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Comment by eudamoniac | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a priori obvious that that method is idiotic; does the podcast detail how this made it into curricula? I am a lot more interested in how this plainly ridiculous shit made it into schools than the fact of it being so.

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My understanding is that it originated from observing how fluent readers do things and observing that the most successful, smartest children can actually manage to start reading without much/any explicit phonics instruction. So you could naively look at who ends up reading the best and how did they do it and think that perhaps that makes sense to do for everybody. The problem is that the sorts of techniques that work for outliers are going to be very different from the sorts of techniques that work for the median.

It wouldn't terribly surprise me if we walk into a similar trap with math. Like when I took a look at some of the common core math, I saw strategies that I use for arithmetic, where like sometimes I might do four-digit multiplications starting from the most significant digit with a sequence of approximations/corrections to arrive at the correct answer. It wouldn't terribly surprise me if this sort of thing just doesn't work for the median person, but from the little I've looked at it, it seems like the effects of CC math are mostly neutral anyway.

I think what those observations missed is that the best readers quickly build up a large baseline vocabulary of known words, whether by phonics or something else, and therefore appear to be guessing often or, when they're guessing, have a much better understanding of the surrounding prose than a median learner who has only been taught to guess at every word.

And yes, something similar is happening with common core math. Curricula are trying to teach the tricks, shortcuts, and mental re-arranging of numbers that are only possible to comprehend once the basics are memorized and internalized. It was miserable memorizing times tables, but I remember being able to start to see the ways you could combine and recombine numbers after I had successfully memorized them. Trying to teach those things without any memorization is putting the cart before the horse.

Yes, the podcast goes into exactly that detail.

IIRC it was a teacher in New Zealand[1] who had teacherly charisma, was earnestly committed to her method, and was so profoundly wrong that she became the first domino of a regression in reading ability which we are still feeling today across the English-speaking world. And teachers and education professionals became fans of both the method and the growing personas behind it. There were Americans who turned whole language hokum into a product for sale... using the cult-like sales tactics of Amway and other MLMs but applied to a target audience of largely woman-attended teachers' development conferences and fairs instead of Mormon housewives.

Sadly, humans were capable of producing plausible sounding nonsense long before the advent of LLMs. And promoting it persuasively.

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

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