How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

apmreports.org

89 pointsphilipswood119 comments

This is how I felt when I first tried to figure out what common core math was, after I kept hearing about it. It sounded like the people who made it were trying to create a process around what I would do in my head to try and solve a problem when I didn’t have paper or a calculator handy.

What common core, and this reading approach, seem to miss is that those are things that come after learning the foundations and rules.

I was taught with phonics, but 99% of words I read today are simply seen and recognized. Much like the 3 queuing method tries to create a process around. However, I think that is something that naturally develops through repetition. When someone reads the word “horse” and “house” enough times, the need to sound it out or read each letter goes away, but that’s not the starting point.

As much as I like to think I can determine a word’s meaning through context, when put to the test, I often miss the mark. Reading on an e-reader lowers the barrier to looking up unfamiliar words and I find myself doing it more often. I find my assumption based on context can often be less than correct. Maybe I’m close, but there is more nuance to the actual definition. Sometimes I’m completely wrong and the whole meaning of the paragraph changes. Not to mention, if I look a word up to learn the actual meaning, it might be something I can introduce into my own speech and writing without sounding foolish.

I relied on context a lot growing up, because I was too lazy to look things up. These days, with it being so easy, I don’t know why kids wouldn’t be encouraged to look up words they don’t know. I think my vocabulary would be much better had I grown up learning the words I didn’t know, instead of simply bypassing them.

I agree there is a development path to learning to read. My son is learning and during the phase of learning the phonics he would use the pictures a lot to help get context. You could tell because he would pause on each new page as he observed the graphics.

But as he became more proficient he started using the graphics as a crutch to guess the words rather than sound them out and blend them. So I started covering the pictures with my hand as I turned the pages and his progress jumped ahead in the following weeks.

He is still learning and falls into guessing patterns too easily. However through accompanied parent reading every night he is progressing well (IMO).

> This is how I felt when I first tried to figure out what common core math was, after I kept hearing about it. It sounded like the people who made it were trying to create a process around what I would do in my head to try and solve a problem when I didn’t have paper or a calculator handy.

> What common core, and this reading approach, seem to miss is that those are things that come after learning the foundations and rules.

The CA Common Core for math¹ is a very tiny spec that can be easily read in a day for the entirety of K-12. It's a spec meant to coordinate textbook publishers, test makers, and other content creators.

It offers very little restriction or guidance, in other words wide latitude, on pedagogical vision.

[1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/BE/ST/SS/documents/ccssmathstandardau...

And what's there isn't too different from what's before, though pedagogical ideas that are now more in vogue (use of tape models) are mentioned prominently, and there's a lot more emphasis on students being able to explain what they've done and why it works.

I'm sorry, but as a mathematician and educator, the comparison to Common Core is unwarranted.

When you say it sounded like something to you, you communicate that you didn't understand what it actually meant and deduced the meaning through pattern-matching - which is exactly the problem here.

Common Core aims to rectify the problems introduced during the "New Math" era (and before it, too), which, like the "three cueing", took sense out of the art of reasoning and imagination we call mathematics.

To understand what I am talking about, I beg you (no exaggeration) to read Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart[1].

It will give you an immediate understanding of how we teach mathematics wrong - like the article we are discussing exposes how we teach reading wrong.

[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician'...

That was an interesting read. I wasn't expecting to actually read 25 pages as a result of a comment here, but the author wrote with enough passion to hold my interest and presented some interesting ideas that I hadn't heard before. Thanks for sharing it and begging me to read it.

I also went a watched a quick video on common core (which used a multiplication example) after reading Lockhart's paper, to try and better understand where I was going wrong, and where you were coming from. Prior to this, my last look at Common Core was many years ago, and fairly brief. It also lacked appropriate context, just the news, so I was entering with a bias (more on that bias later).

I do agree that providing a formula and telling kids to use it 100 times to drill it into their head is probably not a great way to teach. A person can't really extrapolate on ideas when they aren't understood, but rather memorized. It wasn't until after collage that I stumbled across some gifs showing how/why various formulas in geometry are what they are, and I was really upset that those types of things weren't shown in school. All I had was Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, lol. I find it much easier to remember things if I can conceptualize them and understand why something is the way it is. If I can deduce it myself, to the paper's point, that is even better. That way, even if I forget the formula, I know how to get back to it.

My opinions on any change of the math curriculums have been colored by my own experience 25-ish years ago when my high school introduced Integrated Math, to replace the traditional track. My class was the first one without a choice. At the time we were told the idea behind Integrated Math was that no one needed high level math, so why bother preparing kids for it... which was an idea also touched on in the paper. I was planning on going into engineering and needing high level math, so that program kind of screwed me. To live in the author's perfect world, college would likely need to change as well to not assume knowledge of various things going into college level math programs. I liked math (or at least what I thought was math before reading that paper), and Integrated Math destroyed that for me. It was very unfortunate. A year after I graduated, I received a letter from my high school asking me about the program and what I thought of it after having been out for a year. I wrote a pretty scathing letter in response. The program was abandoned some years later. I tried to jump on the traditional track in college, but I did too well on the placement test, so they wouldn't let me take algebra, but didn't really get the foundation to effectively move forward into calc.

