Word: monkey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Massachusetts has made some progress since the days when it banned Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but not much. This week, for example, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was banned with no fuss, no hysteria, no monkey-trial shenanigans. It was a reasonable hearing in which reasonable men argued their sides before a reasonable judge. Yet the decision revealed that this is still the commonwealth of the Yahoos, the Grundys and the Comstocks...
...Monkey. Yet the children could pronounce and spell those incomprehensible words. Using phonics, they had learned to build from letters to words. The reforms, cresting in the 1930s, played down the meaning of letters and played up the meaning of words. The result was the "look-say" and "whole-word" methods of teaching. Children were supposed to be taught first to "see" words and then break them into letters and syllables, but teachers rarely got around to carrying out the second step effectively...
...sorts of "research" was used to justify the change. The work of such experts as Arthur I. Gates of Columbia's Teachers College seemed to prove that children recognize words by visible "clues." For example, said Gates, the "tail" (or y) at the end of the word denotes monkey to children. Soon children were asked to recognize the "two little eyes" in moon-with logical results. Since letters meant nothing, moon turned into boon, loon or soon. Now, say critics. U.S. children are mired in a whole lexicon of reading errors-bolt for blot, bouquet for banquet, cottage...
...night, a candy-striped Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house (no witch), a turreted castle with winding stairs (and "Stoop" signs for the adults), and a walk-in birdcage. In Mouseville, built to resemble a big cheese, they can study scurrying white mice, and in the Hurdy-Gurdy House, a monkey swings to music. Best of all. they can slide down a "rabbit hole" just like Alice, and walk into the mouth of a huge whale just like Jonah...
...after his death, she impulsively married Captain Horace G. Brown, sometime skipper of an oceangoing tanker and former cop, who looked very much like William Randolph Hearst. The marriage almost ended within a year as Brown began making a nuisance of himself: he pushed her into the pool, his monkey bit her, and he let the air out of the tires of visitors' automobiles. She decided to ignore him and became absorbed with real estate interests, acquiring office buildings in Manhattan, Palm Springs' Desert Inn, and 360,000 acres in Mexico...