Well, there's 20 intermittant minutes of my life I'll never get back

[conuly]

In the comments here, I didn't even want to watch the video, I just clicked through to downvote the random racists and homophobes, because why not.

And somehow I got involved in a really, really inane argument with the world's pettiest teacher.

I hate to inform you of this, but a lot of teachers were systematically fed a load of bull about phonics at some point in their teacher education. I don't really know what they're telling tyro teachers in ed school, other than that you can't sound out the word "the" (yes, you can) but a lot of them are really devoted to what they paid money to learn and super resentful when other people don't believe them because they are simply wrong.

I tried to do the classy thing, but eventually I had to inform her... she's been spelling the phrase "sight words" wrong this entire time. Because nothing creates confidence in another person's ability to teach the conventions of English spelling like the fact that they can't spell one of the most common words in the English language. (And yes, you can sound out both the words "sight" and "site". They're entirely predictable.)

Comments

[thekumquat]

At least here we only really get the arguments between Old Phonics and Synthetic Phonics. Though the kids who suffered the Initial Teaching Alphabet are still alive (age 50-60) and pissed off about it.

[fred_mouse]

I had not previously encountered the ITA. Wow, reading about that was .. let's go with infuriating. I'm not surprised that people exposed to that were pissed off!