To this day, I still feel like I have a gap due to missing out on the traditional math track in high school, and the ramifications that had on my college and career (not that I'm doing bad, I'm probably better off for it). Hindsight being 20/20, I didn't actually need it, but things do come up from time to time that make me think I missed out. I've attempted, to go back a few times to learn on my own. Without being in school, and the boring nature of most mathematics instruction, I've never gone that far.

I like the ideas presented in the paper about viewing mathematics as art. At the risk of going against every point he was trying to make, are you aware of anything resources that teach mathematics through this lens that I could check out? Some sort of framework to give me problems to try to solve to lead me in the right direction, while also showing how to see math problems in the everyday and the solutions as art, instead of wandering around in the desert for the rest of my life hoping I stumble upon the problems/solutions that took centuries to uncover. Are some of the Common Core resources out there a good place, or is there something in the spirit of Lockhart's paper that is better?

Thank you so much for reading that paper and writing this comment.

There definitely are resources that I can recommend. Can't do this at the moment (work awaits!), but will come back to this in the evening.

One book that did a lot for me was What Is Mathematics?[1] by Courant and Robbins. Godel, Escher, Bach[2], while not strictly a math book (and not a book I actually finished reading), was another. These would be my go-to recommendations without thinking much.

There are also many more playful mathematics books that might be an even better fit for what you want, but I'd need to go through my bookshelf to pick some.

> It wasn't until after collage that I stumbled across some gifs showing how/why various formulas in geometry are what they are, and I was really upset that those types of things weren't shown in school.

I know, right? Me too.

BTW, if you have ever stumbled into this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/g15ei/tan_demystified...

...I made it for that exact reason. I need to come back to this stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Mathematics%3F

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

This was an incredible interesting read, thanks for sharing. I actually fear that this is a generalized problem with subjects in school, it's not math alone that suffers from this. I remember being asked to learn by hearth poems that I didn't even like, making me hating poetry in general. Or even art, just a bunch of names and artworks to learn and memorize characteristics and whatnot. I enjoyed math and physics, but I realize now it was because I was good with algebraic manipulation rather than proper understanding. And I rather struggled later at University studying physics indeed.

Indeed it is, sadly. But I'm very glad you got to read this paper, and get thoughts from it! The more people see things this way, the closer we are to changing the education system for the better.

Common core math has its issues, especially with teacher training, textbooks, and bad assessments. But I wouldn't lump it in with three-cueing, which sits squarely in opposition to decades of research.

For example, I don't think that kids who struggle with common core math and then switch to the "normal way" (the way their parents learned) will have a leap in ability the way that kids who switch from three-cueing to phonics do.

At least half of the problem with common core math is that parents get a pit in their stomach when they look at their kid's homework and discover that they aren't familiar with the methods. The angst will lessen over time as we start to have kids whose parents grew up with the new methods.

There's certainly a long road ahead in getting math education right, but I imagine the long-term solution will look more like common core than the 20th century curriculum.

> For example, I don't think that kids who struggle with common core math and then switch to the "normal way" (the way their parents learned) will have a leap in ability the way that kids who switch from three-cueing to phonics do.

I'm not quite sure that's true. In my city, there is a local charter school that teaches math with only Common Core methods. The local public school teaches primarily Common Core, but also supplements it with Houghton-Mifflin workbooks of the sort that we learned 30 years ago. By 4th grade, the public school's math proficiency rates are 20 points higher than the charter school's. They draw from similar socioeconomic demographics - if anything, the charter school parents tend to be a bit more affluent and involved in their kids' educations than the public school's.

As said elsewhere, there's not really such a thing as common core mathematical methods.

The main way they differ from what came before is that the CC standards expect students to be able to explain more of what they're doing and why, which is pushing a lot of people building curriculum to emphasize visual methods, bar models, etc. But that's not part of CC per se.

By "common core methods", I'm lumping together a bunch of approaches where, in the words of the immortal Tom Lehrer, "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer".

Understanding what you're doing is important. Understanding what you're doing on the way to getting the wrong answer is not really, unless your goal is to get the wrong answer. IMHO, getting the right answer should be the starting point for math education. It's not all of math education - there is a vital role for understanding what you're doing. And wrong answers have their place as well - it's actually very illuminating to work out what happens in number systems where 1/0=1 or 1/0=0 or is anything other than undefined, and then show how that means that every number is equal to every other number. But the big lesson from working these lessons is usually that mathematical conventions are what they are because it makes other branches of math simpler, and they could be otherwise (that's the whole point of having axioms), but then you'd have to deal with the consequences, which is often that certain results we take for granted don't hold.

In software engineering, we have a saying: "Make it work, make it right, make it fast." It means that you don't shoot for perfect code up-front. There's too much learning involved in just making useful code. But once you have something that works, you can anchor your explorations around something that already has a quantum of utility. At that point, you work on simplifying the approach, making it understandable, cutting out abstractions that aren't necessary and adding abstractions that make the problem shorter. And then when you're done with that, you add optimizations to make the program run faster, but only if necessary.

The point of starting with working code is to bound the search space, though. If you don't have that, you can find that you spin your wheels forever and never generate anything useful. Likewise, the point of phonics is to get you somewhere close to the right word. It bounds the search space, while whole-word or 3-cue approaches leave the beginning reader guessing indefinitely. And the point of drilling math problems until you're at least familiar with basic arithmetic is so that you can enter the conversation about "What does this all mean? Why do these approaches give the same answer? What happens if I take a slightly different set of axioms?" with knowledge of what that answer was in the first place.

