Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
features.apmreports.org
features.apmreports.org
EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name.
But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.
> I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper
I don't know your details, and your experience could stem from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting. (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job, but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten letters once again.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why...
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...
From the transcript:
"She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned."
And from a later episode:
"Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like.
Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."
This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.
Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.
I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book. She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education using his methods.
You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
>While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s, Engelmann became interested with how children learn.
>[...]
>In 1964, he left his job in advertising and became a research associate
>[...]
>In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the University's College of Education.[2][3]
He was never a public school teacher, although he may have taught students as a research associate. He was apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.
The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching", however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least in principle, understand the experience of a student by experimenting on students, you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students. Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under real constraints (including the limits of their own abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized to software development to mean.
> you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students
I'm not sure to follow, wouldn't you at least understand your own experience as a teacher by actually teaching to students ?
I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1 parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading), you just follow the parental directions.
Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.
In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.
Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading.
Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard to be learned.
For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard them. They know what the words mean, but the correct pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling.
The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.
Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly taught these rules.
Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.
Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
Despite challenging the statistics in the original paper, it doesn't provide evidence that phonics actually is better than the teaching techniques prior to that.
Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...
https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...
It doesn't say phonics doesn't work, it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils. Everyone has their own learning strategy and phonics doesn't appear to work for everyone.
You might be justifiably angry that no one showed you or your child the easy way.
1: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Advantages-of-the-...
2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ameliorating-Early-Rea...
3: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effect-of-phonics-...
I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, and I agree that's a problem and that the solution (get good people to be teachers and give them the autonomy to be good) depends on addressing it. But using bad teachers as a reason to strip all teachers of their autonomy is a huge step back.
So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing. We need them to try to teach phonics. Yes, there are some students it won't work for, such as those with hearing problems. However, those students should be in specialized programs already. For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.
Maybe. There's a lot of guessing about what teachers are doing in this thread; I'd be interested in a survey of what they're actually doing.
> For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.
Maybe. The UK has been going hard on phonics and while scores went way up for the next couple years, the effects on the years afterwards were real bad.
If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)
[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse_The%20...
My mom was a public school teacher in a poor district, and the main problem with her kids learning to read is that they did not actually know English. This would make it much more difficult to figure out how to read properly, since they'd never be able to correct 'wrong' pronunciations. I believe a lot of focus on reading is mis-placed when the children cannot speak English properly. Better to focus on diction and vocabulary.
Big picture, irregular pronunciation in English might encourage educators to use different strategies for learning the outlier words or for reinforcement. It could still be optimal to learn with this additional instruction, even if it's a secondary concern for rudimentary learners.
This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...
One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).
It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there.
Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).
On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
Because we read with our kids, all of them were reading by late 3/early 4 years old, by their own desire. While none have had a propensity for George Orwell at the third grade, they do read things beyond their age levels.
I was lucky, and my kids are lucky.
I wonder, are there any organizations that folks can volunteer at to help kids at your and my age in elementary school learn to read?
I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new books and understands that they contain stories. A household without that is far more likely to cause issues with reading because the motivation will be missing.
I think this is the huge thing in common here. If kids are read to from a young age some might pick it up almost "on their own" while others may wait and learn in early elementary school "on schedule", but I think will largely see similar outcomes. But the ones coming at it for the first time from _not_ having experienced reading, even if only from being read to, are starting from a perspective lacking both background and motivation.
By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
>> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own.
> We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.
Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the "whole language" approach people--making the faulty assumption that mere exposure is enough to educate. That works with some, but clearly fails a lot. And even for the kids it works with, I'd be afraid it would leave gaps that would be much better addressed with some explicit instruction.
My kid is tiny and loves to "read" (i.e. memorize and recite books). At this rate, he'll probably learn to read on his own, but I definitely want to make sure he has the tools to successfully tackle difficult and unfamiliar words, so he doesn't self-limit to the stuff he knows well.
My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore.
He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31.
My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do something else, he did. He's getting there though, and we'll get him there.
It's weird how different things can be for kids even in the same family and environment.
As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.
You may not know your child is neurodivergent until you are at or beyond this stage of development.
> Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
> I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.
Still in print almost 200 years later.
They were very interested in books / reading and were pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards.
We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.
I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.
As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.
It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of some words are.
I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool", "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity", etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son didn't get it.
That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education.
Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.
"Well, you see, the universe can be thought of as a quantum foam..."
Without going phonics thereafter I would probably have ended up as completely illiterate before middle school.
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
Yes, exactly.
If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).
English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
English is "[very] loosely phonetic"
Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?
Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple:
* Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/).
* Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter.
* Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).
* Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation.
Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).
Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.
Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".
I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.
As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.
There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
> No, it doesn't
Yes, it does.
This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script.
> According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.
A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?
In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.
Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.
Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D
If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.
I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phoneme is.
What does the symbol “c” represent, if not two different phonemes?
The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do you disagree?
English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.
The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.
The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.
"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.
The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.
What the symbols look like is beside the point.
Phoneticity 20% (Chinese)
--
--
--
Phoneticity 75% (English)
Phoneticity 80% (French)
Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing systems)
With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.
There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.
I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.
It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as any expert will tell you.
Both my kids learned to read in school classes and read a lot.
And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?
Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?
I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?
“Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw):
I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word.
Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.
Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all.
Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”.
To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home.
If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary.
This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.
1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature.
Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.
… true… and then it’s messed with by, for example Bb trumpets - a concept I didn’t learn about until adulthood.
raises hand
Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had.
