IntendoPrinceps

I have a graduate degree in ornithology

You've been waiting for this moment your whole life, haven't you?

Professor Dawkins and Dr. Krauss,

In your experience, what is the best argument in favor of religion?

Col. Aldrin

You've been my hero since I was a young boy growing up in Houston. I was raised in the aviation community and while other kids were reading about baseball players or football players I was reading books about aviation history and basic fighter maneuvering.

I recently graduated college and completed Air Force ROTC as a pilot select, unfortunately I was medically disqualified from service a few weeks before commissioning. The trajectory of my entire life was focused on my eventual goal of being accepted into the Astronaut Corps, and now I find myself thoroughly derailed.

My question is this: what can I do now to further the efforts of space exploration?

Thank you again for everything you've done to inspire me and others like me, I know for a fact I would not be the same person without your example.

Just so you know, she's probably referring to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

I think you're misinterpreting the distinction between "whole word method" and what you call "sounding it out". When you tell a child to sound a word out enough times, they're learning how a single word is pronounced and then replicating that result until they know that pattern X is the word "_____" which is pronounced in a certain way. Their brain sees a shape composed of a distinct pattern of letters, and because they've sounded it out a couple hundred times before they don't really "read" the word this time but just replicate the prior result (shape-> sound -> word). In this way, the number of words they can read efficiently is limited by the number of shapes a child's brain can distinguish and memorize. By using phonemes, they read each word as a distinct pattern of sounds rather than letters, and in doing so they avoid the whole word acquisition model whose weaknesses Dr. OP is seeking to correct. They only have to remember the 40 phonemes to read efficiently, rather than the many thousands of words of the English language.