conuly | Ana has gotten better about writing her journal lately.

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Ana has gotten better about writing her journal lately.

This is due to two things: First, I showed her how to do an outline and made her do one with me before writing her journal, and second, I made a rule about fixing mistakes AFTER we write, and made her sit down with me to edit her journal every day.

Now, the outline concept was a big help, first because it helps Ana organize her thoughts, and also because Ana HATES writing an outline and will jump right into journal time if it lets her avoid it.

The editing was also a big help, first because otherwise Ana would get hung up with paralyzing fear that she was about to make a mistake, and secondly because once she's done (warts and all) she realizes she just doesn't care. (The fact that she doesn't care is probably helped by the fact that I only know one way to edit, and it's not very nice. So once she remembers that - wow, look, time has flown, she wants to go out and play! Truthfully, I don't want to edit her journal EITHER, so whatever.)

So lately I haven't had to stand over her as she writes her journal entries, and boy, how refreshing that is! But maybe I need to pay a bit more attention.

See, she's SUPPOSED to write about her day. Every day. (Actually, she's supposed to write about school. After thinking it over, Ana's come to the conclusion that this is because her principal is a mean meaniepants, but she tries not to hold it against the woman.) Now, she's tried writing about how she hates writing about her day, and she's tried ignoring this rule and making up stories instead, and I guess today she decided to try the passive-aggressive approach:

I whet to the stor after I ~~cam~~ came out of the skool and my sister. after that wegot mulberries. when we got home I did my journal. I rote about mulberries. here it is. we got home befor it raid. after I finish I will go out and dants.

She also drew a carefully labeled picture with tunder, a clawd, raie (rain), linke (lightning), her huse (itself with a labeled windoe, Eva, and dor), and of course "Me"... a child standing directly under two bolts of linke.

I'm not sure where she gets the linke spelling for lightning. Even raie makes sense, she just forgot about the "n" in there, but... linke?

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http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/06/ludicrous-results/

that was giggle-inducing!

I know!

I was hoping it would be a picture of her journal page, but your description is very good too.

Regarding linke... either she got distracted by the length of the word and wrote the letters that came to mind first (which I see Kira doing often) or she sounded it out as lye-{glottal stop}-ing. And of course "ing" doesn't SAY i-n-g, it's like a nyhhn sound. I could see it being li-nink or li-nke.

I don't have a scanner, no :(

And no, as far as -ing goes, I have no idea what you mean. When I say lightning, I say lightning. Just like it's spelled.

You do not say lightning as it is spelled! It's phonetically impossible, or highly improbable at least. Lig-huh-tun-in-guh? Lol. I would write it in phonics IPA if my keyboard let me and if I remEmbered how. When you say "button," do you say the Ts clearly or do you pronounce the T in the back of your throat like buh-uhn? If you do the latter, that uh in the back of your throat is a glottal stop and could possibly be the sound used in some peoples pronunciation of lightning. Li(uh)-ning.

Similarly but different... Say train and tree outloud. Most people do not say t-ree and t-rain, they say chree and chrain. But it's very difficult to get people to believe they are saying ch because they know it's spelled with a t! But they really are! Try saying tree with only the t then the r then the ee sound. It's hard and weird to pronounce it just as it's spelled because we really don't pronounce them as such.

I see what you're saying. Lightning pronounced LIE-nink, and Ana spelled the nink, nke.

Here in Oklahoma I frequently hear "thunnerin and linin ahside" for "thundering and lightning outside."

It is NOT phonetically impossible.

L - makes the sound "l".

igh - ALWAYS makes the sound "I", and counts as one letter grouping.

t - makes the sound (or at least the phoneme) "t". As you observed, in some dialects this might come out as a glottal stop in some positions, and in most dialects (all?) it comes out as a ch in front of the letter r. It's still a /t/, though, even when it's not actually one. It's an allophone of the phoneme.

n - makes the sound "n"

i - makes the sound ih or ee.

ng - makes the sound "ng".

