A pedogogical approach to the duality of the history of reading from the early 20th century

Man oh man, I hope that the title shied you away from this blog post, I just wanted to make it sound like I was smart or something.

For optimal reading pleasure please read this post whilst listening to the following song: Word Crimes

 

In chapter two the authors seeks to showcase the different methods in which reading is taught and how those methods came to be. The showcase a few authors and how they felt that reading and writing should be taught. These methods were spurred forward by the scientific methodology of early 20^th century scientist including Darwinism, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud.

John Dewey: Scientific method to reading: Dewey felt that students should not be taught all alike. That the idea that each and every student should learn to read in the exact same way, from the same material,  in a way memorization and mastery. Instead, Dewey felt that reading should be inquiry based, much as the scientific method of study is, where Dewey deviated was that he felt the ideas and information should be a collaborative effort, that a democracy should be reached with students and a community solution was the way to go.

Edward l. Thorndike: Stimulus response: Prior to the behaviorist Skinner (and his skinner boxes full of stimulus) Thorndike felt that a teacher could use methods to strengths students and their abilities. He felt that a teacher must first study a student in order to find the buttons to push to get the desired results. It is thanks to him that we have STARDIZED TESTING, so, immediately, I personally hate him. His idea was that by classifying what a student needed the most a teacher could reach that students and give them what they needed to succeed in class. BOOOOO!!!!

E.B. Huey: Prior knowledge is helpful: While I know that this delineation of what he is saying is as easy to classify as the previous two I was hard pressed to come up with a better way to succinctly define what Huey felt.  Maybe I should have said ‘ the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.’ Anyway, Huey did a bunch of studies and found out that phonics is a load of crap… well not in so many words. Heuy found that the traditional way of teaching reading with a focus on letters, sounds, and each individual part as an important part of a whole was not the most effective way to teach meaning and instead it is actually an active part in making it harder and less natural for readers.  Huey showed that eye movement showed that students who are familiar with the material and information were able to read and understand the material quicker, also that the first part of the word is more imporatntnt than the last and that peoples could even read things whin wurds had mani mispellengs and stille undersend the meandings of the author. Which is great for our students as none of them feel that spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter.

            And with those main ideas with about a hundred years in the making we come to our current education system of teaching reading and it contains mostly 2 fields of thought. First, that a student should learn phonetically with all the rules, regulations, and ideas rolled into one. The other idea is that students enquire about more than the nuts and bolts that an emotional and psychological component is important for students to read.

            As for me and my classroom, I feel that the emotional component is better, mostly because I do not want to grade standardized tests, or drill into my students the minutia of the English language things like dangling participles, future perfect past tense stuff, when to use whom instead of who. Those are things that I don’t want to grade… Then again, I think that it will be good for them to know when to use their or there. And it does bother me so much when a student uses the word ‘ANYWAYS.’ It makes me want to like murder them and all of there families if I can find where they are at. (NOTE: this previous statement is complete hyperbole, I also realize that I made mistakes in my grammar and syntax, those were done intentionally to prove my point, which is… That I am an odd duck and just want to see if anyone is actually reading this)