It’s Sunday night, and I am in the midst of trying to reach 18,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, and Shana, Gered, Rebekah and I are sitting in our living room watching ‘Friends’ and trying to help Shana find phonics words to expand her students’ vocabulary.
The only problem is that the words cannot be too confusing, cannot contain sounds like ‘-ion’ or ‘-tion,’ cannot contain the letters ‘o’ or ‘u’ and should be two or more syllables. We’ve been having a very interesting time trying to come up with words that are suitable, and so far the list features some very eclectic vocabulary: galactic, gallivant, dentist, rabbit, radish, epithet, hamlet, and fantastic. The reason for this strange exercise in trolling the English language for useful words is because though the kids here learn phonics, they don’t learn phonics in a practical way.
The purpose of teaching kids phonics is, as I understand it, to help them sound out unfamiliar words by teaching them that certain clusters of words share the same sounds, so you can take the knowledge that the ‘ese’ in ‘these’ and ‘Chinese’ sound the same, and figure out the words Chinese and these. The problem is that the kids here (as I discovered doing midterms) do not really learn how to use the phonics, they simply memorize the word. Consequently, when I tried to help kids by sounding out the words they were having difficulty with for the spelling portion of the midterm, they for the most part could not do anything with my hints.
We talked about this at lunch today (my apartment plus Shana’s cousin Jennifer went out for sushi), and it’s a problem across the board, and so Shana for one is taking steps to correct it, an idea I may well borrow. In the meantime, however, much hilarity has ensued from imagining fourth graders learning the word ‘gallivant.’ Once again, it is hard not to find yourself going just a little bit crazy (or at least questioning your sanity), but I guess that’s part and parcel of analyzing the English language and attempting to teach it correctly.
