You wrote to ask “What do you do for students in upper grades to close the reading achievement gap?”

First, consider this quote from Regna Lee Wood’s June 1996 article, “The Dumbbell Curve”:

Since American teachers switched in the 1930s from reading instruction that worked for everyone to reading instruction that neuroscientists now tell us doesn’t work for anyone, school-produced illiteracy has soared. And it is illiteracy–not low IQ–that is not only responsible for decades of declining test scores but is also critically linked to every critical social problem in Oklahoma and nationwide.

I love to teach reading to teens and adults because I can make rapid repairs and the students are so appreciative.  Most have the maturity to understand that they are being provided with what may be their last chance to learn to read, and thus their last chance to acquire the means to more easily set and achieve life goals, whether academic or non-academic.  Poor readers have suffered since the day they discovered…with deep, heart-rending disappointment…that the act of reading books was not going to be as easy or as much fun as they had expected or dreamed.  Persons who can teach reading should be encouraged to do so; should be encouraged to remediate reading skills and repair fractured self esteem in individuals of all ages.  (This would make a wonderful “pass it on” project in America.)

I honed my skills while teaching reading at the local jail where incarcerated adults react with the same appreciation at receiving genuine reading lessons. My challenge there was that each time I went, the class was made up of new arrivals plus some who had already received a lesson or two from me.  I needed to teach basic introductory material again without boring the “seasoned” students, while teaching as much as possible during the restricted contact time.  My task was challenging but rewarding because it pushed me to learn how to teach more efficiently and effectively.

It was that high pressured teaching which forced me to ponder the bare bones instructional components necessary for rapid reading instruction and improvement. The education establishment approaches the teaching of reading at a snail’s pace, using a plethora of books and materials that in weight might be comparable to materials necessary for teaching rocket wiring, circuitry and assembly.  In special education classes the teaching moves at an even slower pace…when it moves at all.

In my great need for speed, I determined that there are 180 essential Tools for Reading…tiny tools that include the 26 alphabet letters…and that these reading tools are not difficult for individuals of any age to learn if they are taught with skill.  Non-college educated one-room schoolhouse teachers once successfully taught these tools to most anyone and everyone.

The greatest challenge, and the main difference facing a teen or adult delayed reader, is the need to make up for years of lost opportunities for learning language, vocabulary, knowledge, and concepts.  Not only do delayed readers lose in life from their inability to read efficiently and effectively, they lose as well from academic deprivation.

Because teens and adults do not have educational time to waste, I have written a book for the rapid improvement of reading skills in those populations with use of my method.  The book is not yet available but in the meantime…

First, explain to your students that reading problems are never, never the fault of the individual.  Reading problems are the fault of bad teachers, badly trained teachers, bad educational philosophies, bad materials, and bad schools.  I explain to my students that if they must describe themselves with a label, to consider themselves TD (Teaching Disabled) not LD (Learning Disabled).  True LD and true dyslexia are infrequent occurrences.   (As I think back through four decades of teaching, I can count my truly dyslexic students on one hand …and probably leave a spare finger if not two.)

Second, understand the importance of precise hearing and speech.  Train students for those and always expect precision in listening and speaking.  No slang or dialects allowed.  English is precisely recorded using precise spelling patterns based on precise pronunciation.  Put students though Auditory Training if necessary, covering your mouth to force them to listen closely to speech sounds.

Realize the vital importance of cursive handwriting and teach it as you teach the 70 phonograms.  Expect students to speak the sounds aloud as they practice writing each phonogram precisely.  Thereafter, expect the use of cursive for notes and every writing assignment, no matter how large or small.  The July Education Reporter , in its Education Briefs, included this quote from Psychology Today:

“In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of the brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.” Psychology Today, 3-14-13

My method is specific to the instruction and learning of the 180 Tools for Reading. These essential reading elements must be taught as soon; as precisely; as methodically; and as fully as possible and they must be taught to automaticity.  The instruction in cursive handwriting will facilitate learning because we speak in cursive!  We do not speak in chopped-up print.  We say “stop” not “s/t/o/p.”   Cursive reinforces the flow of mental thoughts and connections.

THE 180 TOOLS FOR READING:

26  ABCs

70  Ways to Spell the

44  Voice Sounds used in American English

6  Types of Syllables (Open, Closed, E-Controlled, R-Controlled, Vowel-Team, Consonant+le)

2  Types if Questions (Literal and Inferential)

3  Types of Writing (Narrative, Informative, Informative-Narrative)

29  Spelling Rules (Only 29.  Not the gazillion that we were miseducated to believe!)

(Some detailed explanations:  Six Types of Syllables and The Absolute Need for Phonics for Teaching/Learning a Phonetic Language like English.)

Additionally, go to http://www.spalding.org and read everything there.  Order the book/manual The Writing Road to Reading by Romalda Spalding and study it carefully.  Order a set of Phonogram Flashcards….small size for individual and small group instruction; large size for classroom.  If at all possible, take a Spalding training class.  It will be the best money you ever spend.  I have been through two different Spalding classes and I learned more in those two two-week sessions than in all the “teacher training” (not!) offerings that I was forced to endure at university.

Order a set (A-E) of the McCall-Crabb reading test lessons (plus the instruction booklet + answer keys, and a pack of answer sheets).  Analyze the books and decide which levels you should order for your students.  Once you have enough books for a class, begin each instructional period by having students read silently (and answer the questions) of one 3-minute story.  I trained my students to get book, black and red pencils, and answer sheet as they entered the classroom. As soon as the school bell rang, I announced “Ready…Set…Read!” and pushed the button on the timer set for the 3 minutes. When the timer rang, the students put down their pencils.  I called out the answers while they corrected with red. We went right on to the next story, and tried to do a third story.  Following the readings, we discussed any problems or questions about the stories.  Every day.  Without fail.   The results were that reading scores went up and up and up and the students became more attuned to the world, its history, and its workings.   I cannot stress enough how valuable the McCall-Crabb readers are for teaching concepts, history, language, vocabulary and…reading skills!   I refer to the books as Reading Practice That Educates. 

Following the readings,  I methodically taught the entire Code for written English using the phonogram flashcards;  I led practice in instant decoding of words at all levels of difficulty by using the logic of the 6 Types of Syllables;  I led the way in methodically and logically analyzing each spelling word on the week’s spelling list.  We then turned our attention to non-insulting fiction and nonfiction books, magazines, and materials; relative-to-life fiction and nonfiction. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl was usually our first basal reader.  After that we read Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer and A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck.  Once skills were developed using such books, I dug literature anthology textbooks out of storage bins where English teachers, enamored with some Progressive Foolish Fad, had dumped them.  My students read poetry, short stories, plays, essays, writings of various authors, all selections chosen towards the goal of helping students “catch up” culturally and educationally.  We studied Greek mythology; read a prose version of The Odyssey, then watched the movie The Odyssey with Armand Assante.  We constantly researched and learned new words using The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. Always we worked to close knowledge and language gaps by reading for content, comprehension, and vocabulary.

With elementary-aged students, I teach almost pure Spalding. For teens and adults, I adapt Spalding for increased speed in instruction.  I teach the logic of language, which teens and adults find so interesting and so “learnable”; I make even more use of word etymologies; I provide more specific instruction in the use of Greek and Latin roots towards rapidly broadening vocabulary, especially for science classes and comprehension. With little ones, I teach spelling first, which is absolutely the right process.  With adults and teens, I teach reading first with logical spelling lessons woven into reading lessons. With adults and teens, reading gains will come about quickly.  Spelling skills will develop much more slowly.

Spelling is a vital aspect of reading but must be approached differently with students who have not been readers.  Poor and delayed readers have not read enough to notice and learn correct spelling patterns in English.  They, themselves, have spent years making so many spelling errors that they have never formed accurate mental word images against which they can check and correct spelling errors.  Poor readers must be taught to Spell-by-Logic rather than by memorization.  They must be trained to listen more precisely and choose phonograms with thought and skill.  They must be taught to think more about the meanings and origins of words and use those as tools for making spelling decisions.  It is too late for delayed readers to develop the ability to easily spell by rote.  They must be trained to analyze speech and meaning to wisely match sound to phonogram.  They may need to strategize before spelling most words; may never spell any but the simplest with automaticity.  Actually…all of us would be better spellers if we were taught to accurately hear and logically analyze words rather than to memorize lists of nonrelated words.

This is what I “do for students in upper grades to close the reading achievement gap “. I hope that you find my techniques useful and applicable to your students and your teaching style.  I wish you great success in your teaching because our teen and adult delayed readers need now, more than ever, to develop much better Receptive Language Skills (reading, listening, vocabulary) and Expressive Language Skills (spelling, writing, vocabulary).   With improved reading, vocabulary, knowledge,and cursive instruction, students’ brains will develop a greater ability to think, judge, assess, weigh, determine, evaluate, create, imagine, problem solve, …

When I read headlines like “School District Returns to Traditional, Methodical, Instruction,” I will have some hope for American schools, but for now too many in the educational community treat schooling failures as merely bubbles that can be popped, blown away or ignored; too many educators choose solutions that are more dream than substance. For far too many decades now, costly fads have been the preferred curricular choices and while low-scoring (See here) administrators and teachers retain control of the schools, rarely-to-never will there be any decision to restructure failing policies and retrain teachers to provide appropriate and skilled instruction to all students.

An interesting article was up at Drudge, but before I could type “Phonics,” the article was taken down. How odd. The piece may be evidence of yet another dreamy tactic for dealing with real problems within the educational mega-structure.

New York City To Try Longer School Day In 20 Middle Schools. ”NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The school day is about to get longer for some New York City school kids – and we’re not talking a couple of minutes. It’s about to be two and a half hours longer. If scores go up, the plan could be extended city-wide, CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer reported Monday.”

The article quotes City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who apparently has some sentence structure problems, ”It’s where the achievement gap really seems to grow, in New York City about three-fourths of seventh and eighth graders. Three-fourths of seventh and eighth graders do not read at a proficient level.” Hopefully, the reporter just misquoted her.

My instant reaction was to think of (Is it not still running in the background?) Hilary Clinton and Marc Tucker’s plan to get kids…heck, to get entire communities!…into the confines of their local schools for that “Cradle to Grave” ‘education’ + supervision by STATE-indoctrinated agents and authorities. (Reading suggestion: None Dare Call It Education by Dr. John Stormer)

I agree that school days in America are too short, cheating children of educational time and complicating life for working parents, but what besides resentment can be gained by increasing school days by 2½ hours in one fell swoop? I am especially concerned because I have no reason to trust that the additional 2½ hours will be spent in carefully reconstructing proper and solid foundations for learning so that the students actually will be able to become successful in all subject areas.

The most important foundation for learning in America is the ability to precisely understand, speak, use, and read English. Most often, poor students neither speak nor read English accurately and fluently. Unless students are taught phonics and how to usephonetic skills to break the phonetic code in which the phonetic language of English is recorded phonetically…individuals of all ages generally face insurmountable educational hurdles in all academic areas. But for some inexplicable reason, this level and type of logic will confuse and anesthetize most of those who passed through teacher training programs. The rational graduates have either left the schools, physically and/or spiritually, having quit or retired; or remain in the schools but spend their days ultimately frustrated and bitterly unhappy.

I would very much like to explain to school board members across America that accurate, complete, methodical phonics instruction not only teaches students of all ages to read, but is the only way to teach anyone to read a phonetic language like English. Throughout my long teaching career, I repeatedly advised school administrators and school boards to drop the Failing-Fad-Following and return to phonics instruction but only one school, Northern Michigan Christian in McBain, was willing to listen to the Truth and decide to change their entire approach to reading instruction based on that unbreakable Law of Phonetic Languages. The results have been remarkable. My tide-turning question to that school board may have been, “Why would any parent pay $X,X00 a year for their child not to learn to read at NMC…when that same child can…not learn to read over at ‘public’ for free?”

Not only do individuals learn to read a phonetic language once they are taught the phonetics of that particular language, they quickly develop the skills to do so. Remember “Dick & Jane” and the devastation that the sight word, word-calling method brought to America? It is with frustration and despair that I report the following: “Dick & Jane” have not left the premises. “Dick & Jane” have simply been renamed “Dibbles, Memorize & Hurry.” The misbegotten method is still firmly entrenched in the collective psyche of the American mis-educational cartel. (Aside:See the difference between the reading levels of WW-II recruits [pre-sight words] and Korean War recruits [post sight words] here.)

No, Reyna Franco, there is not ”…a great need for additional education and resources,” unless those additions would consist of correct methods with tried and true curriculum.

Believe me, ‘longer days’ spent without the receipt of the right kind of corrective reading instruction will quickly become frustrating and counterproductive ‘endless days’.

Other reading:

Education’s Dunces and Whipping Boys

What Do They Think Will Happen?

So often I hear, “Of course, your son reads well. He has a reading specialist for a mother!”

My son does read with ease, taking in entire pages in what appear to be single glances. His 2^ndgrade standardized tests found that he was reading at the 11^th grade level. (Of course, David was not allowed to check out chapter books from the school library until he became a 3^rd grader because it was against school policy. See this.)

We kept the family cars supplied with clip-on book lights so darkness had no power to stop our reading. By high school, David would take 3-4 thick novels on each day trip…so he would not run out of reading material. Usually, all had been read before we arrived home in the evening. I kept a miniature encyclopedia in the car and he read every page, more than once. I smile when people say that David seems to know something about everything because…well, he does.

But, I never taught him to read.

David learned to read without effort because he received four important gifts in life:

1. Articulate, chatty relatives who were always discussing the past, the present, and the future; who talked about plans, books, people, animals, news, relationships, problem solving, mechanics, movies, television programs, experiences, and personal reactions to Life, from trivial to weighty.

2. A family that traveled extensively to see new and interesting things which were photographed, discussed, and described to others: Wilder’s Little Houses; Caddie Woodlawn’s home; ferries; lakes; rivers; mountains; zoos; aquariums; aviaries; caves; trails; historical markers, and more.
3. Parents who began – soon after David was born – to read aloud…in the morning, mid-morning, during lunch, before nap, after nap, in the car, in the living room, on the porch, at the supper table, in waiting rooms, while riding all the way to Colorado, while riding all the way back,…to and from everywhere and at all the times in between; parents who ended each and every day with “Bath, teeth, and a couple good books.” PLUS…
4. A very wise day care provider who made one day of every week “Sound Day”. Prior to those days, parents led their children on treasure hunts through their homes to fill bags with “things that begin with the sound /m/” …or /b/ or /th/…on through most of The Code in which English is written. Mitten, mouse, mug, movie, even a picture of a moustache, were carried to “school” for group discussions that went like this: “Look! David brought his cat’s toy mouse. Mmmmmouse. Listen! The word ‘mouse’ begins with /mmm/. mmmmouse. The word ‘house’ does not begin with /mmm/ but the word ‘mouse’ does. Everyone say mmmmmmmmouse.”

After these 4 gifts of gold, David could easily recognize spellings-for-sounds in the thousands of words that he already knew and used. Those words flowed together into language and concepts which were already known, or were added to his knowledge base. The stage had been set and David required no other reading lessons. He is not unique. He just has a mother who understands that Language is the foundation for constructing a Life. Readers must have a variety of language ‘tools’ stored in their brains which they then use to assist them in the act of reading. Words, concepts, ideas, knowledge, sounds, and spellings are the absolutely necessary tools for a Reader. A child who knows little-to-nothing will read….little-to-nothing.

As a preschooler, David listened to the best in children’s literature, including chapter books like the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Once of school age, he listened to the best in literature for young adults, and even to adult novels like James Oliver Curwood’s memorable Kazan and Baree, Son of Kazan. As a preschooler, David was not interested in trying to read the books himself, so I never had to worry that he might memorize sight words and so mis-wire his brain. He listened to sounds; to vocabulary; to themes; to language usage; to beginnings-middles-endings. He soaked up books. One day, when he was nearing 5 years old, he told me that he had decided to read a chapter book, and he did. Around the World In Eighty Days, in an shortened version, was the first book that he chose to read, then he was on his way to become a non-stop and lifelong reader.

The best reading lessons are those that teach language, vocabulary, and knowledge. One cannot read print without the ability to quickly and smoothly make mental connections between 1) things already stored in the brain and 2) the print on the page. A wise parent will make sure that their children’s time – and brains – are filled with information and experiences that will make connections between the Language of Books, and the Language of Life, simply snap, crackle, and pop!

The schools have forgotten – and now unfortunately refuse – to carefully teach the Code in Which English Is Written. How well can a person, who has never been taught the code in which music has been written, read music? To read English skillfully, both children and adults must learn the full Code for English: /b/ is spelled ‘b’; /k/ is spelled ‘k,’ ‘c,’ and ‘ck’; /f/ can be spelled with an ‘f’ or a ‘ph’; /z/ can be spelled with an ‘s’ or ‘z’; …and on through both the Simple and Advanced Code.

Look in your rearview mirrors, educators! You made a very wrong turn! DIBBLES and sight words are simply the left lane on a terrible highway! Please double back and correct your life-destroying errors. It is vital that a phonetic language like English be taught by methodically teaching the Phonetic Code for English. There is no need to blame parents or genetics or culture or poverty. Only the education establishment is at fault, with professors, teachers, and consultants pushing bad policies, fad-philosophies, and damaging curriculum offerings.

My mother, Doris Sneary Regnier, was indeed right when she said, “Children who manage to learn to read in today’s schools…do so in spite of the teaching and curriculum.”

Recently by Linda Schrock Taylor: Empty People Not Loaded Guns

So often I hear, “Of course, your son reads well. He has a reading specialist for a mother!”

My son does read with ease, taking in entire pages in what appear to be single glances. His 2nd grade standardized tests found that he was reading at the 11th grade level. (Of course, David was not allowed to check out chapter books from the school library until he became a 3rd grader because it was against school policy. See this.)

We kept the family cars supplied with clip-on book lights so darkness had no power to stop our reading. By high school, David would take 3-4 thick novels on each day trip…so he would not run out of reading material. Usually, all had been read before we arrived home in the evening. I kept a miniature encyclopedia in the car and he read every page, more than once. I smile when people say that David seems to know something about everything because well, he does.

But, I never taught him to read.

David learned to read without effort because he received four important gifts in life:

1. Articulate, chatty relatives who were always discussing the past, the present, and the future; who talked about plans, books, people, animals, news, relationships, problem solving, mechanics, movies, television programs, experiences, and personal reactions to Life, from trivial to weighty.

2. A family that traveled extensively to see new and interesting things which were photographed, discussed, and described to others: Wilder’s Little Houses; Caddie Woodlawn‘s home; ferries; lakes; rivers; mountains; zoos; aquariums; aviaries; caves; trails; historical markers, and more.
3. Parents who began – soon after David was born – to read aloud in the morning, mid-morning, during lunch, before nap, after nap, in the car, in the living room, on the porch, at the supper table, in waiting rooms, while riding all the way to Colorado, while riding all the way back, to and from everywhere and at all the times in between; parents who ended each and every day with “Bath, teeth, and a couple good books.” PLUS
4. A very wise day care provider who made one day of every week “Sound Day”. Prior to those days, parents led their children on treasure hunts through their homes to fill bags with “things that begin with the sound /m/” …or /b/ or /th/…on through most of The Code in which English is written. Mitten, mouse, mug, movie, even a picture of a moustache, were carried to “school” for group discussions that went like this: “Look! David brought his cat’s toy mouse. Mmmmmouse. Listen! The word ‘mouse’ begins with /mmm/. mmmmouse. The word ‘house’ does not begin with /mmm/ but the word ‘mouse’ does. Everyone say mmmmmmmmouse.”

After these 4 gifts of gold, David could easily recognize spellings-for-sounds in the thousands of words that he already knew and used. Those words flowed together into language and concepts which were already known, or were added to his knowledge base. The stage had been set and David required no other reading lessons. He is not unique. He just has a mother who understands that Language is the foundation for constructing a Life. Readers must have a variety of language tools stored in their brains which they then use to assist them in the act of reading. Words, concepts, ideas, knowledge, sounds, and spellings are the absolutely necessary tools for a Reader. A child who knows little-to-nothing will read little-to-nothing.

As a preschooler, David listened to the best in children’s literature, including chapter books like the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Once of school age, he listened to the best in literature for young adults, and even to adult novels like James Oliver Curwood’s memorable Kazan and Baree, Son of Kazan. As a preschooler, David was not interested in trying to read the books himself, so I never had to worry that he might memorize sight words and so mis-wire his brain. He listened to sounds; to vocabulary; to themes; to language usage; to beginnings-middles-endings. He soaked up books. One day, when he was nearing 5 years old, he told me that he had decided to read a chapter book, and he did. Around the World In Eighty Days, in an shortened version, was the first book that he chose to read, then he was on his way to become a non-stop and lifelong reader.

The best reading lessons are those that teach language, vocabulary, and knowledge. One cannot read print without the ability to quickly and smoothly make mental connections between 1) things already stored in the brain and 2) the print on the page. A wise parent will make sure that their children’s time – and brains – are filled with information and experiences that will make connections between the Language of Books, and the Language of Life, simply snap, crackle, and pop!

The schools have forgotten – and now unfortunately refuse – to carefully teach the Code in Which English Is Written. How well can a person, who has never been taught the code in which music has been written, read music? To read English skillfully, both children and adults must learn the full Code for English: /b/ is spelled ‘b’; /k/ is spelled ‘k,’ ‘c,’ and ‘ck’; /f/ can be spelled with an ‘f’ or a ‘ph’; /z/ can be spelled with an ‘s’ or ‘z’; …and on through both the Simple and Advanced Code.

 Look in your rearview mirrors, educators! You made a very wrong turn! DIBBLES and sight words are simply the left lane on a terrible highway! Please double back and correct your life-destroying errors. It is vital that a phonetic language like English be taught by methodically teaching the Phonetic Code for English. There is no need to blame parents or genetics or culture or poverty. Only the education establishment is at fault, with professors, teachers, and consultants pushing bad policies, fad-philosophies, and damaging curriculum offerings.

My mother, Doris Sneary Regnier, was indeed right when she said, “Children who manage to learn to read in today’s schools do so in spite of the teaching and curriculum.”

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; and a former homeschooling parent. Linda recently finished writing her first book, which will hopefully be out by the end of the year. She has begun work on the second book in what will become a series.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Recently by Linda Schrock Taylor: The All-Important Reading Lesson

If guns were the underlying cause of mass shootings, in schools or in other places, what conclusion should be drawn from the mass school knifings that took place in China on the very same day as the Sandy Hook killings? "BEIJING (Reuters) — A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country."

Actually, few people will wonder about the underlying cause of knife-wielding assailants because most media sources have buried that story while setting their sights; while aiming their weapons at gun control. Shame…no, curses…on those who are willing to destroy the rights of millions of law abiding citizens simply because a very few by comparison…evil ones who would manage to get weapons despite any and all gun/knife/poison control laws…choose to act with cruelty and evil intent.

I am relieved to hear that some in Hollywood are finally coming forward to admit that video game, movie, and television violence set the stage…and in all too many cases actually encourage …the unhinged, as well as the borderline unhinged, to pattern their thinking and behaviors after evil role models.

Another great problem in this culture of media violence is that immature brains all too often misinterpret what they see on screens. When I talk to students about death being permanent, many argue with me, pointing out that although Actor X was killed in a TV show on Friday night, the viewer noticed that Actor X in different clothing was back, alive and well, in a movie on Saturday. Try to argue points of existence, roles, playacting and symbolism with an immature non-thinker of any age.

The problem of violence in America stems from the rot in our culture, and the blatant display of evil-in-action on screens of all sizes. For borderline individuals, guns have become the means to act out Hollywood type fantasies plus take their personal hurt out on other people. In America, in China, and elsewhere, knives and other tools can serve the same purposes for such individuals. Whether killers and destroyers use guns, knives, poisons, hands-that-strangle, vehicular-manslaughter, dousing-with-gasoline-then-lighting-on-fire, or other means to maim and murder, the reality is that when someone wants to hurt and kill, there is virtually no stopping them.

