I always tried to tell people it's the shape of the word, and the words represent meanings, not sounds. At least when you asked your mother, "where does it say house?" she showed you.

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As an educator currently working on a Doctorate in Education with a thesis in the area of literacy testing, I'm amazed that we're still having "whole language" vs. "phonics" debates at all.

The BEST book (and one that every educator and parent should read) on the connections between political movements and the history of education in Western civilization is entitled - write this down and order it from Amazon if you like - "Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy" by Canadian professor, researcher and author Brent Davis. This book exposes the etymological and epistemological roots of educational theory like no other.

In fact, I would say with confidence (having done the literature review) that there is NO other comparable book available on the connection between theories of education (How do we learn?) and theories of knowledge (What is the mind? What is knowledge?, etc.)

The truth is simple in its complexity and eclectic in its revelation - there is no single solution. We need to approach educational theory cautiously with an appreciation of various "ways of knowing" if we are ever to advance theories that really change things.

As for the school system(s) in North America, they are designed to create obedient consumers for the prevailing military industrial complex. My emerging documentary on the state of education in America will therefore be entitled "Sheep With Wallets: Exposing the Mind Factories of North America".

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than to read what a noneducator thinks he or she knows what he or she is talking about when it comes to reading.

Just because somebody is a parent doesn't make him or her qualified to write about the so-called "reading wars."

Stick with politics, please.

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The fact there's a debate at all is b/c of politics, not b/c teaching one method to the exclusion of the other (or even suggesting that are only two methods (black and white, see, fundies can reduce anything to two sides) is more effective. In my lifetime, I've seen my mother (30 years + in the same district) go through more "New and Improved" teaching methods than I can count. Every new administration has to shove its own ideas at the kids ("doing" something about education), nevermind the instability of constantly changing the approach and the lack of real assessment (and I'm not talking NCLB testing) as to what actually helps kids learn. I don't claim to know the answers but I can see the system is rotten.

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When folks type in all caps, it becomes more difficult to read, for we depend on those tails above and below the line, those spaces. Curiousity vs CURIOUSITY just seems to carry my eye better, and adds to my reading enjoyment. When some folks first started on the internet, they used all caps....it was easier for new typists....and now very few do. Their own comfort may have taught them. When you want your message to be read, one needs to do all possible to make it easier. Likewise, being careful of one's rhetoric. Strong, sometimes viscious, anit-whatever IS difficult to read. A reasonable tone carries the message better, I feel. Passion can still be reasonable.

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Octavia Butler was one of those writer/thinkers who saw the logical outcome of the current neoconservative social, political and economic agendas. The grim future she imagined is not something that we would want but one it appears we are doomed to get.

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If you look at these words: cog bog dog fog mog, or :goon loon moon noon, then it's obvious no "whole" or impressionistic approach will be able to distinguish them as easily as just recognizing each letter and the sound it represents.

When we can decipher the code, we can make shortcuts, and leave out bits yet still recognize the sense. Language is redundant - it gives us more information than we strictly need to know to get the message - so we don't need to get all of it for it to work. Just the essentials.

The big thing is that using the code should be experienced as fun and valuable if a learner is going to bother learning it.

The "traditional" oppressive authoritarian approach has been to teach the reading code as hard labour, rock-breaking 101 for kids. This goes for any subject you care to choose. Maths, shorthand, French, Latin, typing, whatever.

The "traditional" progressive liberal approach has been one of pious hope that feel-good classroom style will lead to learning osmosis, the kids will suck it up somehow...

Both styles are predicated on a view, conscious or unconscious, that only a minority will ever learn anything properly. And the results, naturally, confirm this very pessimistic view.

But everybody can learn anything, more or less :-). Each successive extension of democracy in world history has shown this - millions of people written off by the old ruling classes as subhuman and unteachable suddenly prove as capable as any of the old elite and usually a lot more capable.

So obviously the need is for a scientific approach to learning the elements and nitty-gritty of a subject, along with a knowledgeable, cheerful, supportive, materially and emotionally adequate learning environment.

Give people the tools to work with and the motivation to use them. Simple. Except where vested political and social interests fight tooth and nail to prevent this. Some governments are more vicious than others in this respect - the Taliban and the Bush administration leap to mind. But nowhere is there a true social commitment to all people learning all the fundamental skills you need as an active and informed citizen of the world.

We need a society where everyone counts and everyone is needed for their brains and creativity, not just their hands and bodies. The capitalist world order has definitely proved that it's not the answer since 1991. Instead of a new world of peace and prosperity the victorious capitalist world plummeted us into the present mess. Time to make ownership and production cooperative and collaborative, with everyone included in from the get-go. No more big owners ruling the world and sucking it dry, and no more small fry getting skinned for working and starved for not.

