Word: alphabets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...English is taught via French at Manhattan's Ecole Française (enrollment: 224), a private grade school that believes in early language learning and reading-by-phonics. French, being more phonetic, is easier to learn first. Kindergartners start by handling Montessori method alphabet cards with "tactile" sandpaper letters, soon form words and start reading and writing in French. Apparently they have no trouble switching to English in first grade: "We just add the sounds," says the headmistress, Mrs. Eric Correa. Now the kids are doing arithmetic in French as well as English...
...anti-Administration "aye"; it had seesawed to a 13-13 tie by the time the clerk reached Douglas of Illinois. Two-thirds of the way down the list the Administration led, 37 to 31, but still ahead was the "murderers' row" of conservatives at the end of the alphabet...
...Alphabet Soup. At Vandenberg the crews get their most crucial training. Few get a chance to fire an actual missile like last week's. But they come close to the real thing with the help of the Atlas T-601 Trainer, an $800,000 simulator in which each crew must spend from six to eight hours a day for two weeks. The trainer has all the gear of a real block house, plus the machinery by which instructors can crank out data on 200-odd possible missile malfunctions. It is the trainees' job to run their countdowns...
During a simulated countdown, the instructor, watching the trainee crew from behind the broad glass pane of a control room, punches his troublemaking buttons and watches the countdown as the crew takes corrective action and snaps out comments and orders in bizarre alphabet-soup missile talk: PDU pressure low. Valve L14 in open position. Get a MOCAM team out here ASAP...
Whenever the child's hand touches something, the teacher takes the other hand and spells into it by touch-alphabet the name of the object: doll, water, mother, mug, spoon. The child imitates the hand motions, but does not understand. Yet repetition of touch-spelled words in a framework of discipline is the only way that a spark can ever jump the distance between imitation and imagination, so the teacher is rough and unsentimental. The child kicks and slaps, and the teacher slaps back. The famous ten-minute fight between them is fully as long and exhausting on film...