View 477 July 30 - August 5, 2007 (original) (raw)
Friday, August 3, 2007
Happy Birthday Alex
For those interested in education, I found the Weekly Standard major essay,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/
Public/Articles/000/000/013/850gvneh.asp
worthwhile. Fair warning: Roberta, who put it aside for me to read, says it's rehashing old stuff. All of which is true I suppose, but she is much closer to the subject than I am. Incredibly, she has managed to get credentials as a Reading Instruction Specialist, and given that she thinks most of the "standard" techniques of reading instruction are not merely wrong but harmful, this shows a frightening determination.
It's worth your while. But if you are concerned about your children, teach them to read. Do it yourself, or in concert with other parents, but do not entrust them to either the public or most private schools. The teaching profession is dominated by professors of education, few -- if any -- of whom ever taught small children to read. Their experience is almost all with college students and other adults, and of course adults don't read like children. We do not "sound out" even big words like Constantinople and Timbuktu. On the other hand, we certainly do not read diethyldimethylphosphotoluene by word recognition, nor do we "recognize" portmanteau words like slithy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
You can read that, and many of you will read it by sight because you've seen it before; but for those unfortunate enough never to have encounteredAlice Through The Looking Glass, you'll have no choice but to "sound out" some of the "words".
As to how to teach your kids to read, the best way I know is to buy Roberta Pournelle's Reading TLC program and use it. It works on just about any version of Windows, including in Virtual PC on a Mac. It certainly will work on a dual boot Mac booted into Windows, and I am told that it works in Windows under Parallels on a Mac.
We don't have a Mac version any longer. The Supercard version for the Power Mac I did used the Mac's text to speech program, and it worked well enough, but Apple doesn't support that any longer and I haven't time to rewrite it; and many didn't care for the "computer voice" although that was a great improvement over the first version which used a parent or reading tutor (we know of one 11 year old who taught a whole class of first graders to read using it) as the text to speech device. Human voices can express disapproval in the wrong places and times. The "Agnes" computer voice on the Mac had great success in teaching, and a lot of kids learned to read using the old Mac version, but we just can't maintain it any longer.
The current (it's a good ten years old) version for Windows has about 10,000 recorded instructions, sentences, phrases, and sounds. Roberta painstakingly recorded each one of those and Robert Ransom took my old Mac Supercard version and with considerable ingenuity turned it into Delphi; instead of text to speech he was able to reference Roberta's recorded sounds.
The program is hokey. The "music" is from the old Basic "Play" function. The game is hokey. It all looks as if it were done in DOS and ported to Windows, which is essentially true. It doesn't matter to the kids: they learn to read in about 70 lessons at half an hour a day, and when they are finished they can READ: which is to say they can take a newspaper and read it to you. Or a Dickens novel. Will they "understand" everything they read? Depends on their age. Most newspapers are aimed at a mental age of 11 to 12; bright 5 year olds will not comprehend everything and dull normal 5 year olds won't understand very much -- of a newspaper. But they can sure read about Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter without having to ask what the words are, and there's a wealth of reading material for 4 and five year old children, and lots more for older. Once you are no longer confined to the awful controlled vocabulary readers, there's a wealth of material for children. Steven Vincent and Rosemary Benet wrote a lot of great stories. There's poetry including Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses which I remember from when I was five. (And, yes, I had to ask what in the heck a counterpane was.)
Her program works. It isn't considered by most school districts (although some schools have adopted it with great success) because while it doesn't preach anything, it does contain the word God and takes that concept seriously in the lesson that teaches those phonemes. This appalled the California evaluation committee. They didn't much care whether the program worked or not; indeed they never tried to find out.
But if you want to insure your kids against the known failing techniques that still flow from Departments of Education, this is the way to do it. Get Roberta's Reading TLC instruction program and use it for half an hour a day (max; some kids get through faster) for 70 lessons. You can then forget about reading instruction and teach them the addition tables (to 12 + 12, please) and the multiplication tables (to 12 x 12 at least) by rote learning -- yes the awful Drill and Kill -- and you can be sure they can at least do elementary arithmetic and won't flunk algebra because they can't add. But that's for another essay.
And when you have done this, help your friends down the road. The US needs bright kids who can read, write, and cipher. We used to think the public schools would do that. Alas.
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Subject: NCLB
Jerry: A quote from Chaska school Superintendant David Jennings on NCLB:
"I, for one, believe this particular federal law to be the single worst piece of federal legislation in my adult lifetime, and my adult lifetime dates back to 1966. It is not merely misguided, as some believe. It is, in fact, destructive, and I believe intentionally so. �The truth is: All the expensive and disruptive testing we now have through NCLB tells us exactly nothing about whether kids have the actual skills the 21st century will demand of them. Simply put, getting right answers means little when we're asking the wrong questions.
It takes a village to raze a mad scientist's laboratory.
We all know that the way to be sure that no child is left behind is to see that no child gets ahead. Jacobin egalitarianism knows no limits. Particularly when the leaders of the Jacobins are quite certain that they are more equal than the others. As they always are certain...
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I should have remembered that HIGH JUSTICE isavailable from Baen in electronic book format. Go get a copy. It's worth reading.
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The last of Bruce Schneier's interview with the head of TSA is up on his web site. Following it is an interesting note:
Face Recognition Test Results
For a few months, German police tested a face recognition system. Two hundred frequent travellers volunteered to have their faces recorded and three different systems tried to recognize the faces in the crowds of a train station.Results (in German): 60% recognition at best, 30% on average (depending on light and other factors).
I'd call that a spectacular success. If we have the computer resources to recognize faces at 30% average in such a test, I would think that with some improvements in lighting and conditions that average could get up to 75% eventually. This is no bad thing. Of course there are all the implications of camera watching crowds.
But in an airline security line it imposes no additional hardship to have passengers look directly into a camera then turn to profile; it takes a second or so. This is certainly worth discussion.
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For the horror story of the week:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/
eveningnews/main3107316.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3107316
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I have recently been told about Technocrati,
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/
www.jerrypournelle.com/?reactions&page=3
which seems to measure site popularities although I don't know how. It places me at 26,000 which is not very good. Daily KOS by contrast is 8. Their authority is very high. Mine is not. Instapundit is 38. I don't question those numbers.
However, I know for a certainty that I have more circulation (unique site visits per month) than a number of sites ranked much higher than mine, but I won't give those examples. My guess is that this, like many other such ratings places, puts highest value on links, and that some sites spend a lot of time working on getting mutual linkages. Also, since I divide this place into MAIL and VIEW and most of you never go to the home page any more but go directly to View, I am sure that has a large effect on ratings and popularity.
I am just vain enough to wonder if it's worth working on site organization to change some of this. Alas, I haven't any ideas on how to do that, but I haven't thought about it either. I suppose I could force everyone to funnel through one page to get to MAIL and VIEW? Whatever my "ratings" I know I have one of the highest quality readership in the world. My mail is probably the most learned mailbag on the web (I include what I publish and what is sent in confidence). Even the mail I can't publish -- as you imagine I get far more than I can put up -- reads to me a lot better than 90% of the weblog comments I see on other blogs.
Suggestions welcomed, but please not idle speculation. I know I have experts in the readership: let us hear from them. As you will have surmised, I'm still deep in Hell, and I don't have a lot of time to read mail anyway (I do manage to read it all, but sometimes it takes time).
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This was mentioned on Rush this morning. It was instantly overwhelmed, of course. It sounds interesteing.
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And if you want to know more about the vicissitudes of authorial marketing, try
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/
living/articles/2006/08/16/author_unknown/
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Once again, my thanks to those who have recentlysubscribed or renewed.