How I Taught My Kid to Read

I think the terminology is confusing people. There may be a ŋ + g, blended together. I guess you could call that "gg" in ASCII, but it's "gg" in the sense of "more than just a lone ŋ or g, or a long sound / mora not in the sense of "gig" or "ŋig"

I think Wikipedia explains it well:

> John Taylor Gatto ... was an American author and school teacher who taught in the classroom for nearly 30 years. He devoted much of his energy to his teaching career, then, following his resignation, authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, which is sometimes considered to be his magnum opus.

I.e. he was a former public school teacher who criticized public education and advocated for alternatives.

> Incentivizing human beings means treating them like the rats and birds

Not at all. Incentivising means to motivate. How many people work because they want money rather than because they like to work?

> Apart from being condescending, humiliating, degrading and destructive.

You're being a tad over dramatic :)

> Rewarding a child for reading makes them read for the external reward (for someone else) and makes them hate reading even more because of the humiliation and having to go against their own internal compass in order to get something they want.

The first part might be true in some cases. But the latter part certainly isn't. We might try to take the moral high ground but parents effectively bribe their children on an almost daily basis: "if you eat all your dinner you can have ice cream / chocolate for pudding"; "if you go in the bath now I'll pour extra bubble mixture in"; "if you're a good buy while we are shopping then I'll buy you a magazine / chocolate"; etc. Even just the process of potty training involves giving over-enthusiastic praise every time they use the potty / toilet instead of wetting themselves - effectively rewarding them with gratitude.

Children are wilful creatures and, as much as we promote independence, we still have lives we need to manage with chores and other stuff that isn't always fun. Even as adults we manage that by saying things like "if I tidy the kitchen now I'll chill with a glass of whisky and an episode of my favourite show" or "I'll go for a run 3 times a week then reward myself with an ice cream at the weekend"... etc. I used HN as a reward for some really dull work (eg I'll write 10 sprint tickets then read something interesting on HN).

Suggesting that the whole concept of a reward system is broken is a massive over-exaggeration. True, rewards can be a broken way of encouragement when used inappropriately but lets not throw the baby out with the bath water (proverbially speaking).

> You may say this prepares them for the “real world” of exploitation but maybe 1, truly successful people find ways to include their internal compass in their daily flow career-wise and 2., a society where almost everyone tolls at the whims and pleasure of a very few ought to be questioned (reference the insane levels of inequality worldwide, having a king emperor is not sustainable).

I think you're trailing off into a hugely philosophical tangent and one I don't really agree with. Capitalism is largely driven by financial reward - many of the greatest disrupters did so for financial gain (the whole "changing the world" meme is really a more dignified way of saying "we want this product to make us rich"). So you can work for personal rewards without being exploited.

You can, in contrast, say a "p" in isolation, as it is the unvoiced consonant. But the English "p" is actually two sounds-- there's the lips-puffing-air sound, and the lips-stopping-air sound. The same letter is used for both, because context allows them to be coded correctly (subject to accents). Usually, the puff is at the start of a syllable, and either one can be at the end. This is one case where the teacher might not be able to distinguish the two sounds, but the student might be able to recognize them as different, because they don't already have the association that they are both represented by the same letter in English.

"B" is the voiced equivalent, but as voicing comes from the larynx and not the lips, you need an additional symbol to characterize that part of the sound. In that sense, "b" is the combining symbol for "p" and an adjacent voiced sound.

This is why Greek codes English "b" sounds as "μπ". Their "β" is more like partway between "v" and "b" than an English "b". Doing this language hack leaves a mark, so if your name starts with a hard "b", you might be able to detect a native Greek speaker still voicing an "m" before your name, or mispronouncing a "b" in your name as an almost v-like beta. I'd be "Log from Mblammo", for instance, and you might be "Mburfog". If someone teaches the phonics incorrectly, it might leave a similar residue in the student's speech.

Since "b" is not an atomic mouth sound, I wouldn't teach it before "p". I'd introduce it with other voice-added sounds, and use whispering and yelling (for some reason, my kids thought it was fun to yell) or normally-voiced speech to help tell the difference. Like when you whisper "cup" and "cub", they sound the same, but when you yell them, they are different. The "p" stops the voicing at the letter boundary; the "b" lets it bleed through from either side. That's why the "b" can't be by itself--a lone "b" is just a whispered "b", which is actually a "p".

Practice voicing boundaries with "pop", "bop", "pub", "bub", "tot", "dot", "tad", "dad", etc. It might also help reinforce that the written symbols are encoded speech sounds, and that means they have to describe what the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, and larynx are doing.

And you might as well tell the student that accents happen when some of the encoding rules get changed. Play a video of someone with a tough-to-understand accent speaking, have the student read a transcript, and then watch it again. One that immediately leaps to mind as kid-friendly is Merida in "Wreck-It-Ralph 2", who essentially says, "May your hearth stay warm, and your pantry full. Come back soon.", but no one else can understand the dialect. Somewhat less kid-friendly is the scene in "Hot Fuzz" that translates a very Northern accent in multiple progressively less-Northern stages, until it can be understood by someone from London.