L - igh - t - n - i - ng. Lightning! Just because some of the letters are represented with more than one sound does NOT mean you can't sound this one out using basic phonics. Most words you can. I'm constantly annoyed when people claim that this or that word has to be memorized as a "sight word" because "it can't be sounded out". Well, it usually CAN be sounded out if you know the rules of basic phonics.

But some reading on the subject has left me mildly horrified - people claiming to be an adult when they learned that the rule for when c says "k" and when it says "s" is constant (I remember being taught this waaaaay back in the first grade), or likewise being surprised to find out that the letter "a" officially makes more than one sound (when they thought it only made one, and all other cases were exceptions) and that there's ways of figuring out which sound it makes in a particular word.

As far as train and tree goes... I know. I've even heard people claim that when children misspell these words it's because they're not hearing properly, but really, the problem is that they hear just fine!

Edited 2010-06-02 12:35 (UTC)

"people claiming to be an adult when they learned that the rule for when c says "k" and when it says "s" is constant (I remember being taught this waaaaay back in the first grade)"

It isn't constant, though, because English contains too many words from disparate language-groups with different rules for pronouncing c. Latin c is soft, for instance, and Latinised Greek words are usually pronounced with a soft c (centaur, Mycenae) in English, even though they were pronounced with the hard k- sound in Greek, but there's not a consistent rule even for that. C in Gaelic languages doesn't follow the same rule as it does in Latin, if you can even call it a 'rule' - the monks who first wrote down Gaelic were using the Roman alphabet, poorly suited to the phonetics of Gaelic, and they wrote it as best they could by ear, having no consistent system at all. Linke for lightning might have been perfectly respectable in a scholarly text of the 10th century, except that they didn't call it lightning back then.

LOL, when my daughter was in 2nd grade and having fits over her spelling homework, I used to try to cheer her up by reading her Gaelic words and having her guess how they were spelled. The unexpected result of this was that she learned to spell in Gaelic fairly well, but not really any better in English. Go figure.

It's not constant, no, but I can only think of a very very small handful of words that break that rule. I mean, it wouldn't be English if a few words didn't have bizarre and totally arbitrary spellings, but there are very few common words that break the c rule. If you can point to a few that do, in English, (the only one that springs to mind is "soccer", and that's not the result of borrowing) that's great :)

"Say train and tree outloud. Most people do not say t-ree and t-rain, they say chree and chrain. But it's very difficult to get people to believe they are saying ch because they know it's spelled with a t! But they really are! Try saying tree with only the t then the r then the ee sound. It's hard and weird to pronounce it just as it's spelled because we really don't pronounce them as such."

Um, where do you live? Because I've never heard anyone pronounce tree or train as chree or chrain, and I've lived on both U.S. coasts and in the Midwest. When most people say, for instance, tea tree oil, it doesn't come out sounding like teach-ree oil; the t sound is only slightly less distinct in the second word than in the first.

(Just tested it with my three housemates, all of whom are second-generation Western Washingtonians: no trace of a chr- sound replacing tr- when they say tea tree oil, cedar tree, A-train or choo-choo train.)

I did not say EVERYONE says it this way, of course. I've lived in England, the South US, Western US, and the Southwest, and just about everyone says it the same. I minored in linguistics and while this does not make me an expert by any means, I had to fight for my grade over this issue and the teacher determined that I was correct and his masters student teacher was incorrect in marking me wrong on my pronunciation of it, and that phonetically /chree/ is more common than /tree/. You can determine if you truly say tree, chree or somewhere in the middle by saying a word beginning with a simple T. Like, "Tea." Don't move your mouth once you say tea. Feel where your tongue hits the roof of your mouth to produce this sound. Feel houw your tongue feels and your mouth is held as you repeat Tea Tea Tea a few times. Then say tree, holding your mouth exactly as it was to say tea. Do you do the t first and then the r as a separate, distinct phoneme, or do they merge together to be a sound that is slightly different than the t all by itself. In most people, the sound is not a perfect t-r. It's a combination. It isn't a perfect ch either, but saying it that way at least allows people to attempt to forget the spelling for a minute and think about what the mouth is doing, because when we are speaking of pronunciation, we HAVE to forget spelling and only think of the shapes and positions of the mouth to form a word.

