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The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#71
post #15

> 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…

lol you really want to drive this point home? Hate teachers much?

>lol you really want to drive this point home?

Sure but why laugh out loud about it? Not sure what's so funny about it.

> Hate teachers much?

No not really. Do you? They have a hard job, are underpaid, and they are usually unappreciated by the society in large. There are also overbearing parents to deal with, some threatening law suites and such.

So given all that what reading and educational model they'll pick? One that necessitates more correcting and confronting students, or the ones where they can just say "reading will be absorbed magically" by simply being around books.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#72
post #28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> While I respect that you might have experience with a particularly bad school,

Thanks for respect! Not sure the school is particular bad, but the general model picked for teaching reading is the one that minimizes possible confrontation, While I respect that you might have experience with a particularly bad school, one-on-one instruction, and is general the seems to require the least effort from the teacher.

> fuck off with

Ok. So respect first, but then I have to quickly go away? "screw yourself" is another interpretation, I guess. Thanks for the advice, then!

> That’s a disgusting slander for a very difficult job.

Oh for sure. It's usually underpaid and unappreciated by society. So given that, which model do you think they'll pick for teaching students? The one which requires more effort or least effort. They picked the one which requires least effort and least confrontation, both with the students and the parents (parents are usually are worse than the students).

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#73
post #12

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.

Yeah, what's odd to me reading this article and then going and reading elsewhere about "balanced literacy" (which I hadn't heard of before) is that it sounds like this parent's teachers weren't using balanced literacy at all—what they describe is just the whole language method. Balanced literacy supposedly was meant to bridge the gap and use both whole language and phonics in the same program, and the author is prett…

My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy" is a reasonable-sounding concept that has been so widely used as to become almost meaningless, and, in particular, that there was not much balance in Calkin's method.

This opinion is undoubtedly influenced by my skepticism over the reasons offered for substituting exercises like guessing the word for those involving "sounding out' a word. While practiced readers do use context clues a lot (probably too much, IMHO, to the detriment of critical analysis), it does not follow that guessing games will lead to basic competence. As for children stumbling over "spelling out" exercises, that is to be expected. They do the same with arithmetic, so should we be teaching them to guess the answer, and hope that, through doing so, they will infer how to get correct answers? And, as others have pointed out here, the premise that literacy comes as naturally as language itself seems to be empirically false and even self-contradictory (so why, then, do we need to be teaching it in schools?)

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#74

Am also a NYC parent, 15 years of deep school involvement. The critiqued curriculum from Columbia TC was supplemental for us and excellent. With all respect to those conducting reading studies of various kinds, and of course to parents whose kids were suffering, many of the broad claims in this piece are bewildering and are far from what I observed directly and indirectly. My views are perhaps colored by my low opini…

I can imagine teachers with sufficient prior experience, and the self-confidence that came with it, using these methods as supplementation, while those recently out of school and having no mentors would use them exclusively and by-the-book.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#75
post #72
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> While I respect that you might have experience with a particularly bad school, Thanks for respect! Not sure the school is particular bad, but the general model picked for teaching reading is the one that minimizes possible confrontation, While I respect that you might have experience with a particularly bad school, one-on-one instruction, and is general the seems to require the least effort from the teacher. > fuck…

Yes, screw you for broadly suggesting that teachers generally prefer to hand kids devices and browse social media. There is a world of difference between needing to find compromises because they’re under resourced and willfully checking out with minimal effort.

You are not recognizing they are “ underpaid and unappreciated by society”. You’re calling them lazy and uninterested in teaching.

Also screw you for doubling down on it.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailore…

The words to describe what you want are "Orthographic reform". There will be no further English orthographic reform. The last successful reform was Webster in the 19th century. Webster didn't make drastic changes, yet he's why Americans and British people spell words differently centuries later. Changes to orthography are much harder once you have printing and then again once you have mass literacy, because now your…

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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#77

It makes no sense to me that they had the idea that reading will just naturally arise like speech. Like, how did they come up with that? We have ample evidence that human infants spontaneously generate language. If you're unlucky enough to be born profoundly deaf in a country without an existing programme of sign language for deaf infants, you'll sign anyway, just there isn't anybody to provide a vast menu of existin…

> I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching. Apparently only a tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously follow links in the article to vet that same article: > She memorize…

And what fraction manage to post essentially the same comment twice ?

Critics of "Balanced literacy" sound like they have similar complaints to those for "Intelligent design". They believe Balanced Literacy isn't really a new thing, but an old discredited idea ("Whole language" literacy education) given a re-branding to escape criticism, just as "Intelligent design" is Creationism again.

