The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
More often than not, it was never alive, or it's changing rather than dying, or the whole rise and fall occurs in a small circle of people.
I have come to treat those headlines as clickbait for pearl-clutching twaddle. Same as "We need to..." and "It's time we..." headlines.
Is this one any different?
You find this kind of attitude across many subjects, not just basic literacy and it's always been quite puzzling. My own guess is that the idea of "structured and disciplined" teaching is a lot more offensive to teachers than students at the proper level. In fact, it can introduce a sort of enjoyable 'gamification' to the task of building up competence in any skill.
Of course it does, that's what the teacher is claiming. Expressly endorsing a less-structured approach, hoping that it will boost enjoyment among students who have yet to develop the basic skills of literacy. Even though the exact opposite is in fact more likely, with students being frustrated by an overly obscure, everything-goes approach.
Saying “I oppose X as a solution to a particular problem” isn’t the same as opposing X.
This statement is false.
By this point, children have already been exposed to a large portion of their parents' vocabulary even tangentially rather than directly.
The amount of attention that kids receive can vary depending on their parents' schedules.
The amount and quality of nutrition has a large impact on brain and cognitive development.
That's not even accounting for base genetic differences, but these differences do impact the epigenetic control of expression of proteins.
I am arguably middle class. I did put a lot of effort and money into making reading fun and interesting for my kids. They do read a lot now. The parents that made it about discipline (I know some) have kids that don't read voluntary. Go figure.
> In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters
> differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but
> as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids
> who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for
> example, or “p” and “q.”
Also not my own experience as an adult learner of Japanese (which has similar symbol-pair challenges for ソ ン , シ ツ , さ ち). And it's definitely not my own memory of learning to read as a child -- to this day I remember the frustration of deciding whether "read" should rhyme with "reed" or "red", but no particular challenges with [d b] since they're easy to recall from [D B]. The worst part of learning to read/write in American elementary schools was cursive, which to do this day I can't sight-read if there's too many i/u/v/w in a row.
In fact, the only time I remember hearing letters described as "three-dimensional" or "rotating in space" is from someone with dyslexia. Maybe the author should get themselves checked?
Humans aren't off an assembly line. We have a collection of genes which enable capabilities, and further, those genes may be expressed or not.
Little Bobby may read via 12 genes, and Pete via 14 genes, with only 10 genes identical between them.
An example ; some humans cannot tell the difference between faces. Literally, some humans do not have the genetic framework to understand concepts conveyed in certain ways.
Why would teaching, learning, be different? And when we talk to people, listen to people regarding their learning experience (such as yours), it all seems subtly different. Unique.
That's because it is.
So teaching needs to be wrapped more, IMO, in the desire to convey info, but also, in the ability to realise that lessons are going to require individual nudging no matter what.
Thus, teaching methods should be less specific about "how to teach" and more about a framework to teach.
When applied to education, this manifests as a belief that the teacher is less important to education than the textbook. The people writing the educational policy framework might understand that it's not a one-size-fits-all, but they're not allowed to write one policy per child. The teachers in a classroom environment aren't given the autonomy to teach according to their own judgement, because (in the eyes of the administration) if their judgement could be trusted then they would be writing policy instead of teaching.
Ah but if everything can be written down, why can't the whole bureaucracy be replaced by a very small shell script?
You also seem to think that "these people make the policies because they are the best at making policies for X", but again, is that right? Have you never heard of an incompetent politician?
If not, I urge you to read my comment again.
The same is true of every other aspect of human capacity, intellectual abilities included.
We are not all equally capable.
Fairness comes from knowing this, knowing that each person is somewhat different, and working to enable the best outcomes for all.
To speak to this, imagine if a teacher explained an aspect of math to a student; multiplication perhaps. In this case, the student does not understand.
Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
>Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
>Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
It depends. If there are 29 other students in the class that got it just fine and the one is struggling, then I would think that the teacher would have to make a judgment about how much time to spend on that one student. Or maybe that one student needs to be in a different class with more one-on-one for a particular subject.
I am all about new pedagogy research, but over the last few thousand years, we know a few things that do tend to work for most people.
