K-12: Sight-words never worked as promised

www.americanthinker.com

Sight-words — a theory about how to teach reading — is absurd. Give me three minutes, and I’ll explain why.

The premise is that children can memorize English words without much effort. This is blatantly not true. Our words are hard to remember, and the more words you learn, the more they get in one another’s way. That’s why we have so many non-readers in middle school and high school. (Dirty little secret: Everyone running the school system surely knows this.)

Think back to when you had a meal with some friends at a restaurant. Can you bring up the scene? Most people can recall big or prominent details, but can you see a particular person? What color is his shirt? What food did he order?

There are humans with photographic memory who can actually memorize serial numbers on bills they handle. But this is extremely rare. You can’t base education methods on skills that only a fraction of the population possesses, just as you can’t teach music as if every student had perfect pitch.

The problem with memorizing and reading English words is that each is composed of a large number of tiny details. These let you distinguish among lake, like, take. Or between 1238 and 1233. Or between i and l. Or between b and d. Or between a period and a semicolon.

I’ve done a lot of proofreading. You have to look aggressively at the details in order to spot the tiny, elusive typos.

Bottom line: Most people cannot memorize all the necessary details required by sight-word reading. And the fact is, English words were never designed to be memorized on sight. They are designed to be sounded out by anyone who has a rough knowledge of our letters and the sounds that each letter represents.

Any page in any novel has hundreds of tiny details. How many do you think you can identify at reading speed?

The genius of phonics is that you can read the words quickly and casually, rarely missing any details that matter. (At this point, the sight-word reader would look at you and say, How is that even possible? It’s always a struggle for me.)

No wonder we have 50 million functional illiterates. No wonder society is getting dumber. The name of the poison is sight-words.

Sight-words require that students commit each English word to a permanent place in their brain, and then students have to recognize that the shapes on the page are the same ones in the memory. It’s not surprising that children complain of tension, headaches, stomachaches, attention deficits, and insomnia.

When a famous expert announced his explanation for “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” the whole mystery came down to this bit of jargon: sight-words. Hundreds and then thousands of words must be recognized on sight. Instantaneously! That’s a word that the Education Establishment loves, apparently on the belief that if you claim something enough times, the public will believe it.

At present, we are in the midst of a singularly disgusting campaign to confuse everybody to the extent that no matter what is said, nothing registers. Parents cannot understand the discussion or make a smart decision in response.

Please read more about sight-words. Start your own campaign against this affliction. All successful K–12 education depends on teaching children to read in the first and second grades. Sight-words make that impossible.

The professors of education want to teach children only five or so words a week — or at best, 150 words for the year! Even if a few kids have a perfect memory, they never reach a few thousand words. But college students need 100,000 words, even 200,000 words. The whole dispute is ridiculous.

For people completely mystified that a scam could be so destructive and so long-lasting, keep in mind the Bernie Madoff story. He was a successful and prominent member of the investment community, but everything he did was a lie. He stole $65 billion. The crash of 2008 caught Madoff. Otherwise, he would probably have gotten away with the whole thing, just as our professors of education continue to promote sight-words.

Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. His literary site is Lit4u.com.

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