In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.

What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.

The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)

Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.

I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.

And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.

I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.

It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).

When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.

So sad.

The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.

I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?).

Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.

I was an atrocious speller until I moved back to foreign-land and had to take English class with my schoolmates.

Learning how people mispronounce English phonetically fixed most of my spelling.

It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.

Indeed, another tale of pure waste. How many of the opposite experiments are there? Is there at least 1 perfectly set up non-trivial experiment that added definitive knowledge in this sphere?

I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.

I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.

The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.

And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.

I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.

If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it.

https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....