It doesn't matter at all which way you or I do it. There is no right, wrong, better, or worse. I do say something similar to "teach-ree" when I am talking about tea tree oil. But it's just one of those ineresting things to think about, and even when people are clearly saying chree and moving their mouth differently than when they say tea or ree, they will still insist the initial sound is a t. It's just one small way of challenging what we think we know.

My degree is in Early Childhood Ed, and I've been teaching children to speak and write since the 70's; I'm also an amateur linguist and conlang geek. From a speech-therapy perspective, when you pronounce tr- as chr-, what you're doing is clenching your jaw-muscles so that your teeth touch, rather than only brushing the tip of your tongue past the ridge of your hard palate behind your front teeth.

*shrugs* Regional dialects are neither wrong nor right. England practically has a different dialect for every social class in every county, and everyone I know to talk to over there is actually Welsh, so I'm not in a position to say how common the chr- sound may be there.

In this country, I surmise it's a Southern/Southwestern regional marker, but I haven't lived in the South or Southwest, so can't be sure. My first mother-in-law was Texan, but I don't remember how she pronounced her tr- sounds, because she pronounced almost everything so differently from me that I often had trouble understanding her. She's the only Texan I've known well, so I can't say if that was a Texan thing, or just her.

From a speech-therapy perspective, when you pronounce tr- as chr-, what you're doing is clenching your jaw-muscles so that your teeth touch, rather than only brushing the tip of your tongue past the ridge of your hard palate behind your front teeth.

That can't be right. When I say train, or truck, or tree, I *know* my teeth aren't touching. I'm saying them now.

And yet, I also know that my tongue is moving between t and r, and in doing so it's making the sh sound. And when it does that, it means it's going ch. I'm not even sure HOW you can go "tr" WITHOUT inserting another sound there.

Edited 2010-06-02 19:09 (UTC)

Hmmm. Okay, when you say T. rex slowly and distinctly, is there still a ch- sound in there?

For me, going from the t- sound to the r- sound is automatic, and my jaw/teeth position doesn't change at all between them - the only thing that moves is the tip of my tongue. In order to put a ch- sound in between them, I've got to move my jaw in what seems an odd way.

I suspect you and I have enough differences in the way we pronounce just about everything, to delight the heart of 'enry 'iggens. I have to admit, regional dialects, slang, archaisms and colloquialisms delight my heart as well; the cool thing about English is that it's really at least hundred languages all rolled into one.

Hmmm. Okay, when you say T. rex slowly and distinctly, is there still a ch- sound in there?

No, but that's because I'm not saying Trex. I'm saying tee rex. If I were saying Trex and using the T not as an initial but as a sound in and of itself, it'd be different.

My teeth and jaw don't move when making t, r, or sh - but my tongue does. If I go t, t, t my tongue is right behind my teeth. If I go sh, sh, sh my tongue is right behind the alveolar ridge. And if I go r, r, r my tongue is behind the alveolar ridge, but pointing upward. (Bit hard to explain - it's "further back" than when going sh.) So in between t and r my tongue HAS TO move into the sh position.

What this tells me is that you and I don't pronounce our r-s in the same way. When I pronounce it, my tongue doesn't touch my palate at all, so there isn't any sh- position between t- and r-.

I know some people who barely pronounce their r-s even in words like road-race, and not at all in words like car-door; then again I know some others who distinctly pronounce them, and even throw them into words like wash that don't actually have them. I bet there's a huge body of literature on this variation in the formal linguistics research.

Ack; gotta go to work, but this has been most fascinating! :)

You can't throw out a comment like that and then not tell me how you make your r!

