Guessing Is Not Part Of Reading
3:13 PM
Muhammad Yusuf
, Posted in
If a teacher tells a
child to guess what a word is, that teacher is basically saying: “I’m not going
to teach you how to read. I don’t care if you learn to read. You will probably
become a functional illiterate and that’s okay with me.”
Admittedly, many
teachers are in a hammer lock, as superintendents and principals may have
ordered the teachers to use an unworkable pedagogy or be fired.
So I’m not saying the
teacher is thinking those thoughts consciously. I’m saying it’s AS IF the teacher
were thinking those thoughts. The children end up in the same place no matter
how you slice it. For a very simple reason: guessing is NOT reading.
Reading is processing
letters into sounds, from left to right. You don’t study the words as if they
are logos or faces. You don’t look around the whole paragraph. You don’t
analyze the illustrations. You don’t think of what you might know about the
subject. You don’t try to deduce meaning from context. All that is blather and
bogus.
Reading involves a
very simple skill: you read the words. That is, you convert them into the
sounds that the letters represent. As I say, you READ the words. You absolutely
do not guess the words. That is the opposite of reading. It is anti-reading.
We are discussing one
of the most astonishing hoaxes of the 20th century. The Education Establishment
convinced itself (so they claim), and then tried to convince the nation, that
the average person could memorize tens of thousands of words as graphic
designs. Well, as you know from trying to name a celebrity or a famous
painting, and the name escapes you for a minute, naming designs of any
kind can sometimes be very tricky. So the official experts had to come up with
various crutches. Use context. Study the pictures. Guess!
Of course, if a
child does not in fact know how to read, that child has NO CHOICE but to guess.
If you are in Shanghai, walking down a street where the signs are written in
Chinese, you will use every trick in the book to guess what those symbols might
mean. You might think: well, this looks like a place where busses might stop,
I’ll wait here for a bus. You might be right. Or the sign might say: LOADING
ZONE.
If you could actually
read Chinese, you wouldn’t guess, you would know. Can’t read Chinese? Of course
you have to guess. You have to be very clever. You may get a few right; but you
will experience a lot of frustration, waste a lot of time and energy, and often
be wrong.
And that’s a perfect
description of what happens to the victims of Whole Word in our public schools.
Now, if you are smart
enough to be reading this article, you probably could memorize a few thousand
sight-works. Some very smart people actually go to college and read using the
techniques mandated by Whole Word. Typically, these people have headaches;
they’re anxious and uncomfortable; they don’t read for pleasure. So, yes, there
is a small minority of brainy people who can read, however tensely, with
sight-words. You may be one of them, so you might be thinking: what’s the big
deal? I think I could do that.
Please put that
thought out of your head. That thought is one of the big reasons why the frauds
running our educational system could get away with their nonsense for all these
decades. To put it bluntly: the smarter citizens are busy preening; while the
dumber citizens are pushed further down.
You are probably in
the top few percent of the population, intelligence-wise. Let’s look at the
people in the middle; they are lucky to get over 500 sight-words. Let’s look at
the bottom 30%; some of these kids cannot learn 100 sight-words, even after
years of trying. Meanwhile, the rest of their education is on hold. Next thing
they know, they’re in middle school and as miserable as drowning cats.
Predictably, they start showing signs of ADHD. They are given Ritalin. Parents
are told their kids are dyslexic and they’ll never read because of something
wrong with their brains. The whole thing is a nightmare--an unnecessary
nightmare.
So don’t suppose that
because you could learn some sight-words, that therefore little Johnny Doe,
with an IQ of 100, can do anything close. No, he is simply depressed, and
dreaming of the day he can drop out of school and take up a life of crime. In
so far as you support Whole Word in the public schools, you abet that
destruction.
All of this craziness
is contained in that one word: guessing. Major theoreticians (all of these are
people with Ph.D.’s in Education) stated flat-out that when children encounter
a word they don’t know, they should guess or skip it.
For the average child,
this pedagogy is death. Your life as a student is over. You can be a worker of
some kind, but probably a low-level one. Meanwhile, there are jobs and
accomplishments that will be forever out of your reach, but they may have been
easy for you if you had only learned to read.
Correct that: if only
your school had bothered to teach you to read.
CODA: I have a reason
for writing this strongly worded article. I don’t think we can trust the people
who came up with Guessing Is Reading. Nor can we trust many of the other weird
things these alleged experts come up with. I don’t see improvement ahead in
education. I’m afraid we’ll see more of the same old nonsense (like guessing).
We’ll hear a lot about Common Core Standards, Social Justice, 21st-Century
Skills, Authentic Assessment, etc. No matter what the jargon is, the meaning
will basically be: same old, same old. Fact is, we could’ve done much better
throughout the 20th century. Now we’re going into the 21st century on the wrong
foot. But here’s good news: there is so much room for improvement. Why, just
imagine what would happen if schools actually start teaching again.
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