[HN Gopher] Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
Author : Khaine
Score : 278 points
Date : 2023-04-17 11:15 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (features.apmreports.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (features.apmreports.org)
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I have a young cousin, he's recently had his sixth birthday.
| Reading is completely novel for him. He loves it. Even though he
| doesn't fully understand the words, he will point to letters and
| sound them, then he will read the full word aloud. It is an
| almost majestic thing to witness; he is so pleased with himself
| when he gets the words right. He was reading everything he could
| find that had letters in my house.
|
| Let's put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be,
| it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don't
| think he'd have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said
| 'that shape means blue' or whatever.
|
| Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what
| makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on
| this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the
| same way?
| [deleted]
| 7thaccount wrote:
| My kid is six and can read 100+ page kids books in about an hour
| (she doesn't do this super often though). It wasn't too hard to
| teach her to get there either, but repetition is key.
|
| We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter
| could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to
| Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun
| as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have
| her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying
| various combinations until something made sense). We did that a
| few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You
| can't force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and
| there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various
| Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but
| became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short
| little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she
| was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she
| reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each
| night. She's in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her
| school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to
| fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I
| never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading
| and I guess picked things up organically). It's pretty cool that
| she can pretty much just read anything now that isn't a very
| unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at
| words though that are wrong, so we're working on slowing down a
| little bit.
|
| It's a balancing act though. You don't want to make it such a
| chore that they don't want to read later, but I just don't think
| the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I'm trying
| to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside
| of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time,
| but lead to big successes.
| Vanderson wrote:
| Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this
| article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school
| age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the
| exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in)
| I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA
|
| Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading
| methods, from what I have been told.
| tdekken wrote:
| Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here
| on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you
| discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a
| FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I
| am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and
| democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the
| skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and
| sight recognition).
| tabbott wrote:
| For those readers who are skeptical whether this curriculum is
| really in widespread use, it definitely still is.
|
| I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife
| and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our
| eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco's lottery
| system means there's no default school.
|
| A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials
| designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really
| puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where
| each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you
| were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".
|
| These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents:
| You don't need to know how to read in order to appear to read the
| book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page),
| and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old
| wouldn't be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we
| talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines
| for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast.
|
| We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at
| all, and found
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
| (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast).
| I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on
| the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably
| deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly
| recommend it as well for those who have the time.
|
| We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we
| picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that
| because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading
| and writing, they're relatively resilient to this sort of fake
| "science" based fad.
|
| (Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included
| plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like
| an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a
| word problem without actually reading and understanding the words
| -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where
| many children struggle to read).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured
| stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and
| another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees
| bear".
|
| This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading
| for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in
| Montessori school, then went _backwards_ in ability for most of
| the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and
| seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the
| words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered _and then some_ ,
| luckily, but god _damn_ do I hate those starter leveled readers
| they used.
|
| To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a
| sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word
| different, and you can guess which word with about 100%
| accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to
| figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the
| book without reading another word.
|
| They also had them do some computer reading program that had a
| feature that'd _read the book to the kid_. So guess what the
| kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into
| 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to
| books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-
| laziness.
|
| All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a
| fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the
| kids.
| shadowtree wrote:
| China has a 99.7% youth literacy rate - isn't that enough proof
| in regards to which method works best?
| euroderf wrote:
| A book I bought (its name escapes me ATM) said, make word-only
| flash cards (no pix needed) of things your kid can directly
| relate to. Like body parts. Then colors and numbers.
|
| It seemed to work. We could play a "body parts game" where I
| shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to
| the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.
| bryansum wrote:
| The Right to Read movie talks about this very topic, and features
| the author of this podcast: https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| I'm a heavy advocate of homeschooling and did that with my kids
| for a while before personal circumstances made it impractical for
| me. I used the book "The Well trained mind" as a general
| curriculum guide and bought books which it recommended. The one
| it pushed for teaching reading was
| https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-...
|
| I used this for my first two kids and am currently using it for
| my third. They pick up reading proficiency in a few months and
| you need to _consistently_ spend about 20-30 minutes a day. The
| bonding that comes with your kids is an added bonus. After that,
| you establish a reading culture at home, blanket ban on
| electronic "entertainment" for the early years and they become
| good readers very quickly.
|
| I lived in a bit of a bubble and when I met my kids' friends when
| they went to school, it was painful to see how crippled they were
| with basics skills and also tragic to see my own kids regress to
| the average in these skills.
|
| The upshot of all this is that basic liberal education is not
| that hard to do for ones own kids and it gives them a lifelong
| advantage. I highly recommend it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| A bit offtopic, but i find it interesting, how young kids ask A
| LOT of questions... "how does that work? why is that like that?
| Where did that come from? How come this is that? How do you do
| that? How did we do that befire this? ....", and then we put
| those kids through the schooling system, and the kids seem
| uninterested in anything, the questions stop and teaching them
| stuff becomes a pain for many.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| They broke training fresh neural networks for people while AI
| training gets the most careful and best supported and financed
| training. Which is already going exponential. What could go
| wrong?
| bradgranath wrote:
| TLDR: Adults don't like the sound of children sounding out words
| slowly and would prefer not to have to listen to it.
|
| The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole
| words.
|
| That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them
| several different strategies to guess what it is they are
| reading.
|
| It turns out (no duh) that doesn't work either, but it _does_
| mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming
| later.
| Khaine wrote:
| Again from the podcast:
|
| Hanford: So much of this research isn't new. And this idea that
| readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve
| words, identify words as they're reading, that was really taken
| on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting
| question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite
| definitively that that wasn't the case. I mean, were you sort of
| aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
|
| Calkins: Um, again, you're asking me to go back and figure out
| what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say
| that, that you have to remember that that research was not - I
| don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-
| based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful,
| and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that
| were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of
| an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
|
| These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that
| were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the
| effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is
| less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a
| fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach
| people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.
|
| Again from the podcast:
|
| "Good reading instruction isn't boring for children. Maybe adults
| find parts of it boring. But this shouldn't be about what adults
| want. It should be about what kids need.
|
| And there's no reason that reading instruction aligned with
| scientific evidence can't be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy
| Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned
| with the science of reading is what she says she's now selling."
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| > Um, again, you're asking me to go back and figure out what
| was in my mind at one point or another.
|
| Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your
| reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is
| pretty much all of it.
| night815 wrote:
| Exactly, isn't the point of research to publish your findings
| which explains the WHY?
| setgree wrote:
| > These people belong in gaol.
|
| Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when
| it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less
| entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if
| it were.
|
| Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she
| persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.
|
| FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable
| _civil_ case against Teacher 's College, and other places where
| teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical
| doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to
| the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be
| thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put
| teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing,
| teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
| xapata wrote:
| > Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even
| when it's very consequential, is not illegal.
|
| It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil
| liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability.
| All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they
| should operate under the protection of a limited liability
| company or something similar.
| Khaine wrote:
| This isn't a free speech issue. This is a matter of fraud.
| Claiming you have methods of teaching literacy when you don't
| is fraud. Lying or pressuring congressman to get government
| grants is equally fraud.
| setgree wrote:
| Fraud is generally defined as intentionally deceiving
| others for personal or financial gain. I think it's pretty
| clear here that these people were _wrong_ , and arguably
| deceiving themselves, but certainly not intentionally
| deceiving others (which implies knowing true facts and
| withholding them). And I also think their main aim was to
| improve the lives of children, not personal enrichment.
|
| Again, not everything that's wrong or bad is illegal.
| Khaine wrote:
| Either they were negligent or they were incompetent. In
| either case, these people should in no way be in
| positions to advocate for teaching methods or teachers
| themselves.
|
| Yet, no one has been held accountable. There has not been
| any reckoning for that teacher who ignored best practice
| because 'fuck bush', and all the others who advocated for
| cueing. Lucy Caulkins has made millions peddling
| techniques that have ruined the lives of 1000s of kids.
| If this were a drug, you would be demanding the company
| be out of business.
| xapata wrote:
| Whether they knew or not is something for the courts to
| decide. A prominent example of this determination is
| Dominion v Fox, currently on trial.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| > for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
|
| Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers
| actually do! Nice, thanks for that.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Nit:
|
| > If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong
| and contrary to the published research at medical schools,
| we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit
|
| But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional
| advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food
| pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on
| anything because nothing is reproducible.
|
| So, maybe not the best analogy.
| nostromo wrote:
| Well, the old food pyramid hasn't been used in almost 20
| years now.
| toast0 wrote:
| The food pyramid and its replacements come from the USDA.
| They're there to sell farm products. And _maybe_ help
| with nutrition for farm workers.
| xapata wrote:
| > hasn't been used
|
| What has it been replaced with? I try to keep up with
| health literature and am not familiar with the food
| pyramid's replacement. Perhaps it hasn't received as much
| advertisement as the food pyramid did.
| avhon1 wrote:
| The USDA Food Pyramid was replaced in 2005 with
| MyPyramid. http://web.archive.org/web/20050830024356/http
| ://mypyramid.g...
|
| In 2011, the pyramid was done away with altogether and
| replaced with MyPlate, which remains the USDA's current
| nutritional guide graphic. https://www.myplate.gov/
| [deleted]
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Yes, early elementary reading education should include phonics.
| Calkins would agree - her first reading curriculum (which is
| relatively new compared to her writing work) tells schools
| using the program to supplement it with a phonics curriculum;
| That wasn't her specialty (just like she doesn't cover math and
| history). Reducing all reading instruction to phonics is wildly
| reductive, and her program does a good job at the non-phonics
| components (and possibly phonics too now? I believe they've
| added a lot more of that to the base curriculum with the recent
| revisions, but no personal experience).
| polotics wrote:
| I think we should all stop using the term "phonics".
|
| If you read the whole article I think you will agree that
| what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...
|
| All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is
| something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the
| make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in
| sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work
| on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as
| unified pictures.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| I don't think that's actually the case. When I'm reading,
| I'm reading sentences or paragraphs at a time (not letters
| at a time), regularly making significant guesses on word
| sound and meaning based on context clues. I think this is
| true of most adept readers. Clearly understanding
| individual letters is part of that, but would not agree
| that "phonics" == "reading"
| tristor wrote:
| I was very lucky and my mother was a teacher at a private school
| when I was young, so I got to attend for free. I had phonics-
| based reading instruction, and learned to read acceptably in
| first grade. By fourth grade I was one of the best readers in the
| school, and ended up in a gifted program.
|
| I still remember and feel appreciation for my first grade
| teacher, Mrs. Drown, for teaching me to read. It opened an entire
| world for me.
|
| The public schools where I lived did not use phonics, and when I
| entered the gifted program I shifted to public school. I met
| people in high school who were considered average students that
| had less literacy than I did in fourth grade. The overall
| literacy rate in our small city was lower than the national
| average as well.
| darkerside wrote:
| I learned to read so young that I don't remember learning to
| read. That must have been such a feeling of awakening.
| somishere wrote:
| IMHO reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom.
| Kids need to be interested in reading, and that's up to the
| parents more than it is to the school.
|
| My very unique / personal take. Have been doing sight words with
| my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of
| prep (pre year 1). He's not advanced as far as I can't tell, but
| I'll tell you it's exhilarating to watch his progress. He
| absolutely loves the challenge of it. And he's already sounding
| out and reading short, repetitive books based on known words.
| He's a lucky kid for so many reasons. Not a great case in point
| for the same.
|
| All kids are different, with unique needs, and schools should be
| expected to adapt to these. But it's a two way street. If an
| individual isn't reading by fourth grade, after four years of
| schooling, then something is going on .. either at home or in a
| cognitive sense. If a whole class isn't reading, then sure - look
| at the curriculum ... but there's probably something more
| systemic at play.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > that's up to the parents more than it is to the school.
|
| The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time
| and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of
| our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise
| them while their parents do so.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Why have parents be involved with raising their kids at all?
| Just let the state do everything.
| humean_being wrote:
| In 1900 the literacy rate of the US was roughly 20%. Over
| the next century states and the federal government
| introduced mandatory educational requirements and expanded
| access to public education. By 2000 literacy is north of
| 80%.
|
| Do you think literate citizens are less free to make
| choices than illiterate ones?
| josho wrote:
| > reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom.
|
| You are correct. Those students that read with their parents
| and learn at home have a significant advantage.
|
| Our education system however should do everything that it can
| to help those children that didn't have this advantage to catch
| up. I've read research in the past that shows good schools to
| bring those kids up to the same level, evidently reading the
| comments here it seems the US school system has significant
| issues.
| phkahler wrote:
| For learning to read English at age 3 or 4, I often recommend a
| video called "The Letter Factory" and its first sequel "The Word
| Factory". Not a fan of the 3rd one, but these 2 are amusing
| cartoons that my kid liked a lot, and now really enjoys reading.
| Just one data point, take it or leave it ;-)
| hitgeek wrote:
| I heard of this story years ago, and was very dismayed. (There is
| no date on this website is this something new?)
|
| however the last 2 years I've experienced kids being taught to
| read in US public school kindergarten and the curriculum was
| nothing like was described in this series. They were taught
| phonics and memorized common non-phonetic words the same way I
| was taught 30 years ago.
| pitaj wrote:
| It's likely you got lucky or your state / school district
| already changed the curriculum.
|
| The podcast goes into how over the past few years, there has
| been a lot of activism to shift schools from cueing back to
| phonics. At various levels of government, including state laws.
| piclib wrote:
| [flagged]
| WalterBright wrote:
| One reason for teaching so long using a failed method is public
| school teachers are not accountable for failure. There is zero
| downside for them failing (they just blame the parents) and no
| incentive whatsoever to do better.
|
| The fix is simple. Give teachers a $1000 bonus for every student
| of theirs that performs at grade level at the end of the year.
|
| It'll be the cheapest, most effective way to improve kids'
| education.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Metric-based rewards are hard to get right. For example, you've
| just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling
| students, and you've further incentivized teachers to work in
| the richest school districts. Since the metric is "how many at
| at grade level at the end of the year," you as a teacher are
| heavily rewarded for being handed students that are either
| already at grade level or have parents who can pay for
| additional tutoring.
|
| The simplest fix you could slap on would be to make it a bonus
| for each student who tested as below grade level at the start
| of the year but above grade level at the end, but that also has
| complexities.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course, implementing such a program will have details that
| need to be worked out. I've posted this before, and get all
| kinds of "but ..." replies, all of which can be easily
| addressed with a moment's thought.
|
| It could be hardly worse than the current system.
|
| > you as a teacher are heavily rewarded for being handed
| students that are either already at grade level or have
| parents who can pay for additional tutoring.
|
| Students are already assigned at random to teachers. So it
| will balance out.
|
| > you've just disincentivized teachers from working with
| struggling students
|
| The teachers currently have no incentive whatsoever to help
| struggling students. This proposal gives them $1000 reasons
| to help them.
| [deleted]
| jimmar wrote:
| I'm by no means a perfect dad, but one thing I've done well is
| reading to my kinds. In the past 14 years, I've read to my kids
| almost every night. They both tested in the 99th percentile for
| reading comprehension and vocabulary. I'd often be shocked when
| I'd read a complicated word and ask my 5th grade what it meant
| and she'd give me a great definition.
|
| Read to your kids.
| [deleted]
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong?
|
| (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there
| is no article...)
| mikeryan wrote:
| There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really
| administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the
| reading curriculum.
|
| I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with
| reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of
| kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year)
|
| She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result
| of some of this reporting quickly turned back on "phonics"
| teaching for reading but I'm not sure the rest of the schools
| have pivoted as quickly.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm wondering if I'm in the minority, but both of my kids
| learned to read before they started attending school.
|
| My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we
| always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that.
| What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some
| of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things
| which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at
| ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of
| cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches)
|
| It's not important, of course, the kids will get there
| eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far
| more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click"
| which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly,
| and when they transition from learning to read to reading to
| learn.
| mikeryan wrote:
| From my experience there's a pretty wide range of abilities
| going into Kindergarten. I'd say that your kids knowing how
| to read would put them into a minority but a decent sized
| one, may 25-30%?
|
| Also a ton of variation there based on what kids did before
| kindergarten, at home or, definitely kids from Montessori
| schools had more reading then kids like mine who did full
| time preschool at one that didn't have an "academic" focus.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| There was a NYT article about this podcast posted yesterday.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589013
| Muromec wrote:
| English doesn't have consistent rule-based writing spelling, so
| kids have to essentially memorize all word spellings. Since
| some kids suck at this game, there have to be compensation
| strategy to fill in the blanks. At some point it went too far
| and the last resort compensation strategy became the main
| method children are taugh (tough? tof? damn this language, it
| makes no sense) to read.
| [deleted]
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Bob The Builder got my child started.
|
| I didn't read to her most nights, btw. I told her a multi-year
| bedtime story instead.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software
| engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education
| is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to
| use software methodologies and languages that came from their
| university professors who've never really spend much time (at
| least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried
| software development where code had to be shipped. They may have
| even "observed developers" or "measured output" in constructing
| these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew
| how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of
| dollars, along with training, books, etc.
|
| EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you
| are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like
| the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own
| hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach
| Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be
| great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and
| feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are
| short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily.
| Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
| skywhopper wrote:
| For what it's worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse
| than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son
| was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it
| out for months. It didn't go well and eventually we gave up.
| Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really
| learned to read in second grade. Now she's a voracious reader,
| writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior
| year of college.
|
| The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things,
| even basic things, very differently from each other or from
| their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach
| a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial
| number of students behind.
| woolcap wrote:
| An excellent book. I taught all of my kids to read with it. All
| are strong readers. By lesson 70 or so, most of them had caught
| the gist and didn't need to finish it out. Highly recommended.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| until you have felt the wrath of shipping a production stopping
| bug, you know nothing john snow.
| andrepd wrote:
| Superficially, it seems similar to the method I used to learn
| to read. It dates from the 1890s, don't know if it had any
| scientifically basis.
| sailfast wrote:
| FWIW We used the 100 easy lessons book for all of our kids and
| they read very well for their ages and enjoy reading.
| wiredfool wrote:
| That book worked well for my 3 kids, who are all voracious
| readers now. Generally did it at age 5 or 6.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| In this case the researchers know what works but the teachers
| aren't taught the science of reading.
|
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why...
