Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the culture and resources of the parents, the buck stops at home.

Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job.

After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.

I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math.

Many parents are not academic and can’t do a good job in passing on academic skills no matter how hard they might try. Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.

I grew up on a farm, and the start of my journey into tech was fixing machinery and building things outside with my father. With my kids I want to create a similar experience so they feel like they have the power to take things apart, fix them and make whatever they want. I don’t want to jam them up all evening reading and doing times tables.

> I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math.

I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.

Those teachers couldn't be more wrong. Though, to clarify I am referring to reading and the exposure to it. We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".

I'm guessing the advice stems from school being boring already and being ahead of your class makes it even more boring.

Though reading should be something teachers are equipped to handle very wide range of competency.

> We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".

(I feel somewhat qualified...)

It is a mistake to make the kids memorize the times tables before they intuitively understand that multiplication is a repeated addition (or visually, that multiplication is a rectangle). The right moment to memorize comes a few weeks or months after they can calculate the result without memorizing. I think it is safer to wait, because many parents would be tempted to make it prematurely, in order "not to waste time".

Generally: understanding first, memorizing later. If you memorize first... many kids won't even try to understand, because "they already know it". The problem is, if you remember without understanding, there is nothing to correct you if you make a mistake. An incorrectly remembered fact feels exactly the same way as a correctly remembered fact, and you have no alternative way to check.

Also, memorizing instead of understanding is a strategy that works well in short term and terribly in long term, because memorizing a small thing for a few days is easy, but then you forget it (kids famously lose a lot of what they learned at school over summer holidays), and when the memorized things accumulate, it becomes too much and you start confusing them. Actual understanding takes more time, but it can survive the summer holidays, and already understanding many things makes understanding an additional thing easier.

(But when the day comes to memorize the times tables, spaced repetition is your friend.)

montessori does advanced math in kindergarten (advanced compared to regular kindergarten). i haven't heard anything about that leading to problems when those kids go to regular primary schools after that.

>I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.

That's a good indication of a bad teacher and a broken education system.

That sounds sort of noble, perhaps, but that's not how it works. Ignoring the fact that there is more than enough time in childhood for what you propose, reading, and much else.

Cognitive development is a process, of which language development and reading are a major subset. That development is always in-process.

The longer that one waits to start children down the path of language development skills, the lesser the chance that they will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.

For example if you speak to a child less than you should or could, that child's language and overall cognitive development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared to a child with similar potential but much more attentive parents.

Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then research developmental outcomes for that group.

The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you start, and the more that they get, both listening and eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood that they will become an advanced reader.

You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant cognitive need.

And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.

Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major developmental need. You should read stories to your kids. Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready. Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of reading that matters. Every little bit helps.

You are not “jamming” up your kid by reading to them. Reading to them is probably one of the most important things you can do to begin their journey towards literacy, and during it.

Connecting the words they hear as you read to what they see on the page is an important early step. You don’t need any academic training - just read to them.

> Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.

Reading and writing are probably among the most important skills you can teach your child in order for them to fully participate in modern societies.

There’s a difference between reading to your kids and “enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading”.

I absolutely agree that reading and writing are critical skills. In fact, I think they’re so critical that we should demand that professional educators teach children how to do it.

They are so critical I would not solely trust someone else to do it, unless you are supremely confident in their ability.

children should have lots of opportunities to read, at home too. but i think the scientific consensus is that required homework is not as beneficial as once thought.

My parents read to me when I was very young, but never tried to teach me to read. So all I knew of reading was that it was something my parents could do. I learned to read in first grade, at school. I found it compelling and did it on my own at home without much prompting or "enforcing."

That didn't really change until High School, when I found most of the standard reading assignments in English class to be tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no idea how I would have gotten through it.

By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grade 2 level. I think there are as many paths to reading as there are kids.

The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading, by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how cueing helps.

Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have much more difficulty than others, but there really are some basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.

> Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.

Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.

It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.

Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.

The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.

We did everything we could to encourage reading with our kids (reading to them, book fairs, bookshelves full of kid friendly books, etc).

1 kid has grown into an avid reader, the other two (twins) have never embraced it. It's easy (and often appropriate) to blame the parents, but sometimes it's on the student to actually want to do it.

It makes me sad and I would love to change it. Having video games come into the environment (not my choice) certainly did not help.

I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but I'd like to understand what was disagreeable about what I said (for my own edification). My point was simply that nature vs. nurture is a thing (nature wins, but nurture shapes).

Right, so having bad or incapable parents is just a reason to what, toss those kids off a cliff?

How dare you hold people to such high expectations for the development of the lives that they bring into the world.

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