[Nathanael]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

There's actually a pretty big difference. Site reading only works if words are the exact same font etc. ... That's memorization, and effectively useless in "real" life. The only thing it's good for is cultivating an interest in reading from early on.

I'll preface my remarks by saying that I'm an English educator by profession. I'm also father to a five-year old, which I often feel has taught me more than all my years of professional training combined.

I'll try to clarify my remark with an illustration from my daughter:

Several months ago, I decided it was time to teach her how to read an analog clock. First, I googled, and came up with things like "Teaching How to Tell Time - Lesson 1 of 5" (http://www.time-for-time.com/lesson1.htm), or "How to Teach Your Child to Read a Clock" (http://www.ehow.com/how_5168832_teac...ead-clock.html), which said silly things like "Reading a clock can be a challenging skill for a child." and "Learning to tell the time ... sometimes can even takes years to master." Most of the sites I found promised it would take weeks or months for my daughter to learn how to read a clock.

So I tried their approach: "See, a clock has three hands. An hour hand, a minute hand and a second hand. There are sixty seconds in a minute."

And my daughter's eyes had already glazed over. "Rubbish," I said. I turned off the computer and proceeded to teach her how to read a clock in fifteen minutes:

"Read the short hand first. Where is it now?"
"Nine."
"Right. Now where's the long hand?"
"Twelve."
"Good. When the long hand's on the twelve, we say 'o'clock'. So what time is it now?"
"Nine o'clock."
"Right. Now if the long hand's on the six, we say 'thirty'. So what time is it now?"
"9:30." We then spent four or five minutes pushing the hands around the clock, until she had it all down pat.

"Now, when the long hand's on the three, say 'fifteen'. And when it's on the nine, say 'forty five'." We practiced quarter hours for another five minutes, and we were done. One fifteen minute lesson and my four year old daughter could read an analog clock to within fifteen minutes.

Perhaps the most fundamental trait that separates us cognitively from other animals is our innate ability to think in abstractions - to impose categories and organization on all the raw sensory data we collect. It's the foundation to nearly everything we do cognitively.

We adults are so accustomed to going from the general to the specific -- applying abstracted principles to specific instances -- we've completely forgotten that the ability to abstract is itself a learned skill. But we don't abstract in a vacuum -- we need raw data to abstract from. For example: point a toddler at three objects in your living room and say "chair", and it's really amazing how quickly the budding Aristotelean abstracts the idea of "chair"; within minutes she's identifying chairs all over the house. But she needed the raw data first.

The problem is, we adults try to force children to think in abstractions the way we do. The time-telling sites all shared the same pedagogical approach: teach the kid to understand abstract principles like "minute", "hour" and "sixty seconds to the minute", then show him how to apply all that to a clock.

But that's completely backward pedagogically. Young children are still firmly rooted in the data-gathering phase of learning. And this is where memorization plays its role. My daughter doesn't need an Einsteinian grasp of time or to be able to count by fives or any other such silly thing just to read a clock face. She simply needs to memorize a few key points: read the short hand first; say "fifteen" for three; and so forth. All the rest she'll abstract on her own.

Maggie said she doesn't know how to draw a "clear line" between memorization and reading. I said there is none, and there isn't.

As with most children, my own daughter's first attempts at "reading" were simply reciting from memory words she'd heard over and over again. You say that's not reading. But where do you draw the line? Memorize a sentence -- that's not reading? Memorize words, (viz., Dolch list) is that reading? Hooked on Phonics -- is that reading? But phonics is just memorization at the phoneme level. After memorizing "hat" and "cat" (flashcards, anyone?), for example, my daughter was able to pick out "rat" and "bat". But she had to memorize the phonetics first.

The reason Maggie has a hard time finding a clear line is because there isn't any. Memorization is the sine qua non not just of reading, but of everything we do cognitively.

--Nathanael