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...
| Khaine wrote:
| Sure, its not great that they weren't taught the science
| behind it, but on one episode they quoted a teacher who was
| taught the new way, and she rejected it because 'she didn't
| like it'
|
| From the transcript:
|
| "She didn't come away with an understanding of how children
| learn to read. She didn't really learn about the science of
| reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the
| training they got during Reading First opened their eyes.
| Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the
| materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many
| other teachers, Reading First represented a change they
| didn't like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With
| structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited
| the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin,
| it felt traditional and old-fashioned."
|
| And from a later episode:
|
| "Like Christine Cronin. She's the teacher in Boston who tried
| to get on board with Bush's Reading First program, but said
| the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She
| remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and
| Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking - that's what I want my
| classroom to be like.
|
| Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading
| instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms.
| Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up
| with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."
|
| This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold
| on the 'look and feel'.
| numeromancer wrote:
| This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who,
| among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late
| 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various
| teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct
| Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The
| results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational
| establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian".
|
| Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas
| Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is
| as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a
| "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical
| basis behind their effective methods.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at
| most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964),
| was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent
| a long career writing eductation books and articles and
| seminars after that.
|
| You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized
| in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my
| mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending
| time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Engelmann
| scythe wrote:
| What you wrote about the Wikipedia page is not consistent
| with what I read on the Wikipedia page:
|
| >While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s,
| Engelmann became interested with how children learn.
|
| >[...]
|
| >In 1964, _he left his job in advertising_ and became a
| research associate
|
| >[...]
|
| >In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the
| University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the
| University's College of Education.[2][3]
|
| He was _never_ a public school teacher, although he may
| have taught students as a research associate. He was
| apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.
|
| The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching",
| however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least
| in principle, understand the experience of a student by
| experimenting on students, you will never understand the
| experience of a teacher by experimenting on students.
| Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately
| be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under
| real constraints (including the limits of their own
| abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and
| community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original
| complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized
| to software development to mean.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You're right, I misread the "He began working with
| preschoolers" bit as professionally teaching the kids.
|
| > you will never understand the experience of a teacher
| by experimenting on students
|
| I'm not sure to follow, wouldn't you at least understand
| your own experience as a teacher by actually teaching to
| students ?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I (O.P.) want to be clear for the record that I am not
| endorsing (though not discouraging either) that Engelmann's
| or DISTAR methods be the new guiding light in schools. I
| can certainly envision that implementation going awry for
| lots of reasons.
|
| I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1
| parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of
| spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is
| a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't
| have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro
| for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading),
| you just follow the parental directions.
| tdekken wrote:
| Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann
| and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to
| connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I
| am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned
| educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to
| revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize
| access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of
| reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight
| recognition).
| havercosine wrote:
| Hello :) . Pleasantly surprised and happy to see folks who
| know about Engelmann and DISTAR here. Random tidbit: I too
| quit software work to launch experiment in ed-tech two
| years back. Randomly stumbled on Englemann through a rabbit
| hole. I'm obsessed with his ideas around sequencing the
| lessons correctly. Beyond reading, I was interested in
| using it to improve how we teach Maths. Unsuccessfully
| tried that mixed with video games. But I agree that
| Engelmanns research on theory of instruction remains a
| treasure trove, as it came from his practice and not
| writing a PhD thesis.
|
| I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book.
| She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English
| is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but
| please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education
| using his methods.
| tdekken wrote:
| Hi havercosine, I would love to (my contact info is in my
| profile).
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to
| happen.
|
| Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since
| adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
|
| The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few
| years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all
| end all solution that it is currently made out to be.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| No way. That is absolute bullshit. You can tell, because they
| cite exactly zero studies showing some other way is better.
| They are looking at scores over time with no control, which
| can be decreasing for any other reason.
|
| Phonics based reading instruction is _response_ to the
| massive scandal that already happened in the US where they
| tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction,
| three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive
| impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing
| method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education
| researchers with new books to sell don 't want to accept that
| the boring way works better, especially for students with
| less support at home (where parents often use phonics to
| teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is
| potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-
| no...
|
| https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-
| of-...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school.
| ..
|
| https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-
| find...
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The UCL researchers are among 250 signatories to a letter
| which has been sent to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi,
| calling on the government to allow for a wider range of
| approaches to teaching reading, which would allow teachers
| to use their own judgment about which is best for their
| pupils.
|
| It doesn't say phonics doesn't work, it suggests phonics is
| only effective for a subgroup of pupils. Everyone has their
| own learning strategy and phonics doesn't appear to work
| for everyone.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of
| pupils
|
| If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby
| out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm
| making one up as a thought experiment.)
| oxfordmale wrote:
| As the petition calls for, it should be left to the
| teachers to decide. Even if the succes rate is 90%, are
| you happy to throw the remaining 10% under the reading
| bus ?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| But so many teachers have been miseducated and they try
| to leave it out. Wyse and Bradbury at UCL are pushing
| non-evidence based approaches on the false authority of
| Margaret Meek Spencer [1] by making up a strawman of
| teaching only phonics, as if people that advocate
| teaching phonics claimed that were the only step in
| learning to read.
|
| [1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse
| _The%20...
| zaphar wrote:
| There is pretty strong evidence[0] [1] [2] that phonics
| is a _critical_ part of learning to read for everyone no
| matter who they are or what their personality is. It 's
| not the only piece of the puzzle but if you leave it out
| you will handicap the student intended to or not. Without
| phonics when you encounter a new word you can't pronounce
| it. If you can't pronounce it you can't use it in
| conversation. You can't use it in your mental processing.
| If you aren't taught it you _may_ pick up the rules of
| thumb eventually but you 'll have done so the long hard
| way.
|
| You might be justifiably angry that no one showed you or
| your child the easy way.
|
| 1: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Advantages-
| of-the-...
|
| 2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ameliorating-
| Early-Rea...
|
| 3: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effect-of-
| phonics-...
| camgunz wrote:
| You and op are both correct. The problems are teaching
| only phonics (which a lot of SOR advocates want) and not
| teaching phonics at all (which happens in a fair number
| of classrooms).
| zaphar wrote:
| Exactly. You also need to learn word definitions as well
| as grammar and sentence structure. Leave out any of the
| pieces of the puzzle and you are handicapping the
| student.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I can't find anyone out there that advocates teaching
| only phonics. It's a step in the process of learning to
| read that, if left to teachers that were taught under a
| non-evidence based approach, many try to skip.
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble is that there's a strong tendency in UK
| journalism these days to treat anything the UK is doing
| as obviously wrong and any alternative as obviously
| better and ignore evidence that contradicts this, and the
| Guardian is one of the worst offenders. (This doesn't
| just apply to education; for example, the British press
| like to blame our energy woes on the government focusing
| on offshore wind and push onshore wind and solar as
| magical solutions, even though the offshore wind push was
| a roaring success that other countries want to copy and
| onshore wind and solar were already struggling even
| before the shift in focus.)
| anon291 wrote:
| I am shocked this comment exists, when the counter-example is
| literally written into it. English uses the latin alphabet
| which is a phonetic alphabet. It's why english readers can
| also 'read' Spanish without understanding any of the words.
| Anyone who says otherwise should be promptly ignored.
| vehemenz wrote:
| To be fair, English pronunciation is not as regular as
| Spanish. Spanish is a purely phonetic language, while
| English is phonetic but irregular.
| anon291 wrote:
| People keep saying this, and I agree english is more
| complicated, but it is otherwise regular. The vast
| majority of English words are regular, and for those that
| are not regular, sounding them out incorrectly in context
| with the other words quickly disabuses you of any
| incorrect reading.
|
| My mom was a public school teacher in a poor district,
| and the main problem with her kids learning to read is
| that they did not actually know English. This would make
| it much more difficult to figure out how to read
| properly, since they'd never be able to correct 'wrong'
| pronunciations. I believe a lot of focus on reading is
| mis-placed when the children cannot speak English
| properly. Better to focus on diction and vocabulary.
| benlivengood wrote:
| English is context-sensitive phonetic, Spanish and other
| Latin languages are regular phonetic. Just look at "are";
| its pronunciation of "a" depends on a following consonant
| and following vowel. Otherwise the "a" would be
| pronounced like "add". There are over a dozen context-
| sensitive rules like that, and thousands of common words
| that are purely exceptions, e.g. "read" and "learning"
| having different pronunciations of "ea", and hence are
| _not_ phonetic. They are whole-word pronunciations
| learned by rote or immersion.
| vehemenz wrote:
| You're probably right that for pedagogical purposes,
| English reading can be taught the same way as Spanish
| because they are both based on phonetic alphabets. I
| don't disagree that knowing English (and knowing things
| in general, along with vocabulary) are essential to
| learning to read.
|
| Big picture, irregular pronunciation in English might
| encourage educators to use different strategies for
| learning the outlier words or for reinforcement. It could
| still be optimal to learn with this additional
| instruction, even if it's a secondary concern for
| rudimentary learners.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of
| "phonics-centric reading"?
|
| In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a
| classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a
| target, it ceases to be a good measure".
|
| Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool
| in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and
| profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a
| lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or
| to justify Departmental failures.
| camelite wrote:
| The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense
| words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by
| having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words.
| They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-
| phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| But there is no sense in which that's a skill required
| for effective reading. English spelling and pronunciation
| have too many random corners for it to be anything other
| than a distracting academic exercise.
|
| Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much
| the foundation of reading.
|
| Historically reading was taught by learning words with
| some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty
| well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-
| trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard
| to be learned.
|
| For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to
| mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard
| them. They know what the words mean, but the correct
| pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling.
|
| The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.
| Izkata wrote:
| Except that's wrong - there are rules to English
| pronunciation that work like 99% of the time. It's why
| most people would pronounce "ghoti" something like "go
| tee" or "go tie" instead of "fish".
|
| Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules
| are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly
| taught these rules.
| darkerside wrote:
| As a parent with kids who struggled (actually, performed
| average) on these nonsense word tests, I do think that is
| bullshit. If you somehow manage to cheat and get your
| kids to recognize all the high frequency words they need
| to be fluent, congratulations, you have taught them to
| read.
|
| Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical
| distrust of our teaching staff.
|
| Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better
| and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
| camelite wrote:
| https://www.pedagogynongrata.com/a-response-to
| oxfordmale wrote:
| It clearly is still a controversial opinion to hold that
| phonics is not the "end all be all" it has been made out to
| be.
|
| Despite challenging the statistics in the original paper,
| it doesn't provide evidence that phonics actually is better
| than the teaching techniques prior to that.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| It's been successful in Scotland:
| https://www.pearson.com/uk/educators/schools/making-an-
| impac...
|
| This article compares Scotland with England:
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-
| ch...
|
| One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in
| accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and
| Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard
| English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good"
| and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).
| kenjackson wrote:
| Used that book for my son at around age 4. He never learned to
| love reading, but he's a good reader.
|
| One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He
| does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes
| incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before -
| I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few
| examples.
| mellavora wrote:
| You are right it is `required methodologies`, but wrong on the
| source.
|
| The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are
| mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be
| easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the
| regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.
|
| Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is
| designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply
| it.
|
| How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has
| to fight against this stuff all the time.
| davemp wrote:
| The US Gov really needs to start in-housing critical tools if
| only to build internal competency. There also probably needs
| to be more incentives for individuals inside the USG to excel
| and produce value. There are too many perverse incentives for
| unscrupulous contractors to milk tax payers (see the national
| parks situation [0]).
|
| There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money
| spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov
| acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing
| research and fostering expertise.
|
| Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just
| be overhauled for a similar effect.
|
| [0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-
| renting...
| jerf wrote:
| There is a significant portion of academia entranced by
| novelty, the joy of forbidden or secret knowledge, and other
| such things. For these people, an idea is not valuable because
| it is true, or useful, or well-established by experience or
| science. In fact these are graded as points _against_ an idea.
| Boring.
|
| Where these academics are most prominent is probably art.
| Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the
| reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a
| viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and
| reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful,
| useful, or indeed even merely _interesting_ into fields so far
| disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even
| interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm
| beliefs to the contrary.
|
| Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does
| seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are
| proposed and generate excitement precisely _because_ they run
| contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for
| years, precisely because they are different from established
| methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they
| can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That
| they are different and heterodox is enough.
|
| Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation
| criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being
| generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike
| against the methodology... or at least, what _you_ would
| consider "better".
|
| Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged
| at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect
| as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most
| subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand
| you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start
| kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original
| "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum
| circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not
| thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical
| pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can
| not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.
|
| In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom
| straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the
| sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can
| hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests
| on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids,
| and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser
| degrees over the past 60-70 years.
| ljf wrote:
| It is a really interesting problem - my son and my daughter
| were both taught using phonics - my son had very little
| interest in reading and spelling (very much like me at his age)
| but reads at about the level he should (I personally think if
| he is anything like me, he is doing really well).
|
| My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the
| same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way
| she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a
| small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son
| (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the
| name and his name.
|
| But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just
| hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on
| paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a
| pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| Random aside:
|
| > I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to
| get words on paper
|
| I don't know your details, and your experience could stem
| from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have
| any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards
| to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a
| few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I
| found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less
| wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting.
| (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on
| the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more
| fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be
| worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job,
| but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a
| conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten
| letters once again.
| bityard wrote:
| Wow, this sounds like my life. I honestly don't remember how
| I learned to read (although I might guess that it came from a
| desire to learn about how the world worked).
|
| But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter
| wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every
| night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the
| stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the
| page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment
| on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from
| wanting to read.
| bonthron wrote:
| "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" is an amazing
| book. I taught my daughter to read before kindergarten. It
| works.
| patall wrote:
| What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or
| before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten
| at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is
| not what you mean.
| AlanYx wrote:
| The book itself recommends that most children start the
| program in the book at age 4, also noting that some
| advanced students may be ready at age 3.5.
| warner25 wrote:
| A note on this: We used this book to teach our two oldest
| kids to read before they entered kindergarten. Kid #1 was
| _asking_ to learn to read at age 3.5, and that 's when we
| got the book. She could really read before her 4th
| birthday. It was indeed amazing. We then started trying
| to push it on kid #2 at age 4.5, since our expectations
| were set by kid #1, and we now regard this as a mistake.
| Nobody was having fun, so we ended up setting it aside
| for half a year. We picked it up again in the summer
| before kid #2 started kindergarten, and she finished
| learning to read with ease at that time. I think we're
| lucky that the initial attempt didn't ruin reading for
| her. We're being much more gentle about introducing it to
| kid #3.
|
| Kid #1 was and still is an oddball in a number of ways.
| Learning to read so early seems to have given her some
| advantages, like being able to consume volumes of
| information at a young age, but she'll have a harder time
| in other ways.
| bonthron wrote:
| She was 5. Most kids in the US start first grade about 6.
| nemo44x wrote:
| At least here in the USA, age 2 is generally when you start
| pre-school. Kindergarten starts at age 4 and lasts for 2
| years, K4 and K5. Then 1st grade at age 6.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| For what it's worth, that doesn't sound typical to me.
| I'd say pre-school, it's it's done at all, is done at the
| age of 4 - maybe 3 if you're doing it super early. I've
| never heard of "K4" and "K5," and most kids start
| kindergarten at age 5 and only do one year of it.
|
| Where do you live?
| nemo44x wrote:
| I did a lookup and a lot of places refer to what called
| "K4" as "Pre-k". Where I grew up I had preschool and then
| K4 and then K5.
|
| My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between
| 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Where is "here"? In the upper midwest, "Pre-K"/"4K" is
| age four. Kindergarten is age 5. There is not typically
| anything earlier than that, and parents are on the hook
| to find their own daycare if not home with the child.
| Izkata wrote:
| Same here, I did one year of each immediately before
| first grade. Never heard of two years of kindergarten
| before.
| vehemenz wrote:
| In the US, kindergarten starts at 5/6.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My wife mixed reading with spelling, starting when each boy was
| four. She'd work on simple letter sounds, then make a list of
| 'rhyming' words: sat, pat, fat, cat, mat and so on. They would
| sound out the list, then come up with some more, even some
| silly ones like dat or jat. Hilarious! for a four-year-old.
|
| So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a
| few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
| analog31 wrote:
| Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both
| had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of
| the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise.
|
| It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that
| learning to read was special, or that there might even be any
| way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic
| alphabet after all, right?
|
| Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our
| culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read.
| It wasn't a special thing.
|
| I think my parents learned from whatever material they could
| lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that
| my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
|
| Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers.
| Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to
| read at school was leaving too much to chance.
| troupe wrote:
| > Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to
| read at school was leaving too much to chance.
|
| Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation
| gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had
| otherwise.
|
| There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are
| unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to
| "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a
| view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms,
| I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit
| more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.
|
| I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids
| that get the best education are the ones where the parents
| see the school system as an institution they are partnering
| with to educate their child instead of the place that is
| responsible for the education.
| watwut wrote:
| Dunno, I discovered that school teaches them more then I
| thought and learned to value teachers more.
|
| Both my kids learned to read in school classes and read a
| lot.
| sdwr wrote:
| Yeah, I see this helpless, "leave it to the experts"
| attitude in a few places, and absolutely hate it.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| It's one of the attitudes being pushed in the education
| system itself. After a couple of generations, "expertism"
| has embedded deeply into the American mindset. It's very
| dangerous to live in a culture where we don't question
| experts.
| brookst wrote:
| This is true, but like so many things America seems to
| have lost the ability to moderate. For every person who
| blindly follows "experts", there's someone who insists
| experts don't know anything at all and any random thought
| that pops into my head is just as valid as any expert
| opinion.
|
| It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as
| any expert will tell you.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I wish you were wrong. I've met actual Flat Earth
| believers, which I find astonishing and disconcerting.
| Unfortunately, I feel like the over-reaction against
| expert opinion is part of the cost of prior abuse of
| expert opinion. Trust in institutions is eroded and in my
| opinion, for justifiable reasons. We're definitely not in
| good shape as a society.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that
| learning to read was special
|
| As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for
| financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless
| one are dealing with special needs kids.
| joelfried wrote:
| > There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing
| with special needs kids.
|
| You may not know your child is neurodivergent until you are
| at or beyond this stage of development.
| tivert wrote:
| > It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that
| learning to read was special, or that there might even be any
| way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic
| alphabet after all, right?
|
| > Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our
| culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read.
| It wasn't a special thing.
|
| > I think my parents learned from whatever material they
| could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century
| reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
|
| Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of
| resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so
| I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me
| think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the
| school curriculum.
