On the dyslexia front, it makes perfect sense. If I learn to sound out a word, then “dog” can only be “dog.” It can be nothing else. …
Imagine trying to read that way! Now if I tell you that “xib” means “dog” and “bix” means “God”

Oh, this reminds me of my *favorite* joke:

Did you hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac? He lies awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.

(*rim shot*)

On the role of parents who act as massive drags on their children’s educational chances, two articles guaranteed to make your head explode:

How I Joined Teach for America — And Got Sued for $20 Million

and

What’s Holding Black Kids Back?

Key excerpt from the second article:

Social scientists have long been aware of an immense gap in the way poor parents and middle-class parents, whatever their color, treat their children, including during the earliest years of life. On the most obvious level, middle-class parents read more to their kids, and they use a larger vocabulary, than poor parents do. They have more books and educational materials in the house; according to Inequality at the Starting Gate, the average white child entering kindergarten in 1998 had 93 books, while the average black child had fewer than half that number. All of that seems like what you would expect given that the poor have less money and lower levels of education.

But poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas. Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don’t you give me that fork so that you don’t get hurt?” In general, middle-class parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children, pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions: “That’s a horse. What does a horsie say?” (or that middle-class mantra, “What’s the magic word?”). Middle-class mothers also give more positive feedback: “That’s right! Neigh! What a smart girl!” Poor parents do little of this.

The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”

If Hart and Risley’s observations are in the right ballpark, then that means the “mental stunting” of tens of millions of underclass kids is pretty much a fait accompli before they even hit the school system. And this is an underappreciated (in society at large, anyway; I think conservatives already get it) factor in multi-generational cycles of poverty. The people least equipped to raise successful, self-supporting children — due precisely to their own deficits in maturity, sound judgment, education, skills & discipline — are the very ones given all the wrong incentives to do so by hundreds-of-billions $ Great Society programs.

I am the last person who would advocate giving the government power to “license” who can have children and who can’t. But for God’s sake the least we can do is stop using tax dollars to subsidize those who shouldn’t be having children but are. Then at least we’d be back to “normal” levels of underclass, and poor but hard-working & discipline-minded parents wouldn’t live in neighborhoods where their kids are outnumbered 10-1 by 4’5″ walking menaces.

engineer @ 29 wrote:

Furthermore teaching should not necessarily be looked upon as a life time profession. Having young energetic teachers with real degrees not ed degrees is a good thing. Let them teach for a few years and then move on to something else. Let others move into teaching from other productive careers and then teach for a few years.

It would be nice if enthusiasm, flexibility, thorough knowledge of one’s subject & a good head start on teaching ability were the requirements as opposed to a degree in education. Unfortunately, teacher credentialing in many states requires an education degree or at least an MA in another subject area. Some states are pretty insane with the credentialing requirements (*cough* California *cough*), which amount to mainly an industry racket to drive tuition dollars and warm bodies into the education colleges … NOT a baseline for determining pedagogical adequacy.

So the credentialing requirements, esp. in states where teachers’ unions have effectively locked competent non-ed majors out of jobs in K-12 classrooms, pretty much guarantee that teaching becomes, by default, a lifetime profession. Who is going to spend all that time and tuition money earning a degree or two for a job they will only be in for 5 or 10 years at most?

I don’t even think I agree with the premise that the paradigm should be teaching as a starter job. For the truly gifted teachers, it *is* a kind of calling and both they and their students are better off if they stick with it. Next to parents & grandparents, teachers are usually THE most influential adults in just about every kid’s life. I had many very good teachers in my 18 years of Catholic schooling, and a few truly phenomenal ones. One of them became my mentor and was a good friend until he passed away last year. His influence on my intellectual life is incalculable, but even beyond that he was a man of great integrity and I count myself blessed to have known him. Considering the thousands of young people he interacted with over 30+ years in the classroom, I can say that our corner of the world would be much, much poorer had he not dedicated his life to teaching. Best damn teacher I ever had, and I know I am not alone in saying that.

Teaching can be a clock-punching day job or it can be a ministry. What makes it unusual among professions is the role and presence of the teacher in the life of a kid. When you think how much good can be done through and with that role, it is frustrating (and angering) beyond words to see what a shambles so much of the public education system in this country has become.