> By "common core methods", I'm lumping together a bunch of approaches where, in the words of the immortal Tom Lehrer, "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer".

Well, maybe that's really misdirected then, isn't it? Because the actual Common Core standards aren't really behind your complaints.

I don't really agree with the rest of what you say, though. Rote and math drilling are very important, but understanding is pretty important so you know what method to select. IMO, a good math class is 1/3rd rote, 1/3rd intuition/pictures, and 1/3rd efforts to add rigor.

It's worth noting the whole lot of the world introduces pictures and geometric methods early, like some of these curriculums are trying to do, and gets better results in math education than we have. Though I don't really think most US teachers know how to do that well, yet.

> Understanding what you're doing is important. Understanding what you're doing on the way to getting the wrong answer is not really, unless your goal is to get the wrong answer.

Everyone wants the right answer. A huge proportion of our population basically gives up on math at some point from 4th to 7th grade; they decide they're bad at it, and this self-assessment is more predictive of their future performance than their actual performance. This is really a general pedagogical thing rather than being rooted in standards or even curriculum, but a lot of the reason some teachers and programs are trying to celebrate partial success is to reduce this problem. The background trend is particularly harmful to girls, who for a variety of reasons tend to self-assess more harshly than boys.

In any case, this all has very little to do with Common Core, other than it started happening in the same decade. (Buying new textbooks to align with a new standard is a good chance to change things.) And it's really confusing to those of us with some domain knowledge who can't figure out the specific, non-CC reason why a particular person is complaining.

My background: I advise on math curriculum selection and development at a small private school; I coach a competitive MS math team that routinely wins (crushes— we are 4% of the local MS pop but had 8/12 of the top students last year) regional competition despite us being tiny. Our elementary school that feeds us adopted visual and explanatory methods early, and devoted a whole lot of effort at getting good at teaching this way. (Note, we didn't abandon rote practice. Also note that we are not really required to align with state standards, but for math we could do so with very little change).

We get a huge proportion of our student body through AP Calc; my eldest did it in 8th grade.

I think the backlash against phonics is because English just has too many exceptions which makes it frustrating, but it's still important to teach simple phonics (common uses of short and long vowel sounds). Beyond that, any rigid approach is bound to fail because kids just need to get used to the general guidelines of English spelling and learn the exceptions one by one, through guided read-along practice. But the process of making educated guesses on how to say a word based on spelling is part of the learning process.

I'm imagining a reading curriculum that regards the irregularities as funny little foibles, oddities to point out and wonder about. Like if you go to a park and there's that one place it's too steep to walk, or the other that always floods and is muddy, or the place where mushrooms grow. Complaining about orthographic exceptions is like saying everything should be perfectly flat lawn, a giant grotesque golf course.

I wonder how much of it is how, for adults who already understand phonics, teaching it can being repetitive and monotonous. Three cueing offered a teaching theory where kids all sat around with a book with very little teacher intervention.

Maybe the only way to be good at reading for basic proficiency is to just reading more? Not sure why there are so many theories and practices. I have two anecdotes. Not that they count, but in case other people had similar experiences: One is that I didn't know how to read when I entered my first grade. For the entire first grade, I read only my textbook, which was too simple to help me read other books. And then in the summer time after my first grade, I picked up a book for fairy tales of animals, and I read along. I didn't look up a dictionary, I skipped the words that I didn't understand. And miraculously reading was never a problem for me any more. I repeated the pattern when I started to learn English. In English it was a graded reading by National Geographic, if I recall correctly, and later popular fictions by Sidney Sheldon. And then Japanese and then Spanish. I repeated the same pattern. In Japanese I started with 多読, and for Spanish La Alchimista, and Si Hubiera un Mañana after some graded readers. The reading just naturally became easier over time.

Another anecdote was that even the most struggled students in my classes, throughout my middle school and high school, had no problem reading popular fictions. And by struggle I mean they would fail pretty much every subject and could barely graduate high school. However, there were a few extremely popular novels when I grew up, and everyone talked about them. So, every student read them. The novels were written in pretty elegant language with lots of sophisticated words, yet my classmates had no problem understanding them.

>>> Maybe the only way to be good at reading is to just reading more?

Perhaps at some point you plateau and need to practice "micro skills". e.g. there's a point with chess where you stop getting better playing more games - but training puzzles can bump you out of the plateau.

Teachers bought into three cueing because as it turns out, a good portion of students will learn to read on their own. However, another portion of students won't. "Just reading more" doesn't work for these students because they don't know how to decode word sounds in the first place. This is why three cueing was so cruel. These kids were basically having to fake it out of embarrassment.

> Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters

I'm really confused by this. Yes, this is what skilled readers do once they are skilled. But when any kid is starting out, they are by definition a poor (brand new) reader. Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! So how does this "new research" help?

Well, for one thing, it strongly suggests (and I absolutely agree) that phonics is the better way to go. I actually did struggle with learning how to read in early elementary school, and thank the Lord, I was lucky enough to get some phonics-based intervention that finally made things start clicking. Had that not occurred, I'm pretty confident I'd probably still be a relatively poor reader right now.

> Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters!