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes. It was called Mcguffey's First Eclectic Reader. After
| that, the kids books at the public library, which we picked
| out ourselves.
|
| Still in print almost 200 years later.
| mlyle wrote:
| Not OP, and it definitely isn't an 18th century reader...
| But "Bob Books" are a homeschool mainstay and a big part of
| how my kids developed initial reading skills.
|
| https://bobbooks.com/
|
| They were very interested in books / reading and were
| pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards.
|
| We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm
| sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent
| five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned
| by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out
| words from context through a lot of individual reading. My
| children learned from rote memorization and from context.
| Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every
| less-literate person I know did not learn this way.
|
| I would like to say that English is most definitely not
| phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular
| word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are
| enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them
| as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered
| by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.
|
| As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying
| things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic
| symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand
| these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same
| way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary
| by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There
| is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs"
| which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't
| fit in the context.
| euroderf wrote:
| That's a good term, "phonetic landmarks".
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Even though it's definitely not sufficient for English
| spelling, I think it's pretty important to _start_ with
| phonics. It teaches kids how the alphabet is _supposed_ to
| work, and to be fair, it does work that way for most of the
| simple words young readers will encounter.
|
| It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too,
| eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids
| about how strange the spelling of some words are.
|
| I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids
| yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind
| constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool",
| "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity",
| etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son
| didn't get it.
| tivert wrote:
| > It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something
| too, eventually.
|
| That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for
| adults thinking about education.
|
| Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach
| something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone
| who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat
| useful but ultimately faulty method as a _stepping stone_
| to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult,
| though because someone who understands those faults often
| gets hung up on them, and can 't avoid the temptation to
| reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the
| learner to take a too-big leap to the "true"
| understanding.
| brookst wrote:
| "Mommy, how come birds can fly and we can't?"
|
| "Well, you see, the universe can be thought of as a
| quantum foam..."
| xapata wrote:
| "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must
| first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan
| Ialdaboth wrote:
| Rote memorization messed me so bad it made me miss my first
| year of elementary school.
|
| Without going phonics thereafter I would probably have
| ended up as completely illiterate before middle school.
| megmogandog wrote:
| Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology,
| but isn't English one of the _least_ phonetic alphabets?
| afaik most other languages have much more consistent
| pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English
| language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to
| know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.
| slapshot wrote:
| [flagged]
| housecarpenter wrote:
| The writing system of English is far more phonetic than
| logographic writing systems such as that of Chinese. That's
| the relevant difference here. It is true that English's
| writing system is one of the least phonetic _alphabets_ ,
| but alphabets are always, by definition, quite phonetic.
| Most writing systems are alphabetic and not logographic, so
| if you rank them all ordinally, English is going to have a
| similar rank to Chinese, but the absolute difference
| between English and Chinese is quite large. Here is a very
| impressionistic assignment of percentages of phoneticity to
| various systems, which will hopefully make clear what I'm
| getting at:
|
| Phoneticity 20% (Chinese)
|
| --
|
| --
|
| --
|
| Phoneticity 75% (English)
|
| Phoneticity 80% (French)
|
| Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing
| systems)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| You have to distinguish different types of phoneticity.
| Can you pronounce what you read vs. spell what you hear?
| Can you pronounce an unfamiliar character?
|
| With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always
| pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages
| (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if
| you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best
| only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a
| Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to
| choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.
| mcv wrote:
| Not every kid learns it automatically, though. My oldest
| could read before he went to kindergarten (and skipped a
| grade later), my youngest needed extra help learning to talk.
| Most kids are somewhere in between those two extremes.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?_
|
| No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English
| has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar
| words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English
| native speakers seem to overlook:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
| nkrisc wrote:
| English does use a phonetic script. The letters represent
| phonemes and carry no semantic meaning on their own, as
| opposed to an ideographic or logographic script. That fact
| that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes
| doesn't make it not a phonetic script.
|
| There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what
| makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| English is not phonetic. We do not always say a word the
| same way we spell it, unlike for example Spanish.
|
| According to your definition all spoken languages are
| phonetic.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > > English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
|
| > No, it doesn't
|
| Yes, it does.
|
| This isn't about the language, it's about the script.
| English is written with a phonetic script.
|
| > According to your definition all spoken languages are
| phonetic.
|
| I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| The fact that it uses Latin letters doesn't make it
| phonetic if the same letter consistently resolves to
| different phonemes _or_ lack thereof, depending on its
| context.
| mlyle wrote:
| You may argue it's not a very _good_ phonetic script,
| with all of the special cases present... But letters
| mostly represent sounds, unlike written languages where
| characters represent concepts.
|
| A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen
| of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of
| English words correctly and be close on most of the rest,
| "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well
| 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's phonetic because the graphemes (whatever they look
| like) represent phonemes.
|
| If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then
| what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?
| oxfordmale wrote:
| English is an alphabetic language not a phonetic one.
|
| In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just
| based on its written representation.
|
| Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is
| spelled the same but pronounced differently.
|
| You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent
| language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies
| occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard
| for a beginner.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It uses a phonetic _script_. The symbols of the script
| represent _sounds_.
| taeric wrote:
| You are not wrong in idea, but you are wrong in
| specifics. Does English use a 1:1 phonetic language? No.
| Of course not. Just like most "functional programming"
| languages have a lot of differences between them. The
| colloquial use of the term is not nearly as precise as
| many think it is.
|
| Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that
| that is often for phonetic languages. :D
| phoe-krk wrote:
| I don't know what kind it uses, but it's not phonetic,
| because the graphemes do _not_ represent phonemes,
| despite your claims.
|
| If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples
| again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a
| prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are
| present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the
| same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are
| identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would
| end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak"
| suffix are identical... and so on.
| taeric wrote:
| If it was not phonetic, what "idea" would the letter "r"
| represent? That it can represent different phonetics
| depending on other rules doesn't change that it
| represents phonetics.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your
| claims.
|
| I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of
| what a phoneme is.
|
| What does the symbol "c" represent, if not two different
| phonemes?
|
| The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do
| you disagree?
| kweinber wrote:
| If there are rules and they sometimes have exceptions or
| inconsistencies, that doesn't mean that there aren't any
| rules.
|
| English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics
| are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| People confidently stating as fact stuff they know little
| or nothing about. Ask any competent linguist: English has
| a phonetic script. (Not a very good one, perhaps, but
| phonetic nonetheless.)
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> English does use a phonetic script. (...) That fact
| that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes
| doesn't make it not a phonetic script._
|
| The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing
| doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin
| script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-
| language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English
| is not.
|
| Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither
| represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of
| letters, or individual words, that have _both_ meaning
| and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing
| doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin
| script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-
| language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English
| is not.
|
| It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all.
| Written English uses a script that has symbols which
| represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic
| script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written
| English. The script is still phonetic.
|
| What the symbols look like is beside the point.
| tines wrote:
| For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter
| how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the
| letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic
| meaning, right?
| tivert wrote:
| > For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters
| carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning,
| right?
|
| Yes, exactly.
|
| If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be
| impossible to even _try_ to "sound out" words.
| Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).
|
| English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural
| contact* have made the phonics complicated and
| inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
|
| * Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign
| words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever,
| which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous
| degrees as adopting _Pinyin_ spellings in favor of other
| Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to
| English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c"
| and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
| phoe-krk wrote:
| What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when
| writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and
| "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word
| changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's
| not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that
| changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji.
|
| In other words, if you need to read the whole word in
| order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty
| of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by
| definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
| michael_j_ward wrote:
| Pointing out a few outliers in such a large system like
| the English Language and using them to justify
| reclassifying the entire thing is braindead.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| If that is the case, how would you describe the act of
| comparing English to languages which _actually_ have
| consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the
| language (starting with e.g. the same number of available
| letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
| rcoveson wrote:
| Spanish is "strictly phonetic"
|
| English is "[very] loosely phonetic"
|
| Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
| wl wrote:
| Egyptian hieroglyphs are, for the most part, phonetic.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact
| phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of
| abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible
| they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the
| standard.
|
| Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the
| written character gives you no indication of what the
| sound of the spoken word is.
| josefx wrote:
| > Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
|
| Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters
| almost identical to the alphabet we use?
| wl wrote:
| The Latin alphabet is ultimately derived from Egyptian
| hieroglyphs.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I would say that English has a greater level of
| orthographic depth than some other languages (but far
| less than, say, Thai).
| jcranmer wrote:
| The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling,
| many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs
| (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40
| phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet).
|
| The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite
| simple:
|
| * Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate
| (e.g., [ch] goes to /tS/, [ph] goes to /f/).
|
| * Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although
| note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or
| /dZ/ respectively depending on the following letter.
|
| * Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs
| (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).
|
| * Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form
| depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bet/
| while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is
| vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you
| get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the
| "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate)
| consonant in pronunciation.
|
| Those rules predict a large fraction of English
| pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on
| schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /@/) or rules
| to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few
| centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /Sun/). There are
| still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't
| justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the
| frustrating tendency of English to insist on using
| foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign
| words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as
| in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be
| pronounced as in Greek).
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of
| letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in
| total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its
| orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple
| compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are
| present throughout the language (H/CH, Z/RZ, O/U);
| voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always
| sounds like PSZ...); A and E have a rule where they are
| fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is
| everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part.
| Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja"
| from your example).
|
| Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think
| the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is
| English.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| A phonetic script is one where the symbols represent
| sounds. The Latin alphabet is a phonetic script. In
| contrast, consider the shared numeric system used in both
| English and Polish. How do you pronounce "1"? What about
| "10" or "11" - does using the same symbol in all three
| numbers give you any hint about whether they sound the
| same? What if I'm saying the numbers in French?
|
| The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an
| associated sound. They have an associated _meaning_ and
| there are many spoken words for that meaning.
| MisterTea wrote:
| You answered a rhetorical question.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Yep. Might have forgotten to add an implicit /s at the
| end of the original question.
| michael_j_ward wrote:
| It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely
| correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing
| system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word
| (like Chinese or Japan).
|
| Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to
| learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as
| phonetic because it's not _purely_ phonetic. This is doubly
| so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems,
| as is the topic with "Sold a Story".
| Taywee wrote:
| English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you
| considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider
| almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The
| distinction wouldn't mean much.
| taeric wrote:
| If it is not phonemic, what is it? It is not necessarily
| "regular" or "uniform" in the phonemes that are
| represented, but you can't consider it anything other
| than phonetic, as the characters represent phonemes.
| Pretty much period.
|
| As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there
| are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to
| think that is what phonetic means.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| It's entirely possible for a distinction that contrasts a
| large majority with a small minority, or even an
| actually-existing totality with a hypothetical set of
| counterexamples, to be meaningful.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you
| need to learn in English (...)_
|
| I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of
| English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the
| language. It's present from the very beginning, when you
| need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not
| pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have
| mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to
| understand everyone else's pronunciation while also
| accounting for _them_ most likely pronouncing some words
| incorrectly.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Japanese is phonetic, unlike English. In Japanese
| spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent.
| Words sound like they look and look like they sound. Even
| someone who's never studied Japanese before could read a
| text written in romaji and be understood without trouble
| (unlike someone studying French, for example).
| taeric wrote:
| Nit, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. But, largely
| Japanese is not phonetic in written language, as they
| also have a logographic set which makes up a large
| portion of most texts.
| lisper wrote:
| > English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
|
| Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound
| different.
|
| Oh, wait...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever
| method. The remainder need different strategies or more time
| or both to help.
|
| I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my
| parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade
| levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is
| not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really
| advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny
| enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he
| sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year
| in October.
|
| The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's
| a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
| bregma wrote:
| We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A
| lot. Every day.
|
| By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on
| their own. By the time they started learning to read in
| school they could bring their own books to read during
| lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
|
| Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do
| not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is
| going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all
| the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is
| bitterly condemned.
| joelfried wrote:
| We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some
| children require more direct support. Knowing what works
| for those who need it is pretty huge.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I'm in this boat. Every kid is different.
|
| My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero
| effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took
| over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore.
|
| He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series
| in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I
| do at 31.
|
| My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really
| liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do
| something else, he did. He's getting there though, and
| we'll get him there.
| Taywee wrote:
| Basically the same here. Oldest was reading proficiently
| way before preschool, my youngest is 7 and still
| struggling to pick out up. He's really smart, and we read
| to him and with him plenty, but it just doesn't click for
| him like my oldest. He can do math no problem and he
| loves science and learning in general, but reading and
| writing are just specifically hard.
|
| It's weird how different things can be for kids even in
| the same family and environment.
| tivert wrote:
| >> We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to
| them. A lot. Every day.
|
| >> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read
| on their own.
|
| > We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some
| children require more direct support. Knowing what works
| for those who need it is pretty huge.
|
| Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the
| "whole language" approach people--making the faulty
| assumption that mere exposure is enough to educate. That
| works with some, but clearly fails _a lot_. And even for
| the kids it works with, I 'd be afraid it would leave
| gaps that would be much better addressed with some
| explicit instruction.
|
| My kid is tiny and loves to "read" (i.e. memorize and
| recite books). At this rate, he'll probably learn to read
| on his own, but I definitely want to make sure he has the
| tools to successfully tackle difficult and unfamiliar
| words, so he doesn't self-limit to the stuff he knows
| well.
| nice2meetu wrote:
| That time my daughter proudly announced "look Daddy, I
| can read this book with my eyes closed"
| nice2meetu wrote:
| We were told it was better to let the teachers teach
| otherwise kids learn bad habits or don't engage.
|
| That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in
| Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year
| (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so
| intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on
| to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and
| our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20
| words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In
| hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much
| of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by
| not being able to read.
| siftrics wrote:
| "We were told" seems to always preface failure and
| disappointment.
|
| How do people blindly trust random figures of authority?
| It's mind boggling.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Not trusting authority figures tends to be extremely
| laborious, give little benefit, and gets you socially
| marked as an oddball.
|
| Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works
| out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways
| into the future, and you'll have plenty of social
| acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable"
| misfortune.
| siftrics wrote:
| It's not laborious. Just think for yourself. Don't
| delegate critical thinking to some random idiot or
| stranger.
|
| Being marked as an oddball is a very minor downside
| compared to your kids not being able to read well.
|
| It's called "common sense" and you're arguing against it.
| rutthenut wrote:
| >> We were told it was better to let the teachers teach
| otherwise kids learn bad habits or don't engage.
|
| That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given
| with best intentions.
|
| Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their
| kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start
| learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
| nice2meetu wrote:
| Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a
| warning not to let them learn at all! I think the
| intention was more that there is less incentive to
| actively push or pressure kids in to reading before
| school, and that actively trying to teach them one
| methodology might even conflict with the method they end
| up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their
| kids ready for school" by getting them to read before
| starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how
| we took it.
| siftrics wrote:
| How could anyone take the advice "don't teach your kids"
| seriously? Are you insane? It makes no sense on any
| level.
|
| How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as
| if people don't have brains anymore.
| vuln wrote:
| [flagged]
| curiousbean wrote:
| [flagged]
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| > actively trying to teach them one methodology might
| even conflict with the method they end up being taught in
| school
|
| That's what happened with me. My teacher would give me
| zero on a math question if use the methodology my dad
| taught me.
| batch12 wrote:
| Yeah, I think every person is different. My first kid
| learned to read himself from watching educational
| material and using a computer. He knew the alphabet
| before anyone could really understand his words. His
| siblings needed someone to walk them through the
| concepts.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never
| heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x
| words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then
| make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words
| with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that
| already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's an adaptation to the limitations of phonetical
| spelling in english.
|
| IIRC, my kid was taught about 100 "sight words" that are
| usually common words that link stuff together or appear
| often. Stuff like "who", "the", "which", etc. The kids
| memorize those and sound out the other stuff. I think the
| idea is to avoid discouraging kids from getting hung up
| on common things or memorizing things wrong.