German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.
When I was a child trying to learn music reading for piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build a mental model of a score.
I should also add that young pianists and organists have the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on other instruments can have trouble reading piano music, which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).
I think "designed by power users for power users" nails it. Another way of putting it, is that there's a symbiosis between writers and players, if both are skilled in the same notation system, whatever it is. If you can read, you can find work. If you can write in standard notation, you can find people to play it. This creates a huge dis-incentive to explore new notations, except as an academic exercise.
Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto the rod.
Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptation. Instrumentalists took it up outside of the Church, and the rest is history. We standardized on this notation because, even though it was originally for the human voice, it is convenient and good enough that everyone could make use of it.
Finally, I'll note that 20th century composers experimented endlessly with alternate notations, some more seriously than others: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-of...
The articles (definite, indefinite) , prepositions and phrasal verbs are pure hell to learn.
And I don't undesirable what you mean by music notation and piano. The system is quite easy.
Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong. Acknowledge the difference and move on.
For the specific examples you are using, the general idea is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often defined by the rest of the word.
Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the history of the word." Even better if you can have time to go into the history some and explore it. Because that can be what gets kids interested. Exploring.
(And this is no different than many other things. Why do you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of those. Path dependence is a thing.)
Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P
Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you learn the deviations.
Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it works pretty well as a starting point.
English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized, fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for memorization so it works ok.
Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling. "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on spelling. But they just spent two years practicing incorrect spelling!
English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.
To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language.
And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.
1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow)
And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate this with Britain and some northeast American regions. There are probably other sounds too.
As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when encountering it in a word, try them until one seems correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the floor."
Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.
Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different.
Oh, wait...
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions.
Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.
That's what happened with me. My teacher would give me zero on a math question if use the methodology my dad taught me.
As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)
And "two" isn't even a phonetic spelling!
I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece was written but the idea of returning to a system (non-system?) of spelling makes my head hurt. At this point, I can read an book or document written (in English) by an Australian, US Southerner, US Baltimore or Indian writer without needing to decode the writer's dialect. Sure, some of that comes out despite using a fixed spelling system, but that gives the text.. I guess I might describe it as _texture_ or _personality_ without detracting from the ideas, stories or info conveyed.
I think 'ou' is still in play in British English (colour, odour, etc) but was removed from the US standard (i think) sometime in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't minor in my 2nd grade teacher's pov when I spelled it `colour` (1978..I had some old comic books at home--I blame them) but from what I understand, such changes were made after a great deal of debate which included discussions on whether the obfuscation of _existing_ text is offset by decreased obfuscation in future writing. I think, rightfully (if you're into that sort of thing), they got it right. I do not miss `colour` but whether or not it is there does not impact my understanding of the sentence.
If there was a credible effort to revert or deprecate spelling, I would be concerned about knowledge and information dissemination reverting to the old pre-reformation model of jealously guarded silos of information/education.
We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand languages like French and Polish solve this by having rules of how every letter combination sounds, but I don't know enough of them to explain how it works - but they might be useful inspiration if you don't want to add letters). There should be exactly one way to spell a word, and it should be obvious what that way is by how the word is pronounced.
Of course we also need to reform English so that we all pronounce words the same (goodbye and good riddance to all the funky accents - they sound cool but they hinder communication), and a lot of other related reforms that will never happen.
IIRC, my kid was taught about 100 "sight words" that are usually common words that link stuff together or appear often. Stuff like "who", "the", "which", etc. The kids memorize those and sound out the other stuff. I think the idea is to avoid discouraging kids from getting hung up on common things or memorizing things wrong.
~~
Except from the novel (where "I" is the character Scout):
“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’t taught me anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain’t got time to teach me anything,” I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. “Why, he’s so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and reads.”
“If he didn’t teach you, who did?” Miss Caroline asked good-naturedly. “Somebody did. You weren’t born reading The Mobile Register.”
“Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch. Jem says my name’s really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was born and I’m really a-”
Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. “Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us, dear,” she said. “Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage-”
“Ma’am?”
“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. [...] I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the window until recess when Jem [Scout's older brother] cut me from the covey of first-graders in the schoolyard. He asked how I was getting along. I told him.
“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it-” “Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way—it’s like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”
~~
Contrary to this approach in teaching, in my university courses, my professors in math and the Spanish language always encouraged additional reading and study outside of class (oftentimes, this was written directly in the syllabus or part of class discussions). So, I haven't heard much about professors being concerned about students learning the "wrong way"—I suspect that many educators are happy in general when students seek to learn from additional materials outside of what's presented in class.
I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
Yeah, I think this is actually the right approach. A lot of children will learn reading without specific training if you read picture books with them in your lap and they're looking at the pictures and the letters. If they do, that's great; if they don't, that's fine too. Structured reading practice and development can happen later.
I learned French by immersion (my parents sent me to a French school aged six, and for six months I was miserable). When I went to an English school, and took French lessons, I was marked down for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.
How do people blindly trust random figures of authority? It's mind boggling.
Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways into the future, and you'll have plenty of social acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable" misfortune.
Being marked as an oddball is a very minor downside compared to your kids not being able to read well.
It's called "common sense" and you're arguing against it.
The goal of "authorities" are always to harm you as an individual and the more you follow them, the more harmed you will be. There is really no limit to how bad they are willing to make your short existence on earth, including - but not limited to - putting you in a muddy trench to be slaughtered by the enemy's artillery.
I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.
The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.
By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.