It is imperative that we teach children and others not to want to kill. Additionally, we must identify the underlying currents that create Empty people who are willing to load guns and sharpen knives with the goal of hurting others. In her excellent book, The Sociopath Next Door, (a book I strongly recommend that Everyone read as a prophylactic against the "1 out of 25" dangerous persons who populate our families, our neighborhoods and our world, disrupting and damaging our lives), Dr. Martha Stout quotes William Ralph Inge, speaking early in the twentieth century,

"The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born."

Since I am a person who believes that I was born at least 100 years too late, I paid special attention when I read that.

While many are discussing the cultural problems of visual-to-behavioral violence; the breakdown of the family; the delegation of parental roles to visual media; and the loss of a national moral compass, I would like to also direct attention to the schools. As a baseline for our thinking, let us consider this: When my husband (born 1941) attended school in small town Iowa, he and many other boys carried their guns to school and stored them in unlocked lockers. Teenage boys; Unlocked lockers; Possibly dozens of guns in the school building. A massacre in the making? Not at all. The daily outcome was that the boys…as soon as school let out…went hunting so that families might have fresh meat on their tables for evening meals.

In those days, character and values were formed by wisdom that had come down through the culture from …oh, about 100 years prior. Now, our culture treats individuals as though we are all still small enough, and dumb enough, to put beans up our noses. Rampant stupidity causes our do-gooders and tunnel-visioned leaders to erroneously conclude that outlawing beans must surely be the answer.

Empty people, not loaded guns or sharp knives, kill and indeed our schools excel at creating Empty People: Empty people with high-to-excellent self esteem.

For seven or eight decades now, public schools have failed to teach every non-retarded child to read, write, cipher, build a knowledge base, and use all of these tools for Thinking, Analyzing, and Wisely Concluding. School leaders at all levels, as well as teachers, not only fail to identify and take action to prevent the problems and repercussions associated with misfits trying to survive in society, but these supposedly well educated persons have even failed to understand the most vitally important rule of Education…that reading levels are determined by vocabulary levels. Why, the NAEP had to conduct an expensive research project just to arrive at the same conclusion that non-college educated (often teenaged) teachers in one-room schoolhouses knew intuitively, and that societies have known for thousands of years. It is shocking, but not a surprise, that public schools are failing our children in all ways, then blithly releasing amoral, soulless individuals who are capable of preying upon…financially, morally…and even murdering others in society.

Empty lessons create gaps in thinking and knowledge. Empty lessons create huge Holes in Souls and Missing Morals. The emptiest of all lessons are the phony-baloney "Self Esteem Improvement" ones. People develop and improve self esteem by actually doing something; by actually accomplishing something; by actually learning something; by actually improving themselves. No one develops self esteem by participating in special school events designed for hollow non-achievement. The next time that you spot a child wearing some stupid sign like the "I.A.L.A.C." (I Am Lovable and Capable) badges of the 1970's, reread The Sociopath Next Door and increase your vigilance as you determinedly watch for Empty People With Loaded Guns.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

In fact, the ability to instantly see, identify, and use the Six Syllable Types is so important that, if I was given but one opportunity to teach one reading lesson, that lesson would be “How to Use Syllables to Improve Reading and Spelling Skills.”

I purposely use the structure “if I was” because some months ago, I was given the opportunity to teach that lesson. A young man, who had always struggled with reading, was here working on my computer. I suggested that we trade skills: a reading lesson for his computer assistance. During a 90 minute lesson, I taught him to spot and use the Six Types of Syllables. I have not seen him since, but he did phone to report that the one lesson has made all of the difference; that he is now reading everything he has long wished to read; and that he is reading smoothly with rapid decoding and effective comprehension.

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Reading Comprehension depends on…and is limited by…the brain’s Ability, Agility, and Fluidity as it rejects or make connections among and between: automatic Code processing; streaming thought processes; vocabulary and concept banks; language and communication skills; storage of aural and oral information; and the reader’s knowledge and experience base.

By teaching both Phonics and the Six Syllable Types to automaticity, the brain takes over the responsibility for rapid Code processing thereby vastly improving the ability of the reader to develop brain processes that are agile and fluid while interweaving thought; while checking and rechecking knowledge, experience, and language against a developing mental image.

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This is the Lesson Plan that I use for teens and young adults. New readers will not need all of the information at the same time. Older readers can handle more. Do not overwhelm the student, but most importantly, absolutely do not under-whelm or under-educate them, either. Make use of mirrors, writing supplies, palms-on-throat, fingers-in-mouth, just whatever it needed to teach anyone that Print begins in the Mouth!

The One LESSON PLAN

(Have fun with this!! Students love to learn “how it all works”!)

Step A – Check/Correct Student Knowledge/Gaps

With a mirror as your tool, teach the difference between Vowels and Consonants.

When forming Vowels, the airflow through the throat is never restricted. The parts of the mouth and face change shape in order to produce a variety of vowels BUT…the air passing through the throat and mouth remains UN-restricted. (Note: Vowels make singing possible. Try to sing the sound /d/…”duh”. How about belting out /k/? Great singers have the ability to produce great vowels!)

Holding the palm of one hand against the throat, while observing the face in the mirror,

Practice:

aa-aa-aa (as in sat), A-A-A (as in navy), ah-ah-ah (as in fa3ther);

e-e-e (as in set), ee-ee-ee (as in me);

*i-i-i (as in sit) I-I-I (as in silent); ee-ee-ee (as in poli3ce)

*i-i-i (as in gym), I-I-I (as in my), ee-ee-ee (as in baby3),

o-o-o (as in hot), O-O-O (as in open), oo-oo-oo (as in do3)

u-u-u (as in but), U-U-U (as in music), u3-u3-u3 (as in put)

NOTE: The Primary Vowels are: a, e, i/y, o, u. A, E, I/Y, O, U.

A, EE, Eye/Y, OH, U!

When Forming Consonants, parts of the mouth must stop, block, pressurize, explode, hiss, and/or send air through the nasal passages; must in some way restrict, squeeze, release, and/or shape the air prior to it leaving the mouth. Still using mirrors…but this time directing focus to the interior of the mouth…with palm on throat, have students practice Unvoiced and Voiced Consonants; Liquid Consonants; Nasal Consonants; and Huffed Consonants. Students should be every-moment aware of how the airstream is being stopped then released. Voiced Consonants can be felt; Unvoiced Consonants cannot! Teach students to turn on then turn off voice.

Unvoiced vs. Voiced Consonant Pairs:

The only difference between these consonant pairs is the addition, or the subtraction, of VOICE!

Practice:

t-t-t vs. d-d-d k-k-k vs. g-g-g ch-ch-ch vs. j-j-j

p-p-p vs. b-b-b f-f-f vs. v-v-v s-s-s vs. z-z-z

th-th-th (as in thin) vs. TH-TH-TH (as in then) wh-wh-wh vs. w-w-w

sh-sh-sh vs. zh-zh-zh (Note: zh is never used in spelling. Usually the /zh/ sound is spelled “si“. Vision, division, television, precision, decision.)

Note: C makes its S sound when followed by: E, I, or Y

Note: G often (but not always) makes its J sound when followed by: E, I, or Y.

Liquid Consonants: L and R. These two are odd: not fully consonants; not actually vowels. They just “pour” on and on like the movement of flowing water. lllllllllllllllllllll (not lah) rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (not errr)

Nasal Consonants: m, n, and ng. These sounds are created by sending the air stream to the nasal passages. Please note that the sound /ng/ never includes a /g/ sound! “ng” is the spelling for the nasal sound /ng/: sing, sang, sung. It should never be pronounced “/n/+/G/”!…sin-G, ran-G, lon-G…like too many reporters, TV personalities, and others people who should know better now do.

“Huffed” Consonants: h and wh. The Voiceless Consonant sound /h/ is created by huffing out air: Happy Holiday. The Voiceless Consonant sound “wh” is actually pronounced backward: /hw/. Huff in the /h/ then blow out the /w/. Never say “wh” with Voice! With voice, it becomes /w/: wen (not when) wy (not why) wear (not where). Please help save the “wh”.

Step B – THE LESSON: Six Syllable Types

1. – Open Syllables. Definition: Open Syllables are syllables that end with a vowel. Since the mouth and airway must be open to say a long vowel, such syllables are referred to as Open Syllables. Rule: In an Open Syllable, the Vowel usually says its own name/long sound. However, be alert to the Latin and French effects on the “I/Y” spellings vs. pronunciations. If a word does not sound correct using Long I, then try the Short i. Next try the Long ee.

Practice: ba be bi by bo bu / ma me mi my mo mu /

fa fe fi fy fo fu / la le li ly lo lu / tra tre tri try tro tru

2. – Closed Syllables. Definition: Closed Syllables end with a Consonant. This requires that the airstream close or stop to create a consonant sound. Usually the vowel before the closure will be “clipped off,” resulting in the production of a short vowel.

Practice: bag beg big bog bug tan ten tin ton bob cob fob job lob mob

brand rust frost crust wrist blond lost trust cast pals talk

Practice combinations of Open and Closed Syllables:

ba con ba gel glo ry i dol sha dy bag gy ju ry mo ment fi nal

ru ral va cant po et pre cept qui et tu tor fru gal di et di al

chill y gyp sy mud dy sand y sul try fan cy pup py pan try

shep herd ad vent an gel bal lad car rot chil dren trum pet fam i ly

tri fo cal va ca tion cru el re gal vi tal pal a tial gi ant re do

3. -E-Controlled Syllables: Definition: E-Controlled Syllables are those in which a Silent Final E forces the Vowel before it to say its own name. First teach these in pairs so students can immediately see /feel what the Silent Final E can quickly accomplish.

Practice: rob/robe hid/hide wad/wade cod/code fad/fade

cub/cube tub/tube Tim/time tap/tape win/wine fin/fine sit/site

cloth/clothe bab/babe wok/woke mil/mile dol/dole gal/gale

ac cu mu late al le vi ate lat i tude de pop u late cre ate sur prise

4. – R-Controlled Syllables: Definition: R-Controlled Syllables are those in which an R changes the expected sound of the vowel. Teach the sentence: Her nurse first works early. Here the main spellings for /er/ are in statistical order for their appearance in English.

Practice:

Her nurse first works ear ly. / doc tor dol lar

fern hurt third worm learn / al li ga tor col lar

din ner church bird word heard / an ces tor vin e gar

berth pur pose birth world search / in ves tor burg lar

ner vous fur fir worth re hears al / glad i a tor

gro cer y dis turb con firm wor ry Earth / per pen di cu lar

5. – Consonant +le Syllables: Definition: Consonant +le Syllables provide a Silent E for a syllable that otherwise would have no vowel. Rule: Every English syllable must have a vowel!

Practice: can dle cra dle ta ble lit tle ti tle bat tles rat tle han dle re spon si ble ap pli ca ble el i gi ble trea cle bi cy cle rat tle

6. – Vowel Pair-plus Syllables: Vowel Pair-plus Syllables are those in which it requires two or more letters to spell the vowel.

Practice: see seen keen spleen ca reer ca reen

ay/ai: day tray play dis play / pain stain quaint saint

oy/oi: toy boy oy ster Tol stoy / boil soil oint ment foil

aw/au: awl brawl aw ful un law ful / fault caulk auk Paul

oa/oe: boat coat soar oat meal / toe Joe foe doe sloe

ough: though through2 rough3 cough4 though5t bough6

igh: sigh night sight high light thigh sight fright

ow: cow how sow owl scowl / flow bow throw sow2 show

oo: boot loose smooth / foo2t coo2k soo2t y / floo3r

ou: round sound pro found / fou2r / you3 / cou4n try

ea: eat / brea2d / brea3k

ew/ui: new few grew ewe / fruit suit

ie: field / pie2

ei: con ceit / vei2l / for fei3t

ey: they / key2

eigh: eight freight / heigh2

augh: daugh ter caught taught

STEP C – PRACTICE USING MULTISYLLABIC WORDS

Write the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” on board or paper then lead the students in dividing the word into syllables.

an/ti/dis/es/tab/lish/men/tar/i/an/ism

Have the students count the vowels (11). (Remind students that Vowel Pairs-Plus count as only one (1) vowel.) Have students count the number of syllables (11). Rule: Each syllable must have a vowel; each vowel must have a syllable. A count informs the reader of how many syllables must be decoded then pronounced.

Using the pointer finger of the left hand, cover all syllables of the word except the final one. Now teach students to “Decode Backward; Read Forward” as you slide your finger left, exposing one syllable at a time.

Decode Backwards: “ism”; “an ism”; “i(ee) an ism”; “tar (ee) an ism”; “men tar i(ee) an ism”; “lish men tar i(ee) an ism”; “tab lish men tar i(ee) an ism”; “es tab lish men tar i(ee) an ism”; “dis es tab lish men tar i(ee) an ism”; “ti dis es tab lish men tar i(ee) an ism”; and finally: “an ti dis es tab lish men tar i(ee) an ism”! Point out that the root word is “establish”.

Read Forwards: Have students smoothly read the entire word from beginning to end.

Practice:

Divide, Count Vowels, Decode Backward; Read Forward:

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

(Hint: u2018cious is a syllable suffix that is pronounced “shus”. CI represents /sh/.)

For further practice, use the dictionary to choose various sized words. Noah Webster, creator of the “Blue-Backed Speller,” designed his program so that beginning readers could soon pronounce any word they saw, whether they understood the meaning or not. That should be the goal of all reading instruction: Ability, Agility, and Fluidity.

I have no respect for the current election paradigm — “Choose a Player Then Destroy All Others” — and the news that Herman Cain will now put his support behind Newt…added to Sarah Palin’s defection…have almost destroyed any remaining hope that I had for the restoration of America.

They, along with so many others, have forgotten the original intent of the Founding Fathers, who created a government that would only be as honorable as the elected officials that We the People choose.

Everywhere, we witness the decay that is engulfing America. The main root of the rot is in the three branches of government. The Supreme Court refuses to acknowledge that its purpose is to judge constitutionality, not to legislate and deform our culture with decisions that trump common sense and morality. The Senate and the House spit on the trust that the voters placed in them and instead kowtow to corrupt leaders, members, and lobbyists, further destroying freedom in America. The president refuses to understand that he is the Chief Policeman who works for the People, rather than a legislator and a king.

Some would hold We the People at fault. “Citizens need to be better read. Citizens should listen more carefully to the news issues of the day.” However, citizens cannot be held totally responsible when their information sources rush to corrupt information; to hide, ignore or lie about the truth.

Voters are left with few sources from which to gather honest information which can help them make informed decisions as to which candidates are honorable people. Even fair and balanced news agencies hide news, distort issues, and slant dialogue toward favored candidates. I have nicknamed one major news person, The Election Fixer.

So voters turn to friends, neighbors, and other persons they believe to be trustworthy. Many people, me included, have viewed Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as almost-neighbors; as trustworthy people who share our distrust and dislike of the government in charge. That is, until they chose to default on that trust by supporting a candidate long known for dishonorable behavior and decisions. Palin and Cain chose to join the election fixers to misdirect the thought processes and the morals of the citizens.

Palin and Cain see Newt as the best candidate yet everyone I meet looks at Newt and sees a philanderer rather than an honorable person. We look at Newt’s wife and see a second mistress…not even a first one…instead of a potential First Lady. Obviously, Palin and Cain have taken their fingers off the pulse of America.

I have met no one who honestly likes, trusts, and respects Newt. The less decisive people just hem and haw, mumbling about him being…bright. Ah…and articulate. Um…and he debates well…even as they forget that those are the same irrelevant measuring sticks that were used to measure Obama’s presidential skills. Yet, Palin and Cain will succeed in causing many citizens to believe that those two must have some magical information upon which they based their decision. Again, Americans are being encouraged to distrust and dismiss their best intuition, common sense, and morals. Sensible voices cannot even be heard when Palin and Cain take the stage and tell their followers how to think. Unfortunately, too many voters will give Palin and Cain too much credence; will sit back and refuse to think for themselves.

If a self-assured but dishonorable man swaggers his way to face Obama in November, each vote for Newt could very well mean a vote for Obama, and that is exceedingly frightening. I, for one, refuse to vote for the Lesser of Two Evils and everyone with whom I speak all feel the same. We will stay home rather than vote.

America needs honorable spokespersons who support honorable candidates. Newt is not only a poor choice, his candidacy is forcing other, more desirable candidates to quit the race. We are so fortunate that an honorable man like Ron Paul is willing to stay in the race, and we are so fortunate that his supporters provide financial backing. Speaking of Ron Paul …consider the how his potential for winning the ticket would improve if 1.) people at all levels would stop repeating the erroneous “He would be great as president but he has no chance of winning,” and 2.) if spokespersons with a following would publicly put their support behind an honorable man.

I keep picturing an algebraic formula with “RP” representing voters who already support Ron Paul; with “Y” representing voters who would listen to their better judgement if they were not led astray by the Media and by the influence of others; with “P” and “C,” respectively, representing votes for Ron Paul that Palin and Cain could encourage: RP +Y +P +C = An Honorable Victory for America

It is heartbreaking to realize that winning has become more important than honor.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Never has any student chosen the Ineffective Method although almost all teachers, principals, curriculum consultants, textbook publishers, and textbook adoption committees make the wrong choice every time. But remember, Ineffective Textbooks assure another round of Expensive Ineffective Book Purchases. To further compound the problem, teacher training professors no longer understand how to teach future teachers how to teach reading. The circle of Money-Reinforcing-Ignorance continues with its ever-widening diameter of destruction.

The long prevailing and very Ineffective Look Say method of reading instruction – although constantly renamed and repackaged – continues to destroy potential and create deep-seated reading and self confidence problems. Flashcard memorization. Dick & Jane. Whole Language. Balanced Literacy, Dolch word lists and more serve to retard the nation and ruin lives.

These variations of the same mistake all fail badly and Whole Language cannot even be called a method. It is a dream; a hope; a wish; and a prayer. I liken Whole Language to a process in which a musically ignorant person is forced to listen to pieces by great composers. After hours of listening, the person is given a violin and expected to replicate the music heard. I almost burst out laughing the first time that someone explained the …ah, rationale…behind Whole Language but I stopped in horror as I visualized the implications and unexpected consequences of such craziness. The Whole Idea was too dangerous to be funny. Other “new” curriculums are almost as goofy, especially one that has beginners read a couple simple words, then read a picture, then read a word or two, then read a picture… Only fools, or those who purposely set out to destroy America, can stand behind such destructive options.

Wisely, my students always choose my 180 Method. America would return to educational excellence if only curriculum directors, teachers, school boards, textbook publishers, college professors and the rest of the Error Makers were as wise as those individuals who suffer the stings and the embarrassment of illiteracy.

180 Tools To Repair the Damage

• 26 ABCs
• 70 Spellings for the
• 44 Sounds of American English
• 29 Spelling Rules
• 6 Syllable Types
• 3 Types of Writing
• 2 Types of Questions

26 ABC’s – After 13 years in American public education, almost all of the kids actually have learned the alphabet although huge numbers remain illiterate. Absolutely no applause is warranted.

70 SPELLINGS – These are best taught using an individual set of Spalding phonogram cards. These spellings should be taught so that the students learn the order in which certain spellings are most used in English to represent the sounds of the English language. Examples: Teach students that the letter “A” can represent three different sounds in this statistical use order – /aa/, /ay/, /ah/. The letter grouping “CH” can represent three different sounds in this statistical order – /ch/, /k/, /sh/. By training the brain to sort through possibilities in their most likely order of usage, the decoding of written English will become automatic and rapid.

**Note: Letters say nothing! The letter “f” represents the sound /f/ but the letter “f” says nothing. Never teach “B says /b/.” Instead, say “The letter B is used to represent the sound /b/.” Remember, English is written in a CODE which the schools no longer understand how to teach. We cannot expect students to DECODE if they only have been taught bits and pieces of the CODE in which English is written.

44 SOUNDS – Teach students to clearly hear and clearly speak the speech sounds of English. Students cannot accurately spell if they cannot accurately hear and precisely speak English. Students with dialects and lazy speech patterns will be especially prone to errors and illiteracy. How can such students accurately spell a word like “bathroom” if they say and hear “baf roo”?

I teach students that they must learn many levels of English and that Standard English must be the level used in situations where they need to be accurate, articulate, and literate.

I explain that dialects are fine at home but not in school. To help them better understand what I mean, I tell them this true story: My baby brother, Reed, was deaf and he could never say the term “whipped cream” and he so loved whipped cream on pumpkin pie. Reed always called it “creama whippa”. The family was so tickled by the term that we all took to using it, as well. Reed was killed by a drunk driver in 1973 but to this day – and in his memory – the members of my immediate family say things like: “Who will buy the creama-whippa for Thanksgiving dinner?” Then I ask my students, “Do you think that any of us go into Kroger and ask “Where is the creama whippa?” …Silence as the students see the problem and “get it”. They come to understand why they must speak the level of English appropriate to their surroundings. “Baf roo” is simply not appropriate for use outside of the home and friendship circle. Neither is creama-whippa. These are not “bad” words if their use is restricted to limited and appropriate situations. Teach children to speak, spell, and write Standard English so that they can participate fully and skillfully in the larger world outside of the home.

29 SPELLING RULES – I teach these rules using the Spalding Reading Method and the book THE WRITING ROAD TO READING by Romalda Spalding. Do not teach students to memorize the rules! Teach students to logically USE the rules. I have written about the rules here Spelling Rules Rule, and here Spelling: A Lost Art, and here Spell Logically

6 SYLLABLE TYPES – Every English syllable has to have a vowel and most English syllables fall into one of six categories. Understanding these are essential to rapid Decoding (reading) and correct Encoding (spelling).

**Note: The vowels are a, e, i/y, o, u. Vowels are made with an open throat that does not restrict the flow of air, although the mouth and face do shape the sounds. Consonants are made when parts of the mouth and throat act in some way to stop, squeeze, restrict, explode, or redirect air through the nasal passages. Try to sing /d/. How about /h/? We sing vowels. Skilled singers produce vowels skillfully.

1) Open Syllables – end with a vowel and so the mouth is open. Usually, the vowels at the ends of open syllables say their long sounds; say their own name: me, my, ba con, va ca tion. ** I/Y do not always obey these rules because of Latin and other influences. Y can say the sounds of I; I can say the sounds of Y. Consider these: Short I – in or gym. Long I – silent or my. Long E – police or baby. Y – yellow or onion.

2) Closed Syllables – end with a consonant and so the mouth has to close to make it. Because of the mouth closing to produce the consonant, most often the vowel in a closed syllable is “clipped off” so that it says its short sound: met, bet, bug, in, fin, rich, patch, con cert

3) E-Controlled Syllables – end with a Silent Final E which forces the vowel before it to say its long, or name, sound: hat/hate cut/cute mat/mate

4) R-Controlled Syllables – These syllables contain an R that changes the expected vowel sound to something different: Instead of a short e, one hears /er/; instead of a short i, one hears /ir/; instead of a short u, one hears /ur/, and so on. Have your students memorize “Her Nurse First Works Early” for a basic range of statistical usage options.

5) Consonant-LE Syllables – These syllables end with a consonant +L +Silent E. The reason for needing the E is that all English syllables MUST have a vowel. Examples: lit tle, med dle, cra dle

6) Vowel Team Syllables – In these syllables, the vowels are spelled with two or more letters: pain, play, cow, bow, bread, break, foot, boot, floor, eight, thought, etc.

Poor spellers should be taught to carefully check their spellings. If they are creating syllables that fail to meet one of the above 6 standards then they either have a spelling error or they have spelled a foreign words. They should check with the dictionary. Skilled readers use the knowledge of the syllable types to rapidly anticipate pronunciation and speed up decoding, as well as to spell with accuracy and insight.

3 Types of Writing – When readers pick up a book, they take a moment to understand what type of reading they will need to process in that particular book. We do not open a physics book with our mind prepared to read a Victorian novel. Our brain handles such adjustments so automatically that we are unaware of the process but remedial readers need to be taught how to spot and prepare for the three different kinds of writing.

