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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

#131

Post by yowzadave »

camgunz wrote: post #58

All 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…

We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I remember when we first brought her to kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was "decoding" the text, rather than reading it.

OK, if you say so--she's sitting in her room for hours a day silently "decoding" her books.

Anyhow, our anecdotal evidence of 1 suggests that this method works and was the foundation of a (so-far) lifetime love of reading!

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

#132

Post by Izkata »

Auracle wrote: post #123
nemo44x wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least here in the USA, age 2 is generally when you start pre-school. Kindergarten starts at age 4 and lasts for 2 years, K4 and K5. Then 1st grade at age 6.

For what it’s worth, that doesn’t sound typical to me. I’d say pre-school, it’s it’s done at all, is done at the age of 4 - maybe 3 if you’re doing it super early. I’ve never heard of “K4” and “K5,” and most kids start kindergarten at age 5 and only do one year of it. Where do you live?

Same here, I did one year of each immediately before first grade. Never heard of two years of kindergarten before.

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

#133

Post by lalaland1125 »

noirscape wrote: post #21

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back…

> What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages.

The phonics debate is a lot less relevant for secondary languages.

The goal of phonics is to teach a person how to write a language that they already speak. The goal of second language instruction is generally to teach someone how to write and speak a language that they don't know in any way.

Very different education goals.

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

#134

Post by mschuster91 »

kyrra wrote: post #98
mschuster91 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge I'd also say part of the cause of this are the teacher unions. When we don't do merit based promotions and raises, people don't care as much.

It's hard to fairly measure and evaluate "merit" for teachers. You can be the best teacher of the world, prepare every single lesson for hours according to the most modern scientific standards - and yet have half your class fail in tests because they literally didn't have anything to eat since the warm school-provided lunch yesterday. Food scarcity is a problem affecting at least 75% of US school districts [1], it's gotten way worse since the COVID assistance ended [2], and it has been shown in studies to be closely linked to performance [3] (hardly a surprise for anyone who ever had to experience food scarcity).

The teacher unions do have a point there, because introducing anything "merit" based only punishes those teachers and school districts for stuff they can't control, much less actually solve.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/04/us-schoo...

[2] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23618443/school-lunch-kids-pan...

[3] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/10/15/21121847/universal-free-...

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

#135

Post by denton-scratch »

gumby wrote: post #6

Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.

Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries.

I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time for my time. That's why I say it's rude.

To be honest, the reason I'm reading the comments is in the hope of finding a proper summary.

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

#136

Post by tabbott »

For those readers who are skeptical whether this curriculum is really in widespread use, it definitely still is.

I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco's lottery system means there's no default school.

A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".

These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents: You don't need to know how to read in order to appear to read the book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page), and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old wouldn't be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast.

We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at all, and found https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast). I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly recommend it as well for those who have the time.

We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading and writing, they're relatively resilient to this sort of fake "science" based fad.

(Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a word problem without actually reading and understanding the words -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where many children struggle to read).

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

#137

Post by camgunz »

yamtaddle wrote: post #113
camgunz wrote: post #58

All 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 n…

Yeah. I mean I agree that Heinemann is milking books they've already put resources into publishing and they should quit. And I'm sure there's a bunch of teachers who aren't good at teaching or being humans and not teaching very well. But the core conceit of Sold a Story is there's currently a huge problem with reading pedagogy everywhere, and that's at least currently false, and maybe was never true.

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

#138

Post by ajsnigrutin »

A bit offtopic, but i find it interesting, how young kids ask A LOT of questions... "how does that work? why is that like that? Where did that come from? How come this is that? How do you do that? How did we do that befire this? ....", and then we put those kids through the schooling system, and the kids seem uninterested in anything, the questions stop and teaching them stuff becomes a pain for many.

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

#139

Post by woolcap »

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…

An excellent book. I taught all of my kids to read with it. All are strong readers. By lesson 70 or so, most of them had caught the gist and didn't need to finish it out. Highly recommended.

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

#140

Post by tivert »

analog31 wrote: post #20
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…

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…

> 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.

Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.

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