I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.
Where do you live?
My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.
Where I live it’s private. So parents send their kids to pre-school at 2.5-3. But by 4 the public schools will take them in.
Kid #1 was and still is an oddball in a number of ways. Learning to read so early seems to have given her some advantages, like being able to consume volumes of information at a young age, but she'll have a harder time in other ways.
I'm not trying to be all hippy about it - kids still need assessment and evidence that learning occurred and there needs to be accountability. And teachers aren't going away. Human leadership is important and someone needs to be accountable for what a kid has learned, etc. A dystopian implementation would be no teacher and a parent just gets a daily report.
It is not the only way: getting other students to teach. Yes it has a bootstrapping problem of quality and requires QA on the delivery but it is still definitely doable at scale.
It so often goes off the rails, though.
One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.
> Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends' kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN comment I wrote.
If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon delivers) is the best time to start.
The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.
Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.
How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.
There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise.
Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect.
[0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary.
Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough.
Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better".
Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.
In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.
2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?
The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.
Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.
I snagged a used copy for $70 because I wanted to compare it to the newer 2nd edition which is way more affordable [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...
Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.
For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.
Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.
That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.
It seems completely barmy, to me.
Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.
Great, the next education fad will be trying to teach kids like some software engineer trained his algorithm.
"Hey kids, start your integration over this new 1TB data set. Remember to adjust your weights after each iteration!"
Just because MLM can work doesn't mean it does work in all contexts. We get to change the software (and hardware although that has been less relevant IMHO) behind ML models as much as we want, for humans we need to adapt the training methods.
Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.
Again from the podcast:
"Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.
And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."
If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...
All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.
(It's a little more complicated than that though. Yes, individual letters do matter, but good readers aren't mentally sounding out every word they read. Rather, their eyes take in every letter at once and their brains instantly recognize the word. That's why you can probably still read this paragraph even though the middle letters in every word are scrambled.)
Phonics is important for being able to read words your brain isn't already familiar with, which is especially critical during the learning process when "words your brain isn't already familiar with" is like 95% of words. Context clues can help there too, but those aren't nearly as easy or accurate as just sounding out the word.
Fun anecdote: I recently had a chance to re-experience that learning process myself after listening to a long fantasy book series on Audible with lots of made-up terms (names, cities, magic items, etc), then going on a fan forum later and seeing those same words spelled out for the first time ever. Phonics was invaluable to me in puzzling out which words corresponded to which terms I was familiar with from listening to the series.
Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is pretty much all of it.
Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.
Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.
FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
Again, not everything that’s wrong or bad is illegal.
Yet, no one has been held accountable. There has not been any reckoning for that teacher who ignored best practice because 'fuck bush', and all the others who advocated for cueing. Lucy Caulkins has made millions peddling techniques that have ruined the lives of 1000s of kids. If this were a drug, you would be demanding the company be out of business.
> If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit
But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible.
So, maybe not the best analogy.
What has it been replaced with? I try to keep up with health literature and am not familiar with the food pyramid's replacement. Perhaps it hasn't received as much advertisement as the food pyramid did.
In 2011, the pyramid was done away with altogether and replaced with MyPlate, which remains the USDA's current nutritional guide graphic. https://www.myplate.gov/
It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability. All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they should operate under the protection of a limited liability company or something similar.
Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers actually do! Nice, thanks for that.
- if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
- Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts
I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here.
For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0].
[0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.
Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!
But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)
My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we need to do something different". Educational methodology is almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what works, tested on children, versus proving of academic scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and should be continued until something better can be identified. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.
Thanks for sharing. I'm going to try this book. My 5 yr old likes to be read to, but sternly refuses to attempt to read words. Also montessori. He likes some mobile games which have menus so I'm going to explain why we are doing it but also position this book as a way so he can read menus in games so he knows how to play. And then I'll reinforce that when he asks me to read any menus/storylines in the games by going through the phonetic process and challenging him.
> Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not be able to read.
I had a similar situation where I had a thesis on my child's behavioral health concern. Saw a neurologist and she confirmed exactly what I said. Wife was STILL not convinced and even criticized the neurologist's evaluation. But our kid improved after I disclosed the neurologist's evaluation to my sis in law and told them we need them to move out. They had been staying with her family in my house for a year and my wife had been watching their kid. Problem solved. Case closed. My wife wanted to help her sis so much that she was refusing to see the damage the situation was causing.
I also had to take matters in my own hand with getting kids to be sleep trained. Wife refused to do cry it out and we just kept struggling and getting no sleep over and over and kids weren't getting quality sleep. I'll get onboard a plan but if it doesn't work, I'm not going to continue to stay on that path.
I told her I'd handle it and then boom, got them trained in a few days. Not fun at ALL, but all these industries and philosophies take over and push it out there as the new one true way when we have hundreds or sometimes thousands of years of success in various things that work lol.
This is not unique of course. We see this in engineering all the time. Until the tried and true disciplines prevail. And the ones that care about what works best for the context, rather than what is popular at the time are the ones with less stress/anxiety.
I've seen family members say - oh cry it out is stressful for the child and creates distrust. Meanwhile, both partners get no sleep, project their stress and frustration and even end up yelling at their child because of it! Their spousal relationship suffers big time too. Makes no sense to me. Also the same ones who try to optimize everything for their child according to modern parenting philosophies are the ones who have completely unhealthy marriages in my experience. In my opinion, the best thing you can do for your kids is to just show them how to treat and love your spouse and do things that take care of yourself and your spouse so you can be great parents. If you try to do everything according to what is popular at the time, you're going to have a bad time. You need the oxygen mask so you can help your dependents.
