"Comprehension" is a Boondoggle

The issue of "comprehension" is a boondoggle that educators use to make what they do look much more complicated than it actually is, and to justify bad curricula that don't teach comprehension or rote learning or anything at all.

For instance, confronted with a 6th-grader who can't add two fractions with large denominators (because she can't conveniently draw the pie chart), educators say "that's OK, the important thing is that she has deep conceptual understanding." (And how is the pie chart any deeper than the standard algorithm for adding fractions?)

Similarly, confronted with a 7-year-old who can't read because she thinks she should be able to guess everything from context, educators say, "that's OK, the important thing is that she WANTS to read, and she understands a great deal when you read out loud." (That's pretty much what Younger Daughter's first-grade teacher told us at Natural Friends!)

In both reading and math, educators (often, unfortunately, those who train the next generation of teachers) use the issue of "comprehension" to distract attention from the point that their methods don't work; then they promote false dichotomies in an effort to sound "progressive".

In math, the false dichotomy is between "rote learning" and "conceptual understanding"; in reading, the false dichotomy is between "word-calling" and "comprehension".

Now, it might happen that a child could have technical skills without deep comprehension. For instance, she might be able to perform long division without understanding why it works, or she might be able to read a word off a page without understanding its meaning or context ("Mom, what's a carriage return?")

But the opposite doesn't hold. You can't have deep understanding without technical skills. If a kid can't read a word off the page, or add two fractions, that doesn't magically prove that she has deep understanding instead.

Ideally, skills and comprehension should march together hand in hand. Kids should acquire skills and also understand how and why they work. This might be a gradual process; comprehension can deepen over time. Often, comprehension is the result of continued practice of technical skills (one more reason to teach the skills first.)

Word-Calling vs. Comprehension

From Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch:  he's quoting from Teaching to Read, by Mitford Mathews:

On page 159 of his delightful book Teaching to Read, Mitford Mathews tells the following story:

A group of educators visited a Chicago parochial school where the Leonard Bloomfield phonic system was taught.

They were taken into a classroom of perhaps 40 first grade children.  On the teacher's desk were elementary books from various grades.  The visitors were invited to select a book and ask any of the children to read from it.  The readiness with which the children read was unusual.  One of the guests happened to pick up a sixth-grade science book and asked one of the boys to read a passage from it.  In doing so the child encountered and read the word "satellite".  Father Stoga (the superintendent) asked him what the word meant and the child said it meant a big object in the sky.  Dean Gray, the man who gave us Dick and Jane, found the answer unsatisfactory, showing that the child was reading, that is pronouncing, quite beyond the vocabulary appropriate to his age, and not getting the sense of what he read.  He explained to the other visitors that what the children were doing was in no sense remarkable.  He said that reading experts had long known that children could rather quickly be taught to pronounce words with remarkable glibness but that real understanding of what was read was another matter entirely.  He pointed out that these children were mere word-callers, that they were pronouncing well beyond their mental ages, and that they were heading straight for serious trouble later in their reading development.

No Quality Control in Teaching Reading

From Straight Talk About Reading, by Susan L. Hall and Louisa C. Moats, Ed. D.:

The unanswered, obvious question for most parents is "Where is the quality control?"  A mother of a child who was having trouble learning to read contacted me for information beginning in January of her daughter's first-grade school year.  She was concerned that her child was having so much trouble learning to read and was falling behind.  She decided that the first step was to have her daughter tested to determine if she had any learning disability ... By March she had completed an educational diagnostic evaluation which determined that her child did not have a learning disability. The psychologist who tested her daughter recommended a private tutor who uses a systematic phonics approach to teach reading.

Within three months of tutoring, her daughter was completely caught up in reading.  We met in late June after the school year was over.  This mother proudly showed me the reading, writing, and phonics material her daughter had completed in tutoring over the spring and early summer.  After looking at papers that demonstrated a sequential and systematic approach to phonics instruction, I brought out my file with all my daughter's language arts papers from her first-grade class -- a different first-grade class in the same school -- and we spread them out on the dining room table.  This mother was outraged that she was paying private tutoring fees for her daughter to get essentially the same instruction that my daughter received during first grade, while her daughter sat in another classroom not getting what she needed.  I shared this mother's anger because my older child had had her daughter's first-grade teacher two years earlier, and we had to hire a private tutor for him as well.

Find 3 Things Wrong With This Picture, Part 2

From "My Second Grade Reading Records", sent home with Younger Daughter.

I've got more than 3 this time.  As the parent of a child who was taught these kinds of strategies more than phonics, and as a result tries to guess and fake her way through reading, this one really winds me up.

 1.)  What's missing?  The one strategy that actually works -- look at all the letters and SOUND THEM OUT!

2.) What does "get your mouth ready" even mean?  And why should you "get your mouth ready" in preparation for looking at the pictures?

3.)  Kids should not be encouraged to "look at the pictures" before they start reading the words.  This is how we train kids to be word-guessers instead of readers.

4.)  Kids should not be encouraged to first scan the words and find ones they already know.   They need to learn to read the words IN ORDER, by reading the word's letters IN ORDER.