And "Whole Language" is exactly what I discussed above, a belief that "learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally". A laughably false idea.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes. That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be tea…

You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America." A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision…

Here's realism: There is no authoritarian communist party of the English speaking world which may impose the kind of reform you proposed, so your idea is thankfully dead on arrival. You clearly covet that kind of power though, which is disturbing.

If the scope of the change you're proposing is limited to petty changes like color to colour or vice versa, then I'm confident that your changes would be ineffectual at improving literacy rates. There is no evidence that one spelling or the other is easier for children to learn.

But petty inconsequential changes like that are not what you're actually after. I think that you, with your obvious admiration for murderous authoritarian regimes and grandstanding against tradition, want to make 'traditional English' unintelligible to people who are only taught your new English. In this way you might hope to build a wall between young people and literature and other cultural materials from the past. Another Cultural Revolution is what you want, right? Tear down all that is old, purge society of traditional culture and probably murder millions of people along the way. Just as the CCP did. 枪杆子里面出政权 You admire and covet this kind of power, I can tell. Your little off topic mini-rant about tax policy tells me that you are not merely a would-be language reformer, but temporarily embarrassed head of state as well. Why not tell us about your agricultural policy too? I'm sure that somehow relates to the discussion just as tax policy does. Let me guess, step one is killing all the sparrows who eat our seeds.

You attribute to me a wish to forbid certain spellings, but which of us truly has this wish? Me, who has nothing but apathetic tolerance for the differences between American English and British English? Or you, who wishes to impose harebrained reform on the entire English speaking world and shamelessly uses the CCP as your model for how this might be done?

The English language will continue to change over time, as it always has, as all languages do naturally. What will not ever happen is a new system of writing being imposed on the entire English speaking world by fiat. Even if you became Supreme Leader of the People's Republic of America and forced your new system on the entire country, you would be dismayed to find that the overwhelming majority of English speakers do not live in America, nor any other single country. There is no single central authority for the English language, no governing body to capture. Imposing reform like you suggest is literally impossible so your proposal is beyond worthless. English is used by too many people in too many countries, you can't conqueror and subjugate them all.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America." A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision…

Here's realism: There is no authoritarian communist party of the English speaking world which may impose the kind of reform you proposed, so your idea is thankfully dead on arrival. You clearly covet that kind of power though, which is disturbing. If the scope of the change you're proposing is limited to petty changes like color to colour or vice versa, then I'm confident that your changes would be ineffectual at imp…

Whoa, as the Brits say "Honi soit qui mal y pense"!

Your hermeneutic skills seem a mite lacking today. Did you miss my ironic comment on the PRC imposition of simplified characters: "to my private despair"? I do loathe them and salute Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong for resisting their use. Then, too, PRC Chinese pinyin (Chang -> Zhang, Chin -> Qin etc) is especially ugly.

Nevertheless, it's hard to deny that English spelling is slowly trudging to the point, where almost no one, including PhDs, can reliably write sustained prose without a spell checker. Hence all the internet use of U, gud, watsup, gimme, etc. etc. It's not the case for other languages that writing is so out of synch with pronunciation. Koreans can learn to read years faster because their alphabet fits the language around them.

In your world, it would seem (correct me if I'm wrong) that you shrug your shoulders and tell the children, "hey, just grit your teeth and learn this clunky writing system that will scar many of you for life as too stupid to read or spell, all the people out there in the world demand you pay the price, while they whiz ahead with their easy systems".

I'm dubious of almost all invocations of "structural racism", but this might be an exception.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#80

For context, my introduction to elementary school and formal reading instruction began about 1970 in the U.S. My recollection was that we were introduced to the alphabet and the phonetic sounds for each of the 26 letters with an image of a thing that began with that letter. As an example, I remember "m" was for "mice" ... and a picture of a pair of mice neatly represented the two humps of the letter "m". Combined was…

I recall that same color-coded SRA system. I remember doing well at it (climbed to "higher" color levels than many in the class), but I can't say how much it did to teach me, as opposed to measure where I already was. The three things that did help me a lot were 1) my mom taught me the alphabet before I started kindergarten[0], 2) Dr. Seuss books (first text I was able to read on my own was the The Zax from his Sneet…

> I remember doing well at it (climbed to "higher" color levels than many in the class), but I can't say how much it did to teach me, as opposed to measure where I already was.

I had the same experience in the late 1980s, and I suspect that the SRA system was much more likely to be an effective teaching tool for those who were not like us—closer to (or even below) their grade's reading level.

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