Or you have parents who refuse to do cry it out and say - oh I couldn't get baby down last night, had to hold them on my chest and sleep in a chair. Utter madness. Don't do that. They will now be used to your warm embrace and heartbeat and they will never be able to sleep normally in their bed. Well... until you do some form of cry it out lol.
Most things really aren't that hard or frustrating unless you create and foster an environment that makes them so.
end rant
But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".
Anyway, what's hard about teaching is not pedagogy or the subject material itself, but rather the administrative burdens and management of large and diverse classrooms, as you said, unfortunately.
Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.
IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children progress to reading independently, but even there its not the only thing going on (context is important).
> How else can you learn to read if not sounding out?
Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.
parent comment didn't say "learn best", it said "learn first".
You're saying that they move on from it. That doesn't contradict the "learn first" part, does it?
I learned full word reading, it works great for me. I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. Pretty sure I didn't internalize "e at the end makes vowels long" until nearly high school.
I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
I've met plenty of other people who are the same, but I will also acknowledge that this doesn't work for everyone.
But you know what? I bet a lot of chemists "read" chemical names the same way.
This is how the podcast explains what reading research has found about how people learn to read:
- First learn to associate letters with sounds
- By sounding out words, reinforce those associations
- And associate combinations of letters with known words from their spoken language
Our brains aren't wired for written language like they are for spoken language. We have to actively learn. And by associating letters with sounds, our brains are able to loop in the existing language areas of the brain into written language.
Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.
From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually reads 'the whole word' (I don't think any adult spends any amount of time examining the minutiae of letter ordering in everyday life). However, the opposite does not work. As you pointed out, despite your high reading level, you weren't able to figure out basic phonetic rules until high school. This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example. Even ones not based on latin alphabet. The practice of blending sounds together is a fundamental part of reading.
A child who is using phonics is able to (1) understand, (2) sound out, (3) and speak the written word (which means they will be able to do things like read poetry). A child who is using the whole word approach may be able to understand, but if they cannot enunciate properly the words on the page, then they cannot do either 2 or 3, which means the reading is not complete. I don't see how we can consider this an acceptable replacement.
> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
This is not exceptional for an adult.
> The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.
I don't really think that's what they're saying here. They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. That's different than "not fully able to read".
>> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
> This is not exceptional for an adult.
Sadly, I think that it is. I looked up US literacy rates for this thread to validate my memory that they were something like 98%. I learned that not only are they 92% at "level 1", but only "[f]our in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences" [0]. I know this isn't exactly directly responsive to reading speed or whatever, but this is just to say I had a much rosier picture of US literacy in my head and maybe you do too.
I read a lot of fantasy literature as a kid, and I'll argue that not needing to bother with pronunciation is a huge boon when trying to go through a particular style of fantasy novel!
But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.
> This is not exceptional for an adult.
Really? I've met plenty of functioning adults who say they sound out words in their head when reading. Go to any one of the many online threads about reading methods and you'll come across plenty of people describing that they have a voice in their head pronouncing each word that they read.
Realistically, if I read technical papers and see a word I don't need to pronounce, I just refer to it in my mind as whatever it's written as. I learned phonics as a kid, yet have no trouble simply ignoring the pronunciation. Yet... since I do know phonics, I could pronounce the word, which is a strict superset of abilities compared to the whole word method. Which is my point... Phonics is strictly superior. There is nothing a whole word approach can do that a phonics student cannot, but there are things a phonics user can do a whole worder cannot.
And there's evidence that the focus on phonics essentially kills a love of reading and has a deleterious effect on long-term reading skills [0].
[0]: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
That's not the same thing as sounding out words. It's just the internal monologue.
Some people may choose to sound out a word they've never encountered before to have an idea of what it sounds like, but that's optional.
Not until I read this sentence! Feels a bit like "breathing manually".
It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.
I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.
If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.
> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all
This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.
> If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
Let's be a little more civil than this.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.
Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.
It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading," which is not the point of teaching the decoding step to begin with. The Guardian article grossly misrepresents the actual study, which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read
There's a genetic component there too; my children are adopted and had wildly differing outcomes from the same curricula (and often same teachers). My personal opinion from observation (N=4, plus a few kids of friends) is that some kids will teach themselves phonics even in a whole-language program. Other kids don't. And the kids who don't struggle to read until someone teaches it to them.
> The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.
Again "fails totally" is wrong, but also low SES students are a difficult group for complicated reasons, none of which teachers control.
> Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.
Totally agree, my beef is that most of the legislation and parental demands around phonics and SOR force teachers to use phonics in situations where they know it won't work, or actively isn't working.
> It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading,"
I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.
The quote from the DoE is:
"Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2."
That's good! But it's entirely unresponsive to the argument the report makes, which is that while phonics works for getting students to sound stuff out, their reading scores in subsequent years drop dramatically. It's Table 1 in their report.
> which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read
I don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong. This is a sign of a good paper, not a bad one.
> I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.
Yeah, my issue was that the Guardian piece was cherry picking from the report to make it seem like phonics was useless and not based in evidence. Whereas the report makes it clear that phonics is in fact excellent as a first step, but must be followed by broader instruction in language/culture/literature/etc.
> don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong.
I was paraphrasing pretty directly from the conclusion section. My point being that the Guardian was making stronger claims than the research supports, or rather the existing research wasn't great and the report acknowledges that but the Guardian obscures it.
