Hooked on phonics

a-ay-aw

a as in apple

a (ay) as in lake

a (aw) as in claw

gu-je

g (gu) as in gum

g (je) as in gym

It's been nearly seventy years (gulp) since I was sitting in Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom, reciting the sounds that letters make, with or without the aid of flashcards.

Sometimes phonics was easy. b was just b, the same sound, whatever letter came after it. Other times it was tricky. Soft g (je) when a long i came after the g, as in giant. Hard g (gu) when a short i came after the g, as in gift. Sometimes, any way. (C.f., the word "imagine.")

We may not have been hooked on phonics, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that most kids - but likely not all - came out of Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom - a grim and uninviting little house of horrors - knowing how to read. And, yes, I was one of the four kids in the top of the line Our Lady's reading group, paired up - as if, at age 5-6 I was capable of teaching anything to anybody - with a kiddo who was in the Angel group, trying to help them learn phonics and reading. How could they not get gu-je???

(The middle reading group was named Saint Joseph. As a child, I was always trying to come up with some rationale to characterize everything and everybody. Thus, I concluded, based on our first grade reading groups, that Mary was smarter than Joseph (who was sort of a plodder), and that both Mary and Joseph were smarter than angels, who were just sort of pathetic, wispy know-nothings.)

I hadn't really given a thought to phonics until I saw a recent Boston Globe article about:

...two Massachusetts families are suing famed literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, their companies, and their publishers, alleging the former teachers used “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices to sell curriculums that ignored the scientific consensus about the importance of phonics to early reading.

The families claim that their children were developmentally and emotionally injured, and that the parents incurred costs for tutoring and private schools "to compensate for the flawed reading curriculums used by their children’s public schools."

Apparently, over one-third of school districts in our state use the curriculums designed by the defendants. Interestingly, these districts include Amherst and Brookline, which are widely regarded as having highly rated schools. Amherst has all those professor kids; Brookline is an affluent Boston suburb chocked full of doctors-lawyers-management consultants. And there don't seem to be that many problems associated with Brookline and Amherst kids learning to read. But maybe the Brookline and Amherst parents are supplementing the non-phonics approach by sitting the kids around the kitchen table and drilling them with phonics flashcards. (In much the way parents of children in schools that don't require kids to memorize rudimentary arithmetic formulae sit their kids down and drill them on the times table.)

Anyway, other than knowing that I learned to read using phonics, and, thus, know it's effective - or at least was for me and my Our Lady's reading group colleagues - I don't have a pony in this race. But it sure looks like the alternative to phonics - something called "picture power:" "cueing directions, which instruct children to, for example, look at a picture for context in helping determine an unknown word" - is pretty flawed. (Just off the top of my head: what happens when the books no longer contain pictures?)

The Massachusetts lawsuit represents a new step in the early literacy advocacy movement and could spur new complaints like it nationwide. It follows several years of heightened debate surrounding the “science of reading,” a broad body of research demonstrating how the brain learns to read and which shows a firm grasp on phonics to be key to early reading success.

The suit alleges that the defendants "knew or should have known" that their approach didn't work all that well. In fact, when the evidence started emerging that "picture power" and the like wasn't very effective, the defendants created updated curriculums that incorporate some phonics. Trouble is, school districts have to pay a lot for the updates. Which a lot of them can't afford to. Recognizing that the defendants' curriculums were substandard, the Mass Department of Education has been providing grant money to school districts to update or replace them with "new materials grounded in reading science." And one can imagine  - soft g je sound - that the fact that the government is shelling out money to rid the schools of the defendants' materials can only help the litigants.

It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. 

As with so much else in life, there may be no one perfect answer for how to get kids to read. Maybe a few kids learn better with "picture power," while most don't. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been a "picture power" learner. As I have often said, for me, one word is generally worth a thousand pictures. I learn by reading about something, not by watching a 'how to' video. And the science sure looks like it leans towards phonics.

The question will be whethe the defendants "knowingly and deceptively" foisted their methods on an unsuspecting world. And made a boodle doing it. Nosy Parker that I am, I found the address of one of the defendants and found their $4.6M home on Zillow. So, deepish pockets.