LOL, okay, let me see if I can break it down. I'm hampered because I don't remember the descriptors for the parts or muscles of the mouth, nor the terms to describe the parts of phonemes, so this will be a sketchy and imprecise explanation, but here goes:

When I go to say road-race, the muscle under my jaw moves the inner edge of my lower lip toward the edge of my upper front teeth. The lip doesn't necessarily touch the teeth, but it does flatten and evert slightly as if it was going to, even when it doesn't. Most of the sound is made at the back of the throat, though, and shaped by the muscle at the base of the tongue.

It's that same muscle that makes the r- sounds in car-door. I do pronounce all my r-s, but I don't hit them very hard when they come at the end of a word. Even so, they're much more from the back of the mouth than from the front, which is probably why they don't get blended with my t-s, since those come from the tongue and the palate.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!

Most people, wherever they live, will insert a -sh between a t and an r. This is because those two sounds aren't made at the same spot in the mouth. T + sh is, of course, ch.

You don't need a scanner! We can use my camera. :-)

What's this journal supposed to be in aid of? If the intention here is to foster a love of writing and/or an interest in journaling, it's pretty obvious it isn't working for Ana. She has to write an outline for it, which she HATES; she gets stuck in paralyzing fear of making a mistake; she's learning to loathe your editing process because it isn't very nice and you don't like doing it... and all for what, exactly? What is this meant to be teaching her, and are there any signs that she is actually learning that?

As a teacher who has had to comply with a whole lot of counter-productive notions from administrators who gave more weight to abstract theory than to observation of the actual living children we were attempting to educate, I agree with Ana's evaluation: her principle is a mean meaniepants.

It's a shuck and a sham to call it 'journaling' when it has to be outlined, edited and graded by someone else. Of all the thousands of avid journalers we all know, how many would continue journaling if they had to do it under those conditions? Damn few, I'm betting. I surely would not, and I've kept a journal since 1964.

So, perhaps it would help to explain to Ana that even though they're calling it a journal, it isn't really a journal. What it actually is (from your description,) is a log-book, which is quite another thing. A journal is personal; a log is not.

Probably she can get by with making just one outline, the focus of which is "What My Teacher Wants Me To Write About". So... what does her teacher want? Is the primary purpose of the exercise to find out which parts of the program are memorable or interesting to the students, or to find out which children are able to think about time in a linear, compartmentalized way, or is the idea merely that they ought to be writing, and this is a convenient thing-to-write-about, or what?

She may be old enough now to be told the truth about school: that she has at least a decade of it ahead of her (probably a lot more, smart as she is,) and whether those ten years are full of trouble and punishment, or praise and prizes, is going to depend on her ability to comply with often-unreasonable expectations.

It doesn't matter whether or not she likes the assignments, or finds any value in them. Hopefully she will find something to value or enjoy in most of them, but that's 'gravy', and can't be counted on. What matters is that she does them promptly without fussing or weaseling, works hard to do them as excellently as she can, and turns them in on time with a smile, because that will best please her teachers, and pleasing the teachers is what school is really About.

One might think it's subversive to tell this to children, and so perhaps it is. I've told it to all the ones I look after, though, and they have seemed to find it helpful and reassuring. I think it kind of gets them off the hook of *having* to have a power-struggle over school, to be told flat-out, "Look, you're right; school does not primarily exist to serve your needs, and much of it is, indeed, as bogus as you think it, but if you don't play the game their way, they'll make you suffer for it the rest of your life, so get smart young and save yourself a world of trouble."

Ever consider, children are the only oppressed class whose members automatically become members of the oppressing class after a certain length of time? There'll never be a successful Childrens' Revolution, because by the time they're old enough to be revolting, they're already on the brink of switching sides.

The school doesn't ask that it be outlined. I started doing that because otherwise she couldn't think of ANYthing to write, and she'd sit there doing nothing. At all. So I started sitting with her and planning the basics of what she'd say in each sentence, but she had to fill in the details herself (and decipher my shorthand, really, not a fun task even for me). And now that she's decided she can't stand outlining, we don't do it unless she's struggling. I'm more than happy to help her LESS, not more - I think the only benefit of homework at this age is that it helps kids work on their own. (Dubiously.)