I think overall England has probably gone in the wrong direction and treats phonics like the proverbial hammer. In particular there seems to also be a weird trend there in abandoning instruction in the cultural competency required to comprehend most extant English language writing. My concern is that here in the US, teaching has to its detriment abandoned phonics in favor of a whole language model which has proven terrible at teaching kids to decode language.
I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.
Fortunately I think the US is so disjointed that we might see some good experimentation with different complementary approaches.
> The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-experimental research" in favor of "decades of classroom-based and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with "although literacy researchers caution there is still much to learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.
Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what should actually be taught, except that no particular method should be mandated or banned, and that education should be "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).
And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it. I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.
The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts". Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we need to appreciate the nuance here.
I also didn't mean to suggest those terms were invented by that article, just that they reflect the perspective of the people who use them. I'm assuming initial proponents of the "simple view of literacy" didn't describe it that way, just as we might call "whole language" something different if it ends up being discredited (cf. the focus on cueing in TFA).
> I would think better of it if it had laid out the sort of strong, pragmatic argument you made here about teachers' autonomy
I wouldn't mind something more concrete either. There's educational research out there, but not a ton, and what I've read is pretty non-committal and not very prescriptive. I don't know if that's in deference to "trust teachers" or what have you. I do know that from time to time, teachers who are trying very hard to teach their kids using old, busted techniques they learned in school and are--rightfully so--super bitter when they discover "new" techniques that are decades old and proven more effective, so it's not like there's not an audience for this stuff.
Mostly I think this argument is just two sides that don't trust each other at all, and they're lobbing whatever they can over the wall to try and win the argument (you don't care about dyslexia, you're dooming children to illiteracy to stick it to Bush, blah blah blah). I think that's a big problem. Education in the US is super messed up despite costing a ton, everyone knows it, and it's probably impossible to fix because of the political and bureaucratic structures involved. But it definitely doesn't help when our educators are rejecting government educational research because of (earned) political/cultural mistrust.
As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...
OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.
Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.
There's a "nonzero chance" your dead tree book is a game too ala Sudoku.
If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading), they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters less to young kids, especially when they can more easily imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.
I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators.
The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research.
It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.
Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked.
Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
However, I don’t know what if anything would be relevant to you. If you’re helping kids with dyslexia learn to read then that’s very different than normal tutoring etc.
Really though research tends to have really narrow focus such as classroom lighting.
We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.
So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.
You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.
There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.
In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using it. I work in software now.
- equity and social justice
- culturally-responsive teaching
- student-centered learning
- learning styles
There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:
- teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.
- there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way".
- closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless.
- frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people.
- there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.
- a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
I'd also say part of the cause of this are the teacher unions. When we don't do merit based promotions and raises, people don't care as much.
The teacher unions do have a point there, because introducing anything "merit" based only punishes those teachers and school districts for stuff they can't control, much less actually solve.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/04/us-schoo...
[2] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23618443/school-lunch-kids-pan...
[3] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/10/15/21121847/universal-free-...
See Teacher Unions pushing to keep schools closed at the detriment of students.
We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
Does it really? I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness of marketing and advertising, let alone on the correctness of psychological theories used. Marketing and advertising run on common sense and FOMO.
Thinking that is a kind of proof that marketing and advertising work - to get people to believe they aren't being profoundly influenced by marketing and advertising.
Marketeers are an easy target, though. They can't afford to ignore it, so they buy into some of those theories. And drop them just as easily. But they have to pretend it works.
If you've got good data on marketing effectiveness, I'd like to see it.
While quantitative data on how it works and how effective it is might be lacking, the point is that it does work. The remaining questions are of the "more study is needed to draw any conclusions" kinds of objections that the tobacco industry used to obfuscate the hazards of smoking and that the petrochemical industry uses today to prevent action on global warming. It's is this kind of uncertainty and doubt that I'm asserting is why so many people are still unclear about how much influence marketing and advertising have over their choices.
> the point is that it does work
The point was: psychology is not a good science, and educational science is worse. How come these people run schools?
I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.
My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.
This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.
Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.
That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.")
tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)
Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that. Thanks!
I hear you that they are bring emotional, and that needs to be reflected, but just like there is truth in your post although it came of as a bit inflammatory to me, there is truth in those emotions as well. Distill that instead of dismissing it.
You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations.
For example from another story posted here today:
Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.
Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
This is the problem.
The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.
It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.
From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing + engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing would be a way to express those values.
Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all early childhood development research.
So, no. This doesn't go against any research. Unless you frame it in the most uncharitable way that you can.
Plus given there are three years worth of children in the same class, seeing the “senior” children operate at the higher levels of activities helps with incentive for the younger children who want to emulate them.
That said, anyone can open a “Montessori school” and not adhere to any particular Montessori pedagogy. I’d argue the schools with the purest interpretations of Maria Montessori’s teachings are often just as problematic as those who are Montessori in name only. There are two tribes in Montessori: AMS (purists)and AMI (more flexible).
Thankfully the school my daughter attended was AMI and I watched the school adapt their methods to children who needed more structure than classical Montessori advises. Ultimately, it’s not for everyone.
I don't think it really matters if you start with writing or reading first, because it's basically the same skill: knowing letter shapes and knowing which sound corresponds. It's that learning really benefits from receiving the same information in different contexts. So as long as you both teach them to write and read, the order doesn't really matter.
