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 ;-)
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
11–20 of 524 posts
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#12As 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…
That book worked well for my 3 kids, who are all voracious readers now. Generally did it at age 5 or 6.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#13I 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 understan…
> 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_...
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#14As 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…
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...
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#15Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong?
(I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#16As 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…
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.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#17As 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…
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.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#18I 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 understan…
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.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#19Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
There was a NYT article about this podcast posted yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589013
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#20As 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…
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.