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steanne

here's a good long article on it

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-...

ah, linked and discussed previously

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600

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> Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words.

Yes, as you become a better reading, the individual letters don't really matter anymore, as it starts being parsed without effort. It is NOT, however, viable for new readers. Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?

Right? Like trying to teach a baby to run, because it's a faster way of getting around.

> Who TF thought that would justify it for beginners?

Someone called Marie Clay, who apparently has something of a celebrity status among teachers [1]. My assessment is that her heart is definitely in the right place, but her rational brain didn't cover itself with glory here.

As the old German saying goes: with the heart you can move mountains, but without the brain, it's easy to put them in the wrong place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay

Since the modern era began we have mainly focused on figuring out where to put these mountains and not at all why we would want to move them in the first place.

We are too practical for something as Enlightened as republican democracy.

> In response, several international Reading Recovery affiliated institutions released a statement listing Clay's various awards as proof of the efficacy of her theory

Did they seriously do an appeal to authority when dealing with childrens education?

"Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM."

Yes. That is the state of a lot of education policy, I'm afraid.

What I find most incredible of these methods is their insistence on pictures, pictures, pictures! Take cues from the pictures!. I recently listened to the "Sold a Story" podcast, which takes a strong stance against these cueing methodologies, but I felt constant frustration that nobody ever seemed to point out that not every text has accompanying pictures! How do the believers in cueing methods expect a kid to read a headline? Or a sign? Or this very comment?

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