We'll see. 

a-ay-aw
gu-je

A January 6th story

Growing up, we learned about the Feast of the Epiphany/Feast of the Magi, when the three kings arrived at the stable to greet Jesus, the newborn king, welcoming the swaddled babe with what must go down in history as the three most useless baby gifts of all time. Well, maybe gold would come in useful for an impoverished couple. But frankincense and myrhh??? Whatty-what-what?

The Feast of the Epiphany placed a far second, of course, to Christmas. Unless, of course, you lived in Latin America, where it was the big holiday kahuna.

One year, however, our teacher - Sister Saint Wilhelmina - decided we were going to actually celebrate it. Sister Saint W - as mean a nun as the god of parochial schools ever gifted to a parish school - was highly competitive. Her class had to sell the most magazines during the fall wholesome magazine sale campaign. 

Her class had to win whatever contests the St. Dominic Savio Club ran every month - even if if meant cheating to win. Case in point: one year, the contest - which we read about in our monthly St. Dominic Savio Club newsletter - offered some little prize to a classroom that had someone with the initials MC sitting in the second seat of the fifth row. This was in the December newsletter, so the MC was the clever for Merry Christmas, and the second seat-fifth row thang was the clever for 25. Well, lo and behold, the day before Sister Saint W handed out the newsletters, didn't she juggle the seating arrangements around so that Michael Curran was fortuitously seated in the right spot. 

I don't remember what the prize was. Maybe we didn't actually get our claim in on time. I suspect that every Catholic school with a cheater or two in its convent had, miraculously, some kid with the initials MC in the right place at the right time.

St. Dominic Savio contest aside, what Sister Saint W most wanted to win was the honor of teachingg the grade that collected the most mission money, money used to support the Propagation of the Faith, an organization that aimed to spread Catholicism throughout the world.

So for the Feast of the Epiphany, Sister Saint W decided it would be a fun thing to dress up like one of the kings and bring an offering of mission money to lay before Baby Jesus in the creche in the convent chapel. The big lure here was getting into the convent, which was never allowed. 

We all craved any glimpse into what their life outside the classroom was like, but entering into the convent just never happened. Talk about the holy of holies!

So our glimpses were things like seeing the back of Sister Marie Therese's shaved head when the wind blew her veil up one day when we were out in the schoolyard for recess. Or a half-burned letter sent to one of the nuns from her her brother, which had blown out of the convent trash barrel. Or standing next to the side of the school and looking down the hill into the convent's back yard, which was entirely taken up by a clothesline. On the outside lines of rope, the nuns would pin up their sheets and towels. On the inside lines were their bloomers and corsets. Apparently, they never realized that, from our perch on the hill, we could see their undies. What a thrill!

But actually getting inside of the convent? Never in a million years.

Yet here we were, all decked out like the magi (i.e., in bathrobes and hats), coins in hand, entering inside the secret, sacred walls of the convent.

I remember as clear as day what my get-up was.

I had some sort of goofy, royal blue plush winter hat that kinda-sorta resembled a crown. (This pic is a close approximation. Thanks, eBay!) But the piece de resistance of my costume was "my" pale grey quilted bathrobe, banded with red edging with vaguely Asian designs in gold, on collar, cuffs, and overall trim. Those vaguely Asian designs? I was rocking the we-three-kings-of-orient-are theme. Unlike every other kid with their pedestrian plaid bathrobes that made them look more like shepherds than kings.

I say it was "my" bathrobe because, like so much of my clothing, it was a handme down from my sister Kathleen, for whom it was a handme down from our cousin Barbara. Sometimes the handme downs from Barbara, while always beautiful and elegant, were a bit off. Barbara is 9 years older than I am, so something that was dead-on fashionable in 1950, say, looked a bit out of date by 1959. Like the red spring coat with the nipped in waist. Ugh!

But I loved that bathrobe, and was so proud to be sporting it on that brief march from the school, down the hill to the convent.

Of course, the trip inside was disappointing. All the doors were closed, so we couldn't see much of anything of the nuns' actual living quarters. We were just funneled into the chapel, left our mission money gifts in the basket that Sister Saint W had in front of the manger, and rushed back out the door. Fifty kids run through in about two minutes. 

I can't remmeber what the take from the Gift of the Magis parade was. My contribution was probably a dime. Some spoiler suckup - looking at you, Gerald N! - probably got a buck or two from his mother to toss in the basket.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany! 

(Let's not go anywhere near the more modern meaning of January 6th...)