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling,
| so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read.
| There are often several different phonetic ways you could
| spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two).
| In reverse there are often several different phonetic
| ways to pronounce a written word.
|
| As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed
| English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would
| help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > There are often several different phonetic ways you
| could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too,
| two).
|
| And "two" isn't even a phonetic spelling!
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| That's interesting because in the 1960 novel To Kill a
| Mockingbird (widely taught in the US and well-known in
| other countries), there's a scene where the character Scout
| is criticized in school by her teacher, when it's
| discovered that Scout learned to read ahead of the
| curriculum, from her father at home. The teacher expressed
| the concern that Scout might end up learning how to read
| incorrectly. If I remember correctly, the end result was
| that Atticus (Scout's father) told his daughter that she
| could secretly continue to read at home, just without
| telling her teacher, to avoid conflicts in class.
|
| ~~
|
| Except from the novel (where "I" is the character Scout):
|
| "Teach me?" I said in surprise. "He hasn't taught me
| anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain't got time to teach me
| anything," I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her
| head. "Why, he's so tired at night he just sits in the
| livingroom and reads."
|
| "If he didn't teach you, who did?" Miss Caroline asked
| good-naturedly. "Somebody did. You weren't born reading The
| Mobile Register."
|
| "Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch
| instead of a Finch. Jem says my name's really Jean Louise
| Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was born and I'm
| really a-"
|
| Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. "Let's not
| let our imaginations run away with us, dear," she said.
| "Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's
| best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll
| take over from here and try to undo the damage-"
|
| "Ma'am?"
|
| "Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a
| seat now."
|
| I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my
| crime. [...] I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let
| well enough alone and stared out the window until recess
| when Jem [Scout's older brother] cut me from the covey of
| first-graders in the schoolyard. He asked how I was getting
| along. I told him.
|
| "If I didn't have to stay I'd leave. Jem, that damn lady
| says Atticus's been teaching me to read and for him to stop
| it-" "Don't worry, Scout," Jem comforted me. "Our teacher
| says Miss Caroline's introducing a new way of teaching. She
| learned about it in college. It'll be in all the grades
| soon. You don't have to learn much out of books that way--
| it's like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one,
| see?"
|
| ~~
|
| Contrary to this approach in teaching, in my university
| courses, my professors in math and the Spanish language
| always encouraged additional reading and study outside of
| class (oftentimes, this was written directly in the
| syllabus or part of class discussions). So, I haven't heard
| much about professors being concerned about students
| learning the "wrong way"--I suspect that many educators are
| happy in general when students seek to learn from
| additional materials outside of what's presented in class.
| nice2meetu wrote:
| Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis
| on us as parents taking an active role in reading with
| them and encouraging them at home.
|
| I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote
| it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure
| your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read
| before even starting school". An example of kids being
| confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet,
| whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't
| think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your
| kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read
| before even starting school".
|
| Yeah, I think this is actually the right approach. A
| _lot_ of children will learn reading without specific
| training if you read picture books with them in your lap
| and they 're looking at the pictures and the letters. If
| they do, that's great; if they don't, that's fine too.
| Structured reading practice and development can happen
| later.
| analog31 wrote:
| When my oldest brother was a preschooler, my mom attended
| a meeting at school for parents of preschoolers. They
| specifically told her: "Do not attempt to teach your
| child to read, you will do it wrong." Also, she tried to
| find out the right way, and was rebuffed. She sensed
| bullshit, and taught us to read at home.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at
| school was leaving too much to chance.
|
| That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of
| the public education system that I've ever heard.
| kritiko wrote:
| The public education system in the US is ~6 hours per day,
| ~180 days per year. Of course anybody with the means is
| supplementing that.
| zaphar wrote:
| Phonics based approaches to reading have been a mainstay of
| private and home school programs for decades. It creates a
| silly disparity between those who can afford or are willing
| to sacrifice enough to put there children through them and
| those who have to use the public school system. Every once
| in a while the parents will have enough and revolt somehow.
|
| I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never
| really experienced the public system. But one of the small
| towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was
| in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a
| number of years and knew by experience how to teach a
| phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents
| learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial
| number of families just pulled their kids out of the school
| and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time
| that the school was oddly hostile to updating their
| curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the
| phonics method substantially improved the students reading
| ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and
| the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could
| see dramatic before and after results right there.
|
| Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve
| their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to
| get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every
| town or school district will have someone who knows and can
| share the information.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned
| to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic
| alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in
| first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade
| was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading
| recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George
| Orwell.
|
| Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one
| way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in
| school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it,
| since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think
| that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).
|
| On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family
| culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers.
| And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think a family culture of reading is huge. They
| eventually pick up that it is important and fun and that
| leads to a lifetime of learning.
| tomrod wrote:
| My story reflects yours (I was a "late" reader by grade but
| also the youngest in my grade, and voracious after I found
| the world larger than my tiny country town).
|
| Because we read with our kids, all of them were reading by
| late 3/early 4 years old, by their own desire. While none
| have had a propensity for George Orwell at the third grade,
| they do read things beyond their age levels.
|
| I was lucky, and my kids are lucky.
|
| I wonder, are there any organizations that folks can
| volunteer at to help kids at your and my age in elementary
| school learn to read?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I was not considered a "late" reader at all for the early
| 80s though, at least where I was -- they just didn't try
| to teach preschoolers to read then and there like they do
| now. I think what they do now is a mistake... but that
| could be my own anecdotal prejudices.
| abeyer wrote:
| > And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
|
| I think this is the huge thing in common here. If kids are
| read to from a young age some might pick it up almost "on
| their own" while others may wait and learn in early
| elementary school "on schedule", but I think will largely
| see similar outcomes. But the ones coming at it for the
| first time from _not_ having experienced reading, even if
| only from being read to, are starting from a perspective
| lacking both background and motivation.
| barrkel wrote:
| Starting X early is IMO a bit of a red herring with child
| development, especially when they're in the low single
| digits. Their minds grow in power recognizably on a weekly
| basis (particularly noticeable when you spend a week apart)
| that an amazing uphill achievement at time t can be a
| trivially picked up thing at time t+1.
|
| I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new
| books and understands that they contain stories. A
| household without that is far more likely to cause issues
| with reading because the motivation will be missing.
| martindbp wrote:
| Exactly. I try things with my son and observe if he's
| ready or not. There's no rush, nobody will care at 30 if
| you were a year "late" learning X. For example, I'm very
| skeptical of the trend of trying to teach
| advanced/abstract math to kids earlier and earlier. If
| they're that one in 100 and they are interested, sure.
| But in your late teens you just have so much more brain
| power, you'll easily catch up. I remember being
| intimidated in CS undergrad by the ubernerds, who had
| been coding since they were 6. But within a few months we
| were all at the same level anyway.
| abeyer wrote:
| Also, school curricula in the US are all based on grade
| year... which spans almost a whole year of age within a
| class based on enrollment date cutoffs.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah. Tried to get mine to ride a bike at 3.5 and he kept
| falling over. Now he tries again at 4.5 and he just
| immediately drives away.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, and it varies with each kid. My younger brother
| and I were 18 months apart. Whether he was "early" or I
| was "late," what was my mom going to do with him while
| teaching me to read? So we learned together.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics,
| how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the
| same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and
| that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the
| latter, but neither of the former?
|
| And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow",
| as in "low" and "borrow"?
|
| Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with
| phonics?
|
| I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"?
| Really, French?
| xattt wrote:
| You can imagine each language as a painters' pallete.
|
| Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access
| to some colours, but not all.
|
| Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and
| others don't. When they don't, you try to see the "colour"
| as another one until it makes sense (looking for context).
| Kind of like "what colour is dress".
|
| To speak to your British English example, you also know
| that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don't use a
| standard colour and only use one they "whipped up" at home.
|
| If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are
| multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar
| but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they
| each have a different "shade". Paint consistency might also
| vary.
|
| This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead
| of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language,
| you "dip" into a "sound palette" of another language to try
| to get as close as you can to the original word.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| That is just the tip of the iceberg for "ough". The way I
| pronounce English there are six sounds that "ough" can
| make:
|
| 1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough
| (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow)
|
| And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate
| this with Britain and some northeast American regions.
| There are probably other sounds too.
|
| As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it
| can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in
| order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when
| encountering it in a word, try them until one seems
| correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For
| "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the
| floor."
| generalizations wrote:
| Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a
| combination of several older languages, saxon and french
| included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which
| language the word construction originated in.
|
| English _is_ phonetic; but it 's also bimodal.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Multimodal - Germanic languages, French, Latin, Greek and
| (to a lesser extent) Slavic languages have all produced
| common words in the English lexicon.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| "tough", "rough", "though" and "borough" all come from
| Old English, without any French influence. The wackiness
| in pronouncing "ough" is sadly not predictable from any
| set of rules and as you'd probably expect varies between
| dialects
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
| taeric wrote:
| This really isn't that difficult, all told. Just consider
| the rules of any sport, and see how conditional so many of
| those are. Yet they will pick them up just fine.
|
| Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so
| long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong.
| Acknowledge the difference and move on.
|
| For the specific examples you are using, the general idea
| is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to
| letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often
| defined by the rest of the word.
|
| Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I
| don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the
| history of the word." Even better if you can have time to
| go into the history some and explore it. Because that can
| be what gets kids interested. Exploring.
|
| (And this is no different than many other things. Why do
| you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it
| is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and
| some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of
| those. Path dependence is a thing.)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Just consider the rules of any sport, and see how
| conditional so many of those are.
|
| Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P
| hydrok9 wrote:
| History! Britain got conquered a bunch of times and some of
| the old words have just stuck around.
| mcv wrote:
| My son, not a native English speaker, even taught himself
| the Chaos poem. It's a good way to learn to appreciate
| the horrors of the English language.
| hydrok9 wrote:
| They are living relics of the ancient past! and we still
| use them today! English is cool.
| javajosh wrote:
| So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron
| charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we
| have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation,
| of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us
| we can create our own notations and methods to translate
| between the old and new, but then you get splitting and
| fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such
| a notation, and make something beautiful with it, well,
| then you have a chance at fixing something.
|
| 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially
| the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender
| of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse
| the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to
| detect foreign speakers and berate them.
|
| 2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary
| minus signs has this poor choice caused?
|
| 3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes
| is needlessly complex, requiring _both_ a flip and a
| rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with
| frequency still increasing to the right in both forms -
| which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence
| and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many
| kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and
| don 't get into music at all simply because their (quite
| correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane
| music notation?
|
| Definitions don't require explanations because they already
| have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and
| precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must
| fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only
| marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get
| pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes
| is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a
| rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical,
| with frequency still increasing to the right in both
| forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance
| prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.)
| How many kids were and are turned off by this notational
| horror, and don't get into music at all simply because
| their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated
| by arcane music notation?
|
| While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be
| a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single
| instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it
| allows me to read music written for piano and play some
| of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys
| are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across
| instruments is IMO a really cool feature.
|
| Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar,
| especially the way prepositions conjugate with the
| (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of
| prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a
| language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate
| them.
|
| Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German
| grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their
| spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite
| controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling
| grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost
| points in exams that weren't even about spelling because
| I made so many mistakes.
| LeonB wrote:
| > Compatibility between music notation across instruments
| is IMO a really cool feature.
|
| ... true... and then it's messed with by, for example Bb
| trumpets - a concept I didn't learn about until
| adulthood.
| euroderf wrote:
| > How many kids were and are turned off by this
| notational horror
|
| _raises hand_
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Music notation is pretty much the archetypal example of
| something designed by power users for power users. As
| someone who has done some orchestra conducting and
| composing, it's incredibly powerful and expressive, and
| the fact that you can usefully conduct an orchestra on an
| unknown piece with nothing but a score (no recordings) is
| amazing. Music notation hits a very powerful level of
| abstraction, and is so information-dense that all the
| information required to recreate a symphony fits in a
| small book.
|
| When I was a child trying to learn music reading for
| piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was
| learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of
| "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and
| conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build
| a mental model of a score.
|
| I should also add that young pianists and organists have
| the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require
| you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a
| staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on
| other instruments can have trouble reading piano music,
| which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread
| across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a part time jazz bassist. I play in a so called "big
| band," so most of what we play is scored like orchestral
| music, albeit with improvisational portions.
|
| I think "designed by power users for power users" nails
| it. Another way of putting it, is that there's a
| symbiosis between writers and players, if both are
| skilled in the same notation system, whatever it is. If
| you can read, you can find work. If you can write in
| standard notation, you can find people to play it. This
| creates a huge dis-incentive to explore new notations,
| except as an academic exercise.
| watwut wrote:
| English has essentially random grammar with some half
| working rationalizations slapped on it. German grammer
| has at least logic to it.
|
| The articles (definite, indefinite) , prepositions and
| phrasal verbs are pure hell to learn.
|
| And I don't undesirable what you mean by music notation
| and piano. The system is quite easy.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar,
| especially the way prepositions conjugate with the
| (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of
| prepositions reuse the same conjugations.
|
| Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have
| gender-based noun declension. This is not special to
| German, it's English that's one of the few special ones
| that have lost it, no other European Indo-European
| language had.
|
| German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only
| the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish,
| which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and
| declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself,
| which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact
| that even within a gender, different noun types declense
| differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine
| animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three
| can be seen as subgenders. I simply don't have an idea
| how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all
| of this other than through many years of practice.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary
| minus signs has this poor choice caused?
|
| Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way
| of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving
| from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a
| particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular
| kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of
| silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening
| to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know
| whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto
| the rod.
| duskwuff wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/567/ comes to mind. :)
| pianoben wrote:
| Western music notation originated in religious vocal
| scores, at a time when church music was largely
| homophonic (just one melody). As melody is linear through
| time, using the horizontal axis to denote time makes a
| lot of sense - just like we do with the written word.
|
| Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music
| became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth,
| fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptation.
| Instrumentalists took it up outside of the Church, and
| the rest is history. We standardized on this notation
| because, even though it was originally for the human
| voice, it is convenient and good enough that _everyone_
| could make use of it.
|
| Finally, I'll note that 20th century composers
| experimented endlessly with alternate notations, some
| more seriously than others:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
| culture/5-12-examples-of...
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is"
| a lot.
| analog31 wrote:
| I think we started with books that happened to have words
| that were easy to decode. After that point, we admitted
| that the English language is actually quite a mess. And
| once the kids got some momentum, then they began figuring
| things out for themselves, or asking. We continued reading
| to them, and would occasionally stop to ask them if they
| knew a particular word.
|
| To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure,
| but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited
| clues built into the written language.
|
| And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't
| know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as
| "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody
| explaining the meaning of those words to them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"?
| Really, French?
|
| "Oiseaux" is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions
| to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though,
| AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it
| would warrant a question...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Of course but that's not GP's point I think. A kid shall
| wonder why it's not at the very least "oiso" (when
| there's one) or "oisos" (when there are several). Or even
| why not "waso" (with "wa" as in "wapiti").
|
| And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write
| "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french
| electro btw):
|
| https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Well the discussion is about phonics, so I was thinking
| of how none of the letters in "oiseaux" are pronounced.
| That was pointed out to me by a French colleague.
| Although he stopped at "oiseau", strangely. Anyway I
| thought it was a common joke of sorts.
|
| I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the
| "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not
| pronounced where the "a" is written in the word.
|
| Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but:
| oo-aah-zoh.
| dmm wrote:
| > Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read
| with phonics?
|
| Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that
| follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in
| Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you
| learn the deviations.
|
| Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it
| works pretty well as a starting point.
|
| English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized,
| fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for
| memorization so it works ok.
|
| Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They
| don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling.
| "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and
| they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At
| the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on
| spelling. But they just spent two years practicing
| incorrect spelling!
