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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#31

Post by andrepd »

lr4444lr wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#32

Post by bluGill »

Vanderson wrote: post #8
kleiba wrote: post #4

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 understan…

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...

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.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#33

Post by Retric »

bradleyjg wrote: post #10
kleiba wrote: post #4

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 understan…

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…

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…

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#34

Post by tomrod »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #27
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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?

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#35

Post by Mezzie »

kleiba wrote: post #4

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 understan…

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!)

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#36

Post by oxfordmale »

mattmcknight wrote: post #30
oxfordmale wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 wi…

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.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#37

Post by gavinmckenzie »

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.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#38

Post by AbrahamParangi »

tgv wrote: post #18
kleiba wrote: post #4

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 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 t…

One of the downsides of credentialism seems to me that in squishier fields you can end up creating false-credentials where none should exist.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#39

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

camelite wrote: post #25
mandmandam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lone…

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.

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.

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