One reason for using the cardboard letters for younger children is that the brain regions handling bodily movement are much more advanced, and thus provide more context which (as stated earlier) helps in memorization.
But I suspect the main reason for using the sandpaper letters is because it is way more interesting for the children to have something with tactile feedback, instead of just looking at a flat card.
Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German.
https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56
So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.
Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory.
So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and just sleep at night.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through some emotional manipulation.
I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time for my time. That's why I say it's rude.
To be honest, the reason I'm reading the comments is in the hope of finding a proper summary.
The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to teach many kids to read."
If you listen to someone like Terry Gross there's an enormous amount of editing involved to make it sound like a natural conversation. Podcast world is the opposite.
When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it's just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ significantly from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they're different compared to yours.
I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.
As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned much. The gamification features are effective at driving user engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good educational tool.
The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore.
The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching.
As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.
https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ is a decent review that seems similar to my own experience.
So far drilling on Anki has been a bit better. Still not sure what else will work aside from moving there.
The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary languages.
The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a language that they already speak. The goal of second language instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and speak a language that they don't know in any way.
Very different education goals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA
Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.
I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)
What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
> I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)
I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.
> What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.
Thanks again for sharing your DI story.
I used this for my first two kids and am currently using it for my third. They pick up reading proficiency in a few months and you need to consistently spend about 20-30 minutes a day. The bonding that comes with your kids is an added bonus. After that, you establish a reading culture at home, blanket ban on electronic "entertainment" for the early years and they become good readers very quickly.
I lived in a bit of a bubble and when I met my kids' friends when they went to school, it was painful to see how crippled they were with basics skills and also tragic to see my own kids regress to the average in these skills.
The upshot of all this is that basic liberal education is not that hard to do for ones own kids and it gives them a lifelong advantage. I highly recommend it.
"Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession." (https://archive.ph/MEqrK)
The truth every teacher faces is that there is no single silver bullet. There is no any "method" in education that can replace simple things – time, effort, motivation, affiliation etc.
"cherry picked evidence means the conclusions are bullshit" ?
If I conclude after a lesson that learning took place then why? Is it because the way I taught (words and examples I used etc) or because kids had finally enough time to think about topic and things just fell into place and it really didn't matter how I taught? Or it didn't matter at all and they knew it already, but finally just realized what I asked from them? Was it learning at all or just memorizing? If learning didn't took place then why? Is it because of normal cognitive overload? Is because of lack of attention? If yes, then why? Tired? Hungry? Just a bad day? They just didn't like me? And these are only very basic and general questions. Normally there is 20+ kids in the classroom and they all might have different reason why they learnt or didn't. There is a lot of going on in every kids' mind and all these matter how they learn up to very big and complicated things like culture, family background and group dynamics. Every experienced teacher knows that depending on class results might be very different even if you use same methods, examples, words etc.
Yes/no?
Actual evidence-based science would be fantastic. But a lot of what I've seen being touted as "science" in this field is flimsy or not science at all.
The primary cause is the downfall of research done by universities. Our institutions are churning out mountains of bullshit "science" in certain fields, including in education. This junk science is now being pushed down into the classroom and it's devastating for educators and students.
Once I was consulting a very large family foundation in this space and asked why there are no randomized trials in education. I was told that researchers in the space think it's unethical to conduct studies with control groups on students. (Which, to be clear, is moronic.) The result is there's very little in the way of solid evidence about what even works.
Grandma's own education was high school, plus maybe a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7.
But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities. Old stuff that worked couldn't possibly get you ahead in that empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was incredibly boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education Establishment.
I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco's lottery system means there's no default school.
A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".
These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents: You don't need to know how to read in order to appear to read the book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page), and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old wouldn't be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast.
We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at all, and found https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast). I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly recommend it as well for those who have the time.
We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading and writing, they're relatively resilient to this sort of fake "science" based fad.
(Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a word problem without actually reading and understanding the words -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where many children struggle to read).
This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used.
To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word.
They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness.
All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.
I will say though that the school's method of teaching phonics is much more rigorous than anything I ever learned as a kid. They have a long list of graphemes (letters and letter combinations), and they need to be able to recite all the phonemes (sounds) that each grapheme can make. I have a hard time answering their phonics questions, like if they ask me what sounds "ou" makes. It can make at least four sounds, e.g. sour, group, court, country. I can't confidentially help them without a cheatsheet.
My very unique / personal take. Have been doing sight words with my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of prep (pre year 1). He's not advanced as far as I can't tell, but I'll tell you it's exhilarating to watch his progress. He absolutely loves the challenge of it. And he's already sounding out and reading short, repetitive books based on known words. He's a lucky kid for so many reasons. Not a great case in point for the same.
All kids are different, with unique needs, and schools should be expected to adapt to these. But it's a two way street. If an individual isn't reading by fourth grade, after four years of schooling, then something is going on .. either at home or in a cognitive sense. If a whole class isn't reading, then sure - look at the curriculum ... but there's probably something more systemic at play.
The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise them while their parents do so.
Do you think literate citizens are less free to make choices than illiterate ones?
You are correct. Those students that read with their parents and learn at home have a significant advantage.
Our education system however should do everything that it can to help those children that didn't have this advantage to catch up. I've read research in the past that shows good schools to bring those kids up to the same level, evidently reading the comments here it seems the US school system has significant issues.
The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather than the boring learning is a problem.
Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too.
I have many criticisms of the education I received as a youngster, but they did get this right.