What makes you think so? Perhaps some kids pick this up really quickly and practice it. Some kids learn faster how to run and kick a ball, and some learn faster how to ride a bicycle.

when you are starting on day 1, isn't it obvious you don't know any written words and you have no skills to put the letters together, because you are just starting out?? Then saying "just start recognizing word as a sequence of letters like the skillful readers do" is about as helpful as "just start reading" if you've never done this before.

> instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters

This appears to be the very basic, which is far from being enough to become a "skilled reader".

i think steadily recognizing words from letter sequences is very far from basic or intuitive for anyone starting out. Probably the most difficult step actually. Hence all these tricks like the cueing theory to get the kids to understand at least something and start progressing.

See "orthographic mapping." When you see a word you haven't learned yet, you look carefully at the letters in order to figure out how to pronounce it. Once you do this enough times for that word, it's saved into memory. You see the letters and you can retrieve that the word very quickly.

Next time you encounter a new word, try to catch yourself sounding it out in your head. I wasn't really aware of the process until I tried.

Retraining as a math teacher here, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how kids learn stuff at the moment.

At one point in the article it states that indeed the trio of semantic/syntactic/graphophonic cues are used by readers. The article kind of dances around the point that even if these cues tend to be used by competent readers, it doesn't mean that training them directly is how novice readers need to learn.

I'm really coming round to this belief that there is no substitute for the "rote" drilling of basic skills.

> "rote" drilling of basic skills

I think it depends on the nature of the task for which the skill is used. But I agree. There are certain things that are just not realistic to master without rote drilling of some sort of supporting material.

At the same time I think rote drilling gets a bad reputation because poor teachers will tend to fall back on it in instances where it isn't particularly useful.

I personally had a low opinion of it until university, where I encountered two independent topics where it was clearly necessary.

I had a heck of a time reading as a kid. I was taught just to sound every single word out and reading a chapter book took me literally forever. Beyond the time factor, my comprehension was terrible because in taking the time to sound every single word out I would lose track of the overall meaning of the sentence and often need to start over. I would say I was a very poor reader into high school.

Honestly the thing that really helped was just spending so much time on computers. Eventually something in my brain clicked and started memorizing shapes of the top of words. My eyes scan the top of the letters. I only fall through to looking at the individual letters when what I read didn't make sense. I can read pretty reasonably fast now.

Do different fonts effect you or are they universal enough to not give you any problems?

Never really been much of a problem. I will say that OpenDyslexic is one of the hardest to read I have ever tried though.

You might have something unusual going on there. At the beginning I, and to the best of my knowledge everyone I grew up around, was also taught to sound words out. At some point I stopped needing to do that. That happened quickly for the common words and more slowly for the uncommon ones. At the extreme end, for example extremely specific medical or chemical terminology, I still have to do that on account of never having encountered the word before.

At no point did I intentionally memorize word shapes. At no point in my life have I ever been conscious of recognizing words by shape. That might well be what's happening under the hood, but if so it's not something I have any awareness of. I just see a word and (in most cases) instantly know what it is without thinking about it.

I read this or similar article like a year ago.

I am an avid reader and I did not realize until I read about it that someone could struggle with reading because it is so effortless for me.

It is my story “don’t take others experiences for granted “, I have a bit more empathy for people knowing that.

How can we expect kids to learn to read a language that's taken an alphabet and created a poor woman's logogram out of it?

wi hæv ɔl ðə tulz wi nid tə tɝn ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ˈɪntu ə ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ wʌn kæn rid wɪðˈaʊt ˈnidɪŋ fɔr jɪrz ˈtutərɪŋ. jɛt wi doʊnt bɪˈkəz ɪd bi tu mʌtʃ wɝk.

see also https://www.shavian.info

(the Achilles heel: any phonetically spelled language can only be correct for at most one dialect!)

Unless each spoken dialect corresponds to a matching written dialect. But that just sounds like an even messier system than modern english.

That's an argument for why we should all use Chinese instead.

You can always phonetically spell in the dialect. Which Finnish does often. So if you have a dialect you write it out phonetically. There might be slight deviation from standard phonetics(some vowel variations), but the dialect does get rather close.

In the end, maybe it is inherently wrong take that same word in different dialects is the same word. Usually they are close enough to be relatively intelligible.

Interesting article. I’m from Germany and I learned to read with the phonetics and sounding out words approach. My kids as well. It’s the first time I heard about this style of teaching how to read. My first reaction while reading was: “and how do some kids manage to read at all with only this system?” It’s very late into the article where they mention that first some kids will learn how to read no matter what and second that the problem is a mixed message as schools do teach phonetics but that the mean approach taught when seeing unknown words is to use a simpler system. I myself never look at queues or pictures when reading unknown texts. While learning English I read English books and used the context approach. But I had to first learn a lot of vocabulary to even start that.

Alternative alphabets have been kicking around for ages as a way to make it easier to learn English; mainly because our existing alphabet is inconsistent and doesn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence of letters to sounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

Sequoyah famously brought the Cherokee from 0% to 90% literacy in a decade after he invented a syllabic writing system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabar...

Literacy could be much easier if we switched orthography and now with technology everything can be auto-transliterated.

If you want to know about this in podcast form: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Takes more time than reading the article, but the podcast has IMO a nice pace of leaving you curious and giving you info. It includes opinions from teachers, parents, etc.

Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are already fairly resistant).

It's really common for me to encounter adults doing things like reading sentences haltingly, substituting in a completely wrong word with the same first letter now and then, or just giving up on a sentence, and these are just the ones with English as a first language.

Test yourself: what did you do when you encountered the words casphetato brolganic alvolamina sooveg in this sentence? A fluent English reader will just read them; I made them plausible and decodable, not like zprxapsi mnoqlkzb which I pulled out of a random number generator and a fluent reader may well do a double take at.

Relevant:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

One of the key things any parent should be doing is making sure their children are exposed to books from a very young age. And please make sure you take the time to read with your child.

We’ve been reading since mine was very young. His comprehension is great, but trying to make him read or sound out the words? It’s not even that he can’t if you force him, the motivation is just not there. I really hope school will change something there.

All my kids went through this. We read a lot of books together and every kid when starting school was eagerly awaiting the time they finally read by themselves. And every one of them struggled with the phonetics part. They argued that it’s too hard and the lessons are not fun. But we knew that we learned like this and that it worked for us. So with more work it finally clicked. They are all very good readers now. They read tons of books and comics and can sound out words or names they don’t know. I think the system of teaching the phonetics is the best way but how we can keep kids motivated during the boring lessons is something we should tackle. By the way my experiences come from a German background.

To be fair, English phonetics are a pain in the ass. Sounds change with no rhyme or reason to them, and the only way to learn all the different permutations is to see them all.

German has strict grammatical rules but we also have tons of words coming from Latin and close relative French. But I know what you mean. Being thought pronunciation in school in Oxford English taught by a teacher with heavy German accent wasn’t helpful. I learned most words and pronunciation from TV shows and movies but I can’t really spell a lot of words by heart. Reading is different because I know a lot of words. But the reverse doesn’t work for me. Luckily I write with assistance of my computer. To be fair I struggled with this also in German. Writing correctly was always a pain.

This is quite a harmful misconception that keeps getting thrown around! English phonetics make sense; the phenomenon people notice is that in English, orthography recapitulates etymology, because English more than other languages acquires words from multiple sources (the broad categories are Germanic, Latin, and Greek). e.g. "orthography recapitulates etymology" contains Greek, Latin, and Greek derived words in order.

Maybe. I’m not well informed enough to say one way or the other, but it seems doubtful to me. Regardless, the end result is that it doesn’t. Nobody speaks English without loanwords, and someone has already demonstrated that doing that leads to such wonders as ‘uncleftish beholding’.

(2019)

I wonder whether "many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it" is still true now.

There is a massive range of ability, knowhow, ongoing professional development, etc within “teachers”. The US is in itself a good example of this. In some areas, teaching is a white collar profession. In others, it’s blue collar. In my country it’s entirely white collar. In others, it’s entirely blue collar. This has a massive impact on teachers’ ability, willingness, means, etc to stay up to date. it can take decades for new ‘best practices’ to proliferate. This is ignoring the fact that Education is at BEST a social science and carries with it all the grey area, fads, flip-flopping on ‘best practices’, etc. There are schools of thought. Very valid schools of thought. It’s all very complicated.

Well there's two tests to figure out if a kid is a fast enough reader:

1) Have them read subtitles out loud (from a different language so they can't rely on audio).

2) Have them skimp through the text and provide a summary afterwards.

I'm not very sure however how to GET there apart from the boring "read a lot". And reading a lot in today's video-infested age is simply, not realistic. When I grew up in communist Romania there was virtually no video content so much like a century before, the only form of ENTERTAINMENT was reading books. I read them because I was motivated by pleasure. Hated school-mandated readings, never did them or just cheated if no alternative but I did read a fuckton on my own volition because I repeat, that was the most powerful form of entertainment available.

If I were brought up today surrounded by video content everywhere: addictive shorts, game tutorials, movies... I'm not at all sure I would have cared much for reading.

It is what it is and we can't turn back time and expect today's kids to be as proficient readers as a gentleman of the 19th century, they just don't have the motivation anymore.

This "whole word" nonsense has reached new levels of absurdity with people trying to replace words with icons at every opportunity.

The gawddamned icons on a car's instrument panels are a classic example of the suckiness of this approach. My old car says "hot" "cold" "defrost" on the controls. The new ones each invent their own incomprehensible icons.

Most pictoglyphic written languages have evolved towards phonetics. Including Mayan, Egyptian, and western writing.

I'd guess the new cars are probably sold into markets bigger than a single language. (still, that's no excuse not to have an industry group standardising the icons)

I've heard that rationale.

The trouble with it is how are you going to look up an icon in a dictionary? People aren't born with the knowledge of what that wretched icon for on/off means. Or that a drawing of an ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp means oil pressure.

Perhaps that's the emoji U+1FA94 and is thus standard, and emoji will replace spelling until we end up with a morphographic writing system. Dictionaries will work like mushroom-identification handbooks, where you find the emoji by navigating through a tree of questions.

I think he means https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/images/uploads/content/warning-l... ?

Walter, if I told you to pull out the magnitude of Saturn before starting and then push it back in after the engine has warmed up, would you know what I'm referring to?

Yes, the choke.

I guess these days reverse image search might actually be easier than putting displays in each button/knob, but maybe that will also change back in the near future?

