Possibilities and goals

"The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation".

I wish I could tell you that I wrote those wise words, but unfortunately it is a quote from a calendar one of my kids (aka my students) gave me for Christmas a few years ago. But isn't that what children should be about? Possibilities. How can they reach or explore their possibilities if they've already been convinced their not capable of achieving what they think is the simplest thing?

To give you an example I had been working with a nine year old boy for about twenty hours and I could see that his reading was improving so I put a book in front of him and told him to read it. His eyes glazed over full of terror and fear as he stumbled out the dreaded words, "It's a chapter book. I can't read chapter books!" I told him he could try the first page and if it was indeed too difficult he could stop. After reading three quarters of the page, he looked up at me with a totally different look in his eyes and announced with disdain that the book was too easy. I asked him if he wanted to try reading a more difficult book and he agreed to try. It wasn't a "chapter book", but the level was much harder than the last book and he read it with ease. He was astonished with his ability to read the book and asked me why it was so easy now. I explained to him that because he had been taught to read with Whole Language he had never been given the steps to decode a word, but since we had been working on establishing those steps all he had to do was rely on what he had learned and reading would be much simpler.

He's a hockey player so I tried to put it in terms he would understand. I told him to imagine that his hockey coach had just told him to go down the ice and score a goal, but had not told him how to skate or handle the puck. "Would that be a fair or successful way of teaching you to score a goal?", I asked. He answered no and added that it wouldn't make any sense. I then explained to him that teaching a child to read with Whole Language is like that hockey coach expecting a goal,but without giving any instruction on how to get one. Because the emphasis with the Whole Language method of reading is to memorize lists of words, but never understand why they say what they do the child is incapable of decoding a word he/she has never seen before. (Decoding simply means figuring out what the word is.) They are never given the steps needed to decode words on their own.

Whole Language also teaches that if the child isn't sure what the words says just guess. I can assure you that this is about the dumbest advice you can give to a struggling reader. By the way this is not just my unsubstantiated opinion. Anyone who has any knowledge of learning methods will know that we all use six laws of learning to assimilate any new information. One of those laws is Primacy which says the first time we learn anything new is the most important time. If we get it wrong the first time it is extremely difficult to rid ourselves of our perception of the new information. If you doubt my premise I want you to remember when someone gave you a new phone number or address and you accidentally transposed the numbers. How long did it take you to get rid of that incorrect number combination? (Now come on I know everyone has experienced that at one time or another). There are so many reasons Whole Language does not work, but I won't continue lising them at this time, but you can be sure that I will talk about them in future posts.

You know as I sit here writing I realize that putting my thoughts down for all the world to see is a pretty scary thing. But more scary to me is what is happening to so many kids and adults who struggle to read. Did you know that 45 % of Canadians are functually illiterate? Did you know that according to Learning Disabilities Association of Canada that 30-70% of young offenders have some kind of difficulty with reading? Did you know that almost 50% of teenage suicides have been "diagnosed" with some kind of learning disability? Now that's scary!
You'll notice that I have put quotation marks around the word, "diagnosed". I will have more to say about that in my next post. (By now you should know that I always have something more to say on the topics of learning and reading.)

As I speak from my heart I hope that someone will have a chance to read this and that it might help just one more struggling reader.