♫Except for the few we take home to experiment...♫- an Alphabet Soup of Primary Education

[captainsblog]

Not a lot to report (or at least that I can report) from the day's work, so I thought I'd go back over a discussion of things in my early days. The next two days bring the anniversaries of my 1965 graduation from kindergarten and my 1977 exit from the same school district's high school. In between, as I mentioned a few entries back, I was offered an opportunity to shave a year off that process, one I did not take when the invite came near the end of third grade:

I, and a handful of other bright eight-year olds from our school, were invited to join something called the EAP- Elementary Acceleration Program.  It would have moved me to a different elementary school, probably by bus (Prospect Elementary was a block away), and I would have completed fourth through sixth grade curriculum in just two years.  I was incredibly honored, as much as an eight-year-old could be; Mom, though, was adamant that I not do it. As a November baby when the cutoff for school entry was December 1st, I was already one of the youngest kids in my grade, and she was scared to death of the "galoots" at the junior high bullying me when I got there a year younger. (Spoiler alert: they did anyway.)

I found myself wondering if this program continued in some form, because I never ran into anyone from anywhere else, other than some true super geniuses, who had been "accelerated" in this way. So I asked a later East Meadow resident, who has studied and written extensively on mainly the 20th century history of the little burg I originally called home. He replied, starting by clarifying that I've had the name of the program wrong in my head all these years:

EAP stood for Experimental Acceleration Program and was a big "thing" when you went to school but has been gone for decades. In the past 40 years or so, East Meadow has had a program called "Quest" that does not accelerate kids but instead offers a pull-out class for kids in grades 4-6. ...Anyway, the original EAP was highly controversial in nature because, to make a long story very short, there was a religious and political divide regarding spending taxpayer dollars on a gifted program. Essentially, liberal Jews were in favor of it and conservative Christians were opposed. This pattern was similar to many other curricular programs in East Meadow at the time. School board members often ran in favor of or against special programs. Since Prospect Avenue School and Salisbury School were almost entirely Jewish and the Board of Education became very conservative, they were among the first to be shuttered... along with their gifted and talented programs that catered to the "Cadillac Crowd," as the anti-Semites called them. Officially, of course, the schools and the programs were canned because the student population was shrinking after the Baby Boom ended.

When I read that, all I could say was, Oy.

Prospect wasn't "almost entirely Jewish" in my day- St. Raphael's RC had a substantial population- but somehow I don't recall any religious friction among at least the kids back then. (Racial friction, unfortunately, was another matter, for the rare Black kid who slipped past the Realtors and redlining and deed restrictions to get into our classes.) I also don't remember the "conservative Christians" being much of a political force in at least our community. But then, I was privileged enough not to have to pay attention to such things. 

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EAP wasn't the only "experiment" going on in 60s education. In elementary school, I enjoyed one, was barely spared a second and caught the tail end of a third.

By the time I got to school, I was already reading "chapter books," although nobody called them that back then.  All through elementary school, we were encouraged to supplement our classroom reading through a program called SRA. It stood for Science Research Associates, and it took us through color-coded levels of "on our own time" reading materials.  I don't remember it quite the way this snarky post goes through, but I do know I was rockin' silver by the time I got to fourth or fifth grade.  Best as I can tell, McGraw-Hill still pimps the product, but I don't recall Emily or any other kid of her acquaintance working with it. (By her day, publishers had moved off the free stuff model and started sending home monthly catalogs of supplemental reads that we could buy and have delivered, or Em could attend the Scholastic Book Fairs with Snoop Cliffy Cliff urging even more purchases.)

One advantage of these books was that they were all in English.  Kids a year younger than me at Prospect weren't so lucky. Those who learned to read there and then were subjected to an experiment called i.t.a.  It's apparently de rigueur to put it in all lower case, consistent with the program's demand of simplicity: The Initial Teaching Alphabet

was conceived by James Pitman, grandson of Isaac Pitman, developer of the famous shorthand system of note-taking still in use today. What James Pitman thought was not dissimilar from the ideas of Stephen Linstead, Chair of the English Spelling Society Spelling reform. Pitman thought that if he could produce a single symbol for every one of the forty-four sounds in English, children would have a simplified and very easy system to learn. Doing so would give us a writing code not unlike Italian or Spanish.
 

