Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 78, Greencastle, Putnam County, 8 December 1981 — Page 5

Can Johnny read?

Simplistic methods, boring materials contribute to kids' inability to comprehend

By FRED M. HECHINGER c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Reading scores are improving in elementary schools all over the country, but teenagers’ reading skills continue to slip, and so does their interest in reading. Richard C. Anderson, director of the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, does not consider this a paradox. It is the natural consequence, he says, of merely drilling children to get the words right, without getting the message of what they read. “Don’t misunderstand,” he adds quickly. “Nobody at the center argues that phonics are not needed." Phonics is the technical term for teaching children to “decode” words letter-by-letter and sound-by-sound. But Anderson says he feels that many of the methods now being used to teach reading are simplistic and many of the materials children are given to read are boring. In their training, he says, teachers are given plenty of techniques but not enough cohesive structure with which to apply them. Anderson illustrates a fundamental error this

opinion

LARRY GIBBS Publisher

Letters to the Editor Theft of Christmas candy 'final blow' to spirit of season

To the Editor: What is the spirit of Christmas? I was always taught it was love thy neighbor, love my Lord, love and honor my mother and father among other things. Christmas has been a time for love and good cheer for children of all ages. During the past several years my wife and I have put a display in our yard. Included were a stuffed Santa Claus and a table with a glass jar containing candy canes for all children, young and old. The smiles on the little faces getting their canes meant the world to us. Occasionally, we would find a penny or a note from a little child, which we still cherish. All our effort, time and expense was of little consequence. Last year, while we were gone a short while, someone with the Christmas spirit stole Santa and destroyed him. But we bought another suit and

Bex comments a collection of half-truths, exaggerations

To the Editor: I have some difficulty constructing a sense of exactly what went on at Mr. Brian Bex's presentation to the joint meeting of Rotary and Kiwanis that was reported in your edition of Friday, Nov. 27,1981. The summary of his comments, if accurate, suggests a somewhat paranoid collection of glossy half-truths, exaggerations and selective examples. Perhaps Mr. Bex’s cheapeast shot was his claim that the National Education Association is now serving as a conduit for bringing materials designed to discredit the economic system to public school classrooms. That’s all our school teachers need - another attack by some self-rightous, so-called “responsible” civic leader who has cloaked himself in the flag of the nation. I find Mr. Bex’s methods of persuading others to share his views as objectionable as he finds the viewpoints he criticizes. If there is any group whose message is getting excessive exposure in the media today, it is those individuals who aspire to becoming successful entrepreneurs but who lack the personal ingenuity to develop legitimately marketable ideas, products or services

Signed letters are welcome

The Banner Graphic believes the interests of its readers are best served by expression of varied points of view. We offer our opinions and those of others on this page and welcome you to do the same, whether you agree, disagree or wish to comment on another subject of public interest. Letters to the editor should be typed or written clearly and limited to 300 words if possible. All letters must be signed and include the author’s address

way: A workbook sentence may say, “The worker dug a hole in the ground.” A good reader will infer that the worker used some tool, not just his bare hands. Such a reader creates a picture in his mind. But poor readers, even though they are able to read the words, make no such inferences, nor will they reason to make connections with other parts of the story. And since poor readers are also likely to be deficient in phonics, teachers will drill them and drill them, ignoring the meaning and the connections that make reading add up to more than pronouncing words correctly. Why is this happening? The first reason Anderson cites is that teachers are not taught that children who get the word right may still need help with integrating the meaning of words. Children, says Anderson, need to be prepared to bring their own knowledge to bear on what they read. If, for example, a story begins with a statement that a youngster lost a pair of mittens, a teacher might ask: Have you ever lost anything? How did people react to it? Many reading instructors ask children about what they have just read, Anderson says, but are too often content if the child simply parrots