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I can also personally vouch for Teach Your Child to Read in 100
| Easy Lessons. It accelerated my ability to teach my kiddo to
| read by doing exactly what I wasn't an expert in - designing a
| reading pedagogy. We worked though the book in pandemic
| kindergarten and I can't help but attribute his current reading
| success to the work we did back then. It was a silver lining in
| a time of uncertainty and the memories I have of us working
| through the book together are memories I'll cherish for the
| rest of my life.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I've tried this book. My son won't follow the instructions
| exactly. And the book makes it clear they must be followed
| exactly. i don't know what to do.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I recommend trying just one activity in each lesson per day
| at first - start really slowly.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| jkubicek wrote:
| We also used "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" for
| both of our kids. It works outrageously well and we've
| recommended it to all our friends with young children.
| ugh123 wrote:
| >"Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"
|
| Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only
| issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with
| content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's
| guidance pointing at the word segments.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students
| _at scale_. If parents are willing to spend more time coaching
| their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be
| less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to
| student ratio for a reason. Bloom 's 2 sigma problem is very
| real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor
| pedagogy can yield results.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I don't know if it's utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we
| may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That's
| the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
| nicwilson wrote:
| > [AI is] the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
|
| It is not the only way: getting other students to teach.
| Yes it has a bootstrapping problem of quality and requires
| QA on the delivery but it is still definitely doable at
| scale.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| When it works, it's beautiful. Teaching someone else is
| such a great way of consolidating your own understanding.
|
| It so often goes off the rails, though.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'm cautiously optimistic that it's utopian-ish. If we do
| it right and supplant it with human interaction and
| assessment then kids will be better off. They'll be able to
| learn at their own pace with content that is built around
| their interests and style of learning best. They can learn
| when they feel like learning instead of having to use the
| typical rigid and regimented structure of today's
| classroom.
|
| I'm not trying to be all hippy about it - kids still need
| assessment and evidence that learning occurred and there
| needs to be accountability. And teachers aren't going away.
| Human leadership is important and someone needs to be
| accountable for what a kid has learned, etc. A dystopian
| implementation would be no teacher and a parent just gets a
| daily report.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I taught for about ten years at the high school level,
| but I work as a consultant in the tech industry now.
| While the curricular piece might seem like the natural
| starting point, the nut to crack would be increasing the
| trustability of in-class assessments as accurate data on
| a student's knowledge/abilities are required for that
| kind of curricular individualization. Good teachers do
| this kind of assessment, of course - but it's difficult
| at scale. It's easier for curricular content that is
| hierarchical in nature, but a great deal of content is
| not. Assessment is a pretty mature research space (and AI
| advances to help generate/curate assessment content could
| be game changing), but there is a block - for some reason
| - preventing assistive instructional tools for teachers
| becoming prevelant. It remains, largely, an analog
| process. That said, I would love to leverage my teaching
| experience to help design and build such a tool.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"
|
| > Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
|
| It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends'
| kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN
| comment I wrote.
|
| If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon
| delivers) is the best time to start.
| arthurjj wrote:
| +1 to "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". It's step
| by step and doesn't require a large amount of planning or
| thinking from the parent. Which means it's easy, which means
| you'll do it. Even when busy
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very
| strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the
| Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of
| entertainment.
| sn9 wrote:
| Fans of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" might
| wish to check out "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach" [0]. It
| uses a similar phonics approach but uses basic pattern matching
| to teach kids in a much simpler format. Be sure to check out
| the reviews for the original and newer edition.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814311156?psc=1
| gnicholas wrote:
| Whoa, this book appears to be $50-$500?
| Khaine wrote:
| From the podcast:
|
| "Here's what's happening to many children in this country. They
| go to a "balanced literacy" school that uses Fountas and Pinnell
| and Lucy Calkins. They're taught the cueing strategies. Their
| reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they're
| struggling - and someone notices - they might get Reading
| Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books.
| And if they're still struggling after that, many of them get
| Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books.
|
| Struggling readers keep getting more of the same.
|
| That's what happened to Matthew. Missy's son. In Gwinnett County,
| Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to
| help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor.
|
| Purcell: And she was like, "You finally arrived at the place
| where most of us arrive." She had given up on the idea that the
| school was going to teach her son how to read. And she'd decided
| she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It's
| what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It's what Lee Gaul
| did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It's what Kenni Alden
| in California wishes she had done with her son.
|
| Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like
| the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was
| undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was
| teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught
| the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him
| out of public school, and they put him in a private school for
| kids with dyslexia.
|
| Matthew's in sixth grade now. And Missy says he's doing really
| well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was
| almost up to grade level in reading and writing.
|
| For Missy, what's especially painful about all this is that she
| had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas
| and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how
| to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books."
| nmca wrote:
| This is one of the most shocking things I have heard about in
| ages.
|
| Because kids can't vote and don't have money they really do seem
| to get shafted in the US.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| A couple of thoughts form my own anecdotal evidence:
|
| * My mother was a stay-at-home mom and some of the earliest
| memories I have is her teaching me to read.
|
| * I had difficulty in school and I did not fit in. My social
| issues spilled into the classroom, my grades suffered, i was
| picked on a lot, and I was usually put in remedial classes (you
| know those smaller classes with like 5 students). Yet I got a
| 1460 on my SATs, +700 on SATIIs, and went to USNews top 25
| college (~20% acceptance rate at the time, ~12% now).
|
| I have gotten more social since, but it left me with the
| impression that public school can do more harm than good. I am
| pro school choice and will seriously consider homeschooling.
| gavinmckenzie wrote:
| My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months
| old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience,
| starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace
| "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers
| along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough
| texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words,
| speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write
| before reading, with an implication that this process will help
| with word recognition.
|
| I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it
| certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-
| year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori
| things) surprising.
| sdwr wrote:
| Probably not really about word recognition, but about being an
| agent in the world. Reading is fundamentally a passive
| experience. The best reader in the world may as well be Stephen
| Hawking.
|
| From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing +
| engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing
| would be a way to express those values.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I never gave it much thought, but I am currently teaching my
| 3-year-old to write letters first because I think the
| recognition and muscle memory with the letters would help with
| stringing the letters together later.
|
| It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of
| people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I know it's not your point, but learning to write by tracing at
| age 3 doesn't sound anything like the actual teachings of Maria
| Montessori. The whole point is _child directed_ learning, and
| having kids at 3 trace things sounds pretty anti-ethical
| towards that.
|
| Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little
| Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all
| early childhood development research.
| taeric wrote:
| Give charity to the idea. Odds are high they had a ton of
| tracing stations available, and the kids that gravitated to
| it, used it. That is, the idea is to enable learning by
| availability of opportunities and encouragement.
|
| So, no. This doesn't go against any research. Unless you
| frame it in the most uncharitable way that you can.
| gavinmckenzie wrote:
| Yes exactly. The children at that age in a "Casa" classroom
| cycle through self-chosen activities every day and may not
| choose the same activities consistently. If a child is
| observed to be avoiding a particular learning activity over
| a period of time, it's the role of the teacher
| (director/directress) to nudge the child back to that
| activity and understand why they might be avoiding it.
|
| Plus given there are three years worth of children in the
| same class, seeing the "senior" children operate at the
| higher levels of activities helps with incentive for the
| younger children who want to emulate them.
|
| That said, anyone can open a "Montessori school" and not
| adhere to any particular Montessori pedagogy. I'd argue the
| schools with the purest interpretations of Maria
| Montessori's teachings are often just as problematic as
| those who are Montessori in name only. There are two tribes
| in Montessori: AMS (purists)and AMI (more flexible).
|
| Thankfully the school my daughter attended was AMI and I
| watched the school adapt their methods to children who
| needed more structure than classical Montessori advises.
| Ultimately, it's not for everyone.
| legacynl wrote:
| I don't think it has much to do with learning reading or
| writing first, but more about learning letters before you
| progress to words, before you progress to sentences, etc.
|
| I don't think it really matters if you start with writing or
| reading first, because it's basically the same skill: knowing
| letter shapes and knowing which sound corresponds. It's that
| learning really benefits from receiving the same information in
| different contexts. So as long as you both teach them to write
| and read, the order doesn't really matter.
|
| One reason for using the cardboard letters for younger children
| is that the brain regions handling bodily movement are much
| more advanced, and thus provide more context which (as stated
| earlier) helps in memorization.
|
| But I suspect the main reason for using the sandpaper letters
| is because it is way more interesting for the children to have
| something with tactile feedback, instead of just looking at a
| flat card.
| camgunz wrote:
| All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story,
| mostly their criticisms are:
|
| - if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to
| read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
|
| - Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts
|
| I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't
| an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for
| specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The
| Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad
| or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say
| people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying
| there are definitely agendas here.
|
| For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading
| (SOR), have a look here [0].
|
| [0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
| yamtaddle wrote:
| AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually
| right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like
| 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education.
| Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True
| Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were
| (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years
| and years ago that it was harmful.
|
| This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast
| about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
| camgunz wrote:
| Yeah. I mean I agree that Heinemann is milking books they've
| already put resources into publishing and they should quit.
| And I'm sure there's a bunch of teachers who aren't good at
| teaching or being humans and not teaching very well. But the
| core conceit of Sold a Story is there's currently a huge
| problem with reading pedagogy everywhere, and that's at least
| currently false, and maybe was never true.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that's just the
| language decoding step. The problem is that the "whole
| language" approach has been shown not to work at all, and we
| regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
|
| If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it's because they're
| being called out for using a shitty method that's ruin the
| lives of poor children.
| dymk wrote:
| You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift
| to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least
| testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or
| worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.
| numeromancer wrote:
| They did test it: see Project Follow Through. They didn't
| like the results, so they ignored them.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| As the sibling comment mentions, it was tested. It got tied
| up in some weird politics and the George W. Bush
| administration was championing evidence based reading
| programs so teaching programs at places like Colombia took
| the opposite stance. Obviously that's a bit of an
| oversimplification, but you get the idea.
| camgunz wrote:
| > Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that's just
| the language decoding step
|
| Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people
| are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap
| between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build
| a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be
| closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this
| podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers
| teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what
| any of it is.
|
| > The problem is that the "whole language" approach has been
| shown not to work at all
|
| This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole
| language works OK.
|
| > regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
|
| We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is
| pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor
| literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and
| it's not been going great [0], for instance.
|
| > If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it's because they're
| being called out for using a shitty method that's ruin the
| lives of poor children.
|
| Let's be a little more civil than this.
|
| [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-
| on-p...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
|
| The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for
| low SES students.
|
| Again, phonics is just about decoding language.
| Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure,
| cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help
| build a mental schema of the language. The study the
| Guardian is citing says exactly this.
|
| It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged
| in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it
| for "encourage a love of reading," which is not the point
| of teaching the decoding step to begin with. The Guardian
| article grossly misrepresents the actual study, which says
| in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the
| evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but
| other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that
| phonics is important in learning to read
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally
| for low SES students.
|
| There's a genetic component there too; my children are
| adopted and had wildly differing outcomes from the same
| curricula (and often same teachers). My personal opinion
| from observation (N=4, plus a few kids of friends) is
| that some kids will teach themselves phonics even in a
| whole-language program. Other kids don't. And the kids
| who don't struggle to read until someone teaches it to
| them.
| istjohn wrote:
| Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.
| numeromancer wrote:
| Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to
| read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
|
| Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read'
| Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has
| oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing
| they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional
| reading skills.
| anon291 wrote:
| I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's
| so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by
| literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent'
| reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we
| silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At
| least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I
| type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not
| sounding out? I clearly remember myself learning to read,
| sounding out words and then being like 'oh that word is X'.
| And I see the same wheels turning with my daughter.
| davemp wrote:
| > . . . and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read
| by internally 'hearing' the audio version.
|
| Not until I read this sentence! Feels a bit like "breathing
| manually".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Little children learn to read first by literally reading
| out loud.
|
| IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing
| whole words that other people read out loud, and the best
| learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that
| heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills
| via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what
| the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of
| the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children
| progress to reading independently, but even there its not
| the only thing going on (context is important).
|
| > How else can you learn to read if not sounding out?
|
| Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed
| that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear
| that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means
| other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as
| part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where
| it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.
| anon291 wrote:
| The logographic languages (Chinese really) all start with
| phonetic systems before the children then start
| memorizing the ideograms. There are dozens of chinese
| phonetic systems in use for teaching. The HTML standard
| has a whole element reserved just for asian pronunciation
| systems.
| pitaj wrote:
| The podcast goes into how this is exactly wrong. For
| phonetic languages, kids best learn to read via phonics.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > kids best learn to read via phonics.
|
| parent comment didn't say "learn best", it said "learn
| first".
| pitaj wrote:
| Even in phonics, kids learn common words like "the" by
| sight. But that doesn't scale. People don't learn to
| recognize every word as an individual token.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > But that doesn't scale.
|
| You're saying that they move on from it. That doesn't
| contradict the "learn first" part, does it?
| com2kid wrote:
| This is one of those topics that people debate endlessly
| because what works "for most" does not work "for all".
|
| I learned full word reading, it works _great_ for me. I
| was well into middle school before I learned I didn 't
| know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I
| was reading at a college level. Pretty sure I didn't
| internalize "e at the end makes vowels long" until nearly
| high school.
|
| I read _really_ fast, I can glance at a word and read it
| long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and
| mentally pronounce it.
|
| I've met plenty of other people who are the same, but I
| will also acknowledge that this doesn't work for
| everyone.
|
| But you know what? I bet a lot of chemists "read"
| chemical names the same way.
| pitaj wrote:
| Full word reading works fine for a subset of kids, but it
| leaves a sizeable amount behind. Phonics is fundamental
| for teaching those kids how to read.
|
| This is how the podcast explains what reading research
| has found about how people learn to read:
|
| - First learn to associate letters with sounds
|
| - By sounding out words, reinforce those associations
|
| - And associate combinations of letters with known words
| from their spoken language
|
| Our brains aren't wired for written language like they
| are for spoken language. We have to actively learn. And
| by associating letters with sounds, our brains are able
| to loop in the existing language areas of the brain into
| written language.
| anon291 wrote:
| > I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words
|
| Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a
| fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it
| here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth
| grade. That is ... problematic.
|
| From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic
| reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because
| a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually reads
| 'the whole word' (I don't think any adult spends any
| amount of time examining the minutiae of letter ordering
| in everyday life). However, the opposite does not work.
| As you pointed out, despite your high reading level, you
| weren't able to figure out basic phonetic rules until
| high school. This would be problematic if you were
| learning any new language for example. Even ones not
| based on latin alphabet. The practice of blending sounds
| together is a fundamental part of reading.
|
| A child who is using phonics is able to (1) understand,
| (2) sound out, (3) and speak the written word (which
| means they will be able to do things like read poetry). A
| child who is using the whole word approach may be able to
| understand, but if they cannot enunciate properly the
| words on the page, then they cannot do either 2 or 3,
| which means the reading is not complete. I don't see how
| we can consider this an acceptable replacement.
|
| > I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it
| long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and
| mentally pronounce it.
|
| This is not exceptional for an adult.
| camgunz wrote:
| >> I was well into middle school before I learned I
| didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th
| grade I was reading at a college level.
|
| > The way you've written it here, you were not fully able
| to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.
|
| I don't really think that's what they're saying here.
| They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college
| level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I read
| words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. That's
| different than "not fully able to read".
|
| >> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it
| long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and
| mentally pronounce it.
|
| > This is not exceptional for an adult.
|
| Sadly, I think that it is. I looked up US literacy rates
| for this thread to validate my memory that they were
| something like 98%. I learned that not only are they 92%
| at "level 1", but only "[f]our in five U.S. adults (79
| percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to
| complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting
| information, paraphrasing, or making low-level
| inferences" [0]. I know this isn't exactly directly
| responsive to reading speed or whatever, but this is just
| to say I had a much rosier picture of US literacy in my
| head and maybe you do too.
|
| [0]: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
| com2kid wrote:
| > They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I
| don't know how to pronounce" issue.
|
| I read a lot of fantasy literature as a kid, and I'll
| argue that not needing to bother with pronunciation is a
| huge boon when trying to go through a particular style of
| fantasy novel!
| com2kid wrote:
| > This would be problematic if you were learning any new
| language for example.
|
| But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers,
| chemical names, and foreign loan words.
|
| > This is not exceptional for an adult.
|
| Really? I've met plenty of functioning adults who say
| they sound out words in their head when reading. Go to
| any one of the many online threads about reading methods
| and you'll come across plenty of people describing that
| they have a voice in their head pronouncing each word
| that they read.
| dymk wrote:
| Young kids don't start with logographic languages or
| whole world recognition. Just look at languages that use
| logographic scripts: Japanese has two phonetic
| "alphabets" (kana), and kids learn those first. Content
| for kids is written in kana. Kids start learning basic
| Kanji later on, but the phonetic script comes first.
| elzbardico wrote:
| For a long time I've held the unpopular opinion that most
| elementary teachers are utterly incompetent, and that as an
| academic field, Education is becoming more and more bullshit. I
| will be down-voted to hell because of this, and yet, the
| reality always seems to agree with my world-view.
| warner25 wrote:
| I like my kids' elementary school teachers, they seem fine,
| and maybe it's mostly about teaching kids to behave in
| another social setting at that age - but I do have it in the
| back of my mind that zero of the best and brightest from my
| graduating high school class (judged by who was in the honors
| / AP classes) went into teaching elementary school.
