The post <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1kun6vj/a_pronounced_issue/?cache-bust=1748168691953" author="the-mothermayhem" source="Reddit">A pronounced issue</a> is a Reddit repost of a Tumblr "essay" that describes the painful fallout of having taught an entire generation without phonetics, with only the "whole language" approach, which---checks notes---involves a whole lot of <i>wild guessing</i> because you have no tools with which to <i>analyze</i>---in the strictest sense of the word: i.e., "break down", or "parse" in the case of sentences, words, and phonemes---unfamiliar words. <n>The title is play on the once-popular <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism" source="Wikipedia">Bushism</a>: "Is our children learning?"</n> Below, I've included the images from the original re-posting on Reddit from a post whose origins are lost in the mists of time. Below that, I've included a transcript---using the <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/interact-with-text-in-a-photo-prvw625a5b2c/mac">Live Text</a> feature by copy/pasting text from the image in <i>Preview</i>---because reading text in pictures is so non-Gen-X-coded that ... I can't even. <img attachment="whole_learning_page_1.webp" align="left" caption="Whole Learning Page 1"><img attachment="whole_learning_page_2.webp" align="left" caption="Whole Learning Page 2"><img attachment="whole_learning_page_3.webp" align="left" caption="Whole Learning Page 3"> <clear><bq quote-style="none">I used to be mad about "whole language" reading approaches in theory but now I work with school-age kids and I am mad about it in practice. <b>me:</b> the word is "commute" <b>kid:</b> complete? <b>me:</b> do you see a P in that word? <b>kid:</b> uh.... compare? <b>me:</b> where are you getting a P??? sound it out. <b>kid:</b> com... complete? <b>me:</b> is that a P after the M? sound it out. <b>kid:</b> *stares blankly* <b>me:</b> [oh right, nobody taught them how to do this. fucking hell...] okay, we'll do this together [like it's kindergarden even though you're thirteen years old...]. what sound does C make? I am not a reading teacher or a dyslexia specialist but I'm having to do remedial phonics instruction for middle schoolers because nobody ever taught them how SO THEY CAN'T FUCKING READ I cannot overstate how much <b>these kids are just making wild guesses when I ask them to read something. Because that's what they were taught to do.</b> If you don't know a word, use context clues and make a guess at what you think the word might be. Which is a <b>fucking insane approach to reading</b>, by the way, and I could rant about this forever because this makes absolutely no sense and <b>I cannot figure out how the entire educational field was duped into thinking that this makes a lick of sense.</b> But I also want to emphasize that <b>even kids who are decent readers have this problem.</b> I work with some kids who straight-up can't read, but even my kids who absolutely can read will just guess wildly at an unfamiliar word. <b>Those kids will go back and sound it out if I force them to</b>, because they can read, so they have the necessary decoding skills. <b>But they have to be pushed to do it</b> and reminded several times to quit fucking guessing and read the actual letters on the page, Jason. For example. I have a kid who is actually a pretty strong reader - probably one of my best. The word was "disagreement." He made a couple of guesses - some nonsensical, but after pushing him to sound out the word, he got closer. He kept saying "dis-age-ment" and "dis-argue-ment." And I said okay, let's break this word down. <b>Me:</b> Is there anything in here you recognize? <b>Jason:</b> "The beginning is 'dis' and the end is 'ment' like argument, but I don't know the middle." <b>Me:</b> Great! Let's pull the middle out. I wrote the word "agree" on the page. <b>Me:</b> Do you know this word? <b>Jason:</b> "Age? Argue?" <b>Me:</b> SOUND. IT. OUT. <b>Jason:</b> "Ag... agriculture?" <b>Me:</b> Jason the love of god. I drew a line in the middle. Ag/ree. Sound out each part. <b>Jason:</b> "I don't know." <b>Me:</b> JASON. I wrote them out on opposite sides of the paper. Ag..........ree. What sound does ag make? <b>Jason:</b> "Ag?" <b>Me:</b> YES GREAT FANTASTIC. Now come all the way over here. Ree. Sound it out. <b>Jason:</b> "Are?" <b>Me:</b> JASON. R. E. E. <b>Jason:</b> "Rey? Ree?" <b>Me:</b> Yes, thank you, it's Ree. Put it together. <b>Jason:</b> "Ag...ree? Oh! It's disagreement!" <b>Me:</b> YES. EXCELLENT. THANK YOU. WHY WAS THIS SO HARD? <hl>#however the situation is better in liberal states that invest substantially more money into education than conservative states</hl> As much as I wish that was [sic] the case, "Jason" and all of his classmates are students in a <b>strongly blue state with some of the highest educational spending per student</b> in the country. I'm not saying the situation is better in red states - I've seen what my friends who are teaching in Texas are dealing with and the situation is dire. I'm just saying <b>it's less of a red/blue or funding issue than you might imagine.</b></bq> I thought of an analogy: Can you imagine seeing a color and being so helpless that you can't even <i>begin</i> to describe it? Do we just start yelling out sounds, in the vague hope that we'll get it? Of course not. We learn words for some colors by rote and then we start combining them. We'll say "reddish-brown" or "yellowish-green" or <i>something</i> sensible. We do the same thing for odors---and numbers and musical notes, and, like, everything man. I am mystified how an entire nation thought that they could stop doing this---just throw out the most battle-tested didactic tool I can think of because <i>learning is hard</i> and <i>it should be easy</i>. Sure, combinations don't always work and then maybe you'll then learn a new word like <span style="color: #e0b0ff"><i>mauve</i></span>, <span style="color: #483c32"><i>taupe</i></span>, <span style="color: chartreuse"><i>chartreuse</i></span>, <span style="color: #e34234"><i>vermillion</i></span>, <span style="color: #43b3ae"><i>verdigris</i></span>, <span style="color: lavender"><i>lavender</i></span>, or <span style="color: fuchsia"><i>fuchsia</i></span>, which there's no way you could have guessed. But your approximation will not have been completely off-base. It will be adequate for a lot of purposes. The "whole language" approach is what it looks like when you don't give people the tools to bootstrap, to be autodidacts. Do accomplished readers sound out words? No. They don't They know all of the words intuitively. Is there a way to skip the tedious part of learning a language and just jump right to the fluency of an accomplished reader? No. No, there isn't. This "whole language" approach feels very much like the AI-assisted approach to coding now being promoted for juniors and beginners. It will end in the same tragic mess that "whole language" has. No wonder people are home-schooling their kids. 🤦‍♂️