ERICBERNSEE Managing Editor

replaced him. Today (Dec. 6)my wife and I set up another display complete with Santa and candy canes in a glass jar, as usual. We left home late in the afternoon for a visit. Upon returning home about 8:45 p.m. (you probably have guessed it by now), we noticed someone had stolen canes and jar both. Santa is still there but I don’t know how long we dare leave it. No, I am not going to buy another jar or candy canes. I am truly sorry, kiddies, but someone dealt the final blow to my wife and I. We will surely miss the cute smiles of little kids, the penny or two, but most of all a scribbled note of a five- or six-year-old child whose heart is full of the true Christmas spirit. Merry Christmas. Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd M. Ellis Greencastle

that will succeed on their own merit and benefit the members of our society. In their frustration these individuals convert their anger to rantings about “unjust” regulations, many of which were designed, interestingly enough, to prevent consumer/worker abuse and exploitation. To Mr. Bex and those who sympathize with his views, I say quit crying about the hostile, unfairly restrictive atmosphere you want so dearly to believe that “anti-capitalists” have created for you and get on with meeting the challenges of personal enterprise that you claim to be so eager to confront. We have endured this maudlin, selfpitying description of the businessman’s plight in the BannerGraphic that are written by Mr. Lescher, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and by Mr. A. Harrigan of the U.S. Industrial Council. Perhaps someone should be sought to contribute occasional guest editorials to your newspaper who would rebut and provide counterpoint to their unanswered whines and whimpers. S.R. rural Greencastle

and telephone number. Although we encourage readers to permit publication of their names, requests for use of initials will be honored in most cases. Letters containing personal attacks on individuals, libelous statements or profanity will not be published. All letters are subject to editing, although such will be held to a minimum and the intent of a letter will not be altered. Send your letters to: Letters to the Editor, The Banner Graphic, F. 0. Box 509, Greencastle, Indiana 46135.

specific facts. What’s needed, says Anderson, are better questions to get children to push beyond the facts they have just read. The second problem, he continues, is that too many manuals are “thin and sketchy on comprehension.” They merely give teachers vague suggestions about what to do, he says, “something of a smorgasbord, probably because it sells better if it has something for any teacher.” Third, he explains, poor readers float over the surface of a text. One way to change this is to teach them to ask themselves questions. To do this a teacher may pretend to be thinking out loud: “If I were reading this, that’s what I’d ask.” After a while, students learn to do this for themselves. Fourth, poor readers find it difficult to compose sensible summaries of what they have read. Teaching them to summarize improves their reading comprehension and usually their test scores as well. “We have fragmented the school reading program,” Anderson asserts, “and much of it takes place in isolation from real reading.” The center’s studies showed that 50 percent of class

Hoosiers offer assessments

Reaganomics not working, congress told

By JAN CARROLL Associated Press Writer INDIANAPOLIS (AP) unemployment and precarious budget picture after massive state tax cuts in 1979 prove that supply-side economics doesn’t work, a congressional committee has been told. State Sen. Louis J. Mahern made that assessment Monday in a hearing before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. The panel came to Indianapolis to learn first-hand the impact of President Reagan’s budget cuts. The Indianapolis Democrat recalled that the Republican-controlled Legislature cut the state income tax from 2 percent to 1.9 percent in 1979 and provided a homestead credit for property owners. The cost of the cuts will exceed SSOO million in five years, he said. But returning tax money to the taxpayers didn’t stimulate Indiana’s economy, he said. Two years later, Indiana has an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent. “Indiana is lowest in taxation and second only to Michigan in unemployment,” Mahern said. “If nothing else, when you return to Washington, you can report to your colleagues that you have seen the supply-side future, and it doesn’t seem to work.” Under Reagan’s economic theory, tax cuts to individuals and businesses will stimulate enough investment and growth in the economy to make up for the loss of revenue. This is known as supply-side economics. Dallas Sells, director of United Auto Workers Region 3, said the cuts in programs for the needy have hurt his members, many of whom are out of work and need help. “These attacks on those most in need must stop,” he said. “Reaganomics is a war on the great majority of working and poor Americans. It is time to terminate this kind of economics. In Indiana and Kentucky, our very survival depends on it.” Sells said the auto industry is in such a slump that “in Indiana, plants are closing so fast that newspapers no longer deem the fact newsworthy enough to write about.” State Sen. Charles E. Bosma, R-Beech Grove, said he thinks the cuts in the welfare programs have not hit those who are unable to help themselves. “By tightening the eligibility requirements on the availability of free comprehensive medical care, free tran-