She also doesn't have to edit, I just did that with her until she realized she hates editing more than she hates having mistakes in her work. Her perfectionist "I'll erase and erase and erase and erase!" problems aren't the school's fault. I'd love to blame the school, but this is longstanding.

Surprisingly, even though she dislikes both editing and outlines, putting them in place for a few weeks did help her just get down and start writing her work without all the tantrums about mistakes and "I can't think of anything!" and all.

They're supposed to reflect on their day and write about their day. Every day. I agree that writing about the same thing every day is the stupidest thing ever. Unfortunately, no progress has been made on that front, so we quietly don't make her do it. "This way you get to learn about their day at school!" I don't give a flying fuck about Ana's day at school, truthfully. It's not worth the major hassle of trying to get her to tell me about it, much less WRITE about it. (You know what really bugs me? They don't even check their journals every day, just randomly. So if she decides not to do it because "they don't even check", she's right. They make a big deal about it, but they only spot-check.)

Outlining and editing are both essential skills, and it's very excellent that you got the opportunity to teach them to her in the context of this assignment. That's pretty-much what I did with my daughter - whatever she learned in school or from her school assignments, or whatever use could be gotten from them, was great, but school was never her primary source of education. A good thing, too, judging by what was being passed off as 'education'.

I think it's a lot better for kids to hear "Yes, this is stupid, and if it was up to me, you wouldn't have to do it, but unfortunately it's not, so just bite the bullet and get the thing done" than the sort of mealy-mouthed for-your-own-good cant they often get from grown-ups. True that children aren't always the best judges of what's in their best interests, and will invariably choose short-term pleasure over long-term advantage. Still, I think it's fair to say that anything that causes them notable distress or resentment without serious cause is not "for their good". I would define serious cause as something affecting their well-being in a major or permanent way: going to the dentist is essential no matter how much they hate it. Most things they hate are not essential, and they're subjected to them for someone else's convenience, not their own good.

If I were Supersecretary of Education, there would be no homework at all in the lower grades, and a maximum of two hours' total in High School. The little girls I look after were delighted to hear this, until they heard that I would also eliminate all these half-days, conference-days, early dismissals and Hallmark holidays, so that they would be in school from 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM every Monday through Friday from Labor Day to Memorial Day except for national holidays and their two-week Winter and Spring Breaks.

If I were Supersecretary of Education, there would be no homework at all in the lower grades, and a maximum of two hours' total in High School. The little girls I look after were delighted to hear this, until they heard that I would also eliminate all these half-days, conference-days, early dismissals and Hallmark holidays, so that they would be in school from 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM every Monday through Friday from Labor Day to Memorial Day except for national holidays and their two-week Winter and Spring Breaks.

That's largely my thought too. A week or two off for each season, and maybe a three day weekend every month (which we largely have anyway) and be done with it, but I'd probably have a longer school day - the nieces go from 8:30 to 2:50 every day, I'd want it longer to make SURE they got gym and two recesses every day, especially as so many kids have babysitters or aftercare daily anyway.

The point of days off in the school calendar isn't so kids can rest, it's so the school can save money by not being open on days parents keep their kids home anyway, for holidays or for farmwork or whatever. But if you do NOT keep your kids home to do chores all summer it's just an added hassle when the kids are young.

I agree wholeheartedly with your "tell it like it is" approach. I also agree about school not being the primary source of education!

My approach with Ana and her school/teacher has been to argue a bit about the "must reflect on her day" topic rule, and when I explained that Ana DID NOT want to write about this topic, but was *pretty happy* to write about other topics, and the teacher still insisted...I quietly let it drop. And then largely don't enforce it with Ana. Because in MY mind the goal is to get her writing more. Period. Why make writing a distasteful chore, whose bright idea was THAT??

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Ana has gotten better about writing her journal lately.

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