| spaceprison wrote:
| Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your
| way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my
| three kids and I can tell you it was a joke.
|
| It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching
| phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to
| a private school that taught phonics as a core function of
| their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.
|
| I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's
| content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about
| matches my experience.
| camgunz wrote:
| Yeah I mean, other commenters have noted that it takes a
| while for curricula to change, but yeah I bet that's what was
| going on and that sounds like bad instruction.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Sold a Story isn't alone; John McWhorter (a Columbia professor
| of linguistics) has a very similar take on phonics and has
| written about it in The Atlantic and the NYT.
|
| As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation,
| though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock
| Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm
| pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here -- he
| tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it
| makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.
|
| 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-
| no...
|
| 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-
| spel...
| 4bpp wrote:
| I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what
| works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading
| instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that
| teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to
| the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement
| and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening
| quote of an older article in Time
| (https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-
| teachers...):
|
| > The teachers felt like curriculum robots--and pushed back.
| "This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man
| telling us what to do," says Weaver, describing their response
| to the approach. "So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher
| group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out." It was
| replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary
| experiences. "Those who wanted to fight for social justice,
| they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading
| was the way," he says.
| pfedak wrote:
| That definitely comes through in the piece the parent linked,
| it's very much a narrative of fighting against misinformed
| outsiders pushing phonics for various research-based reasons,
| instead of just trusting teachers.
| leoc wrote:
| There are plenty of academics who oppose or have reservations
| about the capital-letters Science of Reading
| https://radicalscholarship.com/2022/05/23/nyt-blasts-
| calkins... . Of course they, too, could be ideologically
| motivated or stubbornly attached to their existing beliefs,
| for all I know, but it's clearly not a clean split between
| academics and teachers.
| 4bpp wrote:
| I would be surprised if it were (a clean split between
| academics and teachers). However, it seems like your link
| at least isn't at odds with the idea that there may be a
| clean split between those who seek to optimise for the
| declared learning outcome (reading proficiency, in this
| case) and those who optimise for the advancement of some
| political goal to which the learning outcome is at best
| conditionally conducive, and almost certainly secondary.
| (Just look at the tag collection in the sidebar.)
| yowzadave wrote:
| We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your
| Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in
| this thread. I remember when we first brought her to
| kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent
| reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying
| her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was
| "decoding" the text, rather than reading it.
|
| OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day
| silently "decoding" her books.
|
| Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method
| works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of
| reading!
| gnicholas wrote:
| We use the same book with our kids, and had a similar
| experience with educators. When she moved a to new school in
| first grade, they were extremely skeptical that she has able
| to read chapter books.
|
| But I don't think it was specific to reading -- they pulled
| the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is
| they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of
| skills because then they can't take credit for how well the
| student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on
| report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level
| in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly
| multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front,
| they wouldn't be able to show "growth".
| warner25 wrote:
| I suspect that many teachers also (1) don't want to feel
| like parents can just casually do their job pretty well,
| like their years of education and certification aren't
| necessary, and / or (2) deal with an above-average number
| of parents who think their kids are above-average, so
| develop some skepticism over time. We just sent our kids to
| school knowing how to read without telling anyone and let
| their teachers tell us how well they're doing.
| camgunz wrote:
| Teaching is pretty hard. It's a lot easier if you have
| only 1 kid, you control their home life also, they have a
| similar culture and background as you do, you can give
| them your (relatively) undivided attention all day, and
| you don't need to get them to pass a standardized test.
| Elementary school teachers have > 30 kids, new batch
| every year, from all walks of life, they can't control
| their home life, and they have to teach to a test.
| warner25 wrote:
| Oh, I agree. My wife taught in public high schools for a
| couple years in an economically struggling city. It was
| so hard (and paid so poorly, especially per hour of
| labor) that she quit after those two years and is still
| traumatized by it a decade later.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| We're going through it now, the same book 100 lessons. I have
| two kids, one is almost 6 and one is 3.5. We got the book
| because the 6 year old was struggling considerably with
| reading. The book is a real effort to go through and requires
| a lot of patience with the 6 year old. Thankfully we are 80%
| of the way through it. The incredible thing is the 3.5 year
| old sees the older one do it and she wants to do it and she's
| actually on track to read much earlier than the 6 year old.
| It's really something to watch. I'm glad we found this book
| (actually on another HN thread..)
|
| My wife, who is actually an early childhood montessori
| educator, was vehemently against the book, and I had to tell
| her, "look whatever we're doing right now isn't working, we
| need to do something different". Educational methodology is
| almost something like a religion hence such a strong need for
| what should be more "experienced-based" teaching. Do what
| works, tested on children, versus proving of academic
| scientific hypotheses. Sometimes what works just works and
| should be continued until something better can be identified.
| Again, a lot of this is anecdotal, but it was definitely an
| uphill battle. Frankly I don't think she's still completely
| convinced, but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my
| kids not be able to read.
| exclusiv wrote:
| Always a bit of a struggle as an engineer who is always
| searching for the solution and has a trained approach to
| debugging. Some just don't want to try something new for
| fear it won't work or that it isn't the preferred approach.
| This is most people I feel.
|
| Thanks for sharing. I'm going to try this book. My 5 yr old
| likes to be read to, but sternly refuses to attempt to read
| words. Also montessori. He likes some mobile games which
| have menus so I'm going to explain why we are doing it but
| also position this book as a way so he can read menus in
| games so he knows how to play. And then I'll reinforce that
| when he asks me to read any menus/storylines in the games
| by going through the phonetic process and challenging him.
|
| > Frankly I don't think she's still completely convinced,
| but I refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch my kids not
| be able to read.
|
| I had a similar situation where I had a thesis on my
| child's behavioral health concern. Saw a neurologist and
| she confirmed exactly what I said. Wife was STILL not
| convinced and even criticized the neurologist's evaluation.
| But our kid improved after I disclosed the neurologist's
| evaluation to my sis in law and told them we need them to
| move out. They had been staying with her family in my house
| for a year and my wife had been watching their kid. Problem
| solved. Case closed. My wife wanted to help her sis so much
| that she was refusing to see the damage the situation was
| causing.
|
| I also had to take matters in my own hand with getting kids
| to be sleep trained. Wife refused to do cry it out and we
| just kept struggling and getting no sleep over and over and
| kids weren't getting quality sleep. I'll get onboard a plan
| but if it doesn't work, I'm not going to continue to stay
| on that path.
|
| I told her I'd handle it and then boom, got them trained in
| a few days. Not fun at ALL, but all these industries and
| philosophies take over and push it out there as the new one
| true way when we have hundreds or sometimes thousands of
| years of success in various things that work lol.
|
| This is not unique of course. We see this in engineering
| all the time. Until the tried and true disciplines prevail.
| And the ones that care about what works best for the
| context, rather than what is popular at the time are the
| ones with less stress/anxiety.
|
| I've seen family members say - oh cry it out is stressful
| for the child and creates distrust. Meanwhile, both
| partners get no sleep, project their stress and frustration
| and even end up yelling at their child because of it! Their
| spousal relationship suffers big time too. Makes no sense
| to me. Also the same ones who try to optimize everything
| for their child according to modern parenting philosophies
| are the ones who have completely unhealthy marriages in my
| experience. In my opinion, the best thing you can do for
| your kids is to just show them how to treat and love your
| spouse and do things that take care of yourself and your
| spouse so you can be great parents. If you try to do
| everything according to what is popular at the time, you're
| going to have a bad time. You need the oxygen mask so you
| can help your dependents.
|
| Or you have parents who refuse to do cry it out and say -
| oh I couldn't get baby down last night, had to hold them on
| my chest and sleep in a chair. Utter madness. Don't do
| that. They will now be used to your warm embrace and
| heartbeat and they will never be able to sleep normally in
| their bed. Well... until you do some form of cry it out
| lol.
|
| Most things really aren't that hard or frustrating unless
| you create and foster an environment that makes them so.
|
| end rant
| camgunz wrote:
| Most of the time I defend teachers, but I confess to feeling
| pretty weird about it because with some (super notable)
| exceptions I had pretty bad experiences with them. I have a
| lot of opinions about schools/teachers/education whatever but
| they're pretty polemic and would derail.
|
| But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My
| partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her
| to sit through us reading a very short book to her without
| yelling very loudly. One day haha :)
| pfedak wrote:
| I'd dispute your characterization of the NEPC summary as well-
| reasoned. It's definitely a different perspective, but it's
| clear in a preference for valuing the experience and beliefs of
| "literacy scholars" over any sort of evidence that could
| contradict them. It does seems like a good view of the
| education institution's side of this argument.
|
| It is careful to point out even minority criticism of phonics-
| centered instruction, while suggesting that disagreement with
| cueing approaches is a result of misunderstanding. It
| explicitly devalues "narrow" "experimental and quasi-
| experimental research" in favor of "decades of classroom-based
| and other forms of qualitative research" (how long has the
| experimental research been going on?). Even the naming feels
| slanted: the cueing approach gets called "whole language" or
| "balanced literacy" while opposing views start with "simple
| view of literacy". The "structured literacy" section ends with
| "although literacy researchers caution there is still much to
| learn about the brain and learning to read", while the cueing
| summary is free of similar caveats and emphasizes that it can
| adapt to individual students, as if other methods couldn't.
|
| Ultimately it makes no actionable recommendations for what
| should actually be taught, except that no particular method
| should be mandated or banned, and that education should be
| "student-centered" (curious about the alternative...).
| camgunz wrote:
| I mean, I guess a good of framing this is yeah, it is "the
| education institution's side of this argument". I see it as
| informed by decades of shifting research on how to teach
| reading and attentive to the tension between "we need
| regulations to guard against bad teachers" and "we need to
| give teachers the freedom to apply their expertise". Most of
| the rest of your argument is just not realizing that those
| are the actual names of things (e.g. there's actually a thing
| called "the simple view of literacy").
|
| And to zoom out a little, a big part of educational quality
| is "do good people want to teach". A heavily prescribed
| curriculum is one more barrier to retaining good, motivated
| teachers. I'm not saying phonics shouldn't be taught, and I'm
| not saying teachers should have the freedom to not teach it.
| I am saying that all the teachers I know have kids where
| phonics didn't work (either the kid wasn't getting it, or the
| kid already knew it and drilling it into them killed their
| passion for reading, but hey standardized testing), and
| that's the kind of thing that makes good people quit: you
| know something is counterproductive, but your boss/the man
| makes you do it anyway, and in this case you fail a kid.
|
| The problem is complex, which is why my 2nd bullet point was
| "Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts".
| Another way of saying this is "school isn't a restaurant
| where you pull up and order an education from an unskilled
| worker". I get that it's high stakes and people have super
| bad experiences with educators (I have, for sure), but we
| need to appreciate the nuance here.
| pfedak wrote:
| Sorry, I should have been clearer, totally agree about the
| podcast being a poorer source on the reality and history,
| and just not trustworthy on the big picture. The article
| you shared is a fantastic resource, but I would think
| better of it if it had laid out the sort of strong,
| pragmatic argument you made here about teachers' autonomy.
| The article really doesn't want to question the status quo,
| which would be fine for a historical overview, but feels
| incongruous with the constant needling of anyone who
| happens to be pushing phonics (whether because of concerns
| about dyslexia or neuroscience).
|
| I also didn't mean to suggest those terms were invented by
| that article, just that they reflect the perspective of the
| people who use them. I'm assuming initial proponents of the
| "simple view of literacy" didn't describe it that way, just
| as we might call "whole language" something different if it
| ends up being discredited (cf. the focus on cueing in TFA).
| camgunz wrote:
| Yeah I think we're kidding ourselves if we think there's
| not some level of aesthetics involved here. I would
| imagine most teachers (not all but most) would like it if
| teaching were a holistic, organic journey of learning and
| discovery--I'm not disparaging here, that sounds nice to
| me too--to the point they'll really try to make those
| approaches work over more proven/grounded ones that are
| more assembly line and impersonal. And I buy that a fair
| amount of animosity against NCLB played a role too.
|
| > I would think better of it if it had laid out the sort
| of strong, pragmatic argument you made here about
| teachers' autonomy
|
| I wouldn't mind something more concrete either. There's
| educational research out there, but not a ton, and what
| I've read is pretty non-committal and not very
| prescriptive. I don't know if that's in deference to
| "trust teachers" or what have you. I do know that from
| time to time, teachers who are trying very hard to teach
| their kids using old, busted techniques they learned in
| school and are--rightfully so--super bitter when they
| discover "new" techniques that are decades old and proven
| more effective, so it's not like there's not an audience
| for this stuff.
|
| Mostly I think this argument is just two sides that don't
| trust each other at all, and they're lobbing whatever
| they can over the wall to try and win the argument (you
| don't care about dyslexia, you're dooming children to
| illiteracy to stick it to Bush, blah blah blah). I think
| that's a big problem. Education in the US is super messed
| up despite costing a ton, everyone knows it, and it's
| probably impossible to fix because of the political and
| bureaucratic structures involved. But it definitely
| doesn't help when our educators are rejecting government
| educational research because of (earned)
| political/cultural mistrust.
| aguynamedben wrote:
| If you have a 3-4 year old: Bob Books
| stuaxo wrote:
| I guess you guys in the US could try curriculums from other
| English speaking countries ?
| jononomo wrote:
| This ridiculously stupid approach to teaching kids to read was
| imported to the US from New Zealand.
| josho wrote:
| American exceptionalism leaves some Americans with the mis-
| guided belief that there is nothing to learn from other
| countries. I couldn't help but laugh seeing your comment was
| downvoted at the time I read this.
|
| What Americans should consider is removing charter/private
| schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as
| middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy
| families have time and resources to influence school boards to
| improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not
| just an already elite cohort.
|
| Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not
| depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop
| funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets
| up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less
| resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and
| further disadvantage them.
|
| Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a
| result none of these options will be implemented.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya the main problem with US education is lack of funding due
| to segregation. This should be the headline, not
| microanalysis of one specific symptom like reading
| comprehension.
|
| I'm growing more concerned with each passing year that we're
| so distracted playing whack-a-mole with each of the thousand
| crises facing us that we've become blind to systems-level
| thinking.
|
| When I was growing up in the 80s, we were taught that we
| lived in a meritocracy where anyone could be president
| someday, for example. Today I see that everyone has equal
| dignity, meaning that the sum of each individual's talents is
| the same. But some talents are rewarded more than others.
| Mainly the ability to generate profit, which has roots in
| othering, prejudice, maintaining the status quo, tax evasion,
| lobbying, corruption, but especially cheating.
|
| That's what wokeism is about. Once one sees that it's not
| about individual talent, but the rigging of the system to
| prevent any disruption of the power of the status quo, it's
| impossible to unsee. So a phrase like "tax the rich" (to put
| an end to generational wealth inequality and heal the
| division) means to pull the plug on that power structure. But
| people misinterpret it through their own trauma, get
| triggered, and project against it as a perceived threat,
| because even the smallest benefit like one's gender or the
| color of their skin is conflated with their earning
| potential, because the system truly rewards injustice.
| josho wrote:
| > we've become blind to systems-level thinking
|
| Well said. A consequence of no longer having a
| congress/senate willing to work across the aisle is that it
| takes so much political capital to pass a bill that there
| is no fuel left to apply incremental changes over time. A
| well functioning government will address gaps in policy
| changes in year 2 or 3 after new policy comes out. Instead
| no improvements are made until year 4 when a new government
| comes in and reverses direction completely.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya good point. This Thom Hartmann video popped up in my
| TikTok feed today and explains where the anti-public-
| education movement came from, as the primary way to
| destabilize self-governance (democracy) to continue the
| status quo (classism):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUHOVxjMIDA
|
| The title may be political, but the subject matter is
| not. This is the kind of stuff that we used to learn in
| civics and social studies, which have largely been
| eliminated from the curriculum. Which can now be thought
| of as stuff like critical race theory.
|
| Some examples of the Big Lie -> hidden truth:
|
| * job losses due to immigration policy -> actually lost
| due to education spending cuts, misaligned incentives
| around outsourcing and tax cuts incentivizing the wealthy
| to keep their money instead of reinvesting it in growing
| their businesses
|
| * crumbling infrastructure because nobody wants to work
| anymore -> actually due to loss of tax revenue because
| the wealthy are only taxed at 1/3 to 1/2 their pre-Reagan
| administration rate
|
| * national debt because we spend too much on woke social
| programs -> actually due to spending more on our military
| than next dozen countries combined, because any non-
| capitalist economic success is viewed as a threat to US
| white/male/wealthy hegemony.
|
| Of course the other party has its own issues. But I would
| argue that it hasn't had significant power since JFK,
| which left us in this flip-flop era where it primarily
| plays defense, since the loss of certain basic rights is
| so unthinkable that it takes vast mobilizations to stay
| ahead of the threats.
|
| In other words, sabotage is a much more lucrative policy
| than building bridges. Which goes along with the status
| quo's endorsement of cheating via control of the media,
| judiciary, etc.
|
| Now that mobilizations have failed in the face of stuff
| like the Roe v. Wade repeal, I predict that big political
| changes are coming in a Fourth Turning (I haven't read
| the book by that name yet, by William Strauss and Neil
| Howe).