Nuclear arms freeze Quietly but steadily, an American movement gains strength

By MIKE FEINSILBER Associated Press Writer Spurred by fear that nuclear war somehow has become an acceptable option in Washington, an anti-nuclear movement is developing grassroots strength across America. With arms talks now under way in Geneva, activists are gearing up for a spring offensive of quiet persuasion. Unlike recent mass European demonstrations protesting deployment of U.S. missiles in other countries, the American disarmament drive is focusing on a freeze in atomic weapons production. Already the movement has scored some victories: Twenty-four New England towns voted for a nuclear freeze. A Roman Catholic archbishop, Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, advocates tax withholding, advising Christians that they should refuse to pay half their federal taxes “to the nuclear idol.” Physicians attend seminars on “the ultimate epidemic;” 5,000 have participated in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, N.M. “We’re saying the

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sportation for medical services, free prescription drugs, free dental care, free legal services, free day-care services and subsidised housing, we can expect perhaps that natural fathers will be more rigorously forced to support their own children and to supply homes for them.” he said. “We may even find relatives recognizing their responsibility for family members in need of help,” he added. “There is nothing wrong with budget cuts that effect this kind of decision. After all, this was the American way until our present welfare program began to reward the wrong kind of values and penalize the wrong class of people.” Lt. Gov. John M. Mutz also appeared before the panel. But it may be a long time before he ever delivers another message for Gov. Robert D. Orr. Orr couldn’t attend the hearing and sent a letter via Mutz railing committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-111., for coming to Indianapolis when the panel should have stayed in Washington. Orr added, “Why should you be in Indiana when there is vital work to be done in

threat of nuclear war is the biggest medical problem facing the world today,” says Abram Claude of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Even the staid Journal of the American Medical Association carried a plea that the world’s doctors “join our scientific colleagues who have insistently, with an increasing sense of despair and urgency, attempted to alert humanity” to the dangers of nuclear war. A band of 40 is traveling from Bangor, Wash., to Moscow to stir interest in nuclear disengagement. Roger Molander, a National Security Council aide in the last three administrations, has organized a group known as Ground Zero. In early April, Ground Zero plans to sponsor discussions, at service club luncheons, in churches, schools and public meetings, of all sides of the nuclear question. The National Freeze Clearinghouse in St. Louis says its campaign for a halt to the arms buildup has been endorsed by 46 national organizations, including the National Council of Churches, SANE, the Roman Catholic Pax Christ, and the Young Women’s Christian Association.

time is often spent on workbooks that ask children to fill out spaces but require little reading. Youngsters quite understandably get bored. “It’s heavy labor with less and less experience in real reading,” he says. There is, he adds, a dearth of interesting inschool reading material. Books are adapted, not written. They adhere to so-called “reading ability formulas” with only simple words and short sentences. “They eliminate words that show how sentences are related, such as before, after, but, because, etc.,” the center’s researchers found. Similarly, such simplified texts cut out all hedges or qualifications. As a typical example, he cited the reduction of the sentence, “a railway agent once figured that it would take 20 flatcars to load the trunk of one giant sequoia,” to the simple statement, “it would take 20 flatcars to load the trunk of one giant sequoia.” How, Anderson asks, can children learn to judge the importance of an identified source? Such an approach, he says, not only makes reading in school less interesting but fails to prepare children to deal with complexities and to

