Zig

She would have learned to read anyway. Her 100 lessons took 100 days. There are 180 days in a school-year, if you don't count the weekends. Maybe she would have made the same progress if we had spent the time another way.

My own experience of learning, in childhood and now, is of sometimes feeling ahead of where I was 100 days ago but never feeling ahead of where I was yesterday. Taking a class or reading a book is confusing. It is hard to follow along but I can hope that I will have gotten something useful out of it in retrospect. 

"Teach your child to read" showed me a different model. The glass filled up with water. It felt like I was holding the pitcher. I wasn't scientific about it, I was just impressed. Who made this curriculum?

Siegfried Engelmann died in 2019. He has a website that was updated at least as recently as 2012. "Teach your child to read" was published in 1983. He might have been on the Merv Griffin show in 1966, promoting one of two books he wrote that year. Before that, he was in advertising. He was born in 1931.

It looks like a lot of that long career, maybe everything after 1966, he spent developing a curriculum called "Direct Instruction" and pitching it to public schools and to politicians. That's a battlefield. Zig has critics.

Lots of his writing online is addressed to those critics, and I don't understand it. "Teach your child to read" is crystal clear and it seemed to work, but it was not easy to find out what else you can do this way with a five-year-old. There are other "Direct Instruction" products but they are expensive, not available by interlibrary loan, and probably can't be used like "Teach your child to read." They are for classrooms.

But there are two videos on his website, one from 1963 of his twin four-year-old boys, one from 1966 with seven children who had not yet started first grade, who might have been in a preschool he ran with Carl Bereiter. They are showing off what math they can do. The twins in 1963 are a little ahead of the class in 1966, who were way ahead of Maria in 2020. 

The twins methodically work out the sum of 355 and 297, solve for R given D = 9R and D = 36, add fractions like 2/7+33/7 and 2/2+20/4, find one of the sides of a rectangle given its area and another side, and more. They take turns with the problems and only make one mistake, in between reels.

The kids in 1966 had memorized a little more of the times tables than the twins had. The twins will study the problem for a moment, say something like "count by nines how many times to get to 36?" and then consult a big sheet of paper behind them with a handwritten multiplication table on it to find out. They think out loud about each problem, and it sounds like they really know what is going on as they work.

In June my daughter was a full year older than these boys and didn't know that 8+1=9. If Zig Engelmann had written a book called "Teach your child math in 100 lessons," I would like to find it. Here is a hint from elsewhere on his website:

Jerry Silbert had been urging me to put Give Your Child a Superior Mind online. I didn’t want to do that because a large part of the book provides instructional sequences for reading and math. We have better ways to teach these subjects now than we did back in 1966, so I resisted Jerry’s suggestion. Finally, he urged me to put the first part of the book online. After quite a few urgings, I decided that I should at least read the first part, which I hadn’t done since 1966. I read it, and I was very impressed. I didn’t think that what I wrote back then would hold up so well.

I don't mind the boasting, he might have earned it. That title bothers me but maybe it wouldn't have in 1966. The book is long out of print. The part that Zig put online doesn't have any math in it, and I still haven't found out what "better ways to teach these subjects" he is talking about. I ordered a used copy for 60 bucks. It came in July, it looks just like a crummy paperback self-help book. Maria is almost through it.