It's good to hear that phonics are making something of a comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too. I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university -- when a kid stumbles over a word like "infrastructure," one senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties of printed text.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-rad...
We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying various combinations until something made sense). We did that a few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You can't force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each night. She's in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading and I guess picked things up organically). It's pretty cool that she can pretty much just read anything now that isn't a very unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at words though that are wrong, so we're working on slowing down a little bit.
It's a balancing act though. You don't want to make it such a chore that they don't want to read later, but I just don't think the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I'm trying to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time, but lead to big successes.
I still remember and feel appreciation for my first grade teacher, Mrs. Drown, for teaching me to read. It opened an entire world for me.
The public schools where I lived did not use phonics, and when I entered the gifted program I shifted to public school. I met people in high school who were considered average students that had less literacy than I did in fourth grade. The overall literacy rate in our small city was lower than the national average as well.
A recent meta-analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal... and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139
Here's just one post with a little more info on the political context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-o...
A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...
The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)
However, I wonder if the ideal pedagogy would be different for younger students (maybe pre-K to 1st) who have less knowledge and smaller vocabularies? It's a bit tricky because a lot of the students who need intervention probably need remedial instruction in other areas too, but some of them may have been good students who struggled with reading.
One thing that struck me from this story is kids only wanting to read books they already know. My son was like that. He loves Dr Seuss books and has read the easier ones a dozen times, so he always proposes to read that instead of the new book we're trying to read.
Still, he reads a lot better now than some of the kids in the story. He's starting to pick up on random texts he runs into, reading subtitles (he's too slow though), so there's definitely progress. He's 8, which I think corresponds to grade 3 in the US system? He's about a year behind in reading, so if American kids a year older than that read worse than he does, that's not good.
Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...
Sure, a language like Turkish (29 characters, 29 sounds) will be more phonetic, but English's eccentricities are overstated, with most boiling down to "unstressed vowels get shortened, shwa-ed, or skipped". Once you clear the first 50 or so words by frequency, it gets pretty sound-it-out for a good long time before you start hitting weird loan words.
The fix is simple. Give teachers a $1000 bonus for every student of theirs that performs at grade level at the end of the year.
It'll be the cheapest, most effective way to improve kids' education.
The simplest fix you could slap on would be to make it a bonus for each student who tested as below grade level at the start of the year but above grade level at the end, but that also has complexities.
It could be hardly worse than the current system.
> you as a teacher are heavily rewarded for being handed students that are either already at grade level or have parents who can pay for additional tutoring.
Students are already assigned at random to teachers. So it will balance out.
> you've just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling students
The teachers currently have no incentive whatsoever to help struggling students. This proposal gives them $1000 reasons to help them.
Read to your kids.
This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have dyslexia because they weren't learning to read.
You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I listened to the entire series three times because I couldn't get over it. It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.
Indeed. We can debate the merits of letters vs ideograms as much as we like, but English is not Chinese. Reading an alphabet is a phonetic exercise, even with all the exceptions in spoken English.
And yes, the 'dyslexia epidemic' is harrowing. Sure video-everywhere is part to blame, but how many readers and writers are we down due to children being given a label that says 'you will never spell' early in life. Even if well-intentioned the label is detrimental to your relationship with words.
Let's put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be, it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don't think he'd have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said 'that shape means blue' or whatever.
Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the same way?
"Here’s what’s happening to many children in this country. They go to a “balanced literacy” school that uses Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. They’re taught the cueing strategies. Their reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they’re struggling – and someone notices – they might get Reading Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books. And if they’re still struggling after that, many of them get Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books.
Struggling readers keep getting more of the same.
That’s what happened to Matthew. Missy’s son. In Gwinnett County, Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor.
Purcell: And she was like, “You finally arrived at the place where most of us arrive.” She had given up on the idea that the school was going to teach her son how to read. And she’d decided she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It’s what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It’s what Lee Gaul did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It’s what Kenni Alden in California wishes she had done with her son.
Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him out of public school, and they put him in a private school for kids with dyslexia.
Matthew’s in sixth grade now. And Missy says he’s doing really well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing.
For Missy, what’s especially painful about all this is that she had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books."
* My mother was a stay-at-home mom and some of the earliest memories I have is her teaching me to read.
* I had difficulty in school and I did not fit in. My social issues spilled into the classroom, my grades suffered, i was picked on a lot, and I was usually put in remedial classes (you know those smaller classes with like 5 students). Yet I got a 1460 on my SATs, +700 on SATIIs, and went to USNews top 25 college (~20% acceptance rate at the time, ~12% now).
I have gotten more social since, but it left me with the impression that public school can do more harm than good. I am pro school choice and will seriously consider homeschooling.
What Americans should consider is removing charter/private schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy families have time and resources to influence school boards to improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not just an already elite cohort.
Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and further disadvantage them.
Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a result none of these options will be implemented.
I'm growing more concerned with each passing year that we're so distracted playing whack-a-mole with each of the thousand crises facing us that we've become blind to systems-level thinking.
When I was growing up in the 80s, we were taught that we lived in a meritocracy where anyone could be president someday, for example. Today I see that everyone has equal dignity, meaning that the sum of each individual's talents is the same. But some talents are rewarded more than others. Mainly the ability to generate profit, which has roots in othering, prejudice, maintaining the status quo, tax evasion, lobbying, corruption, but especially cheating.