(the car I was just in had ~30 buttons and knobs on the steering wheel and console, not counting stalk functions, and paging through the languages on offer for the lcd displays I counted ~8 distinct script families)

The old-fashioned way to learn the symbols would have been to see them along with their description in the owner's manual, but that also has its drawbacks — I got a good deal on a new truck a few years ago, with the minor hook being that the only dead-tree manual it came with was in czech.

It wouldn't take me too long to learn On/Off in Czech.

I've been in many foreign countries with zero knowledge of the language, and was able to quickly learn the words necessary, like "exit", "airport", etc. Fluency is completely unnecessary.

In your case it's 30 words. I submit it is not any harder to learn them than memorize 30 arbitrary illustrations that have no particular relationship to their function.

And, frankly, most everyone on the planet knows at least a few English words.

Aha, I hadn't understood you meant arbitrary words were fine, just not arbitrary icons.

Maybe sometime when I get sufficiently nerdsniped I'll figure out how to re-silk all the physical labels in my car into the lang belta from The Expanse?

  P seteshang
  R ruserux
  N naterash
  D do

(Surely someone, somewhere, has a car with its buttons labelled in tengwar/quenya?)

That oil icon has been the way to indicate low oil pressure since long before I was born in the early 80s. It's newer cars that have started to add text explanations to those warning lights, because dashboards have gotten more flexible with dot matrix and lcd screens.

The oil indicator isn't a lamp, it's an old-fashioned oil can. Used for adding oil to the car without spilling it. E.g. this[1] sort of container.

[1] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_AtRmPUXq3uY/TGIVAre5JrI/AAAAAAAAA...

My car has a bunch of acronyms on the buttons. I’d rather have icons for a lot of them.

Should I press the SRH button, maybe the RAB button, how about BSD…

My car has a button with a snowflake on it. Does it mean turn on the air conditioning? Turn on the heat? Turn on the defroster?

With some experimenting, it turns on the defroster - but only if it is in combination with another button with a bent rectangle on it.

The obvious thing to do is have the instruction manual with an index in it and look up SRH quickly using the alpha sort. Even better would be putting the entire manual in the car's computer and using the touch screen to search for SRH.

Can't do search with an icon.

Hunting through the owner's manual isn't a good option while driving.

Having a single page in the manual with all buttons and their meanings would be helpful, and avoid having to look 20 different places if using the index. Once it's looked up, I think for me, an icon has a better chance of being remembered than trying to remember that SRH stands for Steering Responsive Headlights. SRH could mean just about anything, while a steering wheel and a headlight on a button would give me a pretty strong reminder that it's for making the lights move with the steering wheel, even if I don't remember the technical or marketing name for the feature.

Most of the icons in my car have no correlation with their function. Every designer of these thinks he's Susan Kare.

For example, what's the icon for "stop"? There isn't one. We've all simply memorized what a red octagon means. There aren't any icons for verbs, only things, and with the very limited space for a drawing, they aren't going to reliably be interpretable.

My keyboard still labels keys with "Enter", "Delete", "PgDn", "Shift", etc. That's because there's no icon that means it.

> We've all simply memorized what a red octagon means.

This is required learning to get a driver's license. If anyone doesn't know what a red octagon is, they shouldn't be behind the wheel of a car. That same is true for any common symbol used in street signs.

Music playback has pretty universal iconography. ▶ ⏏. I'm sure anyone who used a walkman or discman in their youth could readily tell you what all these icons mean. It doesn't seem unreasonable that standards could/should be made for cars as well. As the names for things get longer and longer, the words are too long for the button, so we need something else.

> My keyboard still labels keys with "Enter", "Delete", "PgDn", "Shift", etc. That's because there's no icon that means it.

Many of these do have symbols. Some keyboards include them. The symbols are commonly used in menus to indicate the shortcut for the command in the menu.

"Enter" - ⏎

"Delete" - ⌦

"PgDn" - ⇟

"Shift" - ⇧

etc - https://www.webnots.com/alt-code-shortcuts-for-keyboard-key-...

These were established decades ago and widely used to this day. Page Down isn't so widely used, but neither is that key in general.

Here is a Thinkpad keyboard that uses many of them.

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/SuQsONNAdfeYp1ZV.lar...

Those are all learned, they are not obvious pictures. There's a limit to how far one can go with this, which is why pictographic written languages evolved into phonetic ones, again and again.

Everything is learned, even language.

Phonetic languages are great when space is unlimited. Only so much can fit on a button, and a picture is worth a thousand words.

If pictures are better, why do picture languages nearly always evolve to phonetic ones?

What's the picture for "go" ? What's the picture for "dog" as opposed to a picture for collie?

There are one million words in the English language. Are you going to memorize them all?

Picture languages simply do not work.

We're not talking about developing an entire language, we're talking about a button to let someone turn features in their car on and off. An icon can be used globally, just translate the owner's manual instead of making thousand of different cars where the only change is the language on the buttons.

It sounds like you take issue with "whole icons" rather than "whole words".

> It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-l...

> The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Not without problem. Reading that next was noticeably slower and more difficult than reading ungarbled words.

Wrong comparison. It's not ungarbled text vs garbled text. It's treating each word as 1 image vs trying to sound out the letters.

I remember when that went around the intertoobs. Subsequent research showed that didn't work with plenty of other text.

