41–50 of 90 posts
> the goofy glasses teachers wore for group reading time to make the written word less intimidating; in the assurances to parents that the best way to help children read was to read out loud to them to instill a love of language and literature; in the artfully arranged reading nooks stocked with cushions, mats, and an appealing array of books; in the hours that teachers instructed young children to sit in those nooks…
I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.
Kids who exhibit interest in acquiring written language skills should be encouraged, but so should kids who are interested in dancing, or playing a musical instrument, or a hundred other things. Unless your kid's main hobby is torturing flies or something they should be encouraged to do things they enjoy, especially before school makes them do some things that, inevitably, they don't enjoy, whether that's writing things down, climbing, or learning about stuff that happened a long time ago.
This was a pretty poor article. They never really explained what balanced literacy is, what its key positions are, or how it measured success. Nor do they really explain how their ideas would be better, or adress failings of balanced literacy.
It sounds to me like either someone in the curriculum development process or the teachers themselves were anti-phonics and stripped them out of the "balanced" process, so this parent's experience may not be reflective of the typical results of a truly balanced method.
Is it really true that 1 in 4 schools stopped teaching kids to associate sounds with letters so they could sound out words? That sounds so insane it beggars belief. If that's true then no wonder people don't trust schools; trust isn't warranted. But the idea is so insane on the face of it that I have trouble believing it.
Secondly, if 1 in 4 schools did this and half of the students in these schools fail at reading because of it, then "and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams." seems a bit dubious. If school's adopted this program independent of school size and half of the students at those schools struggled to read for this reason alone, then I'd expect roughly 1/8th of all students nationally to be negatively effected, not one half.
Third, it would have been nice for this article to go more into the history of the idea. It pretty much lays all the blame on this Lucy Calkins and Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, but also blames this line of thinking for a 1973 SCOTUS decision. That was several years before the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was founded, but the article doesn't go into this history.
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Look at devs. It's easy to create a Lambda on AWS, or to drop some files in S3. It's faster, cheaper, etc than setting up the infrastructure yourself (typically). Now these devs have no idea of how to set up servers, NAS, etc. Who cares about optimization because the details are handled for you. Now we'll wait and see how it plays out. Same thing for early laptop use as primary learning medium. Maybe handwriting and lack of spellchecker won't be a big deal in the real world.
Also, I'm touring local schools currently. The ones so far has said they do a hybrid of physical and laptop learning. So far every class I've walked past has the kids on the laptop except for an art class.
Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I n…
my three year old (just this week, 4) had somehow learned to read on his own (he is on the spectrum). He seem to have picked up both sight reading and phonics as best as I can tell. He will try to sound out the word sometimes, but largely just looks at the word. If it’s big word a , like “awesomeness”, he will try to sound it out, at least a bit. The Dr Seuss books are a piece of cake and he could read them at 3 1/2.
English as a language doesn't help, being a disaster for learning to read. My native Swedish is annoying and hard enough for my kids and it's a paragon of logic and consistency compared to English.
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I agree on the digital stuff. I really don't like that kids are primarily using Chrome books and stuff as their primary mode of learning. Maybe that would be fine in high school, but I feel that elementary and middle schools should be taught with physical media. I'm touring schools in my area now (k-8) to figure out where we want to send our kids. One school says the kids get hybrid instruction, but every single clas…
I hate it. The over reliance on “Canvas” Which on the surface seems like such of a convenience. But every time I watch my kid turn in his math homework by holding his 2-sided worksheet up to the webcam I just cringe. He’ll never get any reasonable feedback on his work because it’s impossible to read. Some assignments have “spot check” questions where you input the answer on Canvas. Instructions like “make sure you sp…