Narrative Writing – Teach students to expect a story line, characters of some type, and other story aspects. Teach students to be alert for the answers to the questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? What happens?

Informative Writing – Teach students to expect and be alert to Facts, Facts, and more Facts. Since textbooks (are supposed to) fall in this category, the students must learn to focus their minds on understanding and retention of Facts and Information.

Informative-Narrative Writing – Prepare students to expect to learn new things while they read an interesting story with characters. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books are a great example. While reading of the family’s interesting moves and adventures, the reader also learns how to smoke meat in a hollow tree; how to butcher and process a pig; how to cross the Mississippi River in the winter; and many more facts, interesting bits of information, and good down-home common sense.

Forewarned is to be forearmed and this goes for the reading process as well. Teach your students to quickly analyze what they are about to read, as well as the reason they will read it, then adjust their expectations and attention accordingly.

2 Types of Questions – There are 1) Literal questions and then there are 2) Inferential questions. I teach this by dramatically pointing out to students that, “The answer to a literal question is literally right in front of your eyes!” The answers to Literal questions can be found and pointed to; can be copied from the page; can be underlined or highlighted. But, Inferential questions need to be pondered and considered as the reader sorts and sifts through the information learned in order to make the mental connections necessary to answer Inferential questions. A Literal question asks, “When was the Declaration of Independence signed?” and the reader’s finger can literally point to “1776″. An Inferential question asks, “What might be a more appropriate title for this book?” There will be no pointing to discover answers to inferential questions. Think. Make and consider connections. Make a decision.

TOTAL = 180

If teachers would make sure that these 180 tools were taught and re-taught as students develop new and higher skills, America could again become an educational model for the world. Without knowledge about, and skilled use of these tools, individuals will never read – and often never mentally process – above the elementary levels. Jails and prisons, as well as welfare rolls, are filled with Look-Say readers who could never move above a 3rd grade reading level. What life option do they have other than crime or living off others who can read and process at higher levels? One cannot help but wonder what these people might have become if they had been taught by wise, knowledgeable teachers working in a Pro-Student system.

My mother, Doris Sneary Regnier, was absolutely correct when she said:

“The children who do learn to read in today’s schools, learn in spite of the curriculum and the instruction.”

My mother has long been of the opinion that occupations like that of teaching can be the least rewarding because of the lack of closure; because "never knowing how it ends" is too often part and parcel of such professions. I completely agree with her because we rarely, basically never, see the outcome of our input.

A real estate agent sells a house and closes the deal. A bookkeeper can find peace when the books balance. A mechanic can pat himself on the back when a formerly useless piece of machinery is brought back from the dead and made useful again. A book writer can check on the number of copies sold. A barber or beautician can see results, and get instant feedback. But many of us just have to wonder and worry if we really did enough; if we accomplished all that could have been accomplished.

I have taught for more than 40 years but still could not explain what more than a handful of my special education students actually learned from me and/or have ended up doing with their lives. I wonder — and I would love to know — but opportunities to discover such information only rarely appear. I therefore was surprised last summer when a very welcome note appeared on my Facebook page asking, “Are you the Linda Schrock who was my teacher at the Colorado School for the Deaf back in the early-mid Seventies?” YES I AM! I had not heard from this student since 1977 and he was one about whom I especially wondered and worried. What a relief. It was like Santa had arrived early.

But then December arrived and I happened to be in a discount store when someone called out, "Mrs. Taylor!" I turned to see one of my former students walking towards me. We hugged then I stood back to really look at him. School had never been easy for this student and I suspected that his home was not, either. I had taught him in the days before I learned to use the life-saving Spalding Reading Method but even without it I tried my very best. I also had set myself a very firm goal: that even if I could not get all academics taught, I would at least try to teach personal pride, self confidence, self control, and hopefully instill a good work ethic.

There stood my once-troubled student wearing a sparkling white dress shirt under a spotless near-new workman's jacket. He wore clean new jeans and his body language was one of confidence and …self control. His stance was relaxed. I asked what he was doing these days and he answered, "I'm still wrenching; working as a mechanic." I automatically glanced at his hands as I had so often done in school and blurted out, "Oh! Your hands are beautiful. Your nails are so clean!" He gave me a bit of a smile as he explained, "Mrs. Taylor, I now wear gloves when I work." I almost began to cry but…

There was no time because, as unbelievable as it seems, another former student walked up and joined us! What are the odds? Chucky Fuller (the name has been changed to protect everyone) gave me a huge warm hug. He was wearing a clean shirt and slacks plus a beautiful blue employee's jacket from the local cable company. He wore glasses and was the picture of a confident working man.

**Now, before I continue, I need to give you a bit of background on Chucky Fuller. Even the mention of his name has caused strong, skilled teachers to shudder. To actually shudder! I feel sure that this boy created thousands of pure white strands for my motheru2018s hair. That was before he began re-coloring mine when I was hired to replace Mother after she retired in relief.

"Chucky" was almost impossible to keep in a classroom because of his hyperactivity and his lack of concern for rules and for those who make rules. He always "forgot" his glasses in his locker so that he would have a sure reason to later get out of class. If a teacher foolishly denied him permission to go get his glasses, there was hell to pay. Few challenged his request a second time. His demands were relentless. I suspect that the teachers, as they handed him the hall pass, were thinking, "Go get the damn glasses! Next time, maybe you could be so good as to forget them at home."

When one humorless, rigid, and empty-of-insight teacher tried to win a battle over Chucky leaving the room so often to go to the bathroom, Chucky simply walked to the waste basket and relieved himself right in the classroom; right in front of the teacher. Still the woman did not learn and next she tried to discipline him by writing on the blackboard, "Must have lunch 1 day in the classroom". Of course the boy never showed up so she upped it to 2 days. 5. 20. 30….She continued this totally ineffective punishment until she had staked a claim on all of his lunch periods until near the End of Time. Chucky had lunch as always, right in the cafeteria with his buddies.

"Will Chucky ever really graduate?" was the question on almost everyone's lips. Things became so bad, and Chucky was kicked out so often, that our wise and insightful principal finally decided to only require (allow?) the boy to be in the building for about 6/7 of each school day. Oops! Change that to 3/4. Oh, shucks, that didn't work. Let's try 5/8. One-half day ended up being the boy's basic schedule….with assignments sent with him so that he could "study" at home. For the time that he was in the building, Chucky was assigned mostly to…you guessed it…"Mrs. Taylor's room." How lucky could I get?

In truth, however, I liked the boy and he liked me. His antics made me laugh behind my hand. I could see that he was quite intelligent and that he understood the System better than 95% of the adults working in it. He had their number, but good. I enjoyed watching him as he went about undermining one silly schooling theory after another. I, at least, could keep him in the classroom for most of the time and I did lay down the law that he must NEVER leave without permission. He respected that. He was not mean; not sullen; not vengeful. Not angry. Not fight-prone. He was….well, he was just a unique person with unique needs and Tenacity was his power tool.

He and I kept two options ready for those times when he could no longer tolerate the four walls: 1) get the glasses from the locker (He would even "forget" them in the locker again while he was out on a bathroom break. Hide my smirk.), and 2) frequent bathroom trips, both necessary and unnecessary. At least I could count on him to always be where he said he would be…strolling slowly to and from his locker, or to and from the bathroom. Not only did we understand each other when it came to room-leaving, I let him to set up a repair corner in my classroom. The deal was…while he tinkered, he had to keep his mouth shut and he had to carefully listen to what I was teaching. I gladly tolerated the ugly smells and the awful mess of old, oily motorcycle parts as I hoped that he would at least learn with his ears.

By the way, Chucky was only one of two students who ever put their hands on me during my four decades of teaching. However, he instantly realized his error when he noticed my fierce eyes and clenched teeth. He quickly removed his hands. The incident dissolved and we remained friends because I felt no need to inform the office, and he realized that I had no-holds-barred self defense on my mind. I was capable of handling the situation. No harm had been done and much respect had been solidified.

Yes, there in front of me stood this infamous Chucky Fuller, looking spiffy and actually wearing his glasses! I laughed and teased him about having the glasses on without a reminder from me. I'm sure that we were both picturing the same old routine as he grinned, saying "Aw, Mrs. Taylor, I HAVE to wear them. I really can't see anything without them." (No surprise to me!)

I quizzed him:

Job? Cable installer and repair man

How long? For over a decade.

Family? Wife and two children. Oldest child is 14. He explained…coolly and calmly…that he is not very happy with the school district (his alma mater…hide my smile) and has requested a meeting with his child's teacher and the principal. He expected that the meeting would go fine. (Wouldn't I like to be a mouse?)

When I walked away from those two clean, confident, thriving young fellows, I went where I could cry unseen. Maybe I really had helped those students. Maybe what I was finally witnessing was…closure!

I just may have received the two best…and rarest…Christmas gifts that any teacher can receive.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

The decision makers in the Teaching of Reading debacle are taking a final wrong path and from this new error there will be no return. After more than six decades of untested fads, illogical theories, and futile practices, the public education theater production has begun its final act. “The End” will be devastation. Einstein once predicted that the weapons of the future would be “sticks and stones.” I suggest that the educational tools of the future will be…soft clay and stiff reeds. You see, the educational-powers-that-be have now decided that schools must stop teaching cursive penmanship, which will ultimately result in a return to primitive, preliterate skills.

Consider this…We speak in cursive. Our mouths, teeth, tongue, and lips control and coordinate breath and voice so that we not only articulate sounds but blend them, one into the other; so that we blend words, one into the other. In both external and internal language; in both expressive and receptive language; we do not separate sounds and spellings to create choppy thought processes. We say “stop” not “s/t/o/p." We say “Seethebrowndog” rather than “See/the/brown/dog." Cursive handwriting mimics and reinforces the natural language flow of brain processing whereas the act of printing causes the brain to stop, start, and fragment the understanding and full use of language.

From my observations and experiences during 40 years of teaching children and adults with language and literacy delays, I strongly believe that cursive handwriting not only supports the acquisition of literacy, but actually teaches and reinforces basic reading skills! As a child does cursive writing, the rhythmic and purposeful movements of the hand and pencil echo and reinforce the child’s thoughts and speech, matching and practicing those two basic and automatically acquired skills. Children master language without effort. With cursive writing, learners can see and feel the reading process pouring forth from their hands in reverse. Why would such a tool not help to make up for missing and/or ineffective classroom instruction and curriculum?

Instead of putting an end to the teaching of cursive, schools would be very wise to introduce and begin cursive instruction in First Grade using a curriculum such as Cursive First. (More information here.) Every child would be the better for it; would be further alone and solidly on their way to a literate and productive future. Print instruction can easily be delayed until literacy skills are solidified and until there is even a need for neat print…like in high school drafting classes.

As usual in the bass-ackwards world of education, teachers, administrators, and decision makers neither notice not understand the problems and consequences of forcing children — who naturally listen and speak in cursive — to shatter the natural linkages of language by stop & start printing of separated and fractured phonemes. Frankly, it is a wonder that any children actually learn to read and write while being given damaging instruction using counter-intuitive methods.

But therein lies the root of the failure of America’s educational systems…the Educated Idiots never seem to wonder. They never wonder if Weirdo-Fad A will actually improve student learning and retention. They never wonder if Strange-Activity B will do more harm than good. They never wonder why American prisons are full of 3rd grade level readers. (Hint: The Look-Say Method lifts learners to that level. The deaf, who lack the ability to hear, store, retrieve, and use any phonetic information, too often graduate high school with Third Grade reading levels.)

Most importantly, the Educated Idiot Decision Makers never wonder if they should first try Counter-Productive-Fad Z on a test population before inflicting it on every child in the nationwide schooling system. How maddening that these so-called-experts never even wonder if the failure of the schools; the diminishing of potential in tens of millions of individuals; and the ultimate destruction of America should be blamed on them. (Note: It should.)

Not only do these so-called experts fail to wonder, they, themselves are apparently not fully and competently literate. I doubt that they even understand that "being literate" once involved more that a getting a fluctuating-pass score on some non-standardized test like the Michigan MEAP. When I was in school (in Michigan, 1953-1966), literacy was taught during classes and lessons in: Reading. Spelling. Writing. Penmanship. Grammar. Vocabulary development. Literature. Diagramming. Rhetoric. Oration. Debate. Foreign language. Linguistics. Comparing vs. contrasting. Critical analysis, and more. Much more.

Logical and literate individuals should not be capable of making the utterly inexcusable decisions that the so-called-experts make regarding educational methods. I conclude that those "experts" have either acted with Stupidity or with Evil Intent. Look at their record and decide. They threw out phonics. They dismissed the importance of neat handwriting. They stopped teaching grammar. They negated the value of spelling lessons, claiming that there are “hundreds of spelling rules and an exception to break every one of them.” (Aside: There are only 29 spelling rules and almost anything that appears to be an exception is really a word of foreign origin. Try as America might, it has no power to force foreign languages to fit English spelling and grammar rules.) These stupid…or evil…decision makers have pushed the children of America over one New Math cliff after another New-New Math cliff. These educated fools are so lacking in wonder and so devoid of intellectual curiosity and conscience that the only recommendation they can now make is to…not teach! Teachers are told to now push the use of computers, spell checkers, calculators, writing groups, peer editing, peer tutoring, student-discovery of algorithms, and worse. Now, the Educated Idiot Decision Makers summarily dismiss cursive instruction.

With the end of cursive instruction, the die will be cast and the loss of potential immeasurable. Our future citizens will not even be able to have a signature! They will not be able to “sign here” and will instead need to print their names or resort to the pre-literate “make your mark here____” system.

However, future signatures will be the least of our worries. Literacy rates are low now, but they are only a warning of the near-total illiteracy that the end of cursive instruction will finalize. As the popular phrase goes, we have not seen anything yet.

The only hope of preventing the final act in the Progressives' War on American Schools is to take back our local schools. We must demand that local school boards reinstate the teaching of cursive instruction. We must insist that the children of America be assigned very competent teachers who not only use and teach accurate cursive for every aspect of instruction, but who also expect neatness and precision from the students, for all written work, on paper and on boards, black or otherwise. If we fail to rise up to fight and win this battle, it may be our last chance. God forbid.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

The decision makers in the Teaching of Reading debacle are taking a final wrong path and from this new error there will be no return. After more than six decades of untested fads, illogical theories, and futile practices, the public education theater production has begun its final act. “The End” will be devastation. Einstein once predicted that the weapons of the future would be “sticks and stones.” I suggest that the educational tools of the future will be…soft clay and stiff reeds. You see, the educational-powers-that-be have now decided that schools must stop teaching cursive penmanship, which will ultimately result in a return to primitive, preliterate skills.

Consider this…We speak in cursive. Our mouths, teeth, tongue, and lips control and coordinate breath and voice so that we not only articulate sounds but blend them, one into the other; so that we blend words, one into the other. In both external and internal language; in both expressive and receptive language; we do not separate sounds and spellings to create choppy thought processes. We say “stop” not “s/t/o/p." We say “Seethebrowndog” rather than “See/the/brown/dog." Cursive handwriting mimics and reinforces the natural language flow of brain processing whereas the act of printing causes the brain to stop, start, and fragment the understanding and full use of language.

From my observations and experiences during 40 years of teaching children and adults with language and literacy delays, I strongly believe that cursive handwriting not only supports the acquisition of literacy, but actually teaches and reinforces basic reading skills! As a child does cursive writing, the rhythmic and purposeful movements of the hand and pencil echo and reinforce the child’s thoughts and speech, matching and practicing those two basic and automatically acquired skills. Children master language without effort. With cursive writing, learners can see and feel the reading process pouring forth from their hands in reverse. Why would such a tool not help to make up for missing and/or ineffective classroom instruction and curriculum?

Instead of putting an end to the teaching of cursive, schools would be very wise to introduce and begin cursive instruction in First Grade using a curriculum such as Cursive First. (More information here.) Every child would be the better for it; would be further alone and solidly on their way to a literate and productive future. Print instruction can easily be delayed until literacy skills are solidified and until there is even a need for neat print…like in high school drafting classes.

As usual in the bass-ackwards world of education, teachers, administrators, and decision makers neither notice not understand the problems and consequences of forcing children — who naturally listen and speak in cursive — to shatter the natural linkages of language by stop & start printing of separated and fractured phonemes. Frankly, it is a wonder that any children actually learn to read and write while being given damaging instruction using counter-intuitive methods.

But therein lies the root of the failure of America’s educational systems…the Educated Idiots never seem to wonder. They never wonder if Weirdo-Fad A will actually improve student learning and retention. They never wonder if Strange-Activity B will do more harm than good. They never wonder why American prisons are full of 3rd grade level readers. (Hint: The Look-Say Method lifts learners to that level. The deaf, who lack the ability to hear, store, retrieve, and use any phonetic information, too often graduate high school with Third Grade reading levels.)

Most importantly, the Educated Idiot Decision Makers never wonder if they should first try Counter-Productive-Fad Z on a test population before inflicting it on every child in the nationwide schooling system. How maddening that these so-called-experts never even wonder if the failure of the schools; the diminishing of potential in tens of millions of individuals; and the ultimate destruction of America should be blamed on them. (Note: It should.)

Not only do these so-called experts fail to wonder, they, themselves are apparently not fully and competently literate. I doubt that they even understand that "being literate" once involved more that a getting a fluctuating-pass score on some non-standardized test like the Michigan MEAP. When I was in school (in Michigan, 1953-1966), literacy was taught during classes and lessons in: Reading. Spelling. Writing. Penmanship. Grammar. Vocabulary development. Literature. Diagramming. Rhetoric. Oration. Debate. Foreign language. Linguistics. Comparing vs. contrasting. Critical analysis, and more. Much more.

Logical and literate individuals should not be capable of making the utterly inexcusable decisions that the so-called-experts make regarding educational methods. I conclude that those "experts" have either acted with Stupidity or with Evil Intent. Look at their record and decide. They threw out phonics. They dismissed the importance of neat handwriting. They stopped teaching grammar. They negated the value of spelling lessons, claiming that there are “hundreds of spelling rules and an exception to break every one of them.” (Aside: There are only 29 spelling rules and almost anything that appears to be an exception is really a word of foreign origin. Try as America might, it has no power to force foreign languages to fit English spelling and grammar rules.) These stupid…or evil…decision makers have pushed the children of America over one New Math cliff after another New-New Math cliff. These educated fools are so lacking in wonder and so devoid of intellectual curiosity and conscience that the only recommendation they can now make is to…not teach! Teachers are told to now push the use of computers, spell checkers, calculators, writing groups, peer editing, peer tutoring, student-discovery of algorithms, and worse. Now, the Educated Idiot Decision Makers summarily dismiss cursive instruction.

With the end of cursive instruction, the die will be cast and the loss of potential immeasurable. Our future citizens will not even be able to have a signature! They will not be able to “sign here” and will instead need to print their names or resort to the pre-literate “make your mark here____” system.

However, future signatures will be the least of our worries. Literacy rates are low now, but they are only a warning of the near-total illiteracy that the end of cursive instruction will finalize. As the popular phrase goes, we have not seen anything yet.

The only hope of preventing the final act in the Progressives' War on American Schools is to take back our local schools. We must demand that local school boards reinstate the teaching of cursive instruction. We must insist that the children of America be assigned very competent teachers who not only use and teach accurate cursive for every aspect of instruction, but who also expect neatness and precision from the students, for all written work, on paper and on boards, black or otherwise. If we fail to rise up to fight and win this battle, it may be our last chance. God forbid.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

When our son
would tantrum — as all toddlers do at least once — we would calmly
carry him to his room; explain that we did not want to see or hear
such ugliness; and give him permission to rejoin us in the common
areas of the home once he “finished.” Soon…then sooner…then
soonest, he finished and the tantrum phase ended. Toddlers are much
more sensible than many teachers. These public tantrums of public
school teachers proves my point.

Unfortunately,
the media is leading the way in giving attention to, and becoming
too distraught over, badly behaving teachers. We cannot carry the
teachers to their rooms — let alone force them to actually teach
— but we can ignore them. Like toddlers, they should soon notice
that no one is paying any attention to their fits and spurts. But
on second thought…they have shown that they are not as sensible
like toddlers.

Governors should
fire every teacher who has broken his/her contract. Teachers do
sign contracts, agreeing to expectations that they teach in the
classrooms; not tantrum in the streets. Demonstrating “teachers”
are stupid to not realize that their behavior is inexcusable and
sets a horrible example for students, parents, and the nation as
a whole. I would be willing to bet that these same teachers are
the ones who constantly complain to their principals about rude,
insensitive, and badly behaving students and parents of students.
Monkey see; monkey do.

The teachers
who encouraged their students to leave school, as well, deserve
to be fired plus lose their teaching certificates. They are
not “teachers.” They are agenda-driven individuals and obviously,
their agenda includes neither academics nor instruction. It is a
shame that America no longer pillories people in town squares. Ripe
tomatoes, anyone?

Intelligence…I
mean a lack of intelligence…plays a very large role in
unions and demonstrations. How else can uneducated, ineffective,
unread teachers remain employed in a nation of crashing standards?
Unions fight accountability. Most individuals choosing “teaching”
as a career in this modern era — of non-readers; poorly educated;
non-thinking; illogical high school graduates — have SAT scores
that rank third (3rd!) from the bottom of the list of professions.
Public school administrators score second (2nd) from the bottom.
Try to sleep at night with those figures — and the consequences
of them — rushing around in your head.

What is to
be done? The question is on the mind of every rational, thinking,
want-the-best-for-children individual. As far as I am concerned,
we need to close all departments of education; withdraw all public
financing; and let the public school system collapse. I have long
advocated for this and I explain more in “Crooked
House; Crumbling Foundation”. We need not fear such a process
anymore than we fear tearing down a dangerous building in order
to replace it with a safer and more efficient one. Americans, functioning
within their communities
are very resourceful and will devise better and more affordable
ways to educate the local children. Education only becomes so complex
and problematic when it is turned over to bureaucracies and politicians.
Cut them out of the picture. Ignore them if they take to the streets
to tantrum. There are other choices we can make. Furthermore, we
should make them as soon as possible. Consider the following:

The libertarian
prescription for our educational mess can, then, be summed up
simply: Get the government out of the educational process. The
government has attempted to indoctrinate and mould the nation’s
youth through the public school system, and to mould the future
leaders through State operation and control of higher education.
Abolition of compulsory attendance laws would end the schools’
role as prison custodians of the nation’s youth, and would free
all those better off outside the schools for independence and
for productive work. The abolition of the public schools would
end the crippling property tax burden and provide a vast range
of education to satisfy all the freely exercised needs and demands
of our diverse and varied population. The abolition of government
schooling would end the unjust coerced subsidy granted to large
families, and, often, toward the upper classes and against the
poor. The miasma of government, of moulding the youth of America
in the direction of the State, would be replaced by freely chosen
and voluntary actions – in short, by a genuine and truly free
education, both in and out of formal schools.

~ Murray
Rothbard, For
a New Liberty, Chapter 7

I have included
links to additional articles that may help you think about and reassess
our disastrous public school system. Do some reading. Do some thinking.
Then fire the teachers and the unions. Literate persons should be
expected to satisfactorily communicate (and solve problems) with
literate bosses and school boards. The unions once worked towards
protecting illiterate workers in harder times. Unions have outworn
their welcome and their usefulness. Fire them.

• “Crooked
  House; Crumbling Foundation”
• “Betrayals
  In Public Education”
• “Public
  School Administration” (and teachers)
• “Keep
  Their Toes to the Fire”
• “Education’s
  Dunces and Whipping Boys”
• “When
  America Counts”
• “When
  I Fault Teachers”
• "Faking
  Competency”
• “What
  Do They Think Will Happen?”
• "6.5
  Cents On the Dollar"
• "Extramural
  Education: An Interim Plan"

February
23, 2010

Linda
Schrock Taylor [send
her mail] is a retired special
education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent;
and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first
book on remediating reading skills.