Although you must admit it works moderately well. So we probably make use of the effect, among other things (your human mind may vary).

Despite Chinese being the supposed "non-phonetic" counterexample people drag out, most Chinese characters are phonetic, a fact that seems to pass through the Western brain like water through a sieve, maybe because the Ezra Pound pareidolia approach seems cooler?

> most Chinese characters are phonetic

Which makes my point. Icons are not progress, they are regress.

The article isn't completely coherent, because it disapproves of "memorizing a bunch of words" while at the same time approving of storing words in memory for instant recognition.

...Is it really saying that to only memorize a bunch of words is insufficient, compared to memorizing lots? Is that the point being made there? Wasn't clear.

It's active memorization vs passive memorisation. What words do you need to teach a kid to memorise for them to read Harry Potter? What if they get into Lord of the Rings instead?

So you teach kids to sound out the words. To decode them. Mug-el = Muggle. But you're not sounding it out for long, you'll memorise it pretty fast. And if you forget it, you'll decode it again.

The point is the memorization will happen automatically to avoid doing the recognition. But if you just jump to memorization you've got no fallback and no way to ever memorise more, you have to actively learn it again. It's like putting cache layer above a database for recently retrieved values. Hell of a lot easier than trying to cache everything or manually predict the best values to cache.

Teaching reading without phonetics. The "new math". "Science" without the scientific method. History rewritten to match modern sensibilities.

There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. Alternatively, for the conspiracy theory that it is trying to create compliant peasants rather than educated citizens.

Tutors adapt to their students. Schools adapt to metrics. Why?

A tutor can do trial and error and eventually find a way that helps the student understand. School system has a needlesly specific curriculum that is decided a priori, and it's not optional.

Kind of.

I work with a lot of curricula. There are degrees of specificity. Common core is, notably, absurdly specific, and dense. It’s the US at its best, which is to say its worst. Including the fact that CC hasn’t ever really been touched since. This is seldom how curricula in actual developed jurisdictions are built.

There are also degrees to which a teacher can ‘play it by ear’ in their classroom. This is informed by their ability to do so competently, and the freedom allowed by their school, school system, etc. The existence of a curricula, even in a public education context, doesn’t inherently disallow a teacher from attempting different teaching styles to get through to a kid, or changing what they focus on in order to teach to their students’ zone of proximal development.

Schools “adapting to metrics” is very much moreso informed by the undeniably reality that, with any sizeable group of kids, and realistic constants on resources, you quickly need to start doing “formative assessment”, and doing assessment well is really hard.

Above all though, schools adapt to metrics because it’s what’s demanded of them by their bosses. By that, I don’t mean ‘educational bureaucrats’, I mean…parents, taxpayers at large, etc. ‘Hold hands under a rainbow and nothing bad ever happens’ individualised education is simply very hard to monitor, it’s very hard to hold anyone to account. Stakeholders hate this. They want measurement. They want numbers. And numbers invite systems, and putting people into boxes. We get exactly what we deserve here. Nothing more and nothing less.

I’ve been very impressed with the “awful” common core math. It teaches kids to think about numbers the way my friends and I do. (Context: I’m not a mathematician, but won lots of state math contests in high school. I didn’t choose to specialize in it but neither do I suck at it.)

It’s very different from the dreadfully boring memorization-based curriculum I had to endure.

The problem is you shouldn’t be thinking deeply about addition and multiplication when you’re just number crunching or working through algebraic manipulation.

Understanding is well and great, but instant and effortless arithmetic recall is table stakes.

I've yet to find anyone who hasn't written part of a CAS that understands what algebraic manipulation even is, let alone how to do it outside of hand picked artificial examples.

I find it astonishing that term rewriting systems are considered esoteric mathematics that you don't see unless you work in a very specific and niche fields of mathematics or computer science.

Never met a physicist? Or even someone from engineering department?

Plenty of college students are doing multiple pages of derivations for their coursework.

And yet, give them something as innocuous as

$$ \frac{\frac{a}{b}}{c \times \frac{d}{\frac{e}{f}}} \times \frac{\frac{g}{h \times \frac{i}{j}}}{k} $$

And watch 98% of them fail to bring it to normal for a simple fraction.

Much less than 98% would fail that, why do you think that? Do you really believe that almost all STEM college students are that dumb?

Likely you misunderstood something here, not the people you talked to. Do you mean they get confused with that notation? Not understanding specific notation doesn't mean you can't do the thing.

This was a question I gave as a post grad TA to third year physics students.

In three classes totaling 43 students exactly one got it right and he was a double major from CS.

This is Latex, it renders nicely to: https://arachnoid.com/latex/?equ=%24%20%5Cfrac%7B%5Cfrac%7Ba...

Which is the question I posted all those many years ago.

A lot of the short comings of new math came from the fact that it assumed that the fundamentals of math were simple and easily understood.

Doing real algebra without something like the Kunth Bendix algorithm is somewhere between pointless memorization and the equivalent of a mathematical lobotomization.

That it wasn't invented until 1970 shows us just how poor we are at mathematics.

> There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots.

The world is full of people who are not smart and don't want to feel inferior. No conspiracy needed, we've collectively decided it's best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included. That's what you're seeing here. To a degree this is part of a good society but it also removes incentives to escape mediocrity.

>we’ve collectively decided it’s best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included What are some examples of this?

