<p>“That is why teachers typically use a combination of both approaches to teach reading.”</p>
<p>Yes-I have three kids. One learned using phonics-and was a later reader while working math problems years ahead of his grade level. The next one demanded I teach her to read at age 3 so I picked up a phonics workbook-she hated it and used beginning readers to teach herself using whole words. The last one was a somewhat early reader who learned using both methods both at home and school.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the older two are terrible at spelling, though we think their father’s mild dyslexia is at play here. The youngest has always been an excellent speller, although she makes far more typos, even though she’s the one who’s grown up with electronic communication. I think the real answer is-there IS no one solution.</p>
<p>I knew we were headed for trouble when my son’s 7th grade honors English teacher told the parents at back to school nite that she wouldn’t be teaching the kids much grammar since she didn’t like teaching it. </p>
<p>Student’s have to take a foreign language in order to learn the past perfect and future perfect tense in school today.</p>
<p>The poor state of writing skills in this country makes me very sad.</p>
<p>My political canvassing this fall exposed me to lots of lawn and seasonal decorations. In urban, rural, and suburban areas alike, many people had signs, mailboxes, welcome mats, etc. with the family name. A MAJORITY were punctuated like this: “The Camaroff’s.”</p>
<p>Most of these were on nice single-family homes in pleasant neighborhoods, and were often themselves expensive-looking custom pieces. (I’m pretty sure that home & garden stores don’t stock the German and Polish names one finds in Wisconsin and Eastern Iowa.) I’d love to believe that there’s just one Camaroff in each house and that he refers to himself using the definite article, but…no.</p>
<p>“The Camaroff’s” is a major pet peeve of mine. </p>
<p>I am not shy in informing shopkeepers and so forth when they have had grammatical or spelling errors in their signage or communication, and why someone should be strung up for it.</p>
<p>This is the first line, and he lost me right there. So for his entire career, he was oblivious to the state of student writing at his own institution. And he uses the excuse that he taught large lecture courses, so I guess he feels he was ‘exempt’ from assigning anything that involved writing (I guess not even some short answer questions), because it would be too time consuming to read and evaluate. And I’m surprised that he never taught any small courses which would require writing --many times, profs teach a combination of smaller, upper level courses and larger, introductory courses. </p>
<p>I’d be curious as to how many students the average high school English teacher has per year, and if it’s over a certain amount, then do those teachers get to assign only multiple choice tests?</p>
<p>Writing instruction doesn’t stop at high school. And it shouldn’t be left to a single discipline to have all the writing assignments at an introductory level. </p>
<p>Why should he complain about the state of writing preparation of college students when writing wasn’t even required for his own classes? Clearly, they didn’t need any writing preparation for his college class…</p>
<p>That was my thought as well. Professors like him are part of the problem. I found it odd that a course in a social science discipline apparently didn’t require students to write data-based researched arguments. I know that’s not true today, at least not at Rutgers.</p>
<p>His larger complaint is that today’s students are lazy and anti-intellectual. He is in his mid 80s. Perhaps we all get to the point when we think, “Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?”</p>
<p>[…] Many couldn’t keep straight when to use “there,” rather than “their” or “they’re,” “threw” instead of “through,” “sight” instead of “site,” “aloud” instead of “allowed,” “Ivy” instead of IV (intravenous), and “stranglers” instead of “stragglers.”</p>
<p>These are some of the exact words my third grader came home with in his homework this week.</p>
<p>Back in the 1950s and before, elite universities were mainly for the social elite. They mainly admitted students from feeder prep schools which got most of their students from the social elite. They admitted some public school students and found them to be the most academically motivated, such that they worried about the conflict between admitting more students with top academics and the need to keep the donations coming from the social elite. Some may long for the world where inherited social status meant that one merely had to do ok (“gentlemen’s C” at an elite college after attending a not-necessarily-academically-elite prep school for the socially elite), rather than strive for top-level academic achievement like the students from the public schools have to. Now, of course, even the scions of the social elite have to do well at prep schools which have upgraded their academic standards in order to have a chance at the elite universities.</p>
<p>Of course, back then, bachelor’s degree attainment was only about 10%, instead of around 30% today. While there is a valid argument that there are some marginal students at the edge of the 30%, there are also plenty of people between the 10% and 30% whose talents would be wasted if they had no opportunity to attend college. Such waste of talent is detrimental to everyone, including the wealthy, whose businesses and investments will not do as well under such conditions of economic waste of talent.</p>
<p>OK, first of all, the welcome mat–it IS “The Camaroffs”, isn’t it? The mat signifies in a way whose house this is. I could care less whose MAT it is, as in “Dang, that’s a nice mat that the Camaroffs have, too bad it’s mispunctuated–now it’s WORTHLESS!”. :)</p>
<p>Next, the life skills bucket for 18-year-olds. Scratch the door-to-door sales (too dangerous), replace it with a summer of farm labor, manual labor, hard labor–something that makes him/her sweat, honest work for honest pay. Makes a kid feel good–I know it did me. Also add basic cooking & laundry skills, and YES, etiquette to the bucket. Good stuff. Any more?</p>
<p>Then, finally, my pet peeve, the non-teaching of English grammar & good writing skills. It’s always been my belief that the basics have to be taught from the inside out. Spelling, sentence diagramming, paragraph construction, and go from there. I had an ancient 7th grade English teacher that had us memorize the 25-word weekly spelling list in order, and extra credit was diagramming the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. Try it sometime–you’ll be talking to yourself.</p>
<p>But my point is all that stuff was absolutely seared into my brain through repetition over an entire school year, so that I had a decent base knowledge by the time I hit high school, then J-school in college. Where I believe the disconnect takes place is in the early grades, most likely junior high (do they even CALL it that anymore?!). What my instructor called learning “The King’s English” is NOT a focus currently, so that when a student takes a creative writing or journalism skills class in high school now, grammar/syntax/construction is supposedly rectified by spell-check. And we know how that turns out. Yep, yucky writing…</p>
Really? It seems that is true only if their last name is actually “Camaroffs”. THeir last name is, I assume, “Camaroff”. </p>
<p>So you’re saying if my name is bovertine Johnson, and I have one million dollars, the correct spelling would be "That million dollars is bovertine Johnsons’ "., not “bovertine Johnson’s” ?</p>
<p>Or in other words, two families - one named Frank, and one named Franks. You spell the possesive the same for both?</p>
<p>May be true. That’s news to me. In that case I learned something new. But I point out I didn’t claim to be a grammar expert. :)</p>
<p>The whole world over, young people exposed to farm and other manual labor head to cities, because farm labor did not make them “feel good” growing up. Are you still doing manual labor on a farm? Farming is honorable and necessary work, but it is very unlikely my children will be farmers, especially since my wife and I are not.</p>
<p>Sales, by contrast, is an important skill for almost everyone. Dating is a form of sales :). I am smarter than one of my bosses, but he created the business largely through his sales and marketing ability – so he deserves to make more money than I do.</p>
<p>I’m a senior in high school and I wholeheartedly agree with what OP is saying. The fact is, many high school seniors don’t have the strong foundations in reading and writing required to handle a college level curriculum. When I was in elementary and middle school, we had a much stronger emphasis put on math skills. However, the school systems are not entirely responsible. Parents who let their children watch TV for 5 hours a day are contributing to this problem. I got a 800 on my SAT writing and 740 in reading, not because I crammed or did 1000 practice questions, but because I read A LOT when I was younger. I was always strong in these subjects because I knew how grammar worked by example.</p>
<p>Also, in some parts of the country, many of the public school students were Jewish, which was no small consideration. There were concerns about changing the culture of the campuses if their ethnic composition changed dramatically.</p>
<p>I mean, heavens, if you’re going to admit Jews, what on earth will come next? Admitting students of both genders to the same schools?</p>
<p>Now, when co-education is nearly universal and something like half of the white kids in the Ivy League are Jewish, we laugh at such concerns. But there was a time when people took them seriously.</p>
<p>On another topic, as long as I’m here, I thought you might like to see another favorite from my collection of appalling typos.</p>
<p>Why the hate on cursive? I can write far faster in cursive than I can in print. Plus, it’s fancy. </p>
<p>OT: My 3rd grade teacher never bothered teaching us cursive, so I made myself learn it in 4th grade by looking at one of those guide things. My 5th grade teacher made us do all writing assignments in cursive and so a habit was formed…</p>
I can write far faster in cursive than I can in print. Plus, it’s fancy. </p>