARE ‘THE SCIENCE OF READING’

John Merrow Uncategorized , , , ,

“The Science of Reading” is a real thing, so real that it’s required by law in schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia.  They have been ordered by politicians to adopt what is known as the “Science of Reading,” which mandates ‘evidence-based’ reading instruction, often in the hopes that test scores will improve. (The three states I have lived in in recent years–Massachusetts, New York, and California–have resisted the pressure to jump on this bandwagon, I’m happy to say.)

While this bandwagon has been picking up steam, something unfortunate has been happening: Our kids are reading for pleasure less and less.  For example, only 17 percent of 13-year-olds say they read almost daily for fun, compared to 27 percent in 2012 and 35 percent in 1984. That’s a huge dropoff. 

While we know that correlation is not necessarily causation, could those two developments be connected?  

Let’s start with ‘The Science of Reading.”  Here’s how the newspaper Education Week explains it (with my emphasis added to some words I want you to pay special attention to):  “In a science of reading framework, teachers start by teaching beginning readers the foundations of language in a structured progression—like how individual letters represent sounds, and how those sounds combine to make words. 

That’s Phonics, sounding out words.  In other words, schools and teachers are required by law to teach kids that letters make sounds and, by implication, that they can trust those sounds….

Makes sense, if reading is in fact a science…..

Hold on for a minute, please!  Very often we cannot trust the sounds,  because our language, English, is about as unreliable and unpredictable as possible.  It breaks its own rules willy-nilly.  

My personal favorite example is these three words, which I ask you to say out loud:  Anger, Danger, Hanger.  By the rules of Phonics and the ‘science of reading,’ those three words should rhyme……

Here’s another demonstration of our English language’s weirdness and irregularity, based on a comic routine I found on YouTube a few days ago.

Say this word aloud: EAR

By the rules of Phonics, this word, BEAR, should rhyme with EAR….but it doesn’t

Now that you have learned to pronounce BEAR, it stands to reason that adding a D, making BEARD, will produce a word that is pronounced BARED.  But it’s not; it’s pronounced BEERD.

Back to the rules: EAR and HEAR rhyme, as they should, but HEARD isn’t pronounced HERE-D; instead, it’s pronounced HERD.

And if we add a T to HEAR to make HEART, we don’t get HERE-T.  No, it’s HART.

Back to hard core phonics:  By its rules,  DEAR, FEAR, HEAR, GEAR, and PEAR should rhyme….and they do, with one important exception. Let’s talk about the exception.  What if we add an L to PEAR, to make PEARL.  It should be pronounced PAIR-L, but of course it’s not.  It’s PURR-L.

I wrote about two competing approaches to teaching reading, Phonics and Whole Language (which includes teaching students to recognize some words, not just sound them out), back in January.  You can find that piece here, but below you will find my description of  how one first grade teacher gets her students interested in reading:  

That First Grade teacher often takes pages out of the Whole Language playbook to talk about words that don’t follow the rules of Phonics.  

One day she writes these sentences on the blackboard: COME HERE!  WHERE ARE THE MACHINES?

“OK, kids. On your toes now, because only one of these words follows the rules.”

She asks them to pronounce each word according to the rules they have learned. They do, pronouncing COME with a long O, WHERE with a long E, ARE with a long A, and MACHINES with a long I.  Then she pronounces them correctly, cracking up the children.

“I told you English was tricky and sneaky, but we won’t let it beat us!”

To finish the lesson, she writes HERE on the blackboard and asks the children to sound it out, which they do with ease.  Then she puts a W in front of HERE and challenges them to sound it out.  They rhyme it with HERE.  She replaces the W with T, making THERE, and again asks her students to sound it out.  WHERE and THERE, she explains, break the rules. They will have to learn to recognize them. 

My point then–and now–is that ‘The Science of Reading’ is wildly over-hyped and arguably even dangerous when reading is reduced to drilling in Phonics.  

Never forget these two truths: 1) Every child wants to be able to read because reading gives them both pleasure and power over their environment, and 2) The teaching of reading is both an ART and a SCIENCE.  That is, Phonics is necessary but not sufficient!

I worry that the fervent acolytes for “The Science of Reading” may be taking the joy out of reading, and I know that hucksters are asking school boards to buy their expensive ‘evidence-based’ blah blah blah reading programs. I fear that the focus on “The Science of Reading” may, inadvertently, be producing children who can read but do not and will not, because what they endured to achieve the status of “reader” (by passing state tests) was painful.