Linda
Schrock Taylor Archives

Miss Wagstaff’s English class, September 13, 1965 — History of English lesson

English — Indo-European Family; single words same in all languages
Second family — Hellenic –> Classical Greek and Italic (Romance Languages)–Latin, Spanish, Portuguese
Third family — Celtic (Welch, Scotch, Irish)
Cattle-raising nomads — reason Indo-European family [of languages] spread; possibly family first lived in Czechoslovakia, but could have been anywhere in the general area

Theories of Origin of language:

"Bow Wow Theory" — imitation of sounds of nature
"Ding Dong Theory" — mystical correlation bet/sound & meaning
"Pooh Pooh Theory" — words came from expressions of emotion, fear, anger, pain, pleasure, surprise, etc.
"Ta-Ta Theory" — idea — words imitation of bodily movement

Formal vs. Informal English

Formal English — complicated sentence structure; extensive vocab, no slang
Informal English — more personal; more acceptable in personal writing; use of contractions; simple vocab
Non-Standard English -

Substandard — "I knowed."
Double negatives — "I don’t want no more."
Pronoun "I" used inappropriately
Adjective "good" used for adverb "well"
Overuse of slang — "lousy, swell" (Now add “Ya know”)
Dese and dem for these and them
"Athletics" mispronounced as "ath-e-le-tics"
"Genuine" mispronounced as "gen-u-ine" (rhyming with wine)
Ex: Formal:- apparel; informal — clothes; substandard — duds

Should readers want to hear additional examples of substandard English, just watch television and listen carefully to the speakers. Viewers’ ears are awash with errors, slang, dialect (“my bad”), even during news programs. News people surely grow frustrated with the emails I sent to them: 1) Subject: "Grammar. Mr. There’s-Several. Subject-verb agreement. “There are several." 2) Subject: "Grammar. Miss I’ve-Got. Never use the word ‘got’ unless you have no other choice. Remember that got = have, and have = have, so when you say, ‘I’ve got news for you,’ you are actually saying, ‘I have have news for you.’"

It is well (yet maybe too bad) that I remember the days when radio and television reporters, MCs, actors and actresses, and more were trained to speak clear, precise, error-free English. Why would America want its children to hear and learn grammatical errors? Actually, parents, teachers, citizens did not want children to hear such inexcusable trashing of the English language — then. Unfortunately, in today’s world, few people even notice, let alone seem bothered by, these errors. Why do parents now tolerate it? They tolerate it because real English instruction went missing-in-action before the parents’ generations were taught to hear the differences. Standard English is being lost while SubStandard English is blending into a messy, unspellable patois.

When I asked one of my university students how he could possibly have earned A’s in high school English — with his stunted vocabulary; his extreme dialect; his appalling sentence structures; his atrocious spelling, and his missing skills, he told me, "Mz. Taylor, so few students ever did their homework that if we turned in anything at all we received an ‘A’. Just for doing it. We had no criteria to meet." That was the same semester that my department head informed me that the university’s policy was to not teach grammar. The students not only miss English lessons in K-12, but they miss them at the university level, too.

When college graduates fail to develop the skills needed for clear and accurate communication, they embarrass themselves. Several years ago, I needed my son’s orthodontist to write a letter for my insurance company. A few days after I made my request, a letter arrived. It was poorly constructed; badly written. I immediately called the office and explained that I needed a letter written by the doctor, not by some clerk. The lady paused then said, "Doctor DID write the letter." His communication skills were weak, to say the least. He had graduated from the University of Michigan. I cringed.

Miss Wagstaff’s English lesson on November 9, 1965 — Communication:

Words with precise or tangible meanings/references are concrete
Words with less precise, and less tangible references are abstract
1) It is your own experience which determines what an abstract word means to you.
2) If you are to clearly communicate, you must make your meaning clear.
3) The wider your experience, the better your ability to understand what others mean when they use abstractions.
4) Men who are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies have naturally an instinct and spur which prompts them into virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice. (quote of forgotten origin)

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Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

I suggest that in the last 50 years, American public schools have not taught enough spelling to even make a “stoppage” worthy of media coverage. Instead of making announcements, these criminals should sign confessions down at their local police departments. Frankly, schools have long been attempting to hide their educational crimes of omission, and of teacher inefficiency, by forcing students to memorize lists of spelling words for Friday tests.

The schools should put an end to the counterproductive foolishness that passes for “reading instruction” and use their time instead to only teach spelling. My mother (who taught school until she was 72-years-old) is accurate when she states that “those children, who do learn to read in today’s schools, learn in spite of the instruction.” Nothing else accounts for the few children who escape, actually literate, from the ever-deepening rot that has taken over academics in this nation. Massachusetts had a literacy rate of 98 percent until … they opened public schools. Their literacy rates have been in freefall since then, and the other 49 states blindly leaped for the band wagon … but to their academic deaths, as well.

Teacher-training (LOL) professors; school administrators; local school boards; state school boards; state and federal Departments of Education, I need your attention. The language of America — English, for those who have forgotten — is written in a CODE and the only way to learn how to read and write anything written in that CODE is to first learn how to SPELL. Musical performers and creators learn to read and write the Code in which music is written. Dancers and choreographers learn to read and write the Code in which movement can be recorded. Stenographers used to learn to read and write shorthand notation which also is a Code. When schools lost the teachers who understood the importance of, and how to teach spelling — real education came to a standstill. Schools no longer are capable of teaching students how to Encode, or how to Decode, the Code In Which English is Recorded.

A moment, please, to defend young teachers because they have lost out twice — once in the K-12 schools of their youth, and again with the nothingness that they learned in teacher-training programs. They paid tuition to be trained as effective teachers. (Can anyone imagine an accountant who cannot account receiving a college degree?) Unfortunately, college professors are usually so busy theorizing or developing new fads to foist upon the mis-education culture, that they have little to teach; and almost no focus from which to teach. Furthermore, they have little-to-no effective teaching experience of their own because, frankly, teachers learn more in the first three to five years of teaching than they get taught to their students. To “train” future teachers, one only is expected to have a research Ph.D. and 3—4 years of teaching. (Remember, those first teaching years are only partially effective.)

For teachers who have taught more than five ineffective years but still carry on as usual; refusing to acknowledge and learn missing skills; ignoring blatant failure and suffering students — shame on you. There are libraries. There is the Internet. There is Spalding International. There are my articles. There is no excuse for stubbornness and laziness. Such teachers spend their days NOT teaching children to read, spell, and learn, but happily collect unearned paychecks and ask for raises. They are destroying lives with each day of fraudulent instruction.

Our jails and prisons are filled with 1st—3rd grade readers. Our welfare rolls are filled with the same. How can we expect adults to be fully self-sufficient and lead families with wisdom, in a technical culture, if our schools cannot and will not teach them to read, write, spell, and learn knowledge? If America’s educational mess is not cleaned up ASAP, there will be no future for our nation; for our people; for our Rights and Freedoms. We must start changing local policies today. My mission is to teach Michigan to read; to again retake the leadership position that it held back when I was in school in the Sixties; back when Michigan and California led the nation. Please join me.

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Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Remember typing class from way back when? “Now is the time for all good men [and women] to come to the aid of their country.” The time is certainly now. If Americans will accept the challenge of reclaiming America; of putting it back on its Founding Principles, then this coming year — November 2009 through November 2010 — will become the Year of the Constitution, as well as the Year of the Third Party.

Thanks to Doug Hoffman, citizens now have proof that one person can make a difference; can see the opportunity to save America. I encourage everyone to leave your disappointing alliances with Tweedle-Dem and Tweedle-Pub, and join an honorable third party. Get involved; run for offices at every level; campaign with Tea Party vigor, intent, and confidence. Third parties can only offer strong and viable candidates when good people join them and work together to achieve goals. If saving America and reinstating its fine constitution are not worthy goals, then nothing much matters anymore.

For far too long we have let the Career Political Class handle the business of the nation while we worked at our jobs; paid too many taxes; often spent too much money; and generally clocked too many hours in front of our televisions. Speaking of television, I laughed out loud when I saw the ridiculous clip of Obama demonstrating how he could mop up the mess if only people like you and me would get out of the way. As usual, I responded aloud, “Sorry, Barry, but you have no idea how to accomplish such a task. Hercules, you are not.” An outsider lacks the insights; the commitment; the fixer know-how…the ethics needed to re-found this country. It is time that regular citizens turn our attention and energy to following the upright Mr. Smith to Washington. Congressman Steve King of Iowa recently did it. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) are there working hard for all of us. Now Doug Hoffman has demonstrated the way for average citizens to get to Washington.

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Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Consider the implications of his grand plan. In a style typical of dictators, he is preempting the communications into every school in the nation. He has not sought the permission of parents or local school boards. He will not sign in at the office to get clearance and a visitor badge as everyone else must do.

As a parent, I expect the schools to notify me in writing if a controversial person or group would be making any kind of presentation. I could then decide whether to keep my child home, or ask that he be sent to the library to read during that time. But Barack Obama, with one huge broadcast, will dismiss the rights of everyone, ignore laws, and kick dust on the Constitution.

Parents will not be warned — except by a few like myself, Jeff Bennett at the Federal Observer, and others who stumbled upon the information that was sent to schools and teachers in advance of this controversial speech. The State will attempt to defend itself by pointing out that Obama will be encouraging children to work hard in school and learn all they can for a global economy. (He will cross his fingers behind his back and then tell how he approves of citizens being well informed, better educated, and more active, but Acorn thugs at health care town halls have already proven such talk to be a travesty, at best.)

The problem with the usurpation of nationwide instructional time on September 8 is not so much the message, but the manner. What gives Obama the legal right to trod upon the Constitution in this, and other matters? Nothing gives him the right. But this time, his timing is excellent because….

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Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Obama’s castle-in-the-air,
pie-in-the-sky, wish-upon-a-star health care would never, could never,
and should never be appropriate for Americans. As Dr. Seuss might
put it, “not in a hush, not in a rush; not even if read; not
even if…Red!” ObamaCare is doomed to fail and Congressional
members who support it will be the next to go. Leave. Lose elections.
Be relegated to life again in the real world.

We frequently hear that Britons, Canadians, French, Swedes and others are often ill-served by their health systems. I understand their concerns and their experiences because I, myself, lived under a national health program for a year and found the experience utterly awful. Chances are that the care has grown far worse since I left it 32 years ago.

I was accepted into a masters program at the University of Manchester, England for the school year 1976-77. I sold my house, packed my bags, and “went abroad.” At that time I was a Teacher of the Deaf; Manchester was the first university to ever train teachers of the deaf; and I wanted to broaden my skill and knowledge base. Included in the out-of-country tuition costs was health coverage through the National Health system in England. I was relieved to learn that I had any kind of coverage at all, then thought no more about it. A few weeks later my nonchalance would change.

During a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, to attend the International Festival, I walked and rewalked the Royal Mile, putting far too much stress on my vehicle-spoiled joints. Within a couple days of my return to Manchester, I was almost crippled and so went “to hospital.” Once there, I was put into a waiting room that reminded me of a picture I had seen of suffering in mental hospitals, circa 1880 or so. The “room” was about the size of a small town gymnasium, high ceiling as well, but cold and unappealing. It was full — standing room only — of people with all kinds of emergency conditions waiting endlessly to be seen by a nurse, let alone a doctor.

After hours of painful standing, I decided to ask about the holdup and walked on through the treatment doors. A nurse stopped my advance so I asked for either 1) a timely visit by a doctor or 2) the phone number for a doctor with a private practice. I received neither. The nurse shepherded me to a quiet corner where she advised me to be more patient. She explained the costs I would face if I went elsewhere. She at least found me a chair and I…waited.

The local doctors’ offices provided more shocking experiences. The service was faster but the treatments were nonexistent — unless prescriptions were all that one wanted. In fact, I do not recall ever leaving the office without a prescription, even when the decisions were highly suspect. Pills were passed out like candy. Public Pacifiers.

Appointments with a doctor were a hoot — once I learned the procedures. The first visit, however, was shocking and confusing. I had phoned to schedule an appointment then upon reporting in, I was given a 12-inch colored piece of the material used for name signs in offices. Mine happened to be red with a number cut out instead of a name. Say…34. I went to the waiting room where I joined a large group of people, all of whom were staring at a large wooden board with about 6 colored lights on it. I observed carefully so as to see what would be expected when my turn arrived. A buzzer went off, the blue light began flashing, and someone stood to ask those around him if they had blue with a number lower than his own. No one responded, so he left the room. On it went with yellow, green, orange lights flashing but then the red light flashed. Thus far, the herd had trained me well, so I stood and asked: “Does anyone have Red before number 34?” No one did, so I left the room…but that was as far as I had been trained. Someone finally noticed my confusion and told me that I must go down a long hall and report to the….RED DOOR. But of course! Dr. Red Door. Names were not important. Just procedures.

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Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a retired special education teacher; a reading specialist; former homeschooling parent; and outspoken constitutionalist. She is slowly writing her first book on remediating reading skills.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Decisions coming out of the Oval Office are increasingly…foolhardy, if not outright Treasonous. Yes, sometime between election promises, and the inauguration, someone must have switched the presidential candidate with an imposter — an imposter who comes across as lacking the skills needed to lead a small elementary school! We may very well be reliving the movie, Dave — gone bad!

Think about it. The other president swore to reduce taxes for 95% of the wage earners but this guy has done away with workers’ JOBS, not their taxes. Are the people faring better? Not at all. They are standing in lines at the unemployment offices, collecting checks that will barely keep a family alive, let alone pay for mortgages or buy a new car when the old one breaks now. This promise amounts to Bait & Switch, as do most of the others, as well.

The other president promised that he would take intelligent steps to stimulate the economy and get the United States back on firm ground. Those promises filled my dreams with visions of sugarplums, money in the bank, and…

• "CLOSED" signs on all Federal Reserve buildings
• Massive reductions — to skeleton crews — at every level of government, federal and state
• State and national forests sold back to citizens who really should own that land — and should not have to bid against the DNR and other government officials at land auctions (to bid — with their bottomless coffers — taxpayer monies and printing presses — against We the People)
• Closure of the redundant and failure-creating Departments of Educations, both at the federal and state levels
• Consolidation of congressional districts to save money and prevent the chaos-without-end that comes from a "committee" of 535. It is no wonder that illogical and downright unconstitutional laws come out of that group. I believe that 50 Senators and 100 Representatives would accomplish much more in not only adhering precisely to the Constitution, but in serving as watchdogs on each other
• Selling the post office buildings, trucks, and equipment to the highest private bidder; selling other ineffective government services to private individuals, as well
• Closure of wasteful education entities like Intermediate School Districts and Area Education Agencies. Local citizens can more efficiently run their local schools and educate their local children more effectively. No Federal Fads; no further unconstitutional Federal involvement needed, thank you very much
• End all wars and bring all military personnel and equipment back to American soil — to protect OUR border
• End all welfare for able-bodied adults, and notify welfare recipients that they are now entitled to financially support their own children, no matter their ages. I had to go back to work when my son was 8 weeks old — but welfare mothers were allowed to stay home with their new babies until the children were 2 years old!!
• End all SSI benefits for children!! It is sheer idiocy to think that a handicap is keeping a child out of the work force from Birth until 21 years of age! Taxpayers are being taken for a ride with the SSI farce!

I could continue as I do have more thoughts on how to shrink and tighten up the government; of ways to provide necessary services at less expense and with more efficiency. However, this president appears to have no interest in advice, even constitutional advice, so what would he do with mine. (Never mind. I can guess…)

That candidate assured the nation that he was a US citizen, thus eligible to become president of the United States. However, this Barry-guy has hired entire law firms to fight off all attempts by citizens to gain access to his birth and school records. He must really, really fear that We the People will learn the truth.

What actually is the Truth? I have read extensively and believe that I have a plausible, and quite probable, sequence in mind. Consider this scenario… When the airlines discovered that Obama-Mama was obviously ready to go into labor at any moment, the decision was made that she would not be allowed to travel from Kenya to Hawaii. Mama-Stanley had no option but to birth her son in Kenya (and so a British and a Kenyan citizen), just as his grandmother has firmly stated. Once the baby was on her, rather than in her, Mama-Stanley rushed to Hawaii to file his coming as a "homebirth." Hawaii officials, lacking verification from any health professional in attendance at the birth, simply issued a certification confirming that: An Office Official had noted a live child that was born…somewhere on Earth.

The story very probably went from bad to worse following the compromised birth certificate. Mama later married an Indonesian and this president became an Indonesian citizen. He attended Muslim schools, which only Muslims are allowed to attend. (Hint. Hint!! Be alert to his underlying loyalties.) Since there appears to be no record of any naturalization process (as if that would make him eligible to become president…which it would not); no proof of Barry being born in America; nothing to authorize him to run for the presidency of the United States…this president appears to be an international fraud, traveling in and out of countries, especially this one, carrying no proof of being a natural born, American citizen; no full-form legal (i.e. un-forged; un-doctored; HIDDEN) birth certificate; and carrying a fraudulent American passport. Ah, what "face recognition" can achieve for a person…or at least hide! Or would this be along the lines of…a lie told enough times, with enough lawyers standing at the ready, may get crammed down the throats of an entire nation.

Additional problems caused by switching babies presidents, and by lies regarding Barry’s eligibility, greatly complicate the consequences — intended or unintended — of his …solutions… to current problems and may very well set the stage for more dangerous and destructive future problems for America.

Why is it so difficult for Americans to understand and fight against the wool that is being pulled over the eyes of the entire world? Why are so few Americans able to see with clarity? Why are so few voters willing to speak the truth? And why are they reluctant to insist that Barry do the same? I, of course, hold an opinion on this situation, as well.

The public schools have mis-educated too many generations so that our country is now made up of millions of illiterates, and of millions of citizens who just have no idea how to THINK! Additionally, the teaching of Civics has been removed from so many schools; pride in America greatly disparaged; and so… 51% of the voting public cannot even recognize a fraud, a failure, a socialist/communist. Many, when told that Barry is not even an American citizen, believe that a majority vote can make anything and everything "OK."

Barry, himself, is undereducated yet displays an offensive and unearned arrogance. He shows a deep lack of respect, not only for America as a country, but for the people of America. Consider the way that this president publically demeaned children who qualify for the Special Olympics. I, for one, believe that those wonderful children have more skills in making decisions that this president.

Dr. Reuven Feuerstein was faced with the task of educating children from the concentration camps upon their arrival in Israel. (I have much respect for this man because of his contributions to some of my most successful teaching strategies and techniques.) The children who Dr. Feuerstein taught had had no opportunities to learn about life concepts, vocabulary, stories, and nursery rhymes, neither from their families nor from any schooling. In working with these children, Dr. Feuerstein learned that even very limited children are capable of making judgements and decisions, especially when pondering something that benefits them personally. He presented this example: Even children with severe mental deficiencies, when presented with a plate holding slices of cake, of varying sizes, the children will invariably choose the largest piece (as would almost all of us). Such decisions call for judgement.

I have observed that this president has shown a definite lack good judgement (64 bad decisions in 60 days?). Where are his skills in drawing conclusions? In making wise decisions? In knowing Right from Wrong? He appears to be more mentally limited than the children at whom he laughs. I have concluded that Barry’s judgement is compromised; retarded; or missing completely.

I believe that if most special education children, even those of minimal abilities, were asked whether they would get needed money faster if the money were 1) handed directly to the child, or 2) given to a bank — the children would understand that they could only buy something if the money were put right into their own hands. Even a child realizes that money moves by being saved or spent, but never trickles down from on High into the lowly pockets of those who would purchase. This president does not understand that concept.

Yes, someone switched — or pulled — something on us and now America is rapidly becoming a country where I no longer feel safe. I feel that we have an unethical, ineligible, pseudo leader who lacks the common sense of a simple child.

As far as I am concerned, this foolhardy, naked emperor is not my president. I, for one, am willing to point out the barrenness of, not only his closet, but also of his soul. I am willing to voice my complaints in hopes of educating others. I hope that many others decide to join me. Do not fear standing up to a bully with an agenda to destroy America. Remember those same guys from our school years. Quickly turn around and shout, "NO!" Remember how so many of this melted, just like the wicked witch? Think about it. It is either him and his Global marching orders…or us with our Constitution.

If we huddle in fear…eventually we will huddle in hovels.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Well yesterday, during a lengthy and chatty phone conversation, David said something which really caught my attention. I mean, really! David was not even telling a story; rather, he was explaining that his roommate had been laid off two weeks ago so did not have the money to pay his share of the rent.

I was surprised to hear of the layoff because both fellows work for a large and solid company.

David continued, "Hundreds of guys are laid off! The oil rigs are shut down! The methane wells are down. The roustabouts are laid off. No trucks or equipment can be out and about. I tell you, Gillette is DEAD for the next couple months or so!"

"Couple months?" Gillette, Wyoming — Energy-Producer Extraordinaire — with unproductive wells, rigs, and more? I simply could not believe that to be true and told David so. I mean….come on! It would make no sense to shut down a major energy-producing area while the nation badly needs energy; while the TV ads; the airways; and the president’s big mouth are all filled with calls for cheaper energy; cleaner energy; more accessible energy; American energy — energy, Energy, ENERGY! David must be confused; mistaken; because what he was claiming could only be described as crazy. I told David that he should check his facts before making such claims, but he was insistent that he was right and went on to explain (although I will clean his language up a bit).

"Mom! It is true, and it is all because of those blankety-blank grouse! The damn things are supposedly breeding so no one can drive into or across the prairie for fear of interrupting the birds! I mean everything is shut down; Gillette is almost non-functioning; and this will go on for weeks and weeks. Tell your readers that so they will understand why their energy bills are so high."

I had to admit that he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He was also very angry, and offended at such foolishness. I decided to do some research and found that…David is right!

How stupid; how counterproductive; and how very dishonest this all is, especially as the State claims to be working towards energy independence for America. Independence? The reality is that the State is forcing much needed energy production to cease for months each year because of…the sage grouse!!

It makes me sick to contemplate the ways that the State will further degrade and cheapen human life in America. Today the sage grouse; tomorrow the rewilding of America. (At this link about rewilding, be sure to check out the map. Note where the manipulators will allow humans to perch.)

As for the grouse — read (click links for full articles) what follows and weep, but only if you have the temperament, and the stamina, to handle Idiocy-Writ-Large.

Grouse concerns halt 82 CBM wells CASPER …#8221; A federal appeals board bounced 82 permits for coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin back to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, saying the BLM failed to consider adequately the wells’ likely effect on sage grouse.

The Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Sheridan-based environmental group, and Campbell County rancher William P. Maycock last summer challenged the BLM’s approval of the wells. The Interior Board of Land Appeals sided with the council and Maycock in a decision issued Monday.

Williams Production Company RMT, which holds many of the permits in question, joined the BLM in arguing that the current protections for the grouse are adequate.

Williams did not return phone calls before deadline. His attorney, Tom Toner of Sheridan, could not be reached for comment.

The wells are located roughly in the middle of the Powder River Basin, east of the Powder River and north of Interstate 90, near a coal-bed methane development area called Carr Draw and near the Fortification Creek Wilderness Study Area. The basin has been a hotspot for coal-bed methane development, and is a focus for the debate about the effect of coal-bed methane development on sage grouse.

Coal-bed methane industry representatives on Thursday asked federal regulators to loosen wildlife restrictions that shut down much of the industry’s operations in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin this spring. During breeding periods for sage grouse, eagles and other wildlife, the federal Bureau of Land Management imposes months-long shutdowns of coal-bed methane work to prevent disturbance of the birds’ nests and mating grounds.

Researchers from the University of Montana say sage grouse populations in the Powder River Basin have suffered a sharp decline inside active coal-bed methane fields over the past decade.

As coal-bed methane, or natural gas, production shifted onto federal land during the past year, the restrictions meant to protect the birds came into play more often. That curtailed the drilling of new wells and prompted layoffs of some industry contractors.