What a valid statement, you're missing my point. In the scenario I listed above, the teacher is already re-explaining the lesson again, to that specific student.
So if you read my statements in that context, the difference is -- when already repeating the lesson individually, does the teacher say precisely the same thing, word for word, or does the teacher try to explain it in a new way?
I was mostly in agreement with the article until the poverty claim. You could be "not poor" and the results would still be the same if your parents won't either spend time reading to you or not leave you surrounded by books ( and you are the curious type ). I do not understand this fascination in US with money. Not everything is about money. It can certainly help, but it does not automatically make everything better. Some minimal level of effort is needed.
> he posited whole language as a rejection of “negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity” and compared advocates of phonics to flat-Earthers.
Great, another failed policy constructed for the totally wrong reasons which ends up harming those it was claimed to benefit most.
What does this mean? I've never (consciously) perceived letters as anything but flat.
I then realised that she was doing the more complex stuff, and I should just do things as simply as possible.
The mirroring that happens also tends to happen on letters that have mirrored counterparts. So I see backwards Zs and Ses, and Ds & Bs swapped, but I've never seen a backwards F.
I've definitely learned how to sound things how as I've gotten older because I know a lot more words than I can possibly spell. Mostly because speaking is easier than reading. You just get to use more senses when you speak and the idea of reducing the senses in reading is silly. Honestly people would be better at reading if you could introduce a textured alphabet you could feel. The more senses you can bring into learning something the easier it gates
I don't know why we strayed away from doing the whole sounding out the word and learning the structure of English words stuff...
I don't know if I learned this from school or my dad at home but learning about Latin roots of English words or just roots in general for the different parts of words along with just general phonetic sounding out just seemed like the right way to literacy.
I mean I can't spell worth a damn but who cares about spelling when like everything that we type on fixes my mistakes or at least underlines my mistakes for me and then I could pick the correct spelling. But also my inability to know how to spell has nothing to do with the way it was taught how to read because all of my peers did way better than me in spelling, I just can't spell, but I was able to read better than most of them and also comprehend words at a higher grade level than most of them, I guess it's a trade off between some sort of different type of memorization ability, the ability to Intuit as opposed to the ability to remember... I dunno.
But yeah... I guess this is like common core reading that I dodged by graduating high school when I did. Seems like as soon as I got out of school all of this weird stuff started just getting pushed into the normal curriculum.
Seemed to work well -- I'm told I had taught myself to read, bootstrapped you might say, by the age of two or three.
To be clear, I didn't mean teaching Spanish as a second language: I was imagining a world where everyone was already a native speaker.
After that, you'd need either new letters or a lot of diacritics if you want to avoid multiple readings of the same word. The letter "a" can be pronounced something like three or four different ways, and clearing that up would cause written English to resemble Pinyin (or maybe Croatian). When choosing the new writing system, try to keep existing computer support in mind or nobody will be able to backport your new system to ASCII-only text.
There are many many reforms that can be done to English spelling that would simplify it tremendously without making it fully phonetic. Apart from reversing some of the silly forced latinization, you could get rid of some of the more bizarre letter combinations, like "ough" (could be replaced with, say, ow/off based on word). And sure, even here, there may be some dialectical differences in some words, but they would be rare. No one pronounces "though" like "thoff", so why not write it "thow"?
this may have been a case for their introduction in the first place
You would not. You could instead make the rather sensible choice of allowing the written forms of distinct, increasingly divergent, dialects to be different from one another. There are several clusters of similar but differing written standards existing side-by-side in Europe, and they don't pose any major challenges to communication. And in some language regions, it's quite common for people to write in their local dialects in informal contexts instead of the standard variety, which also doesn't pose any major challenges to communication. There is very little actual necessity for a single unified standard variety. By the time the dialects would have diverged far enough for there to be issues in communicating due to distinct written forms, perhaps a few centuries from now for English, the alternative of having a unified written form would necessarily mean that to be literate at all, you'd have to learn a foreign language (the unified standard), which would be the worse situation to find oneself in, and it would probably be easier to first acquire literacy in your native language, and then learn the standard as a second language.