My Background in Education
When I was receiving my degree in Elementary Education, I witnessed literacy instruction in Pre-K through fifth grade, and remember feeling filled with questions instead of answers. I took literacy classes that encouraged inquiry-based learning and the Balanced Approach — the medium between Whole Language Learning and Phonics.
When I began student teaching in second grade, we spent two and a half hours on Language Arts instruction every day, and the students were not good at reading or spelling. We did a short phonics lesson where the students learned rules I myself remember chanting in first grade: “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” And later, when they were reading their small group books and they came to the words “said, boot, or aisle,” they looked at me as the literacy expert I was supposed to be and asked, “What about the rule?”
I gave them the answer always given to me: “Well, English breaks the rules a lot.”
That answer gave them no more peace than it ever gave me as a child. How can you trust a language that breaks the rules? This morning the first vowel was bossy, this afternoon she took a back seat.
Spelling was worse than reading. When writing creatively, we encouraged “inventive spelling,” with the idea that someday they would learn conventional spelling… except it was never a standard for a later grade.
Every week the students received a spelling list of 10 or so words, which they were to memorize at home. At 10 words a week, that’s about 300 words a school year. There are over a million words in English — how on earth would they ever catch up?
I was overwhelmed. I felt incompetent. I love to read. I love to write. Why didn’t I know how to teach these kids? Why didn’t anyone seem to know — not the teachers I was observing and not the professors who were teaching me. Not even the state-mandated intervention curriculum seemed to help.
Starting Out as a Classroom Teacher
Right out of college, I was hired to teach second grade at a classical charter school. The summer before I began, they sent us all to Hillsdale University to be trained in classical education. We spent two full days in literacy sessions with Dorothy Kardatzke and Melody Furno. Before I entered the classroom, the teachers who had been through this training the year before warned me, “It will feel like a fire hydrant being let loose on you; it’s such an overwhelming amount of new information.”
Well, I was the dalmatian puppy opening its mouth as wide as possible to lap up all the instruction I could — and what a glorious day it was! All those questions for four years, with no answers, and suddenly it was ALL the answers and more. I was ecstatic to apply it in the coming school year.
Miracles of miracles, it worked. As imperfect as a first year teacher can be, I saw my students growing in reading and spelling in a way I never had before.
So what was I missing before?
- Students need to understand the phoneme-grapheme correspondence. There are 26 letters in English because we borrowed the Latin alphabet, which at the time English was first written, was commonly used among educated English-speaking men. However, there are around 42 sounds in English. The result is some individual letters have multiple sounds, for example, g (gate, giraffe) or we have used multiple letters to represent a sound, for example, /ch/ (chip).
- Students need to know how these spelling patterns interact with one another. For example, the letter g says its soft sound, as in giraffe, when followed by e, i, or y. The rest of the time it says its hard sound, as in gate (with the exception of a handful of words, such as eager — this is because we have no other letter in English to represent that hard g sound). Another example would be silent e – it’s not pronounced, but it causes the vowel to say its name, as in, “rate.”
This goes against everything I was taught in college about the Whole Language Approach, which would have students memorize words with letter names (much like a spelling bee) and then use a cueing system when reading (look at the picture, what word would make sense, look at the first letter, etc). This was padded with a bit of phonics, and as a 90’s baby, I had my share of rules that I had learned to distrust — “I before e except after c,” for example. I resorted to the phrase, “Sound it out.” Every other teacher was saying it — but the kids always just quietly stared at the word, and I found myself saying the word for them, hoping they’d memorize it and remember it next time (spoiler alert, they didn’t).
Margaret M. Bishop sums it up well in her book, The ABC’s and All Their Tricks (which, by the way, is the holy grail of spelling books).
“The teachers’ colleges have for many years concentrated on courses that are needed by teachers who will be working with word-memorization first… But most teachers’ colleges teach very little about phonics itself. They do not teach which letter sounds are the easiest ones for children to start with, or which letter-sounds are the most important ones for children to learn early, or which letter-interaction rules are essential, and which ones can be postponed for a little while. They do not have teacher candidates study the history of written English to understand how the letters came to have their present sounds and interactions. They do not teach teachers how to help children learn the trick of sounding words out well enough to understand them, or how to help the children with the truly irregular words.”
(The ABC’s and All Their Tricks, Margaret M. Bishop, pg. 5)
I have been so lucky as to return to Hillsdale University seven times and continue to learn from Ms. Kardatzky and Ms. Furno. I also possess the good fortune to have an older sister with degrees in linguistics, psychology, and speech pathology, who has gifted me text books and time to discuss the mountain of new information I’ve begun to digest. I’ve had the opportunity to be trained in two Orton-based literacy curriculums, as well as LETRS, and RISE (an Arkansas state initiative on the Science of Reading). The professional development I’ve received these past seven years has been unbelievably fruitful, and I’m grateful for it. My desire is that every teacher or parent helping a struggling reader or speller would know English is a systematic code, and it can be learned by everyone.