|
| The parties may switch sides on certain key issues. The
| older generation will probably find itself suddenly
| stripped of power, as the younger generation decides that
| it no longer wants to pay retirements, after a lifetime
| of stagnant wages and ever-increasing rents/student
| loans/etc. Young people may find that they have more in
| common with friends overseas speaking different
| languages, now that universal translators have arrived.
| Nationalism may fade after a last-ditch effort by elites
| to crush the proletariat beneath authoritarian fascism.
| And so on and so forth. So many bastions of the status
| quo are set to fall like dominoes should any fall, that a
| huge global propaganda machine works tirelessly to
| prevent any and all progressive wins.
|
| Admittedly I have blind spots around failures of the
| left. I want to emphasize that I'm more interested in
| learning what those are, and raising the quality of life
| for the middle class, than supporting them outright based
| on ideology and my own biases.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Though, in this case, the problematic technique seems to have
| been imported from New Zealand.
| edtechdev wrote:
| Educational researcher here. There's no such thing as a "science
| of reading." It's part of the highly politicized "reading wars"
| (see also the "math wars" which has been going on for decades).
| It's no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the
| end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry
| pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm
| various teaching strategies. Phonics has its place, contexts
| where it is appropriate and beneficial, but it is not the sole
| strategy that works or should be used in every context.
|
| A recent meta-analysis
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal...
| and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence
| for different strategies for improving early reading skills:
| https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction
| (also championed by one political side) is not an effective
| strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139
|
| Here's just one post with a little more info on the political
| context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-
| science-o...
|
| A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to
| make their reading score rankings look higher:
| https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati...
|
| The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with
| reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading
| to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)
| vehemenz wrote:
| I notice that the study you cite is measuring effectiveness in
| reading interventions. Obviously, that's where the data is
| coming from because we don't carefully track readers who learn
| successfully at a much earlier age.
|
| However, I wonder if the ideal pedagogy would be different for
| younger students (maybe pre-K to 1st) who have less knowledge
| and smaller vocabularies? It's a bit tricky because a lot of
| the students who need intervention probably need remedial
| instruction in other areas too, but some of them may have been
| good students who struggled with reading.
| Dnguyen wrote:
| This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to
| read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night
| since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the
| last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him
| to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I
| read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to
| memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he
| was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven't read
| yet (higher level Dr. Suess's book) and he was able to read 20%.
| Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate
| some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!.
| Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a
| radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe
| even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to
| have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to
| classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the
| talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early,
| so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange. Sadly,
| with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more
| work, we didn't do the same routine. He was barely reading when
| he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in
| 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My
| kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of
| course we were there to help them along. I think reading is
| priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more
| independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read
| instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the
| world to them.
| passion__desire wrote:
| > Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with
| a radio station playing classical music since he was born,
| maybe even before that.
|
| Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German.
|
| https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56
|
| So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know -
| to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I
| sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's
| beautiful.
| legacynl wrote:
| Learning by listening to something during your sleep doesn't
| work. Brains go into a sort of maintenance mode during sleep,
| and it's not possible for your brain to sleep and interpret &
| comprehend sensory input at the same time.
|
| Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the
| length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven
| negative effect on memory.
|
| So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and
| just sleep at night.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It doesnt work but placebo is strong. If someone thinks it
| is working, while also learning in other ways, then its
| likely working.
| xapata wrote:
| The placebo effect is so strong that it even works if you
| know you're taking a placebo. Brains are amazing!
| Khaine wrote:
| Again from the podcast:
|
| "This is Sarah Gannon. She's a teacher you met in Episode 3. She
| trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins
|
| Gannon: I trusted that they're experts. I trusted that this is
| the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the
| leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that
| approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.
|
| Gannon: Teacher friends were like, "Did you read this Emily
| Hanford? And I was like, "I read it." And we were like, "What is
| she talking about?" She was outraged. Because a journalist was
| questioning the way she taught reading.
|
| And then, her daughter, Maeve.
|
| (Music) Maeve wasn't learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach
| her. But it wasn't working. So Sarah went looking for answers.
| And discovered the research.
|
| Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I
| couldn't ignore it. I couldn't keep doing what I was doing with
| Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the
| Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who
| didn't like George Bush.
|
| One day, when Carrie's daughter was in elementary school, she
| came to her mother and she said, "I have something to tell you."
|
| Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and
| anxious, and she just says, "I can't read." The school hadn't
| said there was a problem. Carrie hadn't noticed a problem either.
| But her daughter knew.
|
| Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The
| parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you
| know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret
| when they're struggling. They can look like they're reading for a
| while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it
| all kind of falls apart.
|
| (Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before
| she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers
| in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do
| was to try to find them books about things they were interested
| in.
|
| Chee: And I just kept saying, "Well keep trying." And then when
| they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try. And what
| I'm haunted by is, when it wasn't working, I blamed it on
| children. Carrie Chee isn't sure she would have learned anything
| about the science of reading if it weren't for her experience
| with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine
| with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all
| of this science of reading stuff.
|
| Gannon: I don't know if I could be convinced and that's what
| worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart,
| incredibly talented educators who, it's just like, hold fast to
| old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of
| them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it's OK to be
| wrong. Like, I was wrong."
|
| How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from
| their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their
| family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into
| the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible
| consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an
| engineer who didn't look into the structural properties of a
| material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has
| happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this
| practices?
| rickdicker wrote:
| On the final episode, something that kind of bothers me here is
| the generally antagonistic attitude towards the "get kids excited
| about reading" approach. The whole series focuses on the
| struggling students who were wronged by misguided one-size-fits-
| all teaching, and then the narrator goes on to assert that
| students don't need to be sold the joys of reading because, "look
| at these sound bites of kids learning to read - they sure seem
| excited to me!" Kind of annoying to see someone so dismissive of
| the notion after spending four hours talking about how not all
| kids pick things up through osmosis.
| kleiba wrote:
| I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the
| examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that
| people go to universities to study education, and yet after all
| these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a
| diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in
| their teaching methods.
|
| I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my
| understanding that there is not much of a scientific method
| applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair
| theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard
| problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have
| to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
|
| If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than
| they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to
| even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would
| advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc.
| But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way
| kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?
|
| I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37
| percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already
| be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where
| were the corrective measures along the way?
|
| Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV,
| playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books?
| Somehow I doubt it.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I 'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it
| is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific
| method applied to teaching theories._
|
| My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews
| and independent reports about teaching children to read.
|
| Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results
| will be controversial when parents find they don't understand
| their child's school work any more.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
| bradleyjg wrote:
| From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it
| doesn't sound like the field sees itself as a part of the
| scientific community at all.
|
| There's a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological
| indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying
| ideologies that doesn't seem like an ideal system for producing
| excellent educators.
|
| The little methodological trainings that do take place are
| often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than
| scientifically proven effectiveness research.
|
| It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the
| design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned
| out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we
| had made a mistake.
| Retric wrote:
| There are mountains of education research out there. Some
| collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to
| prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever
| hoops are mandatory.
|
| Research is largely ignored because what actually determines
| what's used is politics not some rigorous validation of what
| works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not
| because it's particularly useful, but because it's been
| privatized and the only way for those companies to make even
| more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to
| convince people more testing was needed, which worked.
|
| Luckily it's shocking easy to educate most people, almost
| like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff...
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I plan to do some volunteer work in teaching. What's the
| best way to find "the good stuff" in terms of educational
| research?
| Retric wrote:
| In general literature reviews are the best starting off
| point.
|
| However, I don't know what if anything would be relevant
| to you. If you're helping kids with dyslexia learn to
| read then that's very different than normal tutoring etc.
|
| Really though research tends to have really narrow focus
| such as classroom lighting.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board
| before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an
| "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they
| wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years
| of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to
| study at a college that emphasized field-based experience,
| because it was the only degree-related value that I left
| with.
|
| In the end, I spent more hours earning my degree than using
| it. I work in software now.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| What's the easiest way for me to learn about this ideology?
| Is there a test prep or similar?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'm guessing it's combo of:
|
| - equity and social justice
|
| - culturally-responsive teaching
|
| - student-centered learning
|
| - learning styles
| [deleted]
| humean_being wrote:
| This was something that I and a friend found surprising when
| he was studying to become a primary school teacher in the UK.
| A lot of the education for teachers in the UK is effectively
| 18th century philosophy taught uncritically - the likes of
| Rousseau, etc...
|
| We both have a university background in philosophy (we both
| did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to
| graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how
| uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers
| was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of
| teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination.
| They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in
| a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in
| your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical
| arguments as doctrine.
|
| So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for
| other doctrinal ways of teaching.
|
| You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff
| around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile
| teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective
| centuries old ideology about how children learn.
|
| There appears to be a big cultural gap between say
| linguistics departments and education departments.
| AlanYx wrote:
| In North America, Rousseau has given way to Paulo Freire
| and successors, but it's the same thing for the most part.
| dwater wrote:
| In my education degree program, in the intro class we spent
| time every week discussing recent research papers we had
| read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but
| when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a
| research focus and some that had a practical focus.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it
| is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific
| method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair
| theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard
| problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't
| have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
|
| There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons:
|
| - teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit.
| Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular
| activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an
| effective social worker for students in need, fundraising,
| classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions
| for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely
| moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their
| children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints
| because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of
| discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of
| this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there
| isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance
| or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers
| do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely.
|
| - there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older
| ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge -
| some of them actively _discourage_ new teachers from trying out
| what they learned in university because "we always did it this
| way".
|
| - closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist
| groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons.
| Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time",
| "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to
| corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private
| schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which
| 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object
| to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list
| is endless.
|
| - frankly said, _no one cares_ about education. Big Labor doesn
| 't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms,
| restaurants and other menial work who don't object to
| exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to
| send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged
| children where the parents take care for good private schools
| to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent
| people.
|
| - there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than
| the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own.
|
| - a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty
| and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in
| the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty
| has exploded...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
| kyrra wrote:
| > there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the
| older ones often lack the motivation to further their own
| knowledge
|
| I'd also say part of the cause of this are the teacher
| unions. When we don't do merit based promotions and raises,
| people don't care as much.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's hard to fairly measure and evaluate "merit" for
| teachers. You can be the best teacher of the world, prepare
| every single lesson for hours according to the most modern
| scientific standards - and yet have half your class fail in
| tests because they literally didn't have anything to eat
| since the warm school-provided lunch yesterday. Food
| scarcity is a problem affecting _at least_ 75% of US school
| districts [1], it 's gotten way worse since the COVID
| assistance ended [2], and it has been shown in studies to
| be closely linked to performance [3] (hardly a surprise for
| anyone who ever had to experience food scarcity).
|
| The teacher unions do have a point there, because
| introducing anything "merit" based only punishes those
| teachers and school districts for stuff they can't control,
| much less actually _solve_.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/04/us-
| schoo...
|
| [2] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23618443/school-lunch-
| kids-pan...
|
| [3] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/10/15/21121847/universal-
| free-...
| syrus wrote:
| Unions are on the rise, and we need them to seize more
| power in every sector of labor to fight against extreme
| wealth inequality. I fully support the teacher's unions.
| More often than not, they include resources for their
| students in their negotiations.
| Khaine wrote:
| Did you listen to the episode where the teacher said, the
| theory might be true (phonics) but I ain't teaching it because
| fuck bush?
|
| This is the problem.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on
| the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B,
| and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to
| reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the
| pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into
| lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were
| all worried about getting the virus and what the effects
| might be. But I knew even before it happened that this
| mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look
| around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people?
| Something isn't right!"
| Mezzie wrote:
| For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some
| level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a
| teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire
| to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco
| parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their
| administration and even the law.
|
| That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers
| notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because
| if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out
| ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will
| bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right,
| Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again
| and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an
| incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further
| erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress
| code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE
| SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is
| for 15 minutes.")
|
| tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept
| non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These
| conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption
| of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let
| anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be
| in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be
| ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE
| CHILDREN!)
| darkerside wrote:
| I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let
| your good points shine through
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization
| from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of
| examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and
| warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into
| more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that
| the media class on both major political sides in the US
| have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-
| jerk fear. And to demonstrate that from what I've observed
| a lot of educational decisions are made from very emotional
| places - that is one major roadblock to treating education
| efforts scientifically. I felt like just saying 'it's the
| parents, admins, and media' wouldn't necessarily get across
| that the obstacles are not well-thought out or nefarious
| but rather a result of everybody being in a heightened
| state of constant emotion.
|
| Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture
| warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that.
| Thanks!
| xapata wrote:
| You did well by saying, "it's important to note that the
| media class on both major political sides in the US have
| very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk
| fear." By giving examples of it, you're falling into the
| same trap that the media does. Exciting prose isn't
| always better prose.
| darkerside wrote:
| I think what I'm most reacting to is the parenthetical
| "quotations", which are straw men, of course. There may
| be an element of truth to them, but if you're not
| literally quoting somebody, adopting their perspective
| needs to be done thoughtfully and empathetically.
|
| I hear you that they are bring emotional, and that needs
| to be reflected, but just like there is truth in your
| post although it came of as a bit inflammatory to me,
| there is truth in those emotions as well. Distill that
| instead of dismissing it.
| tgv wrote:
| Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has
| hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences
| bungle somewhere below even _social_ psychology. There 's no
| reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process
| works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no
| idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and
| ministeries, and mandate methods and topics.
|
| We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them
| properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's
| something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to
| the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| There's lots of very good research on learning going back
| decades. For instance the work of Paul Pimsleur.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| One of the downsides of credentialism seems to me that in
| squishier fields you can end up creating false-credentials
| where none should exist.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think this comment should be removed, as it ranks below 7
| on the Rob-Grant scale.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| You made me google rob-grant scale only to come back here
| and notice your handle. Good job, Rob.
| nmca wrote:
| Just to steelman for a second but educational research is
| obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including
| opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful
| ethical standards and consideration).
|
| I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average
| evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given
| equal investment.
| alex_sf wrote:
| The research being hard means progress will be slower, not
| that we should implement unproven things.
| tgv wrote:
| But then there's no worth in that research (apart from
| trying to find a way to more reliable theories). Bad
| research should be ignored, not taken as "evidence based".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising,
| politics, media, and even in game design.
|
| If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's
| ineffective.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I think there are successful people in those fields who
| have honed a good intuition for psychology. That doesn't
| mean the science behind it is good though.
| tgv wrote:
| > Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising,
| politics,
|
| Does it really? I think there isn't even good data on the
| effectiveness of marketing and advertising, let alone on
| the correctness of psychological theories used. Marketing
| and advertising run on common sense and FOMO.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness
| of marketing and advertising
|
| Thinking that is a kind of proof that marketing and
| advertising work - to get people to believe they aren't
| being profoundly influenced by marketing and advertising.
| tgv wrote:
| I happened to work in academic cog/neuro-sci research,
| and have ended up programming for a company that's doing
| some form of market research, but I haven't seen that
| data. Sure, advertising works, but how, and to what
| extent? There's a bunch of competing frameworks, each
| with their own research school, but it's more marketing
| than science. 20 to 30 dissimilar points on a 2D grid
| with a linear regression line, that's their evidence.
|
| Marketeers are an easy target, though. They can't afford
| to ignore it, so they buy into some of those theories.
| And drop them just as easily. But they have to pretend it
| works.
|
| If you've got good data on marketing effectiveness, I'd
| like to see it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The original assertion was that psychology works just
| fine in marketing and advertising, and you asked "does it
| really?" Here you say, "Sure, advertising works".
|
| While quantitative data on how it works and how effective
| it is might be lacking, the point is that it _does_ work.
| The remaining questions are of the "more study is needed
| to draw any conclusions" kinds of objections that the
| tobacco industry used to obfuscate the hazards of smoking
| and that the petrochemical industry uses today to prevent
| action on global warming. It's is this kind of
| uncertainty and doubt that I'm asserting is why so many
| people are still unclear about how much influence
| marketing and advertising have over their choices.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| > I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it
| is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific
| method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair
| theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard
| problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't
| have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?
|
| My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to
| evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's
| continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a
| different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that
| education was way too politicised, any new minister of
| education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad
| with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and
| would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary
| school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.
|
| This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language
| phenomenon known as "methode globale" didn't last very long in
| France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| > I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some
| ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would
| already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-
| night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?
|
| You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the
| rooftops about this for generations.
|
| For example from another story posted here today:
| Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San
| Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth
| grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same
| classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and
| Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.
|
| Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test
| at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What
| qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought
| process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular
| fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?
|
| Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get
| politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which
| causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.
|
| There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for
| example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism)
| -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up
| like this _once_.
| pitaj wrote:
| Just to comment on the specific issue at hand:
|
| The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an
| phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how
| curricula are built on the theory is another question.
|
| And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or
| even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out
| with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know
| how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just
| memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being
| able to read the words in isolation.
|
| That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious:
| it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the
| kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad
| habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes
| it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
| Vanderson wrote:
| Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a
| science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas
| like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the
| most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make
| before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on
| reading mistakes, etc...