In response, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming this week hosted a two-day “sage grouse workshop” in Casper involving coal-bed methane companies, state and federal regulatory agencies and independent researchers.

BLM officials would not comment on the request to modify its restrictions but agreed to work with the industry in the future.

Montana brings sage grouse concerns into energy decisions BILLINGS — Montana officials are imposing a new restriction on the oil and gas industry that gives more say to state wildlife biologists who have sought to slow energy development to protect an imperiled bird, the greater sage grouse.

The restriction — criticized as a potential new hurdle for companies seeking to do business in Montana — underscores the state’s shift away from neighboring states and provinces that embraced aggressive energy policies to maximize economic returns.

Across the Rocky Mountain West, from New Mexico to Alberta, Canada, a boom in exploration this decade has sparked a backlash from environmental and conservation groups. They claim game animal populations have suffered from a proliferation of oil and gas wells in once-undeveloped areas.

In Montana, those groups are finding allies in state agencies under Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer. During Schweitzer’s tenure, the state has charted a more circumspect course for development, giving greater weight to potential negative effects on wildlife and the environment.

The latest restriction requires companies hoping to drill on newly issued state leases to first undergo review by the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks if sage grouse breeding grounds are present. Biologists from the agency will forward recommendations on where and when to allow drilling to the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which issues drilling permits through the state land board.

Although DNRC director Mary Sexton retains authority over the process, oil and gas representatives said the wildlife agency’s increasing sway over state energy policies could portend a drop in future exploration.

"They’ve got the potential to seriously dampen oil and gas exploration in Montana," said Dave Galt, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association. u2018u2018There has to be a lot more analysis and thought that goes into this before pulling the trigger like they’ve done.”

The new restriction will apply first to a lease sale scheduled for Sept. 5, including more than 300 square miles of state land scattered through the central, western and northeastern parts of the state.

In pushing for restraints on drilling, Fish Wildlife and Parks officials cited recent research that found declines in sage grouse and other game species in Wyoming and Alberta. Sage grouse are of most concern because they are considered candidates for an endangered species listing, which could prompt curbs not just on oil and gas but also agriculture and residential development.

Company executives and industry representatives argue any problems are overstated. Industry-sponsored scientists are scrambling to publish research they say will disprove claims of a grouse decline.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

Another round of jawing* is in process, as politicians and educational elites pretend that they care about high school drop-outs. I suggest that officials are more concerned about the loss of state aid, based as it is on enrollment, than about the swarms of uneducated students leaving the nation’s public schools — with or without a diploma. Neither are Barry and his puppets concerned about students who dropped out last year; nor about the ones who dropped out the year before that; nor are the power elites concerned about the millions of students who dropped out in the past 5—6 decades. Prisons, welfare monies, and parts of all 50 states, house poorly educated, underachieving, and nonproductive adult-sized children. These are the people who are unemployed or underemployed. These are the people who cannot understand the far-reaching and extremely dangerous implications of electing a foreign national as a president, in direct violation of the Constitution. These are the people who proponents of socialism/communism prefer to shackle, smooze, and use.

Because this population — of knowledge and skill deprived /compromised individuals — forms the voting base for the Democratic party, I predict that there will be few, if any, stimulus dollars allotted to pay for skilled teachers working in well-planned remedial programs, for uneducated school leavers, of any age!

I, for one, am very angry that I am expected to financially support an extremely faulty public school system, only to then financially support the millions of individuals that the system fails. I believe that school graduates should have age-level academic and employment skills; good common sense; a broad general knowledge base. In addition, every one of them should fully understand both their Rights, as well as their Responsibilities, as citizens of America.

Public school apologists attempt to excuse their failures with complaints about: student misbehavior; illiterate and dysfunctional families. Jack Kelly, a superintendent at an Area Educational Agency in Iowa back when I taught there, taught a very wise lesson to anyone who would listen, and it bears repeating: WHAT YOU EXPECT IS WHAT YOU GET. Think about it.

Skilled, intelligent, and intuitive teachers, using sensible techniques and methods, can develop eager students by way of presentation and enthusiasm for the subjects. Those same teachers use motivational "hooks" that turn reluctant learners into eager ones. Eager students are not behavior problems when their needs are met. Those students who refuse to respond to skilled teaching, and continue to be behavior problems, do not belong in any classroom.

With this all in mind, I would love to open new schools; ones created to skillfully use traditional methods and materials; to rapidly re-educate anyone who 1) was cheated by the expensive and ineffective public schooling system of America, and 2) is motivated to learn. No misbehaviors; no missing assignments; no wasting of time allowed. Here, then, I offer the Schrock-Taylor Plan for free market schools that will stimulate and educate: the drop-outs, the left-outs, the victims of low expectation schools. Only those with high expectations, high hopes, and reachable goals need apply. (I make those stipulations because, when I taught at a de facto segregated school in the south, most of the male students stated their life goals as being "to become a professional athlete or a pimp.")

NAME: HIGH EXPECTATIONS HIGH SCHOOL

Program: Intensive and expert remedial instruction for motivated adults (ages 16+); followed by 11th and 12th grade-level core academic instruction designed specifically as preparation for life and the working world. High school diplomas awarded upon satisfactory completion of all course work.

Plan: A - Prep Year(s): Specific remediation and repair of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic/math, English, vocabulary, and thinking skills.

B – 11th Grade:

1. English & Composition
2. Literature & Its Relevance to Life
3. Algebra I
4. Geometry
5. Earth Science/Life Science
6. American History
7. Logic, Philosophy, and Debate
8. Tutoring and Support Seminar

C – 12th Grade:

1. English & Composition
2. American Literature/World Literature
3. Algebra II
4. U.S. Government
5. Physics/Computers
6. World History
7. Austrian Economics for Life and Family Management
8. Tutoring and Support Seminar

I believe that such schools would be successful because human beings are not content, and rapidly lose self-esteem, when they are ineffective in life. A wise professor once asked my class, "How many people do you know who, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, answered that they wanted to be lousy parents; criminal; illiterates; or maybe an ignorant employee?" Think about it. I have been for 40 years.

Children want to grow up to be something, but too often schools undermine and/or thwart their goals. After the turbulent teens, young people often reflect on their mistakes and wish so that they had paid better attention and applied themselves more while in school. Their conclusions come too late and the wasted potential is immeasurable. My schools would give individuals very important second chances. My schools would educate citizens — citizens capable of seeing the value in a constitutional America.

Schools like those I envision must come from the free market, because Barry and the Democrats have nothing but lip service to offer a country populated by increasing numbers of illiterate people. Barry and the Democrats love those mind-altering 30-second commercials.

* jawing — my Grandmother’s word for 1) unproductive chatter, yapping; 2) time-wasting "yah, yah, yah" which speakers use to express phony concern in a positive manner. Example: Those politicians spent the entire year — just as they do every year — jawing about what needs to be done to stop students from walking away from failing, irrelevant, boring schools in order to get on with their lives.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

DIGG THIS

Really, I am beside myself with anger and disappointment. I have spent much time these last days, calling my senators and representative, reminding them that they swore to uphold the Constitution and to represent the People; pointing out that the People were voting via phone calls, emails, letters, trips to congressional offices — local, regional, and in DC. The congressman who said that constituent feedback was running 50/50: "50% are saying NO, while the other 50% are saying HELL NO," nailed it.

I am thrilled that the Bailout was voted down, and I sincerely thank everyone who voted "Nay." But…I am angry with all of those who voted for the bill against the wishes of the People; and I am disgusted with those who maintain that the People just don’t understand; need to be better educated; need to watch the market drop and shed tears for fears. I am sickened by those who promise to rewrite the legislation and try, yet again, to get it past the American People buy, harass, and threaten enough unconstitutional representatives (excuse me while I use my airbag, as Michelle Malkin does) to pass their creepy Socialism on the Sneak.

The American People are against any and every Bailout. Why is that so difficult to understand? The messages from millions of constituents have given precisely that message! Apparently, we have sent some very hard-of-hearing; ill-informed; cocky-as-hell; economic-moronic; princely-pruned people to Congress. Or, does DC just naturally turn the less-intelligent senators and representatives into idiots once they arrive in town? Unfortunately, for the stability and the future of this nation, the IDIOTS IN DC perceive We the People as downright stupid. Representative Lungren, R-CA, openly suggested that constituents are merely children who have never learned to swim. He stressed how, when he was a lifeguard, he never let such unskilled individuals near the pools. How irksome, and how demeaning. I resent the implication but you, sir, resemble it!

This morning I phoned Representative Dave Camp’s DC office, as well as his Michigan office, to ask how the congressman intended to vote on the Bailout. I was told that he was looking through the legislation and was trying to decide. (What?) I pointed out that Camp need not even read the document for he already knew how his constituents expected him to vote in order to represent them. Again, I listed the reasons why any bailout would be a bad decision, and I reinforced my expectation that he accurately and honestly represent the people of his Michigan district.

Shortly after the Bailout was voted down, I phoned Representative Camp’s DC office to thank him for voting "Nay" — only to learn that he had voted "Yea." I was stunned. I was told that "he felt" that was best for the people. I left the message that voters had sent him to DC to respond to them; to listen to them; to represent them; but never to "feel" what he thinks is best for them. How dare Camp, as well as the other Bailout Sellouts, to arrogantly ignore the wishes of the People, How foolish, especially now that it is becoming obvious that We the People have a better working knowledge of economic principles and how they relate to Human Action than these pseudo leaders could ever fathom, let alone think through and draw conclusions!

Dave Camp is running for reelection this November, and so I assured the aide that I would now erect a large sign — in my yard that most voters pass on the way to vote — that will read, "VOTE AGAINST CAMP! HE VOTED AGAINST YOU!" I explained the fairness involved when elected officials finally getting a Feel for how it Feels when a vote fails to go the way that they want.

My husband has long assured me that, "What goes around, comes around," but my complaint has often been that I want to want to live to see justice! This time…I hopefully will. I will vote this year, after all, but I will pull only one lever — for an opponent of the representative who failed to represent me. Then I will hurry home to place floodlights and neon sparklers around my "Vote Against" yard sign. Hmmm. I wonder if one of my former students would don an Uncle Sam costume and stand out there to beckon…

I sincerely hope that every American will confirm the votes of their elected representatives and senators then…respond accordingly and appropriately. We must hold elected officials accountable to the People! This fraudulent government has gotten much too far out of hand. A friend says that I should not take it personally, but if I do not take it personally, and if I do not begin to turn the tide near home, the situation will only worsen until America is totally lost. I do NOT want to leave a mess for my son! I do not want him left in debt to the government. I do not want him left with a non-representative government. I do not want him spied on; discounted; despised; negated; or treated like the citizens of This Perfect Day.

I do not want any of the generations cheated, harmed and diminished by the sick outcomes of Socialism on the Sneak.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

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I am truly shocked. Suddenly, the very same people who have consistently refused to believe anything said by any politician from a major party — now believe every word that Mrs. Palin says, even ones she never spoke. Some critics even pass off their own interpretations of what she might have meant, as … verbatim statements. What a reversal of strategies. What a change of heart. Frankly I have not known whether to laugh or cry.

I barely get my jaw back into position before another person, who I had previously thought to be quite rational, writes or says something to reinforce this new-found, total-belief in Republican campaign rhetoric; their trust in the veracity of political candidates and campaign promises. In these people’s prior lives, such reactions and conclusions would have been judged to be completely out-of-character. Now, these same people religiously proclaim their new affirmations of faith, as they push their beliefs on others, by any means necessary, available, and possible.

I am stunned that these same people now … not only allow campaign rhetoric to become such an issue … but aggressively defend their views, even as they insult and hurt friends, family, co-workers, and ultimately…I believe…themselves. Once the ADD effects of the feeding frenzy clear from their brains, I think they will look back and question their own sanity at this point in time.

George the Elder said "Read my lips! No new taxes." We thought, "Sure, George. Right. Whatever." He gave us new taxes.

Bill Clinton said, "I never had sex with that woman!" and we shook our heads in disbelief. We were right — the President of the United States had violated the White House and the integrity of our country.

Barack Obama promises to raise taxes so much that the people of America will be better off. We pause to wonder if this misguided man would read Economics in One Lesson if we mailed him a copy.

Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the promise to keep America out of WW-I…

FDR assured people that America would stay neutral; would stay out of Europe’s war. "Uh-huh."

But now…Sarah Palin answers a conditional, If-Then question about the expectations behind NATO agreements with "Perhaps so" and writers and reporters rush to report that "Palin states that war against Russia is being planned!" Someone sent me four (4) links as support of the war-with-Russia claims. All four authors displayed the same inability to hear, let alone interpret, a conditional response to a conditional question. I taught that lesson in Logic 001 when my son was in elementary schools!

Those who believe that my "passion" is to get votes for Sarah Palin are so very wrong. As I clearly stated, I think that if she is not destroyed by cruelty and lies, she stands a chance to bring some positive changes to America, "whether she wins or not." My passion, as well as my frustration, is focused on those-who-should-know-better but fail to provide honest, solid support for their gossip, accusations, poison arrows, and conclusions. Honesty and supportable claims have been my passion in every classroom in which I have ever taught. If mud-slinging writers were to put such unsupported claims into a paper for my composition classes — I would assign them failing grades but write on their papers, "In the unlikely event that you should stumble across some actual support for your position, you may rewrite the paper and resubmit it for partial credit."

Come on! How often does a politician, once in-office, move to fulfill every campaign promise? Still, there are those who now accept every statement, accurately repeated, or not, as gospel, screaming to the crowds "Palin said it and I believe her!" Unbelievable!

To make matters even worse, these people have now lowered their standards; have joined liberals in their agenda of personal destruction. In this unfair strategy, they have put Mrs. Palin’s entire family into the crosshairs. I cannot help but see such behaviors; consider such rants; as shameful and unworthy, especially when they come from people we once thought that we knew.

I wrote to one writer, a friend of mine, pointing out that his rants were making no distinction between Palin the Candidate and Palin the Person, a woman of character. He wrote back to say, "You are 100% correct. You are smart to recognize and understand the difference." Frankly, I recognized the game as soon as the first sword was drawn. What I fail to understand is why others are unable to recognize the difference; why others feel that the only way to disagree with political rhetoric is to stone the speaker.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

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Yes, the Power of One is real. However, it is very difficult for modern Americans to believe that one person can make a difference at any level above the family. We find such an idea inconceivable because the schools, and the government, have worked overtime to make sure that both children and adults feel powerless. It does, indeed, seem improbable, even impossible, that one person could hold enough power to bring about changes in that government, society, values, schools, churches, religion, educational policies, but the fact still exists.

I rarely watch movies that contain violence, and the sport of boxing has left me cold, but Braveheart and The Power of One are two of my very favorite films. For those who doubt that one person can bring about change, do watch these movies. Read the book, The Power of One, and attend closely to the character, P.K., as a child and at each stage of his life. Read about William Wallace and meet a very noble man. Both of their stories are real, and Bryce Courtenay is still living. Stories such these may help us believe, and even predict the Potential Power of Palin.

Some will point out that different, simpler, more honorable times, provided people like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and many other wonderful Americans, with opportunities to contribute their ideas and lead for change in ways that today’s America would never allow. True, but change is still possible.

Change is available to us, and needed, especially in times like these when the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been trampled and undermined; when King George the Inept rules by personal decree; when the culture around us is decaying at a rapid rate. However, change is not always positive and all too often negative changes seem to beget more of the same. Consider Madeline O’Hair and the nihilistic agenda she advocated; the unprincipled changes she managed to shove down the throats of Americans even as they objected. I send her a special thought of censure each time I hear that another clueless community has voted to remove the Nativity; to wish people "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." (Hint for the unknowing: "Holiday" = holy + day. Change Y to I and add the ending "day.") Mrs. O’Hair attacked the religious beliefs and warped the values and morals of America. Sadly, her poison continues, even in her absence, and spreads through the land. The power of one ambitious, evil person is truly frightening.

Bill Clinton. The number of ways that he violated the trust placed in him as President of the United States, plus the role that he played in twisting and warping the English language, surely pushed America’s definition of morality into this seemingly permanent downslide.

Clinton dumped filth on America, and the unconscionable Media quickly swept the dirt from sea to shining sea, using every means possible, with no concern at all for the children and youth of this nation. If for no other reason, the Clintons should never be forgiven for trashing the morals of America, teaching by example. Yes, what do words/phrases such as — truth, lie, u2018Swear on the Bible’, sex, love, fidelity, infidelity, oath, is! — now convey about values in America? They convey whatever people now want the words to convey in this feel good/look bad, anything goes, culture. Clinton used the Power of One to move the American culture closer to depravity.

I have always believed that one person is capable of bringing about change, and that a small group of committed individuals is capable of bringing about miracles, but I grew up at the side of my mother, Doris Cutler Sneary Regnier. I listened closely as a group of parents demanded educational programs for special needs children, working together with vision, determination, tenacity, and a bit of Puck’s magic. There is a marvelous story which was once used on the cover of a catalogue from LinguiSystems, (a company started by some ladies I worked with in Bettendorf / Davenport / Maquoketa, Iowa) and it has been my support as I fight to improve educational choices and quality for the illiterate and those with other special needs.

One day, an old man was walking along the beach, stopping often to lean over, pick up a starfish — one of hundreds that had been washed up by the tide — and throw it back into the water. Some observers were amazed at the massive job that the old man had assumed and finally they approached him to say, "There are so many of them! You will never be able to get them all back to safety. You are wasting your time to make no difference."

The old man leaned over, picked up one more starfish and threw it out to sea. Then he looked at his accusers and said, "I made a difference to that one."

I believe that Governor Sarah Palin can make a difference to all of us; actually many differences; whether her party wins or loses. Power resides in any one person who has committed to making the world a better place. Sarah Palin has the insight and the intelligence to recognize problems; the courage to speak the truth and expose the unworthy; the motivation to work towards change; and tenacity to hang on like a pit bull until the project is completed and all of the paperwork is done.

Last night I was working on my computer, almost ignoring the television which was on mainly the serve as "company" since I am alone in Florida for health reasons. Suddenly, I realized that someone was speaking about some changes that interested me, and the voice was neither that of Ron Paul nor of Sarah Palin. I glanced up and was absolutely shocked to see a smiling, excited, energized John McCain! Not only did he appear to be invested in his topic, he looked like he had stopped by the hospital to fill up with a quart or two of good, healthy O+ blood! He actually looked alive and his skin had lost its death pallor — that which matches the complexion of the Body Snatchers of movie fame.

As I listened to his comments, I found myself thinking that… John McCain is starting to sound more like Sarah Palin, than….Sarah Palin would ever sound like John McCain!

I therefore find it unbelievable that anyone, of any party or no party, would be so lacking in trust and hope that they would plant unwarranted fear of the Palin family into the minds of others! Such a media blitz is especially revolting in light of the cultural decay proudly brought to us by the media as it accompanied the Arkansas Piper as he blew bubbles of slime from his flute. Yes, the media joyfully danced with our fraudulent Puck as he threw ACD (Arrows of Cultural Destruction), instead of magic dust. I fail to understand those who gave the Clintons a pass, but now gossip, mislabel, and attempt to destroy a decent family. Have they become so accustomed to evil, that they fear good?

Some immediately concluded that Gov. Palin had sold her soul; that she had instantly changed her character from good, to evil, but I encourage everyone to reconsider such suggestions. Women rarely change. A woman of good character will stay that way for life. Those women who appear to be exceptions to this rule either A) never were of good character but hid that fact behind well-designed "window dressings" or B) have been deeply mistreated, abused, used, and hurt by men of bad character. Maybe some men misjudge women by measuring females against those men’s own purchasable consciences… .

Walter Block made an excellent case for supporting Sarah Palin, a woman of fine character. I write to encourage readers to consider the probable future of America if it stays on its present crooked course. Without someone to correct fatal mistakes; redirect the nation from wrong paths taken; reverse bad decisions made by courts, elected officials, and kings, America will soon become one more empire to self-destruct — culturally, morally, financially, civically. In all truth, I had already given America up for lost; had already counted to 9 and was ready to slap the mat… when Mrs. Palin appeared on the scene. She just may hold the Power of One and be our stay of execution; our breath of fresh air; America’s chance to get it right.

America is fortunate to have a person of Sarah Palin’s caliber who is willing to run for office; work hard for change, and subject herself to media abuse. I say that we give her chance; let her prove herself. Really, a career cannot be judged until it is actually over. Let us reach up and give her a hand — both in welcome, and to offer support.

We really have no other to send in her stead.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

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What has happened to Customer Service in America? Have businesses lost their love for consumers? Are there now so many people, with so much money to spend, that businesses need not make customers satisfaction a goal; need not build a base of loyal return customers? Are some companies so shortsighted, so arrogant, that they fail to understand that return customers are their insurance against a time when the market takes a downturn? I sense that some sellers actually dislike customers who expect high standards, skilled service, and quality products. I find myself feeling that some corporations and their employees have become the modern equivalent of the unaccountable, train-hopping, shark oil salesmen of yesteryear.

It certainly seems that many sellers and providers in the current marketplace feel no love for their customers; act as though there will always be other willing buyers waiting to serve the needs of the businesses — as opposed to businesses meeting the needs of the customers.

How unfortunate. If the entire business community would once again embrace the long-valued philosophy, "The customer is always right," our sluggish (dying?) economy would probably show growth. I often leave stores convinced that my attempts to spend $money$ there definitely inconvenience, and at times even anger, employees who might have fun at work if only bothersome customers would stop showing up. Smiles fall to frowns; attitudes sour; many fail to even speak.

It is not that I mean to bother anyone when I enter a business, but occasionally I do need more from a living, breathing clerk than he or she is willing and/or able to do. I do expect businesses to train employees for more than Change Dumping. Yes, would it not be nice to again get our change counted back into our hands? Hahahaha! Clerks count out change?! Nowadays? When is the last time that any of us have been on the receiving end of that skill? (Thank you, Pubelick Skoools of Ghost-America!)

Supervisors and higher-level managers, even owners, are also at fault. They are the ones who fail to hire (or contract someone else who fails to hire) employees who: 1) dress and act as though they are proud to have a job; especially that job, 2) have the skills, training, and knowledge to perform that job, 3) understand and appreciate the role of the customer ($$) in the success of the business ($$), 4) are eager to serve customers, 5) are able to do some problem solving in order to serve the customer, even if that means asking questions of supervisors and other workers, and 6) who speak clear, proper, understandable, un-punctured, English.

There is nothing like the noise of a steel ball flailing around, wearing down all teeth within its reach, to clutter speech and drive customers away from that business and over to its competitors. There is no cultural pride in using a low verbal dialect, or substandard pronunciation, to a Standard English-using customer. I, myself, walk out of businesses that hire such employees.

I also excuse myself and hang up the phone when faced (eared?) with a pleasant, eager-to-serve clerk who only knows Parrot English and whose comprehension of spoken English falls below that of a toddler.

LST: "I am having trouble with my computer."

Parrot English User: "I understand that you are having trouble with your computer."

LST: "I frequently travel across time zones. Is there any way that I can change my computer so that it will override the decision of the fool who drew the time zones, putting Michigan and Alabama in different zones despite the fact that my Michigan home is almost exactly at the same longitude as my Alabama home?"

P.E.User: "I understand perfectly what you are saying. I understand that you are having trouble with your computer." Or your credit card; or your new stove; or your….

A silly example, but the responses from the other end are very typical, no matter how one tries to explain something that is not on the overseas person’s "Expected Problems" script. If the explanation is longer than two simple sentences, I ask for my call to be transferred stateside. I keep hoping that companies will start to see that we, the sheeple, do indeed notice and we do move on to their competitors as soon as we are able to get the "English speaker" at the other end of the line to understand that we wish to end the call. I have often asked for a "Native English User" only to end up with — a broken-English speaker who serves as a semi-supervisor with the same limited comprehension difficulties.

