In Whole Or In Part--The Reading Genius pt 1

There is a lot of discussion in educational circles about the benefits of phonics vs whole word learning. 

Back in the day, whole word was the norm.  People learned words-as-a-whole instead of first learning parts of words and sounds and building up to words.

Here is an excellent article from an educator who saw the evolution from whole word to phonics then, with her own child, found whole word to be best.

Go ahead and read it.  We'll wait......

Ok, now either that article made sense to you OR it was hard to wrap your mind around.  If you are a visual/spatial person who learns the whole, then breaks down into parts, this made sense.  If you are an auditory/sequential person, you like to build up from parts to a whole and you might have trouble understanding how someone can learn best from looking at the whole, then breaking down. 

Here is a "sort of fits" analogy that might help.

VS brains work like doing a jigsaw puzzle.  When people get a jigsaw puzzle out, they look at the picture (the whole), then may organize the puzzle pieces by color blocking them (blue bird here, red flower there, edge pieces).  Then they start breaking the pieces that make a red flower into shades of red (the underside of the flower is a darker red and the upper part is a lighter red). Then they break down into shapes.  They know what the end result is supposed to be, the whole, and break down from there.

AS folk are a little more like lego instructions.  Yes, they know they are building a spaceship, but even if they don't, it doesn't matter.  Lego instructions are very precise and start with, say, getting 5 specific pieces out.  Then you put those together IN SPECIFIC ORDER.  Then you get another five pieces out.  Then you put those together in specific order and connect them to the first 5.  Slowly you build from a single blue x2 block to an airplane.  You don't actually have to know what you are building because the brain is fine with step 1, step 2, and eventually ending up at an airplane.

The VS brains, though, need the whole because they work spatially, not sequentially. 

Parenthetically, this might be why some kids struggle in algebra and other maths where there is not a goal, a whole to break down from. Most elementary and almost all high school math (except perhaps geometry) never tell you where you are going, what you are trying to achieve.  I believe it would be most useful for the VS learner to start at the higher, more abstract math and break it down into its components.

Either way, phonics is very much "one piece, then two piece" where whole word is "whole then part".  Some brains just REALLY do better with one than the other.  Those who do not understand how someone can learn to read "whole word" have to understand that the same bewilderment or doubt you feel for that way of understanding is the same that VS folk feel about phonics.  It is random pieces of information that are unrelated.

More on that in the next post....