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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

what's old is new, even NYC where the war against phonics was started has given up on it. I guess having Mississippi and Alabama score better than them was the final straw

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/3996281-nyc-stressing...

basically 30+ years wasted on a strategy with no scientific basis, I wonder what our school systems are teaching today that will be looked at as being just as dumb 30 years from now

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Some phonics is probably fine, but it needs to simply be a vehicle to helping kids start reading and then they just need to be encouraged to read.

I taught my daughter the sounds of each letter, then we moved on to sounding out two-letter words, then three and four. I pointed out which words were weird and why and we moved on. I then started doing the Bob books with her before she was 5 and then switched to the little Disney short books and Dr. Seuss. Now she's in first grade reading chapter books meant for those in 4th-6th grade, while her classmates are still learning phonics instead of reading. Thankfully her teacher lets me pack her books and she can read those on her own instead of continuing the same tablet lessons she's done a dozen times.

I realize not all parents have prioritized reading like I have and that can be challenging to teachers, but a big push should be to teach them enough to get them reading very simple "see spot run" type books and then plenty of practice where things gradually increase in complexity with amount of words, vocabulary, and words with unconventional pronunciation. The human brain will pick up all the words eventually without needing to try to apply 50 different phonics rules. It's just like with common core math where they have a really neat concept to try to make math more intuitive (and it's great for some students), but to many...it means they're just hopelessly confused and never even learn what would have been common for students 30 years ago.

Personalized instruction (by a good-enough teacher) almost always beats out any kind of standard curriculum given to 20 kids at once, no matter how good that curriculum is.

Phonics may or may not be the best way to teach reading in a classroom setting to students of diverse skills, but it's a really hard problem to solve. Even agreeing on the evaluation of outcomes is difficult. (e.g: should your scoring function be about getting kids up to a minimum standard, average performance, or increase from beginning of year?)

There’s a real risk here to your daughter - your daughters’ teacher sounds at least reasonable, but ideally we wouldn’t force any kid to the lowest common denominator. Only reason to do so is cost, as it’s harder to manage more classes with different skill levels. When I was learning English and was well ahead of my classmates due to similar at home involvement, at school I quickly lost interest and wouldn’t bother with assignments, leading to poor grades. This phase passed and I ended up doing fine, but no thanks to the teachers involved. Could have gone the other way just as easily and then from an advanced learned I would have become a problem one.

Thankfully she seems to have a competitive drive to push the boundaries and learn more. Not everyone is like that of course. You still have to give them some incentives sometimes or just incorporate what you want to teach in the form of a game of some type.

As someone without kids. Is it uncommon for parents to encourage children to read outside of school?

This varies greatly by parents' education levels.

According to [1] 26% of Americans with 'less than a high school diploma' have 'no books' at home. On the other hand, among Americans with a 'postgraduate degree', 42% have 'more than 100 books' at home.

[1] https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/47712-how-many-boo...

En masse, it’s less common than should be and a lot less than one would hope for. OP sounds like a very responsible and caring parent!

This also requires spare time. In US at least, things aren’t as setup to support such allocating enough time for kids. Forget reading time, even basic sick time is tough for most.

It depends a lot on the parents.

If you'll permit me a generalization, well-off parents generally have more time, energy and money to spend on their children's development. For example, if you're a stay-at-home parent, you have more time to think about how to get your kid reading. Maybe you're teaching them directly, maybe you're buying books you think they'll like, or teaching by example by reading books in your spare time.

If both parents are working double-shifts to make rent, you might just be happy that your kid is being quiet watching TV, so you can get some sleep.

My wife and I are both engineers and work full time. I'm tired at night too, but it's worth going through the effort early rather than later when they're struggling.

I started with the sounds that each letter in the alphabet makes when she first turned four I would guess. It wasn't exactly easy, but we'd try to go through the exercise before she went to sleep each night. At first it would take over a half hour to get through it. After a few months of on and off she had it down pretty well to where sounding out letters was possible. Each step is a challenge that they have to get through and it's also a challenge on the patience of you the parent.

It really depends. Unfortunately a lot of parents don't read or encourage their kids to do so. However, as an engineer, all of my coworkers were reading to their kids at a young age and working with them and got them reading early and have generally set them up for success.

It's becoming a lot harder to push a love for reading. The modern world has a lot more competing for my kids time and attention than I feel like I had as a kid. For me, reading was a natural way to pass the time (and I caries a book everywhere I went!) while I feel like for them it's the last thing on their minds.

This is absolutely true. However, I've noticed that teaching them to get comfortable with reading and limiting the screen time (TV, video games) means that they'll shift to reading or physical activities when bored or when they run out of screen time... especially if you let them pick out the books they want.

I have a friend that has a kid that only wants to play Minecraft....she complains he won't do anything else...but then she enables that by giving him so much screen time. I think if you handle certain things the right way, the problem will sort itself outside certain disabilities.

One frustrating point is that the kids have school provided electronics as well these days.

While I'm not against that, it does prevent a challenge to screen time. They have homework to do and will be doing it until you look away, then suddenly they're back on youtube.

We had to restrict even the school devices to public areas of the home, which is unfortunate.

Yep. I was a little dismayed that my kid was using a tablet for hours at school. I think textbooks are probably healthier with the amount of screen time kids get at home now.

We encourage our first grader to read both English and Chinese, but he is just starting out in both.

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