Occasionally, I have questions regarding stock, performance, ease of use. Sometimes I would just like to see the product and read the box! I bought a new air conditioner from a Wal-Mart competitor because all of the AC boxes in the Cadillac, MI store were turned Spanish side out! First of all, I do not speak Spanish, and second, the boxes were too heavy for me to spin. I also resent signs that direct me to ask a salesclerk for assistance in reaching stock that has been placed on shelves over my head. Ask a salesclerk? How? Who? Where? When?

Some of the rudeness seems to be company policy. I first noticed this back in the mid-1980s when I returned a garment to a company that I had been using often and for a length of time. I enclosed a note explaining why I was returning the item; mentioning that it was not up to their usual quality. Their response? They spoke not a word but went quickly to work and removed me from their mailing list. Forever! The Catalogue-Blackballing-Network must be as efficient as the Never-Hire-This-Teacher-Network, for I have never again seen a catalogue from that company, no matter where I have lived; no matter how my name has changed. (A few trees saved, at least.)

Of course, some companies’ rudeness may be their point of pride; even their unstated mission. These companies are generally the only service providers. That is also true for companies that are on the receiving end of government subsidies, legal protection, or backdoor deals.

I have always had an itchy traveling foot, so as soon as I could safely travel alone — at age 9—10 back then — I hurried to the bus station and went to visit my grandparents who lived 180 miles from us. I had to take one bus from Ypsilanti to Lansing, where I then had lunch and a fairly long wait for the next bus. Those travel delays provided me with wonderful opportunities to observe other passengers while I waited for the "Up North" bus and so I did not mind them at all. Later in the day, that second bus driver would stop along the highway nearest my grandparents’ farm and let me off. Grandpa and Grandma Sneary would be parked, awaiting my arrival. I always arrived safely.

I can almost hear concerns: 10 years old! Traveling alone? Long wait in busy city bus station? What about strangers?! Well, remember that there were not so many threatening strangers back then. Also, rest assured that my mother always reviewed her stern warnings about the greatest dangers that lurked in and around those bus stations — "Remember Linda, all employees of that bus company have to pass a Meanness Test in order to get their jobs. Do not take anything they say or do personally. Do not let any of them hurt your feelings." ‘Tis true. Actually, 20 years later, when friends from Chile and England purchased unlimited bus tickets to see America while traveling to and from my home in Colorado Springs, I warned them prior to their arrival in New York, "BTW, All employees of that bus company have to pass a Meanness Test in order…" (My most recent experiences with "that bus company" have shown me that the younger employees seem not to have passed the meanness training, while many test passers still work in the system.)

It is almost beyond belief, but for some reason the customer service policies at too many companies have become anti-consumer. Such behaviors must serve some purpose or one would expect non-government-supported companies to fail. That so many not only hang on, but spread their anti-customer disease, is very worrisome. Is failure becoming a desired outcome? Are tax write-offs so financially lucrative? Or are some employees/managers/owners just too poorly educated to understand the short- and long-term consequences of a breakdown in the buyer-seller relationship? Do none of them face negative consequences for ignoring; for mistreating; for driving away dissatisfied customers?

Word-of-mouth was once the most valuable advertising tool available, but now too many people, at all company levels, are content to ignore; minimally serve; and rudely treat customers, especially dissatisfied customers. We all know that people who are mistreated will, for good reason, complain to family; friends; acquaintances; email buddies; maybe to the whole world, but do the employees at such companies know that? I have told employees that I would tell anyone who would listen about bad customer service that I receive, but their reactions usually amount to, "So? Oh, well. Go ahead. I don’t care." And so…I no longer use the services of UPS because of the way that I was treated by the owner of The UPS Store in Auburn, Alabama. He, as well as the corporate levels of UPS, did not care about my concern, and so now neither do I care about theirs. There are other shipping companies that do want my business, and so I gladly take my packages elsewhere.

Once upon a time, any company intent on success did everything possible to prevent such advertising disasters, but now something seems to be replacing wise marketing strategies with very stupid, self-defeating ones. I suggest that those companies which do manage to stay afloat — that maybe even thrive for a while despite their mistreatment and minimalization of their customers — must either 1) receive governmental subsidies, props, and protection from the natural outcomes of unwise business practices, or 2) they lack competition. We should take this as a cue; as a suggestion to consider gaps that could be better filled: products made and sold with the buyer’s interest in mind; services more skillfully and pleasantly provided.

One very real need is for cheaper, quality educational alternatives to the public mis-schooling mess. In academically moral schools, graduates could leave with better preparation for life; with understanding of the benefits and workings of the free market; with greater awareness of the importance of providing a dollar’s value for a dollar; and even knowing…how to count change…28, 29, 30, 40, 50, 75, one dollar.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

Linda Schrock Taylor Archives

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Linda: Spalding Education International has been an oasis of research-based reading long before The National Reading Panel identified the components of successful instruction. Oasis is an apt description because Spalding Education International (SEI) is located in Phoenix, Arizona, on the edge of the Sonoran desert. From there, The Spalding Method has spread throughout the United States with outposts in Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Unlike the big publishing houses that embrace each reading fad as it came along, SEI stays true to the mission of its founder, master teacher/author Romalda Spalding, preserving and spreading The Spalding Method. Those familiar with Spalding know that it is a total language arts program, teaching spelling (with handwriting), reading and composition. However, Spalding is not as well known as it should be, given its wonderful results. Why the low profile? Dr. Mary North, Spalding’s Director of Research and Development, has agreed to answer that and other questions about the Method and SEI.

Mary: When Romalda Spalding was in her 80s and still actively teaching teachers, school administrators grew concerned about what would happen to The Method after her death. With her collaboration, they set about creating an organization to preserve and perpetuate the method she had devoted her life to teaching. Spalding Education International is a non-profit organization because Mrs. Spalding’s primary focus was always on keeping costs low so that The Spalding Method would be available to anyone who needed it. As per her instructions, everything SEI earns is plowed back into developing and updating courses, creating needed instructional materials and, of course, to pay for staff and office. There is little money left over for promotion.

Linda: Word of mouth has spread the good news about Spalding, but literacy would take a great leap forward if Spalding was better known. When I started teaching Spalding, I bought The Writing Read to Reading (WRTR), text for The Spalding Method, and the phonogram cards and that was all there was. I see that you have more instructional materials now. Tell me what changes you have made since WRTR was first published in 1957 and why you have made them.

Mary: The Writing Road to Reading is in its fifth revised edition, making it the longest continuously published textbook in the history of HarperCollins. Much has changed in education since Mrs. Spalding wrote her book, and not for the better. She did not go into great detail regarding teacher instructions because she assumed a background knowledge that, for the most part, is no longer taught to teachers or students. The 5th revised edition makes explicit the knowledge base, insights and classroom techniques that were inferred in earlier editions, making the Method easier to teach and to learn. The revisions made to Spalding teacher courses are designed to do the same thing. So, in answer to your question, the revisions and new materials are to help those who teach Spalding and, by doing that, expand our outreach.

Linda: I was introduced to The Spalding Method in the book, Turning Back the Tide of Illiteracy by Marguerite Field Hoerl, so I ordered The Writing Road to Reading. In our local library I found an old book by Mr. & Mrs. Spalding; a guide to teaching oneself the method. I studied both books carefully, then followed their suggestion that I study the WRR for at least 40 hours before attempting to teach it. In addition, I (as teacher) lead myself (as student) in making the spelling notebook. Only then did I begin teaching my high school special education students. When I finally was able to take a Spalding course, and even though I had carefully studied the books and followed them as best I could, I was stunned at the amount of additional information and new skills that I gained during the course. I soon realized that I had learned more — not only about the teaching of reading, but about teaching in general — in that two week course than during all of my "teaching methods courses" at university. I returned to my classroom prepared and confident that my teens would finally learn to read, and they did. How do other teachers respond to the courses and content?

Mary: Teachers who take the courses find them enormously helpful and often ask why this information was not part of their personal or professional preparation. SEI provides two 45-hour courses for teachers as well as on-site follow-up. The courses are aligned with the 5th edition of WRTR and are now called Integrated Language Arts 1 and ILA 2.

Linda: I see on your web page that you have added courses for parents.

Mary: Yes, Spalding for Home Educators is new this year. It is offered in two parts. Part 1 (15 hours) focuses on basic skills needed for teaching kindergarten through grade 2. Part 2 (15 hours) expands instruction to grade 3 and above. Although we have had many requests over the years for such a course, it has been surprisingly difficult to launch. Home educators are a loose-knit group not easily reached with information. Frankly, we need help to spread the message that we will offer the course anywhere we have an available instructor and 10 or more parents who want to take it. The details are on our web page. Some home educator sites link to our web site, which is helping, and we welcome others to do so.

Speaking of our web page, we have added a forum where teachers and home educators can submit any questions they may have about teaching Spalding. A qualified staff member will usually be able to answer within 24 hours.

Linda: What is the difference between Spalding for Home Educators and A Parent Introduction to Spalding, your other parent course?

Mary: The 10-hour Parent Introduction is for parents of children in schools where Spalding is taught. It is less detailed since they are not the primary educators of their children. Principals and teachers love the interaction — that the course fosters — between home and school. Additionally, parents are delighted to know how to help their children at home.

Linda: What about the other instructional materials I see on your web page. Tell me about them.

Mary: The K-6 Teacher Guides are a response to requests, from both home educators and classroom teachers, for more direction. The Guides are designed to be used in conjunction with the 5th revised edition of WRTR. In addition to providing guidance for lesson planning, the guides elaborate on lesson delivery; assessment and evaluation; plus contain many tips for more effective teaching. Another reason for creating the Guides was to meet state and local textbook adoption committee expectations. Teacher Guides have become an industry standard and adoption committees have a hard time understanding a program that does not provide them.

Linda: You added something called a Word Analysis CD this year. What is that?

Mary: All words listed in sections A-Z of The Writing Road to Reading have been analyzed to expedite lesson planning. The CD can be used to sort words by rules, parts of speech, spelling lists, and syllable patterns, all categories needed for teaching the week’s spelling/vocabulary words. Teachers and parents tell us it saves a great deal of time.

Linda: That sounds really useful. Do you have other products that will be coming out in the future?

Mary: Yes, a couple of things. In response to home educators’ requests for decodable books aligned to Spalding phonogram introduction, eight (8) Kindergarten decodable readers will be available for the 2008-09 school year. They are specifically written to provide phonogram practice. These handsomely illustrated readers, used with WRTR and the Guide, will be introduced at weekly intervals, beginning with week eight. They will incorporate the phonograms taught that week, along with those already taught. The complete set will include 8 narratives, 8 informatives and 4 informative-narratives. The books will also be sold individually. Providing nascent readers with books is important, and their excitement over being able to read a real book is wonderful to behold. In addition, we believe the decodables will help textbook adoption committees who have frequently cited our lack of readers as a reason for rejecting The Spalding Method.

Linda: And after Kindergarten?

Mary: First grade decodables are in the planning stage. Mrs. Spalding believed that children have no need for special readers after first grade. After that grade, children can read the good literature recommended in WRTR. We provide a grade level reading list and leave it to the teacher or parent to select appropriate books.

Linda: I read in The Spalding News that you are engaged in a research study. Please tell me about that.

Mary: This research project is a four-year study by Arizona State University to establish the efficacy of The Spalding Method. We have plenty of evidence that Spalding-taught children progress faster and have higher test scores than students taught by other language arts programs, but we need the kind of scientific study outlined in NCLB. So far we are delighted with the Kindergarten and first grade results. We publish each year’s report, as it becomes available, in The Spalding News and on our Internet website.

Linda: That is exciting, but not surprising. In addition to being a God send to my younger students, Spalding has been my best tool for remediating reading problems in older, discouraged students. I even used Spalding at the local jail, where I was forced to do some of the fastest instruction ever! Since the turnover in a local jail is great, I usually had new students arrive, and others leave, each week. Since I was only allowed in one evening a week, I targeted spelling with rapid testing/teaching/testing. I now use Spalding at the university level, putting my freshman composition classes through rapid remediation in handwriting and spelling before we move on to developing higher skills for using the three types of writing.

Mary, how did you u2018discover’ Spalding, and how did you become so involved with this wonderful, successful, precise way of teaching reading, spelling, and writing?

Mary: I am here because of the amazing progress my 7th grade remedial students made with Spalding. That was some 30 years ago when, as a new teacher, I was desperate to help my students. On the advice of a friend, whose son had been tutored with Spalding, I bought the book. I taught my students and myself almost simultaneously. The results were amazing. My colleagues wanted to know what I knew that they didn’t. The word got around and the administration asked me to bring Mrs. Spalding in to teach other teachers. One thing led to another and Spalding was eventually adopted district-wide.

Linda: Did you then retire from the district and go to work for Spalding?

Mary: It was about then when my administrator asked me to assist with the creation of what is now called SEI. Mrs. Spalding brought her nephew, Warren North, to Phoenix to help. Warren had just retired from NASA where he had been involved in the selection of the first seven astronauts. Understanding that improving literacy was the key to improving education, Warren agreed to serve as president of SEI. The two of us met and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Linda: You were obviously in the right place at the right time. Surely, Spalding served as Cupid in introducing you and your husband. What about the rest of your staff? How many are there, by the way?

Mary: There are 11 of us.

Linda: Only 11? The big publishing houses have departments bigger than your whole crew.

Mary: We are all dedicated to perpetuating The Spalding Method and have become very good at multi-tasking! We need to keep expenses down in order to keep doing what we do. The research study, as important as it is to the future of Spalding, is an enormous drain on our budget. It required that we identify five experimental schools and provide, at our expense, all the training and materials that the teachers need. Finding control schools with matched populations was a big investment in staff time and took much effort, as well. Of course, the real key to Spalding success is the highly motivated cadre of Spalding Teachers and the Spalding Teacher Instructors who teach our courses. They are the real future of Spalding. Seven of them serve with me on the Curriculum Development Committee. The Committee wrote the 5th revision of WRTR, and designed the Guides and our other instructional materials. All committee members are Spalding Certified — some, like me, by Mrs. Spalding herself.

Linda: I do envy those of you who had the opportunity to study under her! Those of us who have been Spalding partisans over the years have wondered how your organization has survive whole language and the other fads that periodically blow through colleges of education and into elementary school classrooms. It cannot have been easy.

Mary: It wasn’t. My class of 7th grade remedial children, most of whom read below a fourth grade level, were the flesh and blood victims of those fads. Finding Spalding was the answer to my prayers. At the time, I didn’t know why it worked. It was enough for me that it did. Later, I wanted to understand why the Method is so successful and consistent. I read the research and earned my doctorate because I thought that having higher credentials would help me persuade others of the need for research-based instruction. Much later, the National Reading Panel studied the research and concluded that successful reading instruction requires certain components, phonemic awareness and phonics key among them. Those of us in the trenches said "at last."

Then, when NCLB passed, the big publishing houses turned on a dime, sprinkled a little phonics holy water over whole language, and claimed to be "phonics based." After being shunned for teaching phonics all those years, Spalding suddenly had a bunch of well-financed competitors. Who said, "Be careful what you wish for!"? Yet, as you noted, and despite everything, Spalding has persevered. I wish you could read the grateful letters from parents and teachers. They are the reason that we work on. We are continually reminded of the difference Spalding makes in children’s lives. Speaking of that, the friend who told me about Spalding, is now editor of The Spalding News! When she retired from The Phoenix Gazette, where she was an editorial writer, I asked her to come to work for SEI. Because of her experience with her son, she felt that it was something she had to do. Her son had been in a dreadful first grade reading program and thought that reading was a mystery he would never solve. After a summer of Spalding tutoring, he was reading and loving it. He couldn’t believe it could be so easy. He asked his tutor, "Are you sure this is all there is to it?" And "Does everyone know this?" Thirty-five years later, we are still working on it.

Linda: Thank you, Dr. Mary North, for giving me, and my readers, so much of your time. I hope that all parents, whether they are homeschooling their children, or not, will do much reading and learning at the Spalding Education International website. I remain as committed to Spalding as ever, and my present and former students think of Mrs. Romalda Spalding as — a wonderful extra Grandmother who has given them the best of all gifts — the Gift of Literacy.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

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Dear Parents,

I received your letter yesterday, but wanted time to ponder your questions before I replied.

You explained that your 6-year-old child —

…still loves to sit and listen to stories. His verbal/language skills are quite advanced and he has an amazing verbal memory. For example, he can recite long poems after hearing them only once or twice. However, his reading ability continues to mystify us. He knows all the phonograms and the sounds they represent, and he can read phonetically. Yet, he still has to (slowly) sound out each word phonetically no matter how many times he has previously read the same word — even words like "the", "was" etc. As you can imagine, reading on his own is a slow, agonizing struggle for him…[he] also has some particular motor delays and deficits which have significantly delayed his ability to write. Because of this, he does not enjoy reading, he absolutely hates writing, and he increasingly avoids both. (From a letter sent to me by real parents; here follows my reply to them, with some additional information for better clarity. This quote is used with the permission as the parents want others to learn, as well.)

You wrote to ask how you might improve your son’s reading and writing skills. You would like to know if a tutor would be advantageous, and you would appreciate suggestions of things to do over the summer to help the little lad.

First: Do not hire a tutor unless that person is a very skilled and experienced reading teacher; one who understands and teaches use of the systematic Code in which oral English is recorded — i.e. phonograms. A tutor should also have the skills to carefully evaluate the child, isolate the problems, then remediate those, specifically. If you were to hire someone whose MO is to simply have children practice ineffective reading strategies with nary a lesson nor repair, it would serve to solidify the mistakes and probably cause your son to reject reading, maybe forever. Instead, I suggest the following ways that you parents can help him become a competent and automatic user of literacy skills.

Next: Watch this video at Spalding International: Reading and Loving It

Now, let us begin:

Writing: Writing is so very important that it should be taught first. I suggest that you order the book, The Writing Road to Reading, by Romalda Spalding and study it thoroughly. Prepare to have the child create a spelling notebook. Order the purple and white notebook from Spalding (see photo below) which is the appropriate one for his age. The large spaces do not mean that he must write large letters. Encourage smaller, more controllable writing, but allow for expression of personality — as long as the child is accurate, consistent, and neat. Let his internal needs guide you. The notebook allows for personal differences — if written precisely.

Is the school expecting the child to write words and sentences? If so, please put those lessons on the back burner until you have him writing the individual phonograms with ease, care and precision. The Spalding book will have pictures and directions but I want to add that I use a paper plate to create a clock face. I use a highlighter or different colored marker for 2:00, 4:00, 10:00. When I teach a new letter, I liken it to the clock: "To make a u2018c’, start at 2:00 and carefully write back in a circle until you come around to 4:00. Then lift your pencil from the paper." As he writes the phonogram, have him say the sound(s) that it can represent. (The above video demonstrates this.)

If his discomfort and dislike of writing have developed during lessons in printing, then I would immediately switch him to cursive writing. Cursive has flow and is easier to learn. In addition, he will avoid any tendency to reverse letters. There are only 5 connective strokes, and then most of the letters are written very much like they are in printing …without the interruptions to the brain caused by lifting from and replacing the pencil on the paper! The main exceptions are: e, r, s, and z. Use a good cursive program (Not D’nealian), and I recommend “Cursive First."

I believe that Americans should all return to cursive and I do make my university students do so. Unfortunately, most of them never learned to write properly in elementary school, so the complaints are many. However, I have found that the use of cursive improves their skills in reading, spelling, writing, and the flow of thought. I always say, “We speak in cursive.” Really, we do! When we speak, sounds flow from one into the next, then blend into words, just as the letters flow in cursive script. The “stops and starts” of printing break concentration and do not correlate with what the speech mechanisms are doing within our mouths and brains.

Be sure to teach your child a proper pencil grip. The Spalding book will explain the best; one that will prevent hand and arm strain and fatigue. If your small child cannot manage that grip, buy him one of those rubber grips — with indentations molded to hold particular fingers — to slide over his pencil. Wean him off that later, but wait until he is has better muscle control and is not dealing with so many issues at once.

Spelling/Encoding (putting into the Code): You must first work with your son at the phonogram level until he has the first 54 learned: for recognition by ear; for accurate written representation using the Code. This is how you should give spelling tests until he uses phonograms, both expressively and receptively, to automaticity. (The video provides a quick demonstration.)

P: “Write the phonogram that can represent these three sounds: /aa/, /a/, /ah/.”

Child carefully writes "a."

P: “Write the 2-letter phonogram that represents the sound /f/.”

Child carefully writes, “ph."

P: "Write the phonogram that represents the sound /b/ (Note: not /buh/!

Child carefully writes "b."

The Spelling Assessment Manual (at the page, scroll to the bottom) contains charts and instructions that help the parent/teacher know when to teach/write/review each phonogram. The 8 tests are great tools for assessing gains and keeping official records.

Spelling Notebook: Dictate the words and have your son think them through then write and mark them in his spelling notebook. Spalding has a DVD of a teacher teaching these lessons. It is very helpful to see the coaching and marking methods that will help the child learn. At the end of each column, have the child read the list aloud, like so:

Photo by permission Spalding Education International

/m/ /e/ — me;

/b/ /oy/ — boy;

/l/ /i/ /k/ Silent-E — like.

Have him reread the columns using clear diction and accurate pronunciation, until he can flow through the list with smoothness and without errors. That practice will help him learn to sound words out faster, because this task will not put him under the stress of keeping the meaning of a long sentence suspended, word-by-word, in his mind while he decodes. He is not ready for that kind of reading yet. Also, use the words that have been dictated as his spelling tests.

In the Spalding word lists at the back of The Writing Road to Reading, you will find information about when to move your son into real books. Suggestions for good book choices are at the back of the manual. Follow Spalding’s advice and do not worry. As soon as the foundation has been carefully and reassuringly built in a non-stressful way, your son should begin reading with confidence.

Once upon a very long time ago, when I was still a university student, a professor said — that although children might identify and read sight words, they will not actually read for comprehension until they have attained the mental and emotional maturity level of a six-year-old. I have always thought about that while observing children I have met, taught, tested. I have found that information to be generally true.

Even retarded children can be taught to read — once they have developed to a 6-year-old level. That may be when they are 8, 12, 15, or even later. Those children with IQs below 40 will probably never learn to read because their brains never mature; never develop the capacity to handle symbols in such a manner. My husband has a niece with about a 50 IQ who had good reading instruction. She reads at probably a 3rd-grade level, writes conversational letters, keeps her Christmas card list, and sends Christmas cards every year. By observing her behaviors, gait, and immature social skills, one would never guess that she is literate, but she is. I have a cousin with maybe a 30—35 IQ. He is cheery, pleasant, recognizes faces even after years of not seeing us, and….cannot learn to read. He loves jazz and has an outstanding collection of albums; knows all of the artists, but…he cannot learn to read. He has to ask a literate person to make note of a song he has found on the radio; drive him to the store; then locate the album for him. He lives far from his family, happily sharing a group home with his buddies. He works in a sheltered workshop and pays for his music collection with his own money. But his mind is incapable of handing symbols in such abstract ways as they are used in the reading process.

I tell you these stories because I do not want you to worry excessively about your little 6-year-old fellow. He is still certainly within safe time limits, especially with the fine start you have given him — by way of phonogram learning; practice in hearing and using individual sounds; the years of reading aloud to him which has developed his broad oral and listening vocabulary and conceptual base. Applause to you both!! You definitely have time to Raise a Reader. So, towards that end, here are your assignments:

SUMMER

1) Parents, read and study The Writing Road to Reading. If at all possible, have one of you attend a 2-week Spalding #1 training course. Following that training, you will know more about the teaching of reading that most teachers in America. You will not only be able to teach your own child to read, but others — both children and adults — as well.

(An aside: I encourage literate adults to learn to use The Spalding Reading Method the teach others to read. There are non-readers and weak-readers in every aspect of life — churches; neighborhoods; local jails; homeless shelters. Why, there are thousands of them seated in the schools! It might be very rewarding to offer Saturday morning reading school in your garage for children who live on your block. Learn the skills then pass them on to others!)

2) Teach your son spelling and penmanship by following the Spalding book and having him start helping him build a spelling notebook. Consider teaching him cursive penmanship skills.

