[NLA] building policy vision

[tom zurinskas]

In reply to Building Policy Vision – depicting phonics
teachers as “cold fish”.

Cold hearted Whipping kids into Literacy

Your job is to hire teachers with the right skills and
attitude to teach reading.  You look for teachers with
the right stuff.  You assess them according to the
following attributes.

First, teachers have to understand the kids are
conniving innocents that want to do nothing but play,
have fun and run around, yet there is a gold mine of
intelligence behind those darting eyes.  You’ve got to
find it and make it flourish.  They don’t necessarily
want to be there.  But it’s the most important place
they’ll ever be.

Look for teachers with the skills to make fun the
drills of learning the alphabet and associating the
sounds to letters.  We are talking ruthless duplicity
here, superliterates teaching illiterates.  Teachers
need to keep interest, day after day; while at home
reading literary abstracts, at work they’re teaching
“See Spot Run.”  Their job is to march those kids out
of the classroom with skills burned into their brains
to handle life’s future reading needs.  It’s the most
important thing a child need ever learn, and they’ve
got to get it and get it early so they can grow it to
full potential.

Teachers need to be ready to face the repetition with
a happy face, to burn basics into their kids brains,
and establish a strong foundation for the next step. 
Trick them into having fun learning, connive to enable
them to figure out words based on the sounds of
letters.  No child left behind.  Trick each little one
into thinking that each is having fun learning and
that what each does makes your day.  Diabolical, cold
hearted, duplicitous.

That’ll teach ‘em.  That’ll teach ‘em.




--- Eileen Eckert <eileeneckert at hotmail.com> wrote:
> While we make a final push to protect funding for
> the current fiscal year, I 
> have some thoughts and questions about building a
> long-term policy vision. 
> I've seen in the list archives, and participated in,
> a number of threads 
> concerning policy as it affects a specific issue or
> group of learners, and 
> I've seen general statements about themes that don't
> get very specific, but 
> I haven't seen much that puts the particulars into a
> larger framework.
> 
> We've talked about policy around learners dealing
> with crisis or trauma 
> (most recently). In that discussion, the teacher
> (and program) 
> characteristic of caring and respect for each
> learner was paramount, along 
> with the need for program-level policies that
> recognize the needs of 
> learners in crisis or dealing with the effects of
> trauma. In other 
> discussions, such as one around reading methodology,
> the affective component 
> of the teacher-learner relationship was not
> mentioned much (if at all). 
> There, the emphasis was on teacher knowledge and
> expertise around teaching 
> strategies, specifically phonemic awareness, with
> one contributor going so 
> far as to imply that not basing reading instruction
> on phonemic awareness is 
> educational malpractice. So what if you were a
> program administrator hiring 
> a teacher and you had to choose between a cold fish
> with a master's in 
> reading and all the "competencies" to teach phonemic
> awareness or a caring, 
> compassionate, engaging teacher with a bachelor's
> degree in English and a 
> willingness to learn? What if we had federal level
> policy that dictated your 
> decision, put in place because the specific
> discussion around needs of 
> low-level readers OR traumatized learners (as if
> people can't be both) was 
> generalized to the level of a federal mandate? What
> if we had state or 
> federal policies that elevated some teacher
> characteristics to the level of 
> necessities while ignoring others (as we do, of
> course)?
> 
> When you advocate for literacy policy, or make
> policy decisions yourself, is 
> there a big picture? Are there some unifying themes
> or underlying principles 
> that make specific policies complement each other?
> What are they, and how do 
> they work?
> 
> Thanks,
> Eileen
> 

=====
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