as a non-native english speaker. i don't understand and can't relate at all.
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
111–120 of 524 posts
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#112Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.
I think a lot of what they're going for is in this article:
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#113All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are: - if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds - Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In…
AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education. Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years and years ago that it was harmful.
This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#114Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.
Let that be a warning to anyone who gets excited about this podcast! Wow it stinks. It's like the creators were trying to replicate a Dragonball series of cliffhangers without any substance.
In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through some emotional manipulation.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#115They broke training fresh neural networks for people while AI training gets the most careful and best supported and financed training. Which is already going exponential. What could go wrong?
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#116[flagged]
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#117Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the reading curriculum. I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year) She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonic…
I'm wondering if I'm in the minority, but both of my kids learned to read before they started attending school.
My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that. What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches)
It's not important, of course, the kids will get there eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click" which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly, and when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#118The fact that the education system managed to forget how to teach kids how to read is unbelievably infuriating. I have been guilty in the past of rolling my eyes at “teachers are heroes, teachers should be paid like rockstars”. I don’t feel guilty anymore!
If teachers were paid like rockstars we'd be able to get better teachers.
In my neck of the woods, if we paid teachers as well, by mid career, as gas station managers, we'd get better teachers.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design. If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
I think there are successful people in those fields who have honed a good intuition for psychology. That doesn’t mean the science behind it is good though.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students at scale . If parents are willing to spend more time coaching their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to student ratio for a reason. Bloom's 2 sigma problem is very real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor pedagogy can yield results.
I don’t know if it’s utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That’s the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
> [AI is] the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
It is not the only way: getting other students to teach. Yes it has a bootstrapping problem of quality and requires QA on the delivery but it is still definitely doable at scale.