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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

#141

Post by freeopinion »

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…

Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way.

I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.

As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.

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

#142

Post by Mezzie »

darkerside wrote: post #67
Mezzie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through

I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear. And to demonstrate that from what I've observed a lot of educational decisions are made from very emotional places - that is one major roadblock to treating education efforts scientifically. I felt like just saying 'it's the parents, admins, and media' wouldn't necessarily get across that the obstacles are not well-thought out or nefarious but rather a result of everybody being in a heightened state of constant emotion.

Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that. Thanks!

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

#143

Post by rahimnathwani »

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…

> if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds

Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.

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

#144

Post by Khaine »

From the podcast:

"Here’s what’s happening to many children in this country. They go to a “balanced literacy” school that uses Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. They’re taught the cueing strategies. Their reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they’re struggling – and someone notices – they might get Reading Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books. And if they’re still struggling after that, many of them get Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books.

Struggling readers keep getting more of the same.

That’s what happened to Matthew. Missy’s son. In Gwinnett County, Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor.

Purcell: And she was like, “You finally arrived at the place where most of us arrive.” She had given up on the idea that the school was going to teach her son how to read. And she’d decided she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It’s what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It’s what Lee Gaul did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It’s what Kenni Alden in California wishes she had done with her son.

Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him out of public school, and they put him in a private school for kids with dyslexia.

Matthew’s in sixth grade now. And Missy says he’s doing really well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing.

For Missy, what’s especially painful about all this is that she had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books."

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

#145

Post by denton-scratch »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #80

I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that. For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tap…

> covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it.

That produces kids that don't read, in the normal sense of the word; rather, they synthesize a text based on guesswork, and confidently declare that it says what it doesn't say. My daughter is a primary teacher, and has complained about this. It happens.

It seems completely barmy, to me.

Incidentally, it sounds a lot like what ChatGPT does.

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

#146

Post by camgunz »

yowzadave wrote: post #131
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-…

Most of the time I defend teachers, but I confess to feeling pretty weird about it because with some (super notable) exceptions I had pretty bad experiences with them. I have a lot of opinions about schools/teachers/education whatever but they're pretty polemic and would derail.

But, very glad you found success with your daughter. My partner and I just had a kid and what I wouldn't give for her to sit through us reading a very short book to her without yelling very loudly. One day haha :)

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

#147

Post by spaceprison »

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…

Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my three kids and I can tell you it was a joke.

It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read.

I haven't listened to the podcast so I can't speak to it's content but I'm interested to hear if what their talking about matches my experience.

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

#148

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

jasonhansel wrote: post #77
somishere wrote: post #71

IMHO reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom. Kids need to be interested in reading, and that's up to the parents more than it is to the school. My very unique / personal take. Have been doing sight words with my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of prep (pre year 1). He's not advanced as far as I can't tell, but I'll tell you it's exhilarating to watch his progress. He absol…

> that's up to the parents more than it is to the school. The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise them while their parents do so.

Why have parents be involved with raising their kids at all? Just let the state do everything.