3) Read aloud at every opportunity. You can never read too many books to your family. No one, neither children nor adults, ever becomes too old to listen to a great story, well read. Never! If you run out of ideas for books to read, buy a book by Jim Trelease. The Read-Aloud Handbook is a great place to start.

I read aloud to my son until he left home. After supper, and on trips, we had a tradition. I would choose a book that would appeal to Dad, Mom, and David, then I read it aloud for all of us to enjoy (I did learn to conquer car sickness). After my stepmother died, my father came to our home at least 3 nights a week and I read aloud to everyone as we sat at the kitchen table. I read aloud just as my father’s mother had read to her family as they sat around the table; around the kerosene lamp, every night before bed. Right in the middle of very interesting parts, especially as excitement was building, Grandmother abruptly closed the book. The family had to wait until the next evening to hear what happened. She explained that the "suspended story" would provide much to fire imaginations; much to ponder and predict, which I am sure that it did. Dad said that he would dream about the books at night, then spend the next day thinking and daydreaming about what was to come. He credited those interrupted stories as being the force behind his great imagination and love of reading.

4) When you read aloud to your son; with him beside you or in your lap; using age-appropriate books; run your finger under the words as you read, allowing his eyes to take them in as his ears hear the phonemes, words, sentences. Do not even discuss it with him. Just start doing it. Until he becomes more confident with his skills, do not ask him to read aloud or sound out any words except those in his spelling notebook. Just let him listen and watch while building vocabulary and courage. Continue to provide him with many opportunities to develop mental pictures of concepts, faces, scenes. When you are reading aloud, stop now and then to ask questions: Why do you think the boy made a decision like that? Was it a wise decision? What would you have done in the same circumstances? What do you predict that the boy will do next? What does that word, "concentration" mean? How about the word "barrier"? When you feel that he is ready, hold a bookmark or ruler under the lines, quickly lowering it for the next, providing him practice in letting his eyes move more rapidly along the print; peeking forward for a clue; looking back to check comprehension.

When your son is comfortable with print and ready to read — have him first read aloud books and stories that he already knows. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales once played an important role in reading lessons because children, by reading known stories, do not have to worry about comprehension, while at the oral decoding stage. They already know what is going to happen, so they can attend to how that story is written in the Code. Also, children need to read aloud until — they do not need to real aloud any more. In the beginning, a new reader needs reassurance and confirmation from his sense of hearing, and so he reads: Pronounce Word — Hear Word — Understand Word. Once a child has internalized the reading process, he can go directly from Print to Meaning. Then he will read silently with comprehension.

Build a foundation for literacy, stone-by-stone, and you will raise a lifelong reader. Using the Spalding Reading Method, I have been able to teach so much more to so many more students. It is completely immoral that schools in America do not use the best reading program — The Spalding Reading Method. Instead, schools choose to buy the latest, unproven books from publishers that profit from the failure of children to learn. Yes, if students do not learn using Edition #245, the sales representatives gladly return to the schools and collect massive amounts of cash for Edition #246 — which will not produce an educated populace, either. It is criminal!

Thank you for writing, and I hope you find this information helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Linda Schrock Taylor

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

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On my recent flight home from Florida, I sat next to a very interesting and articulate gentleman. We talked nonstop, only pausing for shallow breaths, as we discussed the flaws and faults of public schooling. As many may well imagine, once that topic is opened — time stops for me. I explained the "jobs project" infrastructure of our schooling fiasco, as well as the deceptive "educational" decor of the buildings — designs that rise, just like the false fronts that topped buildings in old Western towns, providing cover for evil-doers, both then and now.

I was pleased to learn that my seatmate had already detected the odor of rotting buildings and mildewed philosophies, as well as the damaged souls and destroyed lives of millions of America’s children. He assured me that others are finally becoming aware of the manipulations behind the smoke screen of federal and state educational programs, mandates, and scams. I pointed him to John Taylor Gatto.

He talked of math and arithmetic, especially his great concerns about school math and its use at higher levels in education, and he used a local example to reinforce the broad, generalized but well well-defined, problem. He is angry that taxpayers have to pay high salaries to administrators who do not even know how to count! He went on to explain. His town voted to build a larger high school, which is now almost completed. Recently, while out for a drive, he decided to go look at the new school. As a property owner, he is an investor in the project and he fully expected to be pleased with the building. However, that was not the case. My friend explained that he was shocked, disappointed, and very angry to note that the school district was setting up many portable classroom buildings on the grounds around the new school.

At first, I wondered if he might be joking, but he was not. Indeed, portable classrooms are being added — prior to the completion of the new main building because that new, almost completed, never-used, high school is already too small! Not only will the school fail to accommodate the student population of the present, the problems will increase with each year. The new school was designed with no regard for the future of the community. The school was too small before construction even began; too small before the construction dust could settle; too small for the opening day of classes. This situation has come about because administrators in the school district simply forgot how to count. Next they will be asking for monies to build … a new school. It is shameful!

The district had held public meetings; planning meetings; board meetings; design meetings; architectural meetings; safety issue meetings; transportation meetings. The administrators had hired architects, consulting firms, contracting firms and sub-contracting firms. However, the school district administrators had failed to count kids! The mathematically-challenged administrators had not only failed to do a head count themselves; they had failed to hire any firm to count for them. The administrators had spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money without even doing a demographics study, even in that area of rapid growth. They never noticed, let alone considered, surveyed, and accounted for, the fact that family dwellings are being built at an incredible rate; that whole neighborhoods of family homes are springing up faster than vendors at a public school grant distribution site. Irate hardly describes my seatmate’s reactions to such stupidity; to such misuse of taxpayer monies. Furthermore, he assured me that he is not alone in his assessment, conclusions, and anger.

If people are waking up to the fraud of taxpayer supported schools, I only wish they would wake up at a faster rate.

This sad and wasteful story led us into a discussion about counting and the teaching of mathematics. Well, actually it led us into a discussion about the non-teaching of math and arithmetic. He asked why students, teachers, and even administrators are not learning math. He asked how the public school system could be making such blunders; failing so miserably, at any and all levels, from pre-kindergarten up through the Congress and the President of the United States? I explained about the mis-instruction of math in America. Of course, no one can explain how: inept skill presentation; wasted time on algorithm (re)discovery; discarded arithmetic facts; absence of skill practice; and illogical, out-of-sequence lessons, could possibly be effective math instruction tools; could possibly help students develop into mathematically skilled individuals. I told my seatmate about "progressive" educational fads (Watch this!) and talked about constructivist math; new-new math; discovery math; transitions math; teacher-as-facilitator math; and about fools-as-math-curriculum-developers. I did find his look of total shock more than a bit reassuring. We both expressed our concerns, and our grief, about the loss of the type of mathematical literacy that made possible the inventions and processes that once built and sustained this nation.

"Why?" he asked. "Why would intelligent people even listen to con artists as they describe snake oil, let alone proceed to purchase so many bottles of it?" Well…who said they are intelligent? Remember those SAT scores! Why? Maybe because the National Science Foundation is the pusher and the banker…but the "Money for Preferred Vendors" math lesson will have to wait for another day.

"But math education used to be so simple and straightforward," he said. "It basically involves: Learn a new skill, then practice it until it becomes an old skill. Then use that old skill to learn a new skill, which you then practice until it, too, becomes an old skill, and so on, from first grade math through high school math, then on through all the math past that. Math education used to be sensible!" He is right, and his description of how intelligent and effective math instruction should be done, is priceless. Taxpayers should demand that every potential teacher excel at "Turning New Skills Into Old." I chalked him up as another Saxon Math thinker, although he had never heard of John Saxon. He does now.

Really, every citizen; property owner; parent; taxpayer; should find out: 1) how math is taught, and 2) how kids are counted, in every neighborhood, state, and even in the nation as a whole. The word "accountability" is thrown about by Congress, but it is time that We the People take up accountability as a tool of reinforcement; as a board of education, and demand that teachers effectively teach; that administrators accurately count; that planners carefully plan. It is time that we wipe the fog from our eyes and see our public schools (and the follow-the-feds private and parochial schools, as well) for what they really are. It is time that we demand accountability for dollars spent in comparison to the number of children carefully and fully educated. Every school should educate the children entrusted to its teachers and administrators. If staff are unable, or unwilling, to do the job for which they are paid, they must be made to close the school. If schools will not, or can not, provide scholarship, knowledge, and skills, then they have become nothing but large, unsuitable holding pens. Feed lots for humans.

Hopefully, when the people finally do understand the extent to which they have been intellectually duped and financially drained, there will be hell to pay. I…can’t…wait!

Do let us count the errors and the evil yet to be discovered by the people, and let us hope that:

• When citizens finally realize exactly how badly the schools are failing…

• When citizens finally understand that teachers, administrators, and legislators are making expensive and life-damaging mistakes with our children’s educations, and with our tax monies, in all areas of schooling, at all levels of government …

• When citizens finally stop accepting the lame excuses that the schools offer: Reading Disabled, Dyslexic, Mathematically Disabled, Behavior Disordered, From a Bad Home, Parents Can’t Read… LD, MI, ADD, ADHD, ODD, BD, ABC&XYZ…

• When people actually do wake up and do take note the consequences of the failure of the public school system: the bulging prisons; the ever-increasing number of people who live, like parasites, off the taxpayers; the disintegrating morals; the disgusting popular culture; the hit-and-run fathers; the results of illiterate and uneducated people in the workplace; the destruction of families…

• When Americans finally notice: The loss of the means for production; the loss of jobs and income; and the overall weakening of America and its economic base…

Hopefully then, people will finally arise and throw the bums out of the schools and out of the government. We need to plan and develop free market neighborhood schools. America is going to need them. But, we must do our math homework. We must accurately count children and neighborhoods before we finalize plans and hire contractors to build schools. We must hire teachers who know how to teach, and especially how to teach children to do math. We must elect leaders who understand and support the idea that the future of America is dependent upon the successes and educational levels of its children. Only then might America count again.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

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I am stunned at how few citizens correctly evaluate government schools in America; at how many people misjudge their own local school districts. Parents are too often guilty of ignoring or recreating reality as they avoid the necessity of taking action. Too often parents are busy supporting their children in every kind of school activity…except those involving Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic. If children bring home A’s and B’s, all must been fine at school, right? Not always. Grade inflation has taken the meaning out of grades and scores. One only needs to teach freshman English classes at a college or university to remove any lingering doubts. However, the general population has neither the opportunities to see the whole picture, nor do they demand that policy makers and administrators keep them accurately informed. Remember, it is local school boards that are condoning and voting for policies that administrators request that they pass.

Citizens should participate in local school board meetings. They must expect, and demand, that local administrators and teachers: 1) strictly obey laws; 2) use good stewardship over each district’s funding, carefully keeping in mind that all monies come from taxpayers; 3) be honestly and fully pro-child; 4) intelligently and fairly lead, rather than attempting to brutally rule local schools. Local citizens should insist that the school board members hold appropriate and legal public school board meetings, never sneaking around, using illegal serial communication "small group" meetings, whether by phone, email, or chats in places hidden from supervision by the public. If your local school board is out of control, and/or controlled by administrators and media, it is time to rid the district of those grave problems. Local citizens should immediately fire and/or recall any administrator or board member, who inappropriately leads (rules) the schools by controlling staff, students, parents, and even the media, by way of retaliation, threats, lies, favoritism, or even via family circles.

Citizens must learn to recognize disastrous leadership and will if they become more alert. Question anything and everything that does not match what your intuition indicates should be the truth. Question everything about the school district that seems at all errant or irrational. One excellent place to watch is your local news sources. Does the newspaper editor write/publish dishonest, biased, and distorted articles about individuals who are repeatedly treated in ways that would lead others to suspect they are on an administrative hit list? Does the media, TV or print, attempt to whitewash lies and misdeeds of school administrators? To distort or totally avoid providing information about both sides of any conflict? Say that you were at the board meeting and you heard a young man, one you have known for years, calmly ask an appropriate question, but when you read the newspaper report that young man and the situation are described as raving and inappropriate. Do not let such things go un-confronted. Inform the editor that you are canceling your subscription, and tell him exactly why. Let him know that the eyes of the community are upon him. If you think that you smell a rat…you probably are right. Seek information from any source other than the local school board and the local media.

Be alert to inappropriate hirings, firings, promotions, demotions; to extra duty assignments awarded by favoritism, or denied/handed down as punishment. Keep tabs on the outcome of the various special assignments, and complain if an unworthy recipient is being paid for poor performance. In one community, a teacher was rewarded for Loyalty (certainly not for any teaching skill) to the King (i.e. principal), with a promotion (+ extra pay), to serve as webmaster for the school. In the years since that $$ treat $$, that webpage has been one of the worst I have ever visited. The site was far better when computer students and their supervisor did the work for free. The site went downhill as soon as the boss’s fair-haired follower was gifted with the job. Check on the Year Books at your schools. Do the graduates receive them in time to gather signatures from friends and faculty prior to the kids leaving school and heading out in the different directions that life takes them? At my school, with a graduating class of 300+, we had the yearbooks before year’s end, and we very much appreciated the competency and professionalism of our yearbook advisor. One administrator has allowed the school to get years behind in delivering yearbooks to students. This same administrator appears to have disbanded the curriculum committee; and removed the legal approval of curriculum and the purchase of textbooks, from the local school board. Does that board not notice that their obligations and legal responsibilities are being circumvented and violated? Might there be kickback involved from the publishers? Ask why a board would put such decisions in the hands of a one-administrator, one-person committee!

Note and complain about any questionable actions taken by administration in regards to sports teams. Are the best coaches being denied positions simply because the King/Principal holds a grudge? Are teachers who want to coach, being slighted and bypassed while the big snots award positions to non-teaching persons from the community? If you have no idea of how many teachers and staff members in your district are being harassed and abused by your administrators, ask questions and find out! How many teachers and others have been laid off inappropriately? How many lies have been told; how many schedule changes have been made in a ploy to trick the public into believing that administrative decisions are handled appropriately and legally? Watch for suspicious decisions that amount to retaliatory treatment of teachers and staff.

Do not count on the union to protect the targeted teachers. One administrator openly refers to the teachers he hates, usually all of the older teachers, as riffraff, and despite his transparent agenda for firings, the local school board supports his treachery, regardless of the loss to the students and the damage to the district. Too often, administrators pad the union rep jobs with Loyal Followers (i.e. suck-ups), so union representation becomes yet another fraudulent act unseen by the public. The local union rep might be a rewarded-for-rear-kissing webmaster. Another might be a fearful, weak teacher, one who would turn to stone rather than be involved in a conflict with the boss. Another might be a band director who would sell his soul to protect his program and instrument purchases. Any hope that he would ever go head-to-head with retaliatory administrators is laughable. Check everything. Take back your communities and your community schools. If the feds closed your local schools for consolidation, pull your children out of those massed and distant schools and bring them home. If you cannot homeschool, then open new local schools!!

I am convinced that the collapse of the American way of education is bringing about the general collapse of the culture; the rending of the moral fabric of this nation. The collapse is bad enough, but even worse are its aftershocks which cause massive and permanent damage to individuals; families; individual and familial pride in self-support; ever-increasing welfare rolls; growing yet disintegrating prison populations; a worsening economy; invasive foreign policies; foolish/stupid voting during elections. All citizens should also shudder at the near-total lack of regard, comprehension, and support for the U.S. Constitution. This national implosion will continue, in infinitely widening circles, because… the reading skills; the intelligence levels; and the thought processes, of Americans have been in steady decline for the last few decades. The population has been mis-educated by a devious and socialist-leaning public school system. America cannot survive when the majority of the citizenry are illiterate and uneducated voters whose brains have been programmed to allow the manipulation of their lives and decisions; who are mis-informed by TV ads and government propaganda. The American Way of Education is rapidly bringing about the destruction and ultimate death of the American Way of Life. This all happens while local school boards back the wrong team; while they illegally work against the best interests of the children.

As the public schools orchestrate the death of America, public school administration, from the U.S. Department of Education all the way down through to the local school districts, orchestrate the ruination and ultimate death of those very public schools. The most shocking aspect of this unscholastic undermining of the United States of America, is that few administrators, at any level, understand the ramifications of the following basic scientific and economic truth: A parasite can only thrive until its host has been devoured.

Far too many administrators have eyes glazed with retaliation; attitudes reeking of manure. With apparent glee, and unfortunately with apparent impunity, evil administrators continue destroying local school districts. Apparently, such leaders (and their circle of dishonorable shills, fools, and even family members) are incapable of drawing and intelligently expressing, this simple conclusion: "Our evil manipulations have already driven away 40% of the students from our district. When we finish driving off the other 60%, and finish alienating the entire community, our paychecks will stop. Oops! We might lose our homes, and even have to sacrifice cars, motorcycles, and other treasures. We will be without a school board to manipulate! Without a staff to terrorize! Without a fund balance from which to weasel unearned raises. Double-Oops!" No, such administrators are too self-centered to think about the outcomes of unethical, illegal behaviors. They are incapable of drawing insightful and intelligent conclusions.

Small-time, power-hungry yet ethically challenged, leaders completely devour the academic carcass, even when there is little hope that another victim will be available. Apparently, such administrators are simply too simple to realize that the more they cheat the students; destroy the staff; offend the parents; and undermine the community — the sooner there truly will be no host upon which to feed! Such administrators have such poor math skills that they are incapable of ciphering: ZERO (0) STUDENTS = ZERO (0) $$ REVENUE $$. The destruction of a local school district happens when local school boards work for the administration instead of for the citizens and children of the communities.

Unprincipled administrators, at all levels, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg, but they are either too stupid, or maybe just too arrogant, to admit the imminent approach of a very bleak personal financial future. (The imminent approach of a bleak educational future for children plays no part in these decisions.) The Jobs Project, as defined and described so astutely by John Taylor Gatto, is rapidly coming to an end. Michiganders, with their wonderful, to-the-point vernacular, would describe such behaviors as "administrators sh**ting in their own nests!" Blunt, but true! Even animals are smarter than such administrators. Mammals are smarter than such administrators. Birds are smarter than such administrators. Reptiles are smarter than….Well, you get the idea.

Actually, teachers are smarter than such administrators, and that is not only frightening, that is the underlying issue behind the deterioration and collapse of the entire public school system. Teachers should not be expected to shoulder the blame for the sick schools because most are doing their best, considering the impediments against which they must struggle: inferior teaching training courses; NCLB; Special Education laws and policies; plus many impediments too subtle, too numerous and too complex to be noticed by the general population. Teachers are expected to perform as ordered to perform. Teachers are expected to jump when and as ordered by: less intelligent, less trained, less intuitive, increasingly more inept, bossy, manipulating, retaliatory, childish administrators. The illegal, federal-theft-of-States-Rights, Government Education System purposely puts such little people into positions from which they can do such big damage. That same crooked system hires and supports these unethical mental peasants and covers for their illegal and/or ignorant decisions and behaviors. Such administrators are rewarded, even as they mistreat others; lie to the public; and even cancel accreditations without school board approval and processes. "I can’t get rid of the staff members I want to remove (i.e., real school counselors, librarians, foreign language teachers, certified special education teachers, etc.) and still pass an accreditation investigation. The only obvious solution to my dilemma is to — write a letter and simply withdraw the school from the program! I’m all powerful and need not even adhere to laws; I need not even put the issue before the school board. I am strong! I am invincible! I am KING!!" Such as this occurs when local school boards support the wrong team.

Here I offer you a very unique opportunity — that of actually observing the disintegration of a local school district via illegal and unethical administrative and board practices. Please do visit http://www.highlandwire.org. The videos have been filmed right at board meetings. Teflon administrators, and their cohorts in crime, can be observed in their natural habitat as they say and do anything to insure that nothing, especially blame, will stick to them. Viewers will be shocked at such obvious ploys, and appalled at how the local school board members sit there, faking attention and good judgement. The site is very enlightening; at times ridiculously funny. Please note that the parasites are still chewing away on the host, garnering 6-1 votes for the destruction of the district. Watch the site for updates.

Of course, there are good administrators, ones who valiantly struggle against the inherent evil, and the dumbing down practices, built into the government school system. There are fine administrators whose mission is to provide children with quality educations. This article is certainly not directed to, nor does it speak of, those persons. The sad news is that their ranks are rapidly thinning. Several communicate with me, and one recently wrote to say that he will quit at the end of this school year. He is withdrawing from the fight in order to do something else, anything else, that in no way involves public education. To that fine leader, with whom I have been communicating for over a year, answering his questions about the best curriculum and materials, I say, "Thank you for your virtue; for your worries; for your efforts and successes; for your struggle to educate the children under your care. You have exceeded expectations with your successes in the face of the ever greater obstacles that the Feds are constantly throwing in your path. I thank you on behalf of the children, the parents, the local taxpayers, the People of America. Godspeed, and may your life and work be successful and appropriately challenging."

To those of you who will remain, I thank you for similar sacrifices and successes. I encourage you to become tattle tales, informing the citizens of your communities, states, and nation, as to the counterproductive policies and laws that your superiors force you to foist upon the nation’s greatest resource, its children. I encourage you to speak up! Open this Pandora’s Box of Public Education and expose all the evil for all to see. Fight for effective and efficient traditional educational methods. When you finally realize that your efforts to save the schools only help evil to increase, please help the system crash so that you can join others in establishing genuine local schools that will only answer to local taxpayers, parents, citizens. If your local school board continues to play footsies with those greatest adversaries of a free America — those power-mad, FedEd-loving, public school administrators, VOTE THEM OUT!! Lead the charge! Lead the change.

Eventually, the entire school system will collapse, but please, do not fear that day. The collapse will provide a long overdue and much-needed cleansing. The collapse will provide a healthy way to end the suffering of the society, and begin the renewal. The Fall will flush out evil, and evildoers. I challenge citizens to play active roles in pulling down the remains, and I encourage you all to give your time, ideas, and skills to the Rebuilding. The task will not be as difficult as one might think; as the powers-that-be want us to believe. I suggest something along the lines of Extramural Education, but each community will develop viable plans that will be appropriate to their own districts. Local citizens are the best decision makers on issues involving their lives; their children; their property. Let us always remember that. Local taxpayers pay the bills and deserve to have the schools that they prefer and need.

In closing, Everyone has a price…or so John Hersey claims in The Child Buyer, ("A Novel In The Form Of Hearings Before The Standing Committee On Education, Welfare & Public Morality….") I find the discussions in the book to be very relevant to the problems Americans face today; problems brought about by FedEd, then condoned by local school boards. The book is worth a read/reread and it will give readers much better, deeper, and clearer insights into the workings of local schools, manipulated as they are by the Federal Department of Education and the 50 state Department of Education clones. We all owe it to the children of America. We must educate ourselves so that we can be effective in educating every child. I repeat — so that WE can be more effective; not THEY!

American schools used to belong to the American people, but they no longer do. The schools belong to the STATE. With laws, the STATE forces the crippling changes in focus and curriculum. With local school boards covering its misdeeds, the STATE assures the disintegration of the schools we once loved. It is time for the nation to awake from its apathy and misplaced trust. It is time to watch our local school boards and carefully evaluate everything they do. It is time to insist that they always obey laws and act in the best interests of the children. It is time to take back our schools.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

DIGG THIS

Back in those rather strange days—the late 60′s and early 70′s—education departments offered some rather strange teacher training classes, and I seemed to end up in the oddest ones. One professor told us that his main goal was, that after his class, we would forever be proud to say, "I studied with Professor ____!" Unfortunately (maybe not), I never remembered his name. In another odd teacher training class, our assignment was to bring something for Show and Tell; something that we felt others would find interesting. I took my live (and unaltered) pet skunk. I then lived on a 50,000 acre cattle ranch, and some of the cowboys had given me the little black and white cutie after its mother had been killed. I was quite interested in unusual pets, and thought that my classmates would have been, as well.

