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Pam
Posts:
1,471
Registered:
12/6/04
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Re: As goes reading education, so goes math education
Posted:
Jun 4, 2010 10:59 AM
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Posted: Jun 3, 2010 2:02 PM by Robert:
> Pam wrote (in part)...
>
> "Robert, you look at statistics and you make
> erroneous and incredibly harmful assumptions about
> "native ability" and potential. I look at real
> children, and so those same statistics tell me a very
> different, and much more accurate, story."
>
> I look at both Pam. And yes, if we could afford a
> personal tutor for every child we would get better
> results.
Sadly, or perhaps happily, this is not the answer. I have students all the time who have previously worked one-on-one with a personal tutor - through special ed in school, for-profit centers such as Sylvan, other private tutors, and they still cannot read. That girl I mentioned in my previous post had 4 years of private tutors plus 5 years of special education. In other words, it is not the one-on-one that makes the difference.
Yes, there will always be some kids who are so severely reading disabled, they will need a Pam. But the school could certainly hire a Pam or two for those relatively few students, if only they taught reading well in the regular ed classrooms and kept most of our current special ed students from falling behind in the first place. They would save SO much money with which to afford some Pams. As it is now, those kids waste away in special ed, needing services throughout their schooling.
Read about Marva Collins, Geoffrey Canada, Kipp Schools, to know that this can be done classroom and school-wide. They are not, and do not hire, O-G practitioners, as far as I know, but we have an attitude in common - failure is not an option and whatever it takes. Marva Collins had her students, inner-city students labeled as LD, many of them, reading and discussing Plato and Shakespeare in 4th grade.
> But not sustainably better, because most of
> the tutored children would not gain enough critical
> mass in these subjects to carry on and teach their
> children.
Gosh, this is so wrong, I don't know where to begin. My students gain 2 to 3 grade levels per year. So they do gain enough critical mass. Often their comprehension is superior, so as long as they can decode, they can fly. It takes a little more work for kids with comprehension issues, but there are some effective approaches for comprehension as well.
In math, it is harder - we have to pay MUCH closer attention and catch the kids before they fall behind, plug the leaks. One thing you don't seem to understand, Robert, is how uneven development is for these kids. They can be quite advanced in one aspect of math, but quite behind in another. So if we catch those glitches as they happen, the students need not fall so far behind. If we support the weaknesses as we remediate them, the students can realize their strengths.
And you cannot underestimate the "mind-shame" which is the most crippling aspect of LDs. When you show a student he is not stupid, when you show him he can learn, when you help him achieve genuine success, that he himself can recognize as success (these kids know, believe me), that "critical mass" mountain suddenly becomes much smaller.
Dr. Mel Levine once said, "Students'
differences in learning, in the long term, may well be relatively
benign in their effects; however, when adults misunderstand and
mismanage these differences, they may render them malignant and create
enduring negative consequences."
> How do you think we end up with the results
> we have? You are not the first person to make the
> incredible statement that every kid is teachable or
> that every person can learn how to teach every kid.
> That is actually a very old philosophy, albeit
> nothing like actual (large scale) results has ever
> supported it. Have you marched down to the local
> school and told them of you theory? Can you teach
> groups of kids or does this method require intense
> individual attention? Obviously, the latter is a
> mathematical impossibility (there are not enough
> people).
>
I am not talking about a method of teaching. This is a really important distinction. Orton-Gillingham is a teacher training program, not a method or a curriculum. You know how little knowledge of mathematics, even arithmetic, elementary teachers have? It is, believe it or not, worse in reading. We are asking teachers to teach without any knowledge at all of how reading development occurs or of how our language is structured, how words are built. So, yes, if we teach our teachers better, we will most definitely see improvement on a wide scale. What I do, for the most severely reading disabled children, works best with intensive individual instruction. But there would be far fewer of those children if reading were taught well in our regular ed classrooms.
> I was talking about ALL disabled learners because you
> said ALL. If we are talking about the "teachable"
> subset of disabled learners than that is different,
> though even then the numbers are very low because it
> isn't just disability at work, there is also tons of
> bad habits that affect even non disabled learners.
>
No, Robert, you referred to the students in the special ed category who are failing the FCAT. That should not include the 1% or less of students who cannot learn to read, at least not with our current knowledge, and does include primarily LD students who are fully capable of learning to read. Elementary kids are eager to learn. Those "bad habits" are learned through repeated failure, failure that initially at least is no fault of their own. Who wouldn't have "bad habits" after repeatedly trying and failing?
> Yes, the state tests are basic, but by 10th grade
> (the test to graduate in FL), you have to at least be
> functional, and the reading test can be problematic
> because of the ambiguity that can crop up. I think
> currently, something like 18% of the students get a
> "label", although some of them (I hope) managed to
> shed it. We can be pretty sure that there is a wide
> variation of ability in that 18%. How do you deal
> with that? Do you divide them into groups or teach
> each one intensely and individually?
There is much less variation of ability than you assume, or at least for reasons other than those you assume. Yes, students with LDs require individual attention because they have different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. O-G is best when it is individualized, and I am fortunate to have the luxury of teaching individual students, but I personally know teachers who have successfully taught groups of LD children to read. The biggest stumbling block is students are identified for services throughout the school year, so some have already had a number of lessons when the next student comes along, who has to start at the beginning. Otherwise, teaching a small group would not be much more difficult than teaching an individual. And quite easy to do for a regular ed classroom. What I teach is so rigorous, by the way, advanced kids would be far less bored than they are in school today.
Robert, we are all different, thank goodness, with different strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, passions, life experiences, motivations. What a dull and unproductive world it would be otherwise. Some kids love math and spend their free time thinking about math, other kids want to get their homework done as fast as possible so they can go dance. We need to allow for and celebrate these differences, give students a chance to shine with sparkles of their own choosing. But we aren't talking about these sorts of differences here, we are talking about basic competency. Many of my students may never be great or passionate readers, although some will, and probably none will be National Spelling Bee champ. But I promise them they will all be competent readers and adequate spellers (good enough to use spell check successfully). Where they go from there is up to them.
Pam
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