Most of the single letter spellings, the one-to-ones remained the same. So, the spelling in ‘bat’ remained the same as in our accepted orthography. Where the system differed was in many of the two-letter consonant and vowel spellings. Thus, Here’s an example: /th/ (unvoiced) in the word ‘thin’ was spelt q; /th/ (voiced) in the word ‘this’ was spelt d; the sound /ae/ as in ‘gate’ was spelt æ; and, the sound /oe/ in ‘goat’ was spelt œ.

If we had a system for spelling the forty-four sounds in English (forty-five in some accents) with one symbol, learning to read and spell would be easy. For example, the sentence ‘I have a goat’ would be written: ‘I hav a gœt’. At the time, Ladybird produced books to support the approach. To give you an idea of what they looked like, here is an example from a book called The Fisherman:

Kids being kids, the first-graders with these tomes were mercilessly mocked for being stupid for having to learn such things. What adults didn't get, in making this all up, is that the kids taught in this system were instantly deprived of access to supplemental reading material not written in this pidgin. 

By that writer's account, i.t.a. was d.o.a. in most places by the early 1970s, and good riddance to it. Wait, I think that sentence is missing a schwa:P

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The other lingering experiment I did get stuck with was foreign language.  Prospect actually began such instruction in fifth grade, which many schools didn't do. It was not a daily subject, though, and your introduction to Spanish or French was decided strictly by the year your class came up to begin it. Mrs. Kraith, clearly not a native speaker of either, was dispatched to instruct us in español on a very basic level for a couple hours a week.  Much of it involved rote memorization of "dialogues" that remain stuck in my head lo these 50 years later.

I am not the only one with such memories.  This blogger identifies the method as another that had been discredited- this one by the likes of Noam Chomsky around the time I was born, but her school, just like mine, hung on to it probably because they'd been suckered into buying all the accompanying shit for it. Prospect didn't have the full el montero of it, but our junior high went all-in with the language lab, the headphones, and the vinyl records with these immortal tales of Latinx drama:

My quest to learn Spanish began in 9th grade by memorizing a dialog I still remember today:

Hola, Isabel, como estas?
Estoy bien, gracias, y tu?
Bien gracias. Oye, quien es ese chico?
Es un amigo mio.
Como se llama?
Se llama Juan. Ven y te lo presento.

This was accomplished by Mrs. S presenting bits of phrases for us to repeat over and over the first week of class. We were not given a book nor allowed to see any of this in writing. The second week, we threaded the phrases into still-unintelligible sentences. The third week we repeated these sentences in unison with an LP that played through our antiquated headphones. If all this wasn't funny enough, the headphones were not synchronized, and some were off by as much as five seconds, resulting in mayhem dressed up in very bad Spanish accents.

One of the dialogs we memorized those first weeks took place in a school cafeteria and had one student declare to another, "Albondigas! No te dije?" Even then, we all knew that there would never come a time when we would have occasion to say, "Meatballs! Didn't I tell you?" It soon became a secret shorthand outside of class. Whenever an adult did something we thought silly or asinine, one of us would shake our heads sadly and sigh, "Albondigas! No te dije?" and the rest of us would laugh our heads off. This continued until a new student from Puerto Rico smirkingly informed us that we were screaming out a word that was slang for "testicles" in Spanish!

If you click the link to that whole blog entry, you'll see a comment from 2013 from a familiar sounding source, which recounts my own experience with that horrid method and how I nonetheless received high school and even Ivy League collegiate credit for not knowing what the fuck I was doing:

Ermagerd I still have these burned into my brain.

I took Spanish from fifth grade through sophomore year of college and never "learned" the language- but always got good grades because I wrote well in English and just translated word for word. The triumph was a higher-level Spanish lit class at Cornell in 1979. The class was mostly Latino engineering students taking it as their gut liberal arts course, and they wrote fluent technical manuals. I wrote my papers in English, translated them, and did better than they did.

In recent years, I've had friends tell me that Duolingo and Rosetta Stone and whatnot really worked for them. It would probably take me twice as long to start over because I'd have to erase those dialogues from my head.  And why should I? Me gusta albondigas.

 

Comments

Hahahahaha

[dauntless_heart]

You know, we don't get as much call to speak Spanish here as you might think. In El Paso--an hour away and closer to the border--yes. Once in awhile I have to call a staff member to the front that is a native Spanish speaker. Believe it or not, it's the coding on the vet records that's hard for us to decipher.

We had a dog in our first year that wouldn't respond to any or our commands. It wasn't until the owner showed up and said, "Aqui!" and the dog came right to his side, that we realized all his commands had been taught in Spanish. :)