completing the seriously delinquent appropriations process in Washington?” The governor said he could not give accurate answers on how federal budget cuts would affect Indiana until an appropriations bill passes both houses of Congress. Rostenkowski reminded Orr and Mutz the House has passed all but one of the appropriation bills and has sent them to the Senate where they are languishing. “The reason we’re here is because I’m still of the opinion that government serves people,” he said. “Most of the budget cuts have fallen on people, on the flesh and blood of people. The central question here today is how much is enough and how much is too much,” he said. Rep. Andrew Jacobs, D-Ind., asked Mutz how many times Orr had been to Washington since he was elected governor. “Was there anything going on in Indiana when he was there?” Jacobs asked. Jacobs asked Mutz to provide the committee with a record of Orr’s Washington travel “so we’ll know how to evaluate his

Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a con-servative-oriented think tank, says he finds no fault with the goals of the disarmament movement “as long as it isn’t directed at the United States alone and doesn’t give the Soviets a free pass.” A disarmament movement has long existed in the United States and in Europe, but it gained impetus when the Reagan administration laid plans to increase the U.S. nuciear arsenal and openly discussed the possibility of limited nuclear war. President Reagan alarmed many on both sides of the Atlantic by saying last September that a limited nuclear war in Europe need not escalate into a superpower showdown. Meanwhile, he has been been pushing for deployment of the new MX missile system, building 100 Bl bombers and developing a new Trident nuclear submarine as well as a submarinelaunched cruise missile. Eric Vhn Loon, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that "without any question,” statements by various administration members about the use of nuclear weapons has sparked disarmament sentiment.

December 8,1981, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic

cope with “real” books. School reading “seldom gets into a character’s head,” Anderson says.Children are not helped to identify with the contentor to relate reading to the real world. In such; books, Anderson complains, “there are few com-; plexities of plot. The stories are artificial and colorless. Style has been bled away.” In the later school years, he says, textbooks lack “cohesive themes” and “skip around without structure.” In the crucial first years of school, Anderson says, “After the initial excitement of learning to read a little and children are excited reading suddenly becomes a dull business.” With the lure of television and the lack of training in how to distill meaning from the printed page, fewer junior high and high school students “get any real pleasure out of reading on their own.” Parents who for years have been reading to their preschool children such wonderfully complex books as the Dr. Seuss stories or “The Little Engine That Could” have long felt instinctively ; that their children’s first excursions into reading in school too often take them into that barreru territory of “basal readers,” devoid of fun, excitement and challenge.

criticism of this committee holding field hearings.” Mutz told the committee the state needs certainity in the appropriations process to be able to plan for the reductions contained in President Reagan’s budget cuts. He also asked Congress to give states more flexibility in spending federal money through the block grants. Earlier, Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut, until recently president of the National League of Cities, urged the committee to look a little closer at the defense department for savings. Hudnut said the nation’s cities had already taken their fair share of budget cuts. He suggested Congress close tax loopholes to save money. He noted the tax breaks in the All-Savers program will cost the federal treasury between $5 and $6 billion, “more than the entire revenue sharing program.” Hudnut suggested that increases in entitlement programs such as Social Security and welfare should be tied to the average increase in workers’ salaries, instead of the Consumer Price Index.

“When you have the president saying 'ye could have a limited nuclear war and trie secretary of state saying we might have a demonstration nuclear explosion that sends a message to the people that the firm line between conventional and nuclear weapons which has been emphasized by every president since Eisenhower appears to be blurring," he said. “In small doses, those who make policy are adapting us to the idea that there can be a nuclear war,” says June Jackson Christmas, a professor of behavioral science at City University of New York. The disarmament activists aren’t the kids in Army field jackets who marched against the war in Vietnam. The kids an? back, but so are people who stood on trie sidelines in the ’6os and ’7os. Many of them wear professorial tweeds, doctor's whites, clerical collars. This campaign is less strident, less gaudy, less chic, quieter and, so far, smaller. Now the battlefield is in the to\vn meeting and the lecture hall, not thje streets. More than 150 somber campijs teach-ins on the consequences of a nuclear war drew 100,000 participants on Nov. 11.

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