TODAY I WENT TO SEE MY MOTHER and her husband (never really a step-dad to me ..) down the West End. We were going to eat Thai food, until we realized the "Indian and Thai restaurant" my Mum thought she'd found was actually offering Thalis ~ not a Thai menu at all! Both of my parents have the same problem: they read what they think is there. And I picked up this habit from them. But I don't think I'm as bad. It's a genetic thing. I think if it was very much worse it'd be called "dyslexia" or something ...
In fact we ended up talking about my humungous spelling problems I had (I was put in retarded readilng group) in primary school. My Mum used to teach me with flashcards and the teachers said this was confusing me as the "progressive" 1970s school was teaching reading by "phonics". In short let me tell you phonics do not work. They're based on the ridiculous premise that the English language can be taught "phonetically". And thanks to this I was constantly banging my head upon the brick walls of head not pronounced "heed" knees that were somehow K-less and so on. I still remember puzzling at a young age "why are there Cs and Ks. And Ss and Cs?" None of it made sense. My early writing books were a tangle of red corrections. And yet I grew up with the ambition to write novels!We had a lovely lebanese dinner. My Mum had chicken skewers. I had lamb skewers (too much chicken's gone to my head. I've grown a gizzard. If we didn't have a "socialist NHS" the doctors would want $5000 to chop it off ... Branzy, unfortunately for him ordered something that sounded charming on the menu, but looked like bulls' testicles floating in a yogurty ejaculation. He kept quiet and kept nabbing bits of our salad ...
Afterwards I remembered I'm supposed to be learning Central European Dialect (ie German) so I raided the local cosmopolitan newsstand for Paris Match, Stern and Die Spiegel magazines, and sat there pretentiously leafing through on the tube home. The woman next to me was reading a novel in Swedish ...And that was that. Today was meant to be hammybuying day but I spent so much time stressing about this evening's food experience I never did anything except the rudiments of getting ready and still I was late ...
Hope yous all had a cheery day too ... Cheerio for now!
Hey sounds like a good day. Hammies can wait until you're bored again! Have to say I'm not a great fan of Lebanese food, we have a load of it over here and it's all a bit 'meaty' for me. I was never great at spelling either and became a copywriter! Thank goodness for spellcheck and proof readers!
ReplyDeleteI wonder how many educational fads were a total waste of time.
ReplyDeleteApparently it exists in all languages. My son learnd with this system too and it didn't work in french either. The strange thing is that he still makes plenty of faults when he writes in french and not a single one when he writes in English and English he had never learned at school ! He picked it up while working in London ! So now he always writes me in English so I can't get angry that he still can't write in french correctly, lol !
ReplyDeleteI had to teach my girls to sound out words to learn to pronounce them, then had to teach them about syllables. So it's thanks to me they can spell so well.
ReplyDeleteThe education system today is pretty dodgy and is letting the kids down. Employers are not interested in reading resumes that a full of spelling and grammatical errors with no punctuation (or apostrophes in the wrong place...my personal bugbear).
I hope your mum's husband didn't suffer too much from his rather dubious sounding meal...
BAINO: How did you become a copywriter? Who with? Was it a big ad agency? Did you get paid £$£$£gerzillions? Do you think I could get a job like that?? Would I need a spellchecker? (Yes...)
ReplyDeleteLOU: a total fucking waste of time. I mean they propound that phonics is "universal" ... yeah right, tell that to the Chinese!
GATTINA: o man all those nonpronounced word endings in French ... totally did my head in. That's why I so much preferred German. Also Germans enunciate their speech far more clearly. Beautiful as their language may be, French people sound like they're prattling with a mouth full of jelly and potatoes ...
PUSSINBOOTS: O no it didn't make him ill. I just don't think he was expecting a bowl full of lumps floating in something white ...
I think I was the very last generation actually to get taught about apostrophe's (haha!) semicolons; and : colons. The kids nowadays are totally lost and no number of spellcheckers or computer-enhanced grammatixx ain't gonna save #'em!!** £$%^*&^%!!
I agree with you on the subject of phonetics. I think it just confuses children when, in the end, they have to learn how to spell the words properly anyway. Why not just start off learning to spell in the first place?! :O)
ReplyDeleteHubby and I read to our daughter from her being a baby and she's been reading for herself ever since she was able to. She would have been an excellent speller now if it wasn't for the confusion the phonetic system has caused.
When our eldest son was due to start school we had the choice of two schools one of which taught phonetic English. At the school open evening I asked them to explain the point of it to be told that it gets children reading quickly. I asked but reading what? They won't be able to pick up a book from the library and read that will they? I told them thanks but no thanks and sent him to the other school where they taught traditional English. Phonetics only lasted one year at the school, I felt sorry for the students who had endured it only to have to start again learning to read proper English. :(
ReplyDeleteSee it's nonsense. I remember Ruth Kelly coming on the Radio 4 Today programme defending her choice of Synthetic Phonics as the reading method of choice today in force across all primary schools. All she could do was parrot that Synthetic Phonics has the best success rate in 80% of pupils ... But what about the poor 20% like me who found it utterly impenetrable?!!??
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