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Laurie has worked as a medical editor and writer for many years. She is the author of the upcoming book Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free, which is being published by Freedom of Speech Publishing.
Sunday, April 14, 2013 Why Trolls Attack! (27 comments)
Some Internet trolls are just jerks. They simply want to annoy other people. Others imagine that they are taking part in a genuine intellectual exchange. The problem is that they never learned grammar and logic in school. Thus, they never learned to parse or reason. As a result, they have no idea that they are unreasonable.
Saturday, February 23, 2013 What I Learned From the McGuffey Readers (5 comments)
The McGuffey Readers taught me that the children of my generation were learning abnormally slowly by historical standards. The problem was that the educational system in the United States had abandoned direct instruction in intensive phonics. Our educational system is still using sight words instead of intensive phonics for teaching reading, and children are still learning slowly, if at all.
Saturday, February 16, 2013 Why Not Let a Child Escape From a Bad Teacher? (4 comments)
If a child is suffering because his or her teacher is a bully or is simply not connecting with that child, why should the child have to finish the entire year in that classroom? Transferring the child to a different classroom can help the child and can reveal the cause of the problem.
Saturday, January 26, 2013 You Can Fix Stupid (10 comments)
Comedian Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid." Yet philosophy and education were developed specifically for the purpose of "fixing stupid." If people remain stupid after having been through school, then their schools need to be fixed.
Sunday, December 16, 2012 The Unspeakable Original Intent of the Second Amendment (42 comments)
The original purpose of the Second Amendment was never to enable citizens to attack their government. It was to enable white men to control slaves and Indians.
Friday, November 2, 2012 Lesson from the Hurricane: We Need Government, Not Charity (9 comments)
Big disasters show us the need for big government. If we had to rely on private charity, the help that we'd get would be too little, too late, wildly inappropriate, or with too many strings attached.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 Hopefully, Grammar Schools Will Go Back to Teaching Grammar
It's okay to use 'hopefully' as a sentence adverb. It's not okay that so many of our public schools in the United States have stopped teaching grammar. The study of grammar provides the basic skills that one needs for logical thinking. That's why grammar was traditionally taught to free people but not to slaves.
Sunday, July 15, 2012 The Three Stooges Do Phonics!
The Three Stooges knew the importance of systematic instruction in phonics. Unfortunately, many of our educators do not.
Monday, June 4, 2012 Someone Else's Weed-Killers Are Killing My Tomato Plants (1 comments)
Beware of using manure to fertilize your vegetable garden. The manure could contain long-lasting herbicides (weed-killers) that can destroy your vegetables.
Sunday, May 13, 2012 Starches Are the Solution to Your Weight and Health Problems (7 comments)
The Starch Solution explains that a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables is the easy and natural way to control weight and prevent or reverse chronic disease.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Why Did the Educators in the U.S. Abandon Phonics? (1 comments)
The scientific evidence was always clear: intensive phonics is the best way to teach people to read English. So why did so many American educators discard phonics altogether, or at least push it to the sidelines? Is it because effective public education was destroying the privileges of the upper middle class?
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 Constipation Can Cause Pants-Wetting and Bed-Wetting
If a child or teen is wetting his or her pants or wetting the bed, the real cause may be constipation. Adding more fiber to the diet and eliminating dairy products usually solves the problem.
Thursday, March 22, 2012 Yet Another Silly Study About White Rice! (3 comments)
A recent article blames white rice for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Yet populations that have based their diet on white rice have been largely free of both problems. How can that be?
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 Should Children Learn to Read What the Writer Actually Wrote? (3 comments)
Children who aren't taught phonics have trouble learning to read. Many educators think that it's okay to teach children to guess instead of to read what's really on the page, but is that really reading?
Friday, March 16, 2012 Does Your Child Need Drugs or Phonics? (6 comments)
Many emotional and behavior problems in children are the result of an ineffective approach to teaching reading, not to a disease of the child's nervous system. Many of these problems go away by themselves if a proper method is used to teach the child to read.
Friday, March 16, 2012 Is Your Child Really Reading, or Just Guessing?
This article describes a simple test that parents can use to see whether their children are really reading, or are simply guessing. Unless children can accurately identify the words that were actually written, they aren't reading.
