Space Race - Education Race?

I have recently been working on an article for Converge magazine. I am finding it very interesting to talk with older collegues and family members about what they recall from teh early 60's and JFK's push to get to the moon before the Russians. In my explorations, I found a new site called White House Tapes (http://www.whitehousetapes.org/). This is one of the coolest sites I have seen in a while...especially if you are a history buff. At the site, you can read transcripts from many conversations between presidents and high ranking officials as they discuss topics that changed the world. What better way to learn history than to hear it from the creators!

Speaking of newly discovered sites and speaking of speaking...check this site out: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#

They call it the Phonetics Flash Animation Project. At the site, they demonstrate through animation, video and audio, all of the sounds of the English language! With a 6 year old at home trying to learn to read and a 4 year old that "kips" the beginning "s" sounds all the time, (S is overrated anyway isn't it?) this site helps educate me and my wife about all the phonetic sounds that we should be working on with our boys. It is amazing that I was trained in early childhood education (1-8) and thought that I knew how to teach kids to read. It is not until I am working with my own children that I realize how difficult it really is.

My undergraduate work was done at the hayday of the "whole language" vs. "phonics" debate. Whole language was the prefered method at Miami at the time and it really seemed to make sense to me. Working in a 3rd grade classroom right after school, the whole language approach worked. Someone had already given then kids the basics.

This brings me to the title of the blog again...the History of Education
History of Education...and Why None of it Matters!

How much of our undergraduate courses focused on the latest fad? Did we waste our time? Are all of those methods still viable? I am not sure.

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