#Post haste etymology professional#

There was a thread on whether the vowel in bang, sang, hang, etc., is ‘long’ or ‘short.’ It was a long conversation about who’s pronouncing what, taking place among people who, like my Pennsylvania colleague, are highly trained and knowledgeable about the English language. I do some of my best writing in response to those questions. Actually, questions pop up on Facebook every day. The second thing keeping me up was a question that had popped up on Facebook about spelling and, of course, pronunciation. I looked at my colleague and asked her, “So at what point does she suggest children have mastered their phonology?”Īnd now I’m looking at you and asking you to consider at what point you mastered your phonology, and what exactly that means. My colleague brought it up because after a few hours of orthographic study with me, she could so clearly see that morphology and etymology both outrank phonology in the hierarchy of the writing system’s concerns, and she was well aware that she was being warned away from my work and the work of my orthographic scholarship community, because it threatens the rabidly phonocentric foundations of the trainer’s life’s work. Just let that sink in: children need to master their phonology first. “But the fact is that children need to master their phonology first.” It went something like this: after a lively discussion about language and teaching, the training session ended with BW admonishing her teacher trainers: “You’ll hear a lot of talk out there about morphology and etymology,” she said. But this story was sticking with me because it offers such clear evidence that people highly trained in multisensory structured language education are getting really bad information, right from the top, as though it were scientific or factual. A lot of people are laboring through the whole erroneous sound-it-out, A-is-for-Apple thing out there. So first, I want to acknowledge that this is total hearsay I am now reporting this to you third-hand, which is probably irresponsible, but it’s not like I’m going out on a very far limb: it’s a ubiquitous perspective, and one that confronts me a lot in my work.

#Post haste etymology professional#

She was summarizing for me some comments she had heard from a bigwig phonics apologist (we’ll call her BW for BigWig) during a professional development event. The first thing I kept turning over was something I heard from a colleague while I was on the road. I didn’t consider them to be related, but of course, there are no coincidences. After my return, I found myself turning over a couple of conversations in my head. By the time I get home, all I want to do is watch a little Netflix and go to bed, but my brain doesn’t wind down so easily. The travel itself is a slog - three hours in a car, four hours on a plane, several more hours in a rental car for a few days, another four hours on a plane, another three hours in a car. Over the summer I had the privilege of traveling to Pennsylvania to work with some old colleagues and make some new ones.