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Learning a habit is different from other kinds of learning: often we are not aware of developing a habit, and we develop it slowly over time. "The process doesn't seem to go in reverse, or else we don't have access to the means to reverse it," Graybiel said.
MIT researcher sheds light on why habits are hard to make and break
This is why you don't want your school using balanced literacy to teach your child to read: you don't want your child developing the habit of relying on "context cues" (i.e. pictures) or "word shapes" in order to decode text.
You want your child to learn to look at the first letter in a word and scan straight through to the final letter -- and to do it fast.
Period.
Bad habits are bad.
and see:
Habits, Rituals and the Evaluative Brain by Ann Graybiel
Annual Review of Neuroscience
Vol. 31: 359-387 (Volume publication date July 2008)
the mix-and-muck-up-the-children method of teaching reading
2 comments:
I have a bit about bad habits on my website, in which I compare whole word teaching to learning how to throw like a girl:
http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Phonics/phonicsandfootba.html
It is a lot of work to overcome the guessing habits of a remedial student.
I read that!
The horrifying thing is that you can't "forget" a habit. Once you've learned it, it's there forever (as I understand what she's saying.)
From what I understand, you have to "inhibit" habit memory in order to create a new habit.
Here's something creepy: kids with ADHD probably don't inhibit prior learning as well as other kids.
The boy/girl ratio for ADHD is something like 4 to 1....and we see huge numbers of boys having reading problems compared to girls.
I'll get some of the material on this posted.
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