> What are some examples of this?

Perhaps attempts to abolish gifted and talented programs in schools?

And abolish algebra until high school.

This is a fantastic comment because of how right you think you are, how utterly wrong you are in reality, and the context being the assertion that people don’t like to feel stupid. Thank you so much for this.

In the metaphorical galaxy brain comic of this situation, “GATE programs fell out of fashion because of tall poppy syndrome” is the first or AT BEST the third frame.

It’s the line of thinking held by the ‘uninformed self-described smart guy’ contingent, that knows nothing about education, yet think that they can intuit their way through it. It’s unrealistic, naive, and utterly condescending. It’s no surprise that I see it so much in tech people.

I was pretty skeptical, which is why I asked for examples, but I’m not particularly up on this subject, so I was hoping you could explain why he’s wrong.

This comment was really hard to parse and understand.

Are you an educator or pedagogy researcher? You certainly act as if you are.

? Examples abound e.g. high school taking four years when a moderately smart kid could cover all of it in a summer.

Citation needed.

You can't cover it all in a summer, you can only think you've covered it all in a summer. In reality, you have only a cursory overview of most topics so you fail when you go to college.

I've seen this firsthand. Kids who think they're gifted and talented, and coast with B's through high school. Then college Calculus hits and they realize they don't actually know math or how to reason about it - they only know the surface level of the pieces and how to apply them in a test.

How is that relevant to what’s happening here? No one’s teaching three-cueing as a way to dumb anything down or enforce mediocrity - the people teaching it genuinely believe it’s the best approach to teaching reading; that it’s how good (not mediocre!) readers learn to read.

I suspect if I sat in on a day of teaching at public schools, I'd be horrified at the rest of the curriculum they teach as well.

> There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots.

You get what you pay for.

Pennsylvania attempted to put minimum standards on teachers; a big chunk of the teachers failed. When faced with the huge amount of money the state would have to shell out for teachers who could pass, Pennsylvania dumped the standards and never tried again.

Pay in education is garbage relative to all the other jobs a teacher is qualified to be doing instead.

And then we complain that education is dominated by the unqualified.

And so it goes.

Teachers unions also negotiate for things that make it nearly impossible to fire an underperforming teacher.

This is the "welfare queen" dog whistle of anti-union propaganda. Please stop spreading it.

Yes, school management has to genuinely document an "underperforming teacher". There is a full legal process that has to be followed and it takes time. Too bad, so sad.

However, the problem is that school management doesn't want to produce that "documentation". It is genuine work and has the downside of maybe exposing that the teacher isn't underperforming and now a countersuit is incoming. In addition, attempting to fire a teacher almost always causes a kerfuffle in the community unless the teacher is complete garbage. And, see, if you, as a superintendent cause a kerfuffle, that is going to hit the local news and the Internet and is going to be a negative mark when you want your next job (superintendents tend to move on while most teachers do not).

So, what your little shibboleth is advocating for is unlimited authority by the superintendent to punish anybody they deem a "troublemaker"--which is any teacher with the temerity to do something that might get in the way of their next promotion. And that optimizes for teachers who simply don't rock the boat under any circumstances irrespective of any teaching skill or educational results.

Yes unions are bad and if we have less union then everything would magically be better. Also if we continue to burn coal and nobody takes the Jab we'd all be smarter or something.

> You get what you pay for.

Not unless it is coupled with accountability for results.

My experience of a lifetime in work is that regardless of what is paid, if there is no accountability for results, the output gradually and steadily declines.

Not paying for something, however, guarantees you won't get it.

This is why I think public education is idiotic. Why don’t parents take personal responsibility for educating kids?

My mom taught me how to read when I was 3. She sat there with the book and helped me through it. Heck I even remember my dad teaching me about the word “the”. I thought it was so funny that it was pronounced “thuh”.

Thanks to my parents I had zero problems with reading.

I think the only way to truly solve these problems is to teach parents the importance of loving kids!

The problem is that some kids respond very badly to parents teaching, and very good to a third party.

Unfortunately, many parents do not have the time or energy to spend this much time teaching kids to read. There are parents who have to work all the time so they can feed their kids, there are single parents who work even more to feed their kids, and there are parents who are raising multiple kids and can't give much time to each individual child as a result. There are also parents who struggle with reading themselves, and therefore aren't capable of teaching their kids!

I agree that in a perfect world, all kids would receive personalized reading instruction from their parents. In reality, though, the poor/disadvantaged kids who need such instruction the most are also least likely to have parents capable of giving it to them. Well-funded public education is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers we have and it's crucial that we continue to support and expand it.

Most parents are dumb. Some parents are a dangerous level of the dumb. The level of dumb where they're unable to admit their flaws and will never say outloud "I'm dumb". That's a big problem, because it means you can't convince them of anything. And then when little timmy is functionally illiterate they'll somehow convince themselves that's fine.

> teach parents

These types of solutions don't work. "Teach people not to smoke" "Teach people to workout" "Teach people to be better people". We need real, actual solutions. As in processes we can take that prove better outcomes. Some hand-wavy "well just do better" isn't a solution. If anything, it's an anti-solution, as in it prevents real solutions getting through.

If you want to reduce crime for example, you reduce poverty via social programs and industry. That is proven, without a doubt, to work. "people need to be better" doesn't work.

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