Phirst Phonics

The other day I tried to get Younger Daughter to read some Bob books with me.  She was extremely resistant, and I think a bit insulted; she sees these as "little kid" books that she has moved beyond.  Fortunately I've found that she's quite willing to do the exact same kind of phonics drills in the back of Why Johnny Can't Read, probably because this is a grown-up book that she sees Mom reading.

Why My Kid Can't Read

Memorizing or guessing the meaning of whole words is not reading; on the contrary, it is an acquired bad habit that stands in the way of your child's ever learning to read properly. Therefore, the problem of improving your child's reading cannot be solved by giving him a more concentrated dose of what he has been getting since first grade. It can only be solved by making him drop the habit of word guessing and teaching him to read -- from scratch.

from Why Johnny Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch (copyright 1955!)

Behavior Problem, Learning Problem, or Both?

Here's my latest theory about what went wrong for Younger Daughter at Natural Friends.

It's clear that YD has language delays, probably caused by not enough attention in her first 16 months of life in an orphanage. YD started speech therapy at 5, and she's still going. When she began, she was collapsing all her consonant sounds into just a few -- d, m, and s, maybe? Speech therapy helped a lot and she is now speaking quite clearly, although her syntax is uneven and she has odd vocabulary blocks. She's said several times, for instance, "Can I help you plant the lightbulbs?" and I'm still trying to convince her that the ones you plant in the ground are just plain bulbs.

Given YD's difficulties with language, it's no great shock that she's a late reader. Back at Natural Friends, they teach reading with Reader's Workshop, which has nothing like the intensive phonics instruction that YD actually needs. So YD was in a very small class of (mostly) very verbal kids, who were (mostly) able to read with minimal phonics instruction. Over time, YD became increasingly intimidated and frustrated by watching other kids who seemed to magically understand reading in a way that she just couldn't grasp. But, like all kids in this situation, she was ashamed of not understanding, and it would never have occurred to her to ask for help. Instead, she just faked it and tried to get by as best she could.

Over time, her frustration led to anxiety and increasingly impossible behavior. I think she was almost in a panic -- we got descriptions of her constantly interrupting the teacher, grabbing things out of kids' hands, unable to sit still for a moment.

So then we started getting complaints from the teacher, and we made the rounds of various specialists. They were pretty useless, frankly. YD didn't need "more structure", or "clearer expectations", or (the school's suggestion) an aide to follow her around all day, and pull her out into the hallway if she was causing a ruckus. She needed teaching methods that would work for her, so she could learn to read and do basic math, and she wouldn't be constantly frustrated by stuff going over her head.

Will Local Public Elementary teach her better? Who knows? I've learned not to count on schools to actually teach my kids. I'll work hard with YD on the reading, and eventually on math too. If school can just be a reasonable social experience for her, I'll settle for that.

If nothing else, YD will be closer to the middle of the class at Fragrant Hills, since there are twice as many kids, spanning a wider variety of abilities. She won't feel like she's on the spot so much. Also, she has her own desk with inbuilt storage, instead of just a seat at a round table, which I think will give her a sense of control of her personal space and belongings.

So far, YD's gotten off the school bus looking happy, and we haven't gotten any complaints from the teacher. She told me last night that she likes her new school, and asked if she could go again next year. I said "sure, if this year goes well." Knock wood!

Not-So-Great Expectations

There's nineteen men livin' in my neighborhood
There's nineteen men livin' in my neighborhood
Eighteen of them are fools
And the one ain't no doggone good.

-- Bessie Smith, Dirty No-Gooder's Blues

I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it or condensed it
I'm against it!

I'm opposed to it ...
On general principles, I'm opposed to it!

-- Groucho Marx, Whatever It Is, I'm Against It!

So Younger Daughter's first day at Local Public Elementary is tomorrow, and I've been thinking about my expectations for the place. Various people have warned me not to get my hopes up too high. That's actually kind of funny -- if you could see inside my head, you would know that my expectations of schools are bog-level and sinking all the time.

Over the past few years, I've gotten used to the idea that I can't trust most schools to teach my kids math, and I'll have to supervise and teach them pretty closely to make sure they've really got it. (Friends Omphalos, where Older Daughter goes, is the best I've seen yet in this regard, but Older Daughter can still use some review and backfilling.)

With Younger Daughter, I'm getting used to the point that we will have to work very hard to get her reading. I can't trust the schools to do this for her, although the public school might be more help than Natural Friends, which really had no provision for any kind of special ed.

Somehow, Younger Daughter has gotten it into her head that reading is a kind of magical process where you memorize what the words look like. She said to me the other day, "I can't read this word -- I don't know it." (Me: "that's exactly why you sound it out!")

Sometimes she glances at a word and thinks she knows what it is, but she isn't paying attention to the order of the letters, so for instance she'll look at "plane" and say "apple", or look at "white" and say "with".

Can Local Public Elementary solve these problems? I don't know, but I'm not counting on it.

So what are my hopes for Local Public Elementary? I hope Younger Daughter will feel more comfortable there, and less threatened. I hope her behavior is better, and if it isn't, I hope the school won't dump the whole problem into my lap, instead of looking for solutions themselves. If nothing else, I'm guaranteed that no matter how dysfunctional the school is, at least they're not draining my bank account.