| bluGill wrote:
| I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and
| they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of
| education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really
| science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is
| as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to
| make sawdust or music, not do more research.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does
| anything need to be changed? Invest in more teachers not new
| fancy methods.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does
| anything need to be changed?
|
| We've been gathering and making food for much longer than 200
| years, and we keep changing that, too.
| tempaway45752 wrote:
| [dead]
| mcv wrote:
| I can't help but think of my youngest son. He's been having
| language development problems his whole life; barely spoke at 3.
| He got help, and he quickly become a very adept speaker, using
| complex sentence structures, though he does have a bit of a
| speech impediment. I already expected him to have trouble
| learning to read, and he did. It was hard, he hated it, and we
| received a lot of help with it.
|
| One thing that struck me from this story is kids only wanting to
| read books they already know. My son was like that. He loves Dr
| Seuss books and has read the easier ones a dozen times, so he
| always proposes to read that instead of the new book we're trying
| to read.
|
| Still, he reads a lot better now than some of the kids in the
| story. He's starting to pick up on random texts he runs into,
| reading subtitles (he's too slow though), so there's definitely
| progress. He's 8, which I think corresponds to grade 3 in the US
| system? He's about a year behind in reading, so if American kids
| a year older than that read worse than he does, that's not good.
|
| Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less
| effective strategy in English than it would be in some other
| languages...
| soneca wrote:
| Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology
| about?
| Khaine wrote:
| Basically, some kiwi (Marie Clay) looked into how good kids
| learn to read, but somehow identified all the things bad
| learners do. Turned this into an approach to help kids, had
| some apparent success in New Zealand. Basically it got kids to
| guess what words were based on the context of the statement,
| the initial letter, pictures accompanying the statement etc,
| rather than sounding out the word. It got imported to the
| states as the word of god, while at the same time science
| identified how kids actually learn. George Bush introduced No
| Child Left Behind which required science based teaching of
| literacy. Those who were profiting off Marie Clay's work pushed
| back because they wouldn't be funded, resulting in the current
| mess we have today.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Ah, thanks for that! It doesn't come across in the written
| section summaries.
| jononomo wrote:
| It became fashionable in early childhood education circles to
| teach children to read by looking at the accompanying pictures
| in the book instead of by deciphering the letters and sounding
| out the word.
|
| This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have
| dyslexia because they weren't learning to read.
|
| You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I
| listened to the entire series three times because I couldn't
| get over it. It blew my mind that some people think that
| reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out
| words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids
| how to read.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not
| about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that
| these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.
|
| Indeed. We can debate the merits of letters vs ideograms as
| much as we like, but English is not Chinese. Reading an
| alphabet is a phonetic exercise, even with all the exceptions
| in spoken English.
|
| And yes, the 'dyslexia epidemic' is harrowing. Sure video-
| everywhere is part to blame, but how many readers and writers
| are we down due to children being given a label that says
| 'you will never spell' early in life. Even if well-
| intentioned the label is detrimental to your relationship
| with words.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really
| struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading
| curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and
| how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided
| Reading despite that.
|
| For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where
| the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be
| reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the
| word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that
| there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that
| was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely
| the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of
| stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.
|
| Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three
| cuing). Like, sure context _can_ be a component of reading, but
| it 's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple
| string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly
| eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so _clearly_
| context isn 't _that_ important for strong readers, and teaching
| kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to
| actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn 't need a scientific
| study to figure that out.
| fikama wrote:
| Your example sentence was incredibly hard to read for me. To be
| fair English isn't my primary language. But still, I think it
| could be that different people read in different ways, so some
| depend more on context than others, etc.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with
| a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is
| without seeing it.
|
| That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the
| word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and
| confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My
| daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this.
| It happens.
|
| It seems completely barmy, to me.
|
| Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.
| riwsky wrote:
| It worked well enough for BERT:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)
| amluto wrote:
| BERT wasn't learning how to read. It was learning how to
| predict (or generate or understand or whatever) text.
| tivert wrote:
| > It worked well enough for BERT:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)
|
| Great, the next education fad will be trying to teach kids
| like some software engineer trained his algorithm.
|
| "Hey kids, start your integration over this new 1TB data set.
| Remember to adjust your weights after each iteration!"
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| It's true, masked-language-modelling has been hugely
| successful in natural language processing. So a priori I
| wouldn't have guessed it would work so poorly for humans and
| that phonics-based teaching is so much better. But the
| evidence is clear.
|
| Just because MLM _can_ work doesn 't mean it _does_ work in
| all contexts. We get to change the software (and hardware
| although that has been less relevant IMHO) behind ML models
| as much as we want, for humans we need to adapt the training
| methods.
| naasking wrote:
| I think they've extended the meaning of "reading" to include a
| certain level of "understanding what you just read". Your
| nonsense sentence can't pass the latter test because there is
| no understanding to be gleaned, but it's not at all obvious
| that that should how we view reading exactly for that reason.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Correct, but I don't know if they've extended anything. When
| you say someone reads at the 12th grade level, it has never
| meant that they can superficially sound out every word, it
| means they can understand what the text is trying to say.
| jononomo wrote:
| Just wait until you get to the part in the podcast where the
| teacher intentionally covers up a word with a post-it note and
| then asks the kids to read it. Apparently, they are supposed to
| figure out the word from the context.
| patwolf wrote:
| My kids go to a school that teaches phonics. Some of my teacher
| friends have told me that phonics is antiquated, so it does make
| me happy to see that perhaps it is the best method of learning to
| read. It has worked well for kids so far.
|
| I will say though that the school's method of teaching phonics is
| much more rigorous than anything I ever learned as a kid. They
| have a long list of graphemes (letters and letter combinations),
| and they need to be able to recite all the phonemes (sounds) that
| each grapheme can make. I have a hard time answering their
| phonics questions, like if they ask me what sounds "ou" makes. It
| can make at least four sounds, e.g. sour, group, court, country.
| I can't confidentially help them without a cheatsheet.
| noirscape wrote:
| What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with
| teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big
| barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they
| do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people
| the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how
| to read a foreign language using their skills to put words
| together, and instead they fall back to the same "guessing game".
| Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets,
| this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome.
|
| When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from
| teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use
| words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if
| you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet
| (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to
| struggle that much with the German ss once you tell them it's
| just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when
| you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced
| differ _significantly_ from your primary languages that barrier
| can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for
| grammatical rules, especially if they 're different compared to
| yours.
|
| I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall
| finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because
| the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn
| how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on,
| and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer
| characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.
| nradov wrote:
| I think your experience is atypical. Most students who learn a
| new language with a fairly "reasonable" alphabet like Korean or
| Russian find that to be the easiest part and remember most of
| the letters within a few days. I don't speak Greek but I've
| been there a few times and learned the alphabet just so that I
| could sort of read signs (forgot it now).
|
| As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's
| actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it
| consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned
| much. The gamification features are effective at driving user
| engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good
| educational tool.
| noirscape wrote:
| For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me
| using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's
| ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's
| considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular
| Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part
| of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot
| when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the
| alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one
| extra character added over the centuries?).
|
| The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system -
| teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the
| characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name
| for every character) and detail how they all looked, but
| there was never any conversation on how the language was
| actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the
| words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson
| for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous
| field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used
| for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn
| into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to
| describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically
| emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar
| being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It
| helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the
| pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken
| anymore.
|
| The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because
| my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I
| could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed
| earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided
| to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that
| the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight
| mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter
| similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but
| it did work. I put it together with a small word list that
| used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce
| those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in
| less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching.
|
| As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese),
| it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning
| languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage
| with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out
| auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right
| translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is
| gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here.
| (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy
| to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics
| and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult
| to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based
| on similarity, which is very different from person to
| person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a
| personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.
| Muromec wrote:
| For all that is wrong with Duolingo (don't use duolingo as the
| only tool to learn a language), it does teach writing systems
| and how to pronounce individual words before throwing you into
| grammar.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Honestly having done a good bit of Duolingo and Babbel and then
| visiting the country I was trying to study for (Netherlands) I
| think they're mostly fun games that make you feel like you're
| learning something.
|
| https://www.mezzoguild.com/babbel-vs-duolingo/ is a decent
| review that seems similar to my own experience.
|
| So far drilling on Anki has been a bit better. Still not sure
| what else will work aside from moving there.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| > What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong
| with teaching people secondary languages.
|
| The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary
| languages.
|
| The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a
| language that they already speak. The goal of second language
| instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and
| speak a language that they don't know in any way.
|
| Very different education goals.
| WalterBright wrote:
| "Why Johnny Can't Read" from 1954 is as fresh as ever.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913...
| bell-cot wrote:
| Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1
| through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute
| teacher when grandma was sick, she was the _only_ teacher those
| kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school
| for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the
| valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma 's students. The only
| "central administration" that she had to care about was the
| little school district's Superintendent. He had no time, staff,
| nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible
| upsides if he got any "new ideas" about education.
|
| Grandma's own education was high school, plus _maybe_ a two-year
| teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School (
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules
| for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make
| sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th
| graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3)
| Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going
| on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high
| points for grades 2 to 7.
|
| But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher
| Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge,
| self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an
| incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities.
| Old stuff _that worked_ couldn 't possibly get you ahead in that
| empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in
| the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you
| could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was
| _incredibly_ boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD
| and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing
| academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education
| Establishment.
| nateburke wrote:
| No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on
| phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a
| parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing.
| They are reading.
|
| OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the
| most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone
| admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child
| observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted
| by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game.
|
| Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should
| not be ignored in the debate on literacy.
| mbrudd wrote:
| 100%! We read to our kids a TON from the day they were born --
| no tricks or gimmicks, we just read to them. A lot. And they've
| always seen us reading actual books. YMMV, but our kids learned
| to read early and well and they both still enjoy reading. A
| lot.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'm not sure how you are reading to your kid but mine usually
| sits on my lap. He knows what is on the screen whether it's
| words or something else.
|
| There's a "nonzero chance" your dead tree book is a game too
| ala Sudoku.
| roydivision wrote:
| Great point. Children also have a powerful desire to know their
| parents are paying attention to them. Phones disrupt this as
| well.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. Kids think my phone === games/videos. They know it can do
| other stuff but why would anyone use all those boring apps when
| games or videos are available?
| noodlenotes wrote:
| I don't think the kid even has to be confused about what the
| parent is doing.
|
| If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading),
| they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the
| parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters
| less to young kids, especially when they can more easily
| imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.
| euroderf wrote:
| My 3yo gets about 10m a day of Khan Academy on my phone. That
| and video calls to mom are ALL he gets on my phone. Hopefully
| this is setting expectations for this particular
| technology/medium.
| cpif wrote:
| This reminds me of an article in the _Atlantic_ I liked [1],
| which argued that the real problem for American education is that
| it places too much emphasis on the mechanics of reading
| comprehension, leaving content-oriented coursework such as
| history, science, and sociology on the back burner. Three-cueing
| or any other inference-based approach to reading isn 't going to
| work when kids don't have enough knowledge about the world to
| make good inferences.
|
| It's good to hear that phonics are making something of a
| comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too.
| I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university
| -- when a kid stumbles over a word like "infrastructure," one
| senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties
| of printed text.
|
| [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-
| rad...
| gumby wrote:
| Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of
| podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is
| extremely low.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot,
| because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence
| summaries.
|
| I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To
| consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing,
| because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the
| author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write
| it; so they're trading their time for my time. That's why I say
| it's rude.
|
| To be honest, the reason I'm reading the comments is in the
| hope of finding a proper summary.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| It's not an exaggeration to say that most episodes of the
| podcast could be summarized with a single sentence.
|
| The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to
| teach many kids to read."
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Thank you! None of the episode summaries says that.
| gumby wrote:
| Exactly me. Podcasts in particular are terrible because they
| are rarely edited at all.
|
| If you listen to someone like Terry Gross there's an enormous
| amount of editing involved to make it sound like a natural
| conversation. Podcast world is the opposite.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Let that be a warning to anyone who gets excited about this
| podcast! Wow it stinks. It's like the creators were trying to
| replicate a Dragonball series of cliffhangers without any
| substance.
|
| In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the
| tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can
| be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through
| some emotional manipulation.
| gumby wrote:
| A good application for a Transformer system like GPT to
| listen to the podcasts and generate the single sentence
| inside.
| neogodless wrote:
| I think a lot of what they're going for is in this article:
|
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
| wyldfire wrote:
| This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago.
| It's pretty interesting stuff.
| obscurette wrote:
| Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly
| disagree that "there is not enough evidence based science in
| teaching" etc. If there is something really to highlight what's
| wrong with education systems all over the world, it's too much
| "evidence based science". Every educational psychologist and his
| dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should
| be taught and have a ton of evidence why. And of course all
| generations of educators so far have been idiots. It's THE reason
| nobody wants to teach any more.
|
| "Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are
| also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name
| of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to
| students and the profession." (https://archive.ph/MEqrK)
|
| The truth every teacher faces is that there is no single silver
| bullet. There is no any "method" in education that can replace
| simple things - time, effort, motivation, affiliation etc.
| nostromo wrote:
| I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons.
|
| _Actual_ evidence-based science would be fantastic. But a lot
| of what I 've seen being touted as "science" in this field is
| flimsy or not science at all.
|
| The primary cause is the downfall of research done by
| universities. Our institutions are churning out mountains of
| bullshit "science" in certain fields, including in education.
| This junk science is now being pushed down into the classroom
| and it's devastating for educators and students.
|
| Once I was consulting a very large family foundation in this
| space and asked why there are no randomized trials in
| education. I was told that researchers in the space think it's
| unethical to conduct studies with control groups on students.
| (Which, to be clear, is moronic.) The result is there's very
| little in the way of solid evidence about what even works.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| You are saying "the evidence is bullshit", right?
| [deleted]
| obscurette wrote:
| No. I mean that it's not hard to gather evidence to back even
| very stupid teaching methods if you simply put enough effort
| and time to it.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Ok, so:
|
| "cherry picked evidence means the conclusions are bullshit"
| ?
| samstave wrote:
| Teaching a kid to read is about _spending time with your kids_
| seriously.
|
| It's parent child bonding
|
| Read to your kids as much as possible
| rkapsoro wrote:
| Me, I stick with Stephen Krashen's hypothesis, borne out by my
| own experience: compelling, comprehensible input is the key. This
| applies to both your first language acquired when you are young
| and any other languages later.
|
| Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide
| selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too.
|
| I have many criticisms of the education I received as a
| youngster, but they did get this right.
| throwaway8503 wrote:
| Hot take, but: the same issue is present in math, with the
| aggressive deprioritization of rote learning of arithmetic.
| People need a foundation upon which to build higher concepts;
| knowing your times tables is necessary to grasp division
| algorithms.
|
| The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather
| than the boring learning is a problem.
| [deleted]
| xkjyeah wrote:
| So, Americans decided to make their language as difficult to read
| as Chinese?!? Well done...
| humean_being wrote:
| This is horrifying. If I understood this correctly, they are
| being taught effectively *next token prediction* instead of
| reading.
|
| The only children that will learn to read will probably be in
| spite of this system.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| My "favorite" part was '"read" this word I have covered with a
| sticky note'.
|
| You need X-ray vision like Superman to actually read that.
|
| Scratch that, it was recorded video, so even Superman couldn't
| do that, you'd need a time machine in addition to the X-ray
| vision.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Well, I was taught using phonics, and then I wrote a paper that
| basically applied the idea to LLMs for constrained text
| generation. I'd say mission accomplished.
| humean_being wrote:
| This is a chance, stay with me here, that humans and LLMs
| learn differently.
| theodorewiles wrote:
| Can anyone suggest better materials / guides for early literacy
| development?
| fwlr wrote:
| The fact that the education system managed to forget how to teach
| kids _how to read_ is unbelievably infuriating. I have been
| guilty in the past of rolling my eyes at "teachers are heroes,
| teachers should be paid like rockstars". I don't feel guilty
| anymore!
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Don't know how anyone who went through school would ever feel
| guilty about rolling their eyes at that.
| fwlr wrote:
| I went to a selective-entry single-gender public school, I
| have always just assumed my school experiences aren't
| reflective of schools in general and refused to draw
| conclusions from my experiences.
| gshubert17 wrote:
| A similar tragedy was losing an effective treatment for scurvy,
| later rediscovered and connected with Vitamin C.
|
| https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
| CalRobert wrote:
| If teachers were paid like rockstars we'd be able to get better
| teachers.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| In my neck of the woods, if we paid teachers as well, by mid
| career, as gas station managers, we'd get better teachers.
| timthorn wrote:
| The UK faced the same challenge but has mostly ensured that now
| synthetic phonics is the standard method of instruction. The
| success of this programme has really been down to a single key
| politician in the Department for Education, Nick Gibb. He's never
| had a cabinet role so didn't get deeply caught up in reshuffles,
| and for most of the past 13 years he's been the Schools Minister.
| The TES ran a profile of him and his phonics drive recently, a
| good followup to the Sold a Story series:
| http://archive.today/ee9LA
| hondo77 wrote:
| People are different. Phonics helped my sister. I had no use for
| them. We both know how to read.
| techaqua wrote:
| as a non-native english speaker. i don't understand and can't
| relate at all.
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