In a stress reduction class, I was expected to tie my wedding band to the bottom of a string then hold the non-ring end of the string to my forehead. We spent a great amount of time leaning over a paper target in an attempt to control the movement and direction of the st(ring) pendulum. We were to make it move up&down; left&right; around&around. Instead of releasing stress, I found the task quit stress inducing. My brain refused to cooperate and instead kept challenging me to think of a way / the way / any way —that this teacher training would benefit a classroom of deaf children. Surely, such an expensive graduate class had a well-designed; well-thought-out; defensible curricular plan and purpose …. Wouldn’t you think? I just wish the professor had told us about it.

In an Every Child Is Born a Prince Until Their Parents Turn Them Into Frogs class, we played a ball game! We were assigned to teams and the room nearly exploded as groups of adults risked life and limb dashing around desks, trying to score. Our prof, as scorekeeper, kept track of points with ticks on the blackboard. He had told us that the name of the game, "Nawr Ulles" (spelled phonetically to his pronunciation) but nothing more. The other team smacked the ball against the blackboard, and the prof yelled, "Two points!" We noted that if the ball hits the blackboard, it is worth two points.

When my team next got the ball, we used that strategy and hit the target–the blackboard. The prof yelled, "Lose three points!" Huh? And so it went…one time a team would earn points for hitting a member of the other team in the head with the ball; then a few minutes later a different player would "Lose 5 points!" for…hitting a member of the other team in the head with the ball. The prof would call Time Outs, during which our teams would meet in huddles and strategize, "What in the heck is the purpose of this stupid game? Can anyone see any consistency in the scoring? Why in the h-ll are we paying good money to spend every Tuesday night for 18 weeks away from our families to do this?!" ("Lose $500!") By the time the prof announced that the game had ended, most of us were quite angry. We became even angrier when Dr. Whoever, who thought he was so cute and so creative, wrote the name of the game on the board: "NoRules." Grrrr

He claimed that the point of the lesson (lesson!?) was to show us how upsetting it is when we do not understand why and how to do something. (No joke, Sherlock!) Now this, indeed, was stress-inducing and brings me to spelling.

"Spell /b/-/r/-/e/-/d/, the teacher says, but when a student writes, "bred," he is corrected to "bread". The teacher tells the class to spell the word /s/-/o/ but counts as wrong, "so" and "sew," wanting "sow" as in grain. After thinking that she carefully taught a lesson on "I before E, except after C" the teacher expects the students to spell vein, veil, skein. When students point out that this does not fit the rhyming rule, the teacher is lost since no one ever taught her the "rest of the story"—"Unless it says A."

For decades now, spelling has been mis-taught by teachers and textbook writers who fail to understand the levels, layers, and depths of the English language. Current spelling (mis)instruction and its (non)applicability to skill development lead to errors, frustration, and less-than-acceptable English skills for life. The absence of rules, whether in a rather silly game, or in important communication and learning skills, brings about confusion and anger while creating a deep distrust of the game, the language, the teachers. (Wow! I did learn something from that class.)

The spelling rules for coding American English from Speech to Print, are stable and vitally important. Learn all 29 and let them guide your thinking and rule your writing. However, do not memorize the rules for rote recitation, and certainly never ask children to memorize them. Study/teach the rules for understanding, then practice makes perfect. Use the rules as tools for logical spelling, then pass that knowledge on to others, especially to children who are suffering through the public schooling experience. Spelling should be taught first! Not reading. If you teach a person to spell, you give them a gift; a tool; that will serve them for their lifetimes.

Many people already know and appropriately use many of the rules, whether they can articulate them or not. Some individuals may have been taught the information by a traditional teacher, a knowledgeable parent, or they may have intuitively discovered usage patterns and spelling techniques. For those who are interested in knowing the rules, I offer the following from The Spalding Reading Method and its teacher manual.

Rule 1) The letter "q" is always followed by a "u" and together they say /kw/ (queen). Note: The "u" is not a vowel here.

**Teach the next two rules together because, although quite similar, they require precision in thought and application. Hint: Remember that there is a difference between a probability and a possibility.

Rule 2) The letter "c" before e, i, or y—says /s/, as in cent, city, and cycle. The letter "c" followed by any other letter—says /k/, as in cat, cot, cut. Note: "Says" suggests the Probability.

Rule 3) The letter "g" before e, i, or y—may say /j/ as in page, giant, gym. The letter "g" followed by any other letter—says /g/ as in gate, go, gust. Note: The letter "e" and "i" following "g" do not always make the "g" say /j/: get, girl, give. Note: "May say" suggests the Possibility.

Quickly read the following words, noting how the vowel that follows the "c" or "g" controls pronunciation, and how pronunciation controls spelling: cork, cark, card, cord, cerd, cork, cerm, cal, cill, cell, cull, cim, carf, cab, card, cif, can, cen, cib, cerd, cuff, cop, cob, cub, cib, ced, cud, cid, cow, caw, gab, geb, gib, gob, gub, gan, gen, gin goin gun (from the Seeing Stars Workbooks by Nanci Bell of Lindamood-Bell).

Rule 4) is an important rule because it can be used to rapidly improve reading skills. Rule 4 says: When a short syllable ends with a vowel, the vowel generally says its name, its long sound. This rule describes Open Syllables and guides us in pronunciation, word decoding, and spelling. An Open Syllable ends (thanks to that last vowel) with the mouth OPEN so a long vowel is usually the result. However, because of the Latin contributions to English, the letter "i" does not always comply, so stay flexible and be prepared consider other pronunciations for that vowel. Read these syllables Note: "a" will say its name here because these are only syllables. If "a" comes at the end of words, it says /ah/.): gu, ga, da, di, bi, sho, nu, ne, te, fe, du, bo, fo. Read: la/ter, me/ter, ti/dy, ho/tel, tu/lip, ba/con, de/cide, li/lac, do/nate, cu/pid.

Rule 5) The letters i and y usually say short i (big, gym), but may say long i (si lent, my, type).

Rule 6) The letter y, not i, is used at the end of an English word (my, fry, comply).

Rule 7) Involves words ending with a Silent E. Those were explained in article # 142.

Rule 8) Involves the spellings for the /er/ sound which were also explained in the same article.

**The next two rules work in similar ways, so I put them together. Note that the second consonant of the consonant pair is not pronounced!

Rule 9) This is called the "1-1-1 Rule" and is used like this: If a word has 1 syllable; 1 vowel; followed by 1 consonant (example: hop), double that final consonant before adding an ending/suffix that begins with a vowel (hop ping). This rule does not apply to words ending with x. Study: hop/hopping; set/setting; run/running; red/reddish; mud/muddy; flat/flatten; writ/written; ship/shipped/shipper; stop/stopped/stoppage.

Rule 10) This is called the "2-1-1 Rule" and is used like this: When a word has two syllables (be gin) in which the second syllable is accented and works like a 1-1-1 Rule word (gin), double the final consonant before adding an ending/suffix that begins with a vowel (be gin ning). Beware: 1) If that second syllable is not accented (prof it) then do not double the consonant (prof it able). 2) If the suffix begins with a consonant, do not double the last consonant in the 1-1-1 syllable (prof it +s).

Rule 11) This is sometimes called the "Drop E Rule" and is used like this: Words that end with a Silent Final E (de bate) are written without the E when adding an ending/suffix that begins with a vowel (de bat able). If adding an ending/suffix that begins with a consonant, retain the e (state / statement). Note: If you are adding an ending that begins with any letter other than e, i, or y, to a word with a "c" or "g", retain the "e" to soften the pronunciation: manage/managing/manageable; change/changing/changeable

Rule 12) After c use ei (receive). If we say "long a," we use ei (vein). In the list of exceptions, we use ei. In all other words, the phonogram ie is used. For more information, see article #142.

**Rules 13 through 16 are clustered because of separate but similar usages; because of the logic involved in applying these rules to spell accurately. Here there are choices: SH? TI? SI? CI? CE?! It is not as bad as it appears.

Rule 13) The Phonogram sh is used at the beginning or end of a base word (she, dish); at the end of a syllable (fin ish); but never at the beginning of any syllable after the first one except for the ending ship (wor ship, friend ship). To review: Use sh to spell the /sh/ sound at the beginning of a base word (shade, shape); at the end of a base word (fresh, wash); at the beginning of the first syllable (shim mer ing) of a word; and the end of a syllable (ash en); but never to begin a 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th or subsequent syllable in a word except for the suffix ship!

Rule 14) The phonograms ti, si, and ci are the spellings most frequently used to represent the sound /sh/ at the beginning of the…2nd, 3rd, 4th, or subsequent syllable in a base word. (na tion, ses sion, fa cial).

Rule 15) The phonogram si is used to represent the /sh/ sound when the syllable before it ends with "s" (ses sion) or when the base word has an s where the base word changes (tense, ten sion; manse, man sion).

I use this spelling lesson as an opportunity to refresh / reteach / expand knowledge of root words (and thus of vocabulary) When pondering whether to use "ti" or "ci", consider the root, and the spelling of the root. Consider sound, listening for the /s/ at the end of the base, so you remember to use "si".

Practice:

vacate — va ca tion; infect — in fec tious; nat — na tion; potent — po ten tial;

impart — im par tial; collect — col lec tion; pat — pa tient; torrent — tor ren tial

*********************************************************************

ses — ses sion; compress — com pres sion; discuss — dis cus sion; depress — de pres sion

tense — ten sion; manse — man sion

**************************************************************************

face — fa cial; space — spa cious; finance — fi nan cial; music — mu si cian

electric — e lec tri cian; physic — phy si cian

**************************************************************************

o cean; o ce an ic; o ce an o graph ic (ce is only used in words having to do with—ocean.)

I can hear objections already! Yes, there are words that do not follow these generalizations, but that does not mean that they are rule breakers. Yes, you will have to memorize some, but that will be much easier if you first learn about each word. Remember what I said beforeu2014always consider the ROOT, whether it be a stem or a base word. One evening another homeschooling mother and I tested many words that appear to be rule breakers. We looked each one up, searching for the rationale behind the spellings of the /sh/ sound. We used regular dictionaries, a dictionary of etymology, and another of my favorite books, Word Stems, by John Kennedy ("From School Library Journal, This handy guide for students, wordsmiths, and language lovers includes a four-page history of the development of English from its Latin, Greek, and other roots."). We looked up "ti" words like palatial, superstitious, influential; substantial. We checked out "ci" words like social, special, especially, ancient, crucial, efficient, suspicious. In every case, we found a root word history to support the spelling of the /sh/ sound.

Rule 16) The phonogram si may also say /zh/ as in: vi sion, di vi sion, oc ca sion, ex plo sion, …

Additional Rules (17-29)

Rule 17) We often double l, f, and s, following a single vowel at the end of a one-syllable word (will, off, miss). This rule sometimes applies to two-syllable words like recess.

Rule 18) We often use ay to represent a long "a" at the end of a base word, but never "a" alone. (pay, hurray) If a word ends with a, that represents the sound /ah/: papa, mama, camera.

Rule 19) Vowels i and o may say long /i/ and /o/ if followed by two consonants as in words like: find, old.

Rule 20) The letter s never follows an x. Never! Never! Never! The phonogram "x" includes the /s/ sound (/ks/) and does not need another one! (excite, exact, exemplary)

Rule 21) All, written alone, has two l‘s, but when used as a prefix, only one l is written (al so, al most).

Rule 22) Till and full, written alone, have two l‘s, but when used as a suffix, only one l is written (un til, beau ti ful).

Rule 23) The phonogram dge may be used only after a single vowel that says its short sound: badge, edge, bridge, lodge, budge.

Rule 24) When adding an ending to a word that ends with a consonant and y, use i instead of y unless the ending is ing.

Rule 25) The phonogram ck may be used only after a single vowel that says its short sound: back, neck, lick, rock, duck.

Rule 26) Words that are the names or titles of people, places, books, days, or months are capitalized.

Rule 27) Words beginning with the sound /z/ are always spelled with a z, never an s (zoo, zero, zip).

Rule 28) The phonogram ed has three sounds. If a base word ends in the sound /d/ or /t/, adding -ed makes another syllable that says /ed/ (sid ed, part ed). If the base word ends in a voiced consonant sound, the ending —ed says /d/ (lived, loved). If the base word ends in an unvoiced consonant sound, the ending -ed says /t/ (jumped, wrecked).

AND FINALLY,

Rule 29) Words are usually divided between double consonants. For speaking and reading, only the consonant in the accented syllable is pronounced. The consonant in the unaccented syllable is silent (lit le).

Please help undo the damage that TV personalities have done. Say "lit le" not "lit tle". Say "to mor ow" not, like The Weather Channel people, and now many newscasters say, "to mor row." The sooner that we can return American speech to precision and clarity, the sooner we will bring America back around to literacy. Literacy will lead scholarship. Scholarship will lead to informed citizens who understand their rights, and expect politicians and judges to adhere strictly to the Constitution.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.

DIGG THIS

I suspect that I hear some grumblings and objections, but really, once one learns to approach spelling logically; to think of each difficult word as an opportunity to study word structure and origins, the process becomes fun as well as mentally stimulating. I will not claim that all frustrations will end, but they should greatly lessen. If all else fails, at least you may learn to smile despite tightly clenched teeth.

I readily admit that I am a poor speller—thanks to Dick, Jane, Puff, and all of the Sight Word Pushers who violate children with: See & Say, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, plus hundreds of flash cards. In my opinion, those Fad Followers have destroyed literacy, scholarship, education, responsibility, families, values and even the culture of America. The repercussions of illiteracy are without end…and may actually spell the end of this nation and our way of life. The FAD pushers have much, so much, for which they must answer. May they do their answering in a warm; very warm place. I most certainly do not mean Florida!

I am always interested in stories, questions, ideas, conclusions, and articles about spelling, and found Robert Klose‘s recent piece on the letter X, to be both interesting and humorous. His examples and explanations reminded me of questions that my students have asked throughout my teaching career. It has been some time since I wrote about spelling, so this might be a good time to again offer more insights and suggestions, of ways to improve spelling skills; on how to use strategies like: prediction, deduction, word knowledge, a sense of humor…and an adventurous spirit. Let us first look at the hated IE/EI spellings.

I before E except after C unless it says A as in neighbor and weigh… UNLESS the word is an Exception.

Generally, it is those darn exceptions that trip up even good spellers! With the IE/EI words, it is helpful to use a mental cheat sheet until the rules are internalized and exception words are learned to automaticity. Borrowing from Romalda Spalding and Wanda Sanseri, with some of my own preferences included, I offer the following explanations. Note: The Exceptions "cheat sheet" is detailed in sections "A" and "B" below—should be memorized. The rules in "C, D, E" should to be studied and practiced for perfection.

A) "Neither foreign sovereign seized (the) counterfeit (so) forfeited leisure."

B) "PHEW–CC" (protein; heifer; either; weird;–caffeine and codeine)

Here are words that The Spalding Reading Method uses as examples for practice of IE/EI words that are not exceptions:

C) "I before E": believe; belief; fierce; brief; niece; priest; field; chief; siege; achieve; piece // pie; lie // mischief. (Please note that the phonogram "ie" can represent three different speech sounds in the Code for spoken English (i.e. SPELLING): Long E (siege); Long I (pie); Short I (mischief).

D) "Except after C": receive; perceive; ceiling; receipt; conceit

E) "Unless it says A": their (root: they); veil; heir (inherit); rein; reign; vein; surveillance; skein; beige; reindeer; heinous

Encoding and Decoding the /er/ sound. Take a guess! How many English words contain the speech sound /er/ in the base word (not counting words with u2018er’ endings like u2018teacher’)? 20,000! (Margaret Bishop) Yes, "20,000!" To further complicate spelling, there are numerous phonograms that are used to represent the /er/ sound: ER, UR, IR, WOR, EAR, OUR, AR, OR, but they cannot be used willy-nilly. English is consistent, so this is a great time to practice applying knowledge, logic and statistics when spelling a word! Spellers who need help with the /er/ words should memorize this simple sentence: Her nurse first works early.

Sanseri explains (pg 134): "Not counting all the words that use ER as a suffix meaning u2018one who’ (farm + er), the ER spelling occurs over five times as often as all the others put together. Each remaining [/er/ spelling] occurs about twice as often as the one after it. ER is used 2,063 times; UR — 247 times; IR — 114 times; WOR — 51 times; and EAR — 31 times." (Italics are mine.)

I first teach my students the concept of "number of occurrences" of a phonogram or spelling in the English language. Why rush to use the "EAR" spelling unless one has a pretty good idea of how the word, or its root, is spelled? It would make no sense to hope of happening upon "1 of 31" when chances are so much better for "1 of 2063". Draw a chart! Show the comparisons, then later write in additional examples.

ER
UR
IR
WOR
EAR

serve
herd
berth
dinner
perfect
nerve
western
merge
grocery
perch
sterling
clerk
certain
mother
summer

+ 60 more!

surprise
purpose
disturb
curtain
Thursday
Saturday
hurdle
further

squirm
circle
birth
confirm

worthy
worship

rehearsal

We retain many words in our visual memory, and we can call upon them for assistance. Even though we may not know them well enough to spell them, they provide a way for us to check our spelling. Pretend that we cannot recall the exact spelling of the word that means "take in new information and retain it."

Since "er" is the most used phonogram, we try that first: "lern". Our brain disapproves of that so we then proceed through the chart:

lern (no) lurn (no) lirn (no)

(No need to try wor this time because we do not hear a /w/.)

Then finally, learn.

Our brain recognizes and confirms that choice.

Many of us already know and use this skill. It is a good strategy for it allows your visual memory to rule out, or confirm, a choice. However, it is very difficult for poor readers and non-readers to use this strategy. They have not read enough to build a multitude of images against which they can compare their own spellings. BTW, Spelling "tests" that have the taker choose the correct spelling from a line of similar words does not test spelling! It tests the ability to recognize words.

Silent E’s. I had long been angry about Silent E’s…probably since I was first taught that the Silent E at the end of a word forces the vowel before it to say its name. That one (1 of 5) rule was so easy to learn…but it also caused me grief, and set me up to distrust the English language. The confusion and harm were compounded by teachers who told us that all the other words, those in which the Silent E that did not control the vowel before it, were "rule breakers." My guess is that such teachers really had no idea that there are five (5) Silent E rules, and basically no rule breakers at all! Then I attended a Spalding Reading course and finally learned how the English Code for Written Speech (i.e. SPELLING) works.

The Silent Final E’s are also presented in the order of their appearance and usage in the language.

1) time; ache: The Silent E forces the reader to go back, "leaping" over the consonant phonogram ( 2 or more letter phonograms, such as /th/, /ch/, /sh/, etc. should be counted as "one") and pronounce the vowel before it using the vowel’s second, or "long", sound.

2) love; blue: This second Silent E prevents the breaking of this rule: “No English word may end with V or U.” (BTW, ‘flu’ is not a real word. It is simply a syllable taken from the word ‘influenza’. It is now being used as a real word in speech, products, and ads, but such usages further harm the ability to spell accurately, using rules and logic.)

3) chance; charge: This third Silent E ‘softens’ a C or G, forcing that consonant to say its 2nd sound—/s/; /j/. Without the E, we would have to say ‘chank’ or ‘charg’.

4) lit tle; cas tle: This fourth Silent E provides a vowel for the last syllable so that we do not break the rule: “Every English syllable must have a vowel.”

5) Odd job E’s: An "Odd Job E" is a Silent E that does not meet the criteria of the first four. Sanseri fit most of these words into three specific (but still "odd") groupings. This specificity has greatly aided me in teaching students to recognize and accurately use such words; to gain confidence in the stability of English.

5a) Not-a-Plural E: (nurse; please; goose) These Silent E’s confirm that the words are not in “plural” form. 1 nur/6 nurs? 1 plea/3 pleas? 1 goo/5 goos? Nah!

5b) Clarification E: This E helps the reader distinguish between similar words, and/or phonograms. Again, some from Sanseri: are/ar; ore/or; ewe/ew; owe/ow; cleanse/cleans; hearse/hears; shoe/shoo; breathe/breath.

5c) Once-Pronounced E: These words probably come from older forms of English, as well as from other languages, when/where Silent E’s were pronounced. are, come, some, ease, done, treatise, giraffe (Sanseri, pg 108)

There are only 29 rules for spelling English words. When my students come to a word that appears not to follow the rules, I challenge the students to do some research. I especially encourage them to become interested in word origins. Rarely do we find an odd spelling that we cannot explain after consulting a good dictionary or book on word origins. Our favorite source is the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, or "the big black book" as my younger students call it.

Often, the word being questioned is from another language. I explain that we simply cannot expect words from other languages to conform to the written code for English! We have only to look at the word "ski" to see the silliness of such an expectation. "Ski” is a Norwegian word meaning a long, thin piece of wood. Since there was no comparable word in English, "ski" was incorporated into our language. But, but, but…English words should never end with an "I"! Or consider this: "Today I ski; Yesterday I skied; Often I have skied." Ok, so far, because we can add "ed" to convey action that has ended, and the result appears to be a word that had a Y changed to an I before the ending was added.

Moving on…"Yesterday, I was skiing." Wait! English words should never have two "I’s" side-by-side! There is no way to follow the rules in this case. When we add a vowel ending, like "ing" to a word, we "Drop the E" but that rule does not apply here for "ski" has no E to drop. Other times we "keep the Y and just add the ending" (skying) but there is no Y in "ski". Sometimes we "Change the Y to I and add the ending" but there is no Y to change. Perhaps we could reverse the process as we do when we remove endings, and "Change I back to Y". We get "skying" and find ourselves back where we started.

In instances like this, we are forced to break English spelling rules, which fuels the misconception that English lacks consistency and dependability. Words like "ski" provide fodder for mis-educated teachers, and mis-educating teacher training professors, as they continue to destroy educational standards and results by claiming that phonics and spelling are unimportant for reading and writing. I believe that is it impossible to get the anti-phonics people to even consider the possibility that they jumped on the wrong wagon decades ago. They will never admit that they are wrong about phonics; will never admit that they have no idea how to efficiently and effectively teach reading.

The reality is—that the only way to read back a code that has been scribed/recorded/SPELLED based on oral speech and an alphabet, is to learn the specific phonographic representations for the 44 sounds generally used in American English. Those children, who learn to read and write in anti-phonics classrooms, learn in spite of the instruction; in spite of the teacher! Those children manage to figure out the Code by themselves, but too often not the complete Code. I rapidly learned the Code for receptive purposes (i.e. Reading) but failed to do well with the Code for expressive purposes (i.e. Spelling.)

The Code for writing down/recording English speech contains: 26 ABC’s, to use in 70 spellings, of 44 vocalizations, within the guidelines of 29 rules. When I ask new students if they prefer to read and spell: A) by learning to use the above 169 items, or B) by memorizing 250,000 words for instant sight recognition and perfect recall for spelling, they never choose the latter. It is a no-brainer, really.

Unfortunately, people who refuse to think, and teach, with phonics are throwing away the greatest invention of all time, the Alphabet. Please do not entrust the minds of your children to such teachers, professors, methods. Appreciate the alphabet and its possibilities. About 2,500 years ago, the Phoenicians found that with 26 simple letters, humans could record and read back everything anyone knows, ponders, or dreams, about the past, the present, and the future. Those 26 letters, and knowledge of the written Code for English speech, will serve us better than all the electronic spelling devices.

Put spelling to the test. Go in person to fill out an application for the job of your dreams. Fill it out right there in the main office of the company, in front of several employees and preferably the boss. Whenever you face a stumbling block, whip out your electronic speller—or ask to use a computer. Do you think you will get the job? In all likelihood, you will not.

Please do not write in teeny script, hoping that the individual letters will be virtually impossible to distinguish from one another and will thus disguise spelling errors. It is far better to spend time improving your spelling skills. The process can be great fun, while exercising and expanding the mind.

Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist (continually seeking ways to improve her methods for Rapid Reading Remediation); a former public school teacher (The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered…); and a former homeschooling parent (whose son, now 20, insisted upon growing up, putting an end to all the fun). Linda now teaches English composition at a state university and is writing her first book.