WEEKLY WARNING WORDS
September 14, 2004 - Week 52 - __ __ __ Reading & Arithmetic
BY DR. BRUNO J. KEITH
The liveliest stories with benevolent consequences can only become the solid foundation of an improved citizenship if we could learn to teach the basic processes more successfully. The lucky kids with caring parents & educational home traditions can find their own way to increase their happiness in and out of school. But the half of our population which is ruined by smoking, alcohol imbibing & addiction to highly popularized drugs of the dregs of our pharmaceutical seducers & real drug pushers can only continue to vegetate by being bound to the TV sets & upsetting programs. They are abused abusers & imminent dangers to their children's mental health & physical survivalism. Their kids can only be saved if they can be taught to read the good & the best the easiest way.
Thus teachers are morally obligated to revise their idiotic teaching of reading. I say, teach the 3000 basic words which are spelled & read as they sound. Start by throwing out for the first few years the Greek Alpha Betha nonsense. Parent & Teacher should never ever mention that moronic ay, be(e), cee(see) stuff until children can read well. As early as possible, let b, B be what it looks like & add one vowel at a time by using its simplest pronunciation. Make be = b & e. The other pronunciations of e must be delayed until the short o is known & used. Only one sound for c (k sound) at one time (cat), sounded out like K and a short ä. Perhaps 2 new consonants of one sound each to the new easiest sound of one vowel at one time. (I threw out my bundle of writing-reading-spelling cards when a local principal's haole wife assured this then 85 year-old-exteacher that all of their school's students could read. That was 2 days after 2 mothers of very gifted 6 graders had told me they couldn't really read & that the rest of their classmates had given up on trying to read. But if I can get my act together, I hope to put on my internet page an abbreviated primer for a daily card development, to print out the only promising direction all schools could take to do their job well enough. Ok?
Arithmetic could also be made simpler, easier & more logical. We should recognize that the Hungarian-French "New Math" was only a theoretical whopper. It never came close to teaching logic, common sense and mathematical brains. There should be a way to force US to discard the retarding, unnecessary duodecimal system, its inches, feet & impossible square deals & cubics. Concurrently, let us try also again to drop the a.m. & p.m. thing. With a 24 hour-hour clock & a clean decimal system we could learn & teach by the tens & tenths, the hundreds & hundredths the fastest, easiest & obvious ways.
Our scientists & military geniuses were unhappy when they learned that neither our teachers nor parents could help their children to unlearn absurdities & learn the simple system which reduces labor, multiplies or divides all numbers by ten or its multiples. It can be learned in a day if you stop ever mentioning the damned inches, feet, yards & miles again. Don't compare the new with the old system. Just begin & end with the zero & zeros before the midst of the first school year. You play around with this system & make it fun & easy.
You still have to add, subtract, multiply & divide. But you can teach simple interest of 1%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, orally in the 2nd school year. All you have to explain is that 100% is the whole amount, 50% a half of it, 25% = ¼ etc. You immediately teach decimals by moving the decimal point 1 place to the left to find 10% & one more to the left to know what 1%, 1/100, amounts to. Then add & subtract & divide to find the amounts in between. I once taught a class of first graders all this in 2 hours. Their poor immigrant parents thought that their kids were then able to enter college the next year. I hope modern math teachers will have the courage to begin teaching what is reasonable, possible & necessary regardless of the warnings of stupid parents or school administrators.
Our Armed Forces & our airlines must stop at once using the 12 hour clock. The a.m. & p.m. confuses travel schedules & many schedulers. We tried, right after World War II, to take up the 24 hr. system but were shouted down by 90% of our populace.
Unfortunately, our calculators & computers destroy everyone's will to use head, mind & intelligence & attacking math massivewise by using charts which show everything the plain & logical way, the do-it-yourself way & the fun way. Now dead reckoning by computer dulls our minds & keeps our Math & Arithmetic close to the zero level.
The Limbaugh Rush turned me off years ago when he made big mistakes in simplest subtractions, multiplications & interest. Neither he nor Jim Lehrer could round off decimals. And Limbo got lost in his presumptious use of the few French words he misused & mispronounced. Limbaugh seems to have now Ph.D. slaves. Lehrer cannot afford such help.
King Charles VIII of France may have had 6 fingers & 6 toes on each limb & sort of justified the 12 system. It took a A Great French Revolution to force our decimal (10) system on a conservative public. Don't try conversion of the one into the other. Throw old books, tools & all duodecimal thinking into the lap of the Smithsonian Institution. A radical entrance into the already worldwide decimal system is needed; schools are bound to pick up & share an enthusiasm for numbers, figures of all known & still unknown dimensions. We would also create a million real jobs of great importance.
But our doing this depends on the non-reliance on most modern & expensive computers for the education for drudges. Rather, develop the old tables & charts, expand them in class & Xerox them, so that students can find answers to real questions before they have to hit the keyboard. The computer could assist in quick check-ups & verifications of the number games & lifelong problems. If you can infuse an understanding, logic & love of the world of figures, mathematics & astronomy, you can do without continuing the use of modern & expensive technology for Japanese Zapp & murder childishness. Cannot we, at least, try to create millions of true wizards out of the witches of death games?
Whenever I tried to tell teachers how the addition chart could also be used for subtraction & the multiplication chart for division, they were too busy saving the souls of young gamblers who hoped for big wins in an illegal cockfight or secret gambling backrooms. Yet, these same born-again pious souls played number games on their own schoolteams & church bingo, too.
The ones with better bureaucrat salaries brought their loot to Las Vegas but voting always against gambling in California, Hawaii or other statisms. Not one religious character admitted the hypocrisy of it. When their idol, Frank Sinatra, was forced into Washington hearings about his Mafia connections, he admitted that many of the giants of the Italian Mafia were his relatives, friends or, at least, acquaintances.
Not one of the 2 Senators & 2 Houslers from Hawaí'i explained the case: Yes, Sinatra was the co-founder of Las Vegas numbers; but his allies were of the Japanese Yakusa. Nappy (Napoleon) Pulawa & Henry Huihui were his allies. Those collected enforced protection money, outlawed competitive enterprise & murdered in that process quite a few nameless persons, a Japanese State Senator & 2 12-year old girlfriends. (The latter deeds didn't increase punishment because 12 had been the "year of consent" although their state legislators had just increased to 14 the year of permissible sex involvement.
Does President Bush know how many of his billions were taken by his richest friends, supporters & homeland anti-gambling pushers off-shore to gambling cruise ships? These private gambling racketeers & professional pious hypocrites prevent income from local supervised & honest gambling to help pay for the special expenditures of public schools for special education for the physically and for the mentally "challenged" which his parochial schools avoid unless hugely rewarded. Gambling income could also force old nonsense to be modernized & help the caring Liberals to finally reform education, so that all the schools of every level finally become the models for a democratic world.
Week 53- September 22, 2004 - Healthy Caring?