That's what wokeism is about. Once one sees that it's not about individual talent, but the rigging of the system to prevent any disruption of the power of the status quo, it's impossible to unsee. So a phrase like "tax the rich" (to put an end to generational wealth inequality and heal the division) means to pull the plug on that power structure. But people misinterpret it through their own trauma, get triggered, and project against it as a perceived threat, because even the smallest benefit like one's gender or the color of their skin is conflated with their earning potential, because the system truly rewards injustice.
Well said. A consequence of no longer having a congress/senate willing to work across the aisle is that it takes so much political capital to pass a bill that there is no fuel left to apply incremental changes over time. A well functioning government will address gaps in policy changes in year 2 or 3 after new policy comes out. Instead no improvements are made until year 4 when a new government comes in and reverses direction completely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUHOVxjMIDA
The title may be political, but the subject matter is not. This is the kind of stuff that we used to learn in civics and social studies, which have largely been eliminated from the curriculum. Which can now be thought of as stuff like critical race theory.
Some examples of the Big Lie -> hidden truth:
* job losses due to immigration policy -> actually lost due to education spending cuts, misaligned incentives around outsourcing and tax cuts incentivizing the wealthy to keep their money instead of reinvesting it in growing their businesses
* crumbling infrastructure because nobody wants to work anymore -> actually due to loss of tax revenue because the wealthy are only taxed at 1/3 to 1/2 their pre-Reagan administration rate
* national debt because we spend too much on woke social programs -> actually due to spending more on our military than next dozen countries combined, because any non-capitalist economic success is viewed as a threat to US white/male/wealthy hegemony.
Of course the other party has its own issues. But I would argue that it hasn't had significant power since JFK, which left us in this flip-flop era where it primarily plays defense, since the loss of certain basic rights is so unthinkable that it takes vast mobilizations to stay ahead of the threats.
In other words, sabotage is a much more lucrative policy than building bridges. Which goes along with the status quo's endorsement of cheating via control of the media, judiciary, etc.
Now that mobilizations have failed in the face of stuff like the Roe v. Wade repeal, I predict that big political changes are coming in a Fourth Turning (I haven't read the book by that name yet, by William Strauss and Neil Howe).
The parties may switch sides on certain key issues. The older generation will probably find itself suddenly stripped of power, as the younger generation decides that it no longer wants to pay retirements, after a lifetime of stagnant wages and ever-increasing rents/student loans/etc. Young people may find that they have more in common with friends overseas speaking different languages, now that universal translators have arrived. Nationalism may fade after a last-ditch effort by elites to crush the proletariat beneath authoritarian fascism. And so on and so forth. So many bastions of the status quo are set to fall like dominoes should any fall, that a huge global propaganda machine works tirelessly to prevent any and all progressive wins.
Admittedly I have blind spots around failures of the left. I want to emphasize that I'm more interested in learning what those are, and raising the quality of life for the middle class, than supporting them outright based on ideology and my own biases.
The only children that will learn to read will probably be in spite of this system.
You need X-ray vision like Superman to actually read that.
Scratch that, it was recorded video, so even Superman couldn't do that, you'd need a time machine in addition to the X-ray vision.
however the last 2 years I've experienced kids being taught to read in US public school kindergarten and the curriculum was nothing like was described in this series. They were taught phonics and memorized common non-phonetic words the same way I was taught 30 years ago.
The podcast goes into how over the past few years, there has been a lot of activism to shift schools from cueing back to phonics. At various levels of government, including state laws.
It seemed to work. We could play a "body parts game" where I shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913...
Because kids can't vote and don't have money they really do seem to get shafted in the US.
We've been gathering and making food for much longer than 200 years, and we keep changing that, too.
It's parent child bonding
Read to your kids as much as possible
I didn't read to her most nights, btw. I told her a multi-year bedtime story instead.
The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole words.
That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them several different strategies to guess what it is they are reading.
It turns out (no duh) that doesn't work either, but it does mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming later.
"This is Sarah Gannon. She’s a teacher you met in Episode 3. She trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins
Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.
Gannon: Teacher friends were like, “Did you read this Emily Hanford? And I was like, “I read it.” And we were like, “What is she talking about?” She was outraged. Because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading.
And then, her daughter, Maeve.
(Music) Maeve wasn’t learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her. But it wasn’t working. So Sarah went looking for answers. And discovered the research.
Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing with Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who didn’t like George Bush.
One day, when Carrie’s daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, “I have something to tell you.”
Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and anxious, and she just says, “I can’t read.” The school hadn’t said there was a problem. Carrie hadn’t noticed a problem either. But her daughter knew.
Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret when they’re struggling. They can look like they’re reading for a while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart.
(Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in.
Chee: And I just kept saying, “Well keep trying.” And then when they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try. And what I’m haunted by is, when it wasn’t working, I blamed it on children. Carrie Chee isn’t sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren’t for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff.
Gannon: I don’t know if I could be convinced and that’s what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who, it’s just like, hold fast to old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it’s OK to be wrong. Like, I was wrong."
How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an engineer who didn't look into the structural properties of a material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this practices?
(I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year)
She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonics” teaching for reading but I’m not sure the rest of the schools have pivoted as quickly.
My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that. What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches)
It's not important, of course, the kids will get there eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click" which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly, and when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Also a ton of variation there based on what kids did before kindergarten, at home or, definitely kids from Montessori schools had more reading then kids like mine who did full time preschool at one that didn’t have an “academic” focus.
She struggled with early education because she didn't like being forced to do things. Every kid is different, I suppose.