Tuesday, December 6, 2022

 Tuesday, December 6, 2022

    I had a chiropractor appointment at noon; I made sure I was on time. Besides the chiropractor's usual treatment, she told me about an exercise she was doing to strengthen her thigh muscles. She writes the alphabet with her foot while holding her leg straight, locking the knee. Someone told me about the exercise before; this time, it caught my interest. 

   I started listening to a podcast on teaching reading today, Sold a Story. It argues that the methods used in the schools for the last forty years rather than teaching effective reading methods were teaching strategies poor readers use. Sold a Story tells how parents became aware of the ineffective teaching methods used during Covid. They saw the schools didn't teach phonics. They taught students to look at the first and last letter of the word and guess the word using a cueing method. Parents were outraged. This has led to this protest and an impending sea change in reading programs.

  I teach phonics. Teaching people not to use phonics in an alphabetic language is plain nuts. However, the Whole Language program has good points. I hope they don't get lost as the pendulum swings the other way. 

   The Whole Language approach taught students to look at the first and last letters of words and guess what the word might be. They called it cueing. It is also inferencing. Cueing, inferencing, or using context clues has its place, particularly in English. The problem is they skipped the step of decoding the word using phonics. 

   The relationship between the sounds and the letters is not a one-to-one correspondence as it is in Italian or Hawaiian. There are six phonically regular pronunciations of the letter a. Each one is nestled in its context. Arriving at an accurate pronunciation through decoding is often hit or miss. However, if you get close enough, you can use the context to figure out the word. Cueing is vital here.

   English is also a stress-based language. The meaning of words can change depending on where the stress is. The word record can have two pronunciations with two different meanings. You need to use context to figure out which is which.

   In English, one word can have multiple meanings. You must use context to figure out which one is applicable. While using the Whole Language approach exclusively is a disaster, so is using phonics exclusively.

   An older friend from over fifty years ago who remains a Facebook friend messaged me that a mayor of a small Wisconsin town was interested in my teaching method. I would love to get my method into school systems. I find it a quick and easy fix for those without learning disabilities who are weak in word recognition. 

  The podcast encouraged me to reach out more to make people aware of my method of teaching phonics. Teachers don't want to teach it because the methods are stultifying. They require drill and memorization. My method teaches people to do what good students do: figure out the words using what knowledge they have. The program doesn't eliminate direct instruction, but the emphasis is on direct instruction on how to learn to read. 

 Today, I had my first session with first-grade I. Her teachers said she had difficulty with reading and needed help. They wanted her to attend the 7 am before-school book club. If they follow the Whole Word method, they would only give her the opportunity to read more; there will be no specific instructions if they follow Marie Clay's method. 

  I asked her if she needed help with reading. She said no. I asked if she had a good memory for words. Yes. Could she figure out words she didn't know? No. I showed her how to decode words. I used the fourth story in the Carpenter materials, showed her how to figure out the words using the sounds the letters represented, and blend those sounds. At one point, I asked her if she knew the sound the letter n made. No. I thought of a word she could read that started with an n, as in now. That's all it took with this child. She had the basics of decoding skills with twenty minutes of instruction. I anticipated she would read on a second-grade level in a month- if I could work with her for three half-hour weekly sessions.

  I worked with I's third-grade brother for half an hour. His mother knew I was a healer. The boy had trouble controlling his anger. His mom took him to a therapist who did play therapy with him. They didn't see results. I don't work behaviorally. Buddhist meditation practices strongly influence my approach. You sit calmly with unpleasant feelings until they go away. Our bad feelings are exacerbated by our hatred of them- or our undue love of them. 

  I explained to J that he should feel comfortable with everything he does with me. On a comfort scale, it had to be at least a 7 out of 10. If it's lower than that, I don't push it. I might with an adult, but never with a child. They're too vulnerable. 

   I teach the clients to monitor their comfort and discomfort with the work. J was wonderful to work with. He got the message loud and clear. He announced that he felt increased tension at one point- a clear signal to stop what we were doing. The work is good when the client feels greater relaxation. That's how we measure the work from minute to minute. Then, there is measuring the results in their regular lives. Did you get angry less frequently? When you did get angry, did it feel less overwhelming? Were you better able to control your behavior when you felt anger? That's what we were looking for, just like the behaviorists. But we're approaching it from a feeling angle rather than a behavioral one. 

  The greatest relaxation came when I said he was a good person because he didn't want to be angry. While self-hatred is good for getting us to the point where we recognize we must change. Once we've crossed that line, self-hatred is counterproductive. Both J's parents have issues with anger. When I pointed out they were people who didn't like that behavior in themselves and were, therefore, good people, I saw the greatest release of tension. Was that coincidental? It was an interesting possibility. 

   I've seen that reaction once before when I pointed out something positive about a parent or informed a child that just because a parent, or any number of people in a biological family, behaved in a particular way, it doesn't doom the child to follow in their footsteps. I don't mean it is easy to overcome, but assuming you're doomed to be like them makes change much harder. 

  Tonight, I heard the county is considering closing Saddle Road not because of the threat of the lava but because of the trouble caused by all the people visiting viewing sites along the road. Besides the unmanageable crowd, people were leaving trash, and some were hiking close to the lava and roasting marshmallows. The lava, anything related to the land, is sacred in the Hawaiian tradition. So many people are disrespectful. It is like desecrating a church. 

   I threw some damp clothes into the dryer for five minutes to remove all the moisture. I prefer line drying; it uses less electricity. While I have solar panels and batteries, they are not enough to run three households for twenty-four hours. Even when the batteries are 100% before the sun goes down, we never make it through the night. We couldn't make it off grid without some series cutbacks.

   Judy finally gave two teachers my contact information. The women are students in Judy's conversion class for adults. When they found out Judy had Orton-Gillingham training in teaching phonics, they asked her to train them. Judy redirected them to me. That would be wonderful. I would love to train teachers in my method. It is readily adaptable to the classroom. I am Orton-Gillingham trained. It required one hundred hours of class presence and an eight-hundred-hour practicum. There are Orton-Gillingham programs that require less time but not less money.

  I have taught volunteer tutors with no educational training the basic principles of The Phonics Discovery System in half an hour, and they saw results. Classroom teachers dread teaching a highly structured and scheduled system. It involves reverting to old ways of teaching that require no thinking on the part of the teachers or the students, and it's boring. TPDS is neither structured nor scheduled.

  With a highly structured and scheduled program, if a student misses a day, there's a problem. There is no problem with TPDS. You can teach all students at their level within the same lesson. The most amazing aspect of the program is it works.

   Many years ago, a first-grade teacher in a Catholic school approached me. She had seen a remarkable difference in her sixth-grade son's reading ability. What had I done? She had yet to make progress with her first graders, and there were only three weeks left of school. I came in and did TPDS using the students' names. I did two half-hour sessions. The teacher told me all her students started playing with the process. Her good students just took off. Her poorer ones made less progress but did improve. If we show students how to learn, they will do it independently. This is fun, as much fun as learning a new video game.