That means socialism, and we'd better find a way of reaching socialism that we can sign on to - fast!

Or there won't be anything left to read...

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I edit people's writing by trade, and I can see every day the effects of some of the teaching methods such as whole word. I was a product of the old phonics workbooks in the 70s. My parents read to me at home, and did so in two languages (French and English). So I recognize that I had a vast advantage over other kids in the class.

But, that said, I see a lot of 20-somethings come through my office. And few can write a coherent sentence. These are college grads. They can't recognize homonyms. I have seen people unable to distinguish between "Principle" and "Principal," "Capital" and "Capitol" and unable to connect if-then statements. They can't seem to recognize subject-verb agreement or even how to put together a coherent idea. I see emails they write and I want to scream.

I do not know if it has anything to do with reading education but I suspect it does.

Now, I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do think that reading is a skill like any other. You have to do it--a lot-- to get good at it. And some of the learning process is a grind. It isn't fun. It's work.

But so is learning to play the piano, and many people play for the joy of it. They still have to practice the scales. Lots of kids play baseball, love it and will never be major-leaguers. But you still have to practice throwing the ball.

I have spent a lot of time teaching people basics of decent writing. I still think Strunk & White is essential for it. I believe that no college student should be allowed to use a thesaurus because it encourages using words you don't understand, without doing the work of learning how they are used by reading them in context.

I also think that people can learn in multiple ways. Phonics is essential for any written language, since written language by definition reproduces the sounds of the spoken language and should be able to be read by anyone to do that. (For example, any English speaker reading the above aloud will produce sounds that are broadly similar and intelligible to another speaker of the language).

Whole word, I think, is adequate for starting people off, but it seems to fall short in terms of getting people into the guts of how to read, as it were. It's like teaching piano by making someone memorize a sequence of keystrokes to play a tune but never teaching the scales.

Phonics is, by the way, essential for distinguishing homonyms in English. As the old saw goes, "Fish" could theoretically be spelled "ghoti" but only the former is intelligible in English. Spelling doesn't have any rigid logic because language can be pretty fluid, especially English which is "a train wreck of French and German" in the words of one despairing scholar. But if one is to be understood, then it must be learned. Period.

(It is interesting to note that literacy rates in Japan, with arguably the most complicated writing system on Earth, are consistently high, and their methods of teaching are very rote-oriented).

Now, I can see the flames coming: You are a linguistic fascist, you think everyone needs "proper" English, grammar is a means to oppress. Well, if you want to express a clear idea, learning to read and write is just plain necessary. Not one of the great figures of advancing liberty -- MLK, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez -- got where they were by writing badly or with a poor understanding of language.

I take great joy in the language. When I see kids growing up unable to read it or write it in a way that lets them express ideas well -- I get angry and sad, and despair for our collective future. And you know what? If solving it means making a few kids feel bad for a few days, than so be it. No kid should leave grade one without certain skills, and they should stay there until they learn them. All the self-esteem in the world won't help a functional illiterate.

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I've read a lot of Octavia Butler pver the years-- Adulthood Rites was the first full-length novel of hers I read, and I immediately picked up the rest of the Xenogenesis series. I also ran into number of her short stories (primarily in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine -- where I read one of her early stories "Speech Sounds" back in 1984). At the time I had no idea she was black of female, only that I was captivated and wanted to read more.

I am deeply saddened to hear she is gone. She was on a par with Ursula LeGuin in her ability to make English get up and dance. And her novels were able to provoke a lot of thinking. And I would hope that others would follow in her footsteps and make Science Fiction really as diverse as the worlds the authors imagine.

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A few readers wrote in privately to express their frustration because they read a lot to their children and their children are not "readers." I certainly didn't mean to imply that just reading to your child would make them a reader. Although doing "phonics" in school didn't necessarily make their children readers (or spellers) either. Because of the individual temperment of children, I don't think there is a full-proof way to get them reading but I do know there is a value in that child being in a culture where reading is done and language is talked about with reverence and meaning.

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"I write this inspired in part by Octavia Butler, who died on Friday of a head wound."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! CRAP!!!! NO!!! FUCK!!!

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Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler is one of my favorite socio-political science fiction books. It's a great read and I highly recommend it to fans of Butler/socio-political/sci-fi

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I hate to challenge the whole embargo on the political aspects of learning to read, but I think whole language does have political implications.

Having taught kids of all ages, I can tell you that after a short while teaching reading you can determine, within minutes, whether or not a third or fourth grade had phonics. Those who did can "decipher" new words, even large ones, because they know how to break it into pieces basic on phonetics. For those whole language kids, they have no way to decipher large unfamiliar words, making new words more daunting.

Now, here's where the politics part comes in. That deciphering gap is not as visible in children who've been taught whole language but were raised in a home in which they were encouraged to read, saw their parents reading, and had access to a wide variety of books. Both the quantity and positive association with reading ensure a broader familiarity with words, thus making phonics less necessary. However, whole language is devasting for children who are not surrounded by books or encouraged to read by their parents. And, guess who that tends to be...

working class and poor kids, especially those who grew up in homes, like mine, where anti-intellectualism is a matter of working-class pride.

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A true pioneer of speculative fiction is no longer with us. Octavia Butler, my mentor, idol and sister in soul has been taken away from us when I know she still had many tales to tell and lessons to teach us. She was a pioneer indeed - in a genre completely dominated by white male fantasies of space ships and interstellar wars and technology-driven dystopias. Octavia Buter took those tired old tropes and breathed not only new life into them, but gave them a humanity they'd somehow left behind. She gave black people - black women, whom society has often rendered invisible - a voice, she-roes to emulate and to cheer for.

I was blessed to have met her once at the SF Book Festival several years ago and I have never forgotten how her words, her presence changed me. She has inspired many others - Tannarive Due, Steven Barnes, Nalo Hopkinson and even Walter Mosely, to tread into these vast literary waters of the imagination and to bring their unique voices into the world of science-fiction, fantasy and horror. Even in my own small works is a bit of her inspiration.

All I wonder now is, who will carry her torch?

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word
weird
ward
wooed

Can you read these words by only looking at the first and last letters? Do you know what they mean out of context? If your answers are "no" and "yes" then you are decoding the word.

In order to understand how people learn how to read there's actually no need to rely on "common sense" or assumptions based on one's own personal experience/perceptions. Researchers have been looking at this for decades, and now there are functional MRI scans that show that good, fluent readers and bad readers (dyslexics and "sight readers") use different parts of their brains. See "Overcoming Dyslexia" by Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale. Dyslexics who are taught phonemic awareness (ability to hear individual sounds) then phonetics (matching the sounds to the letters) then decoding fluency, have fMRI scans that look like those of good readers. In other words, a dyslexic who is taught to decode is doing the same thing as a non-dyslexic good reader; he/she just had to be explicitly taught to do what the non-dyslexic picked up more easily.

I know it's tempting to romanticize reading, especially if one is good at it. I learned how to read very young and was reading books for grown-ups in third grade (I'll always remember my first grown-up choice in the library -- a biography of Elizabeth II.) I really looked forward to creating a book and story-filled household for my sons, and that's what we did. Both sons loved books and stories. I couldn't wait until we were all reading.

I was very surprised when my younger came home from kindergarten and told me (with carefully averted eyes) that "everyone in my class can read except me." It turns out that despite a superior vocabulary, excellent comprehension, and a love of books he was dyslexic. After years of specialized instruction and learning to hear, decode, and hours of practice for fluency, he's now a good reader.

Anyway, my axe to grind is that people's fond wishes about reading actually is very backwards and doesn't address real learning needs. Down with whole language. (I'm not a Republican either. I'm a leftist, a progressive and I am really into phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding. I believe that all kids deserve to learn to read despite some people's ideological devotion to methods that do not work.)

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My mother taught me to read by recognizing simple words and using letters to sound out those I was unfamiliar with. Like most people I now read by recognizing most (but not all) words and even word-groups, without spending time sounding them out. I have always loathed phonics (it bored the crap out of me in elementary school), but it seems silly not to recognize that learning how letters represent sounds is a critical step toward becoming an independent reader. It's just that we cannot stop there.

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I, too, was saddened by the news of her passing. I always meant to write a fan letter to this great writer, but I guess I will never get the chance now. Her Earth Seed series are two of my favorite books she has written. In the series, we find the main character in a post-cataclysmic Los Angeles. She never tells us what happened to America, just that society has crumbled and our heroine must flee the city on foot and walks the 101 highway north. No cars, just people running and surviving. Ten years ago, I did not make the connection, but in reading about post-peak oil production, I now realize that the world she described was a world without gas/oil. The story of the rag tag band of survivors that the heroine leads are tied together by a belief system that Butler creates called Earth Seed. The main premise of this "religion" is that God is Change and mankind's destiny lies in space travel and sowing our seeds among the stars. A wonderful philosphy/religion/school of thought by a beautiful soul that I will miss. I pray that the world she envisioned in those books never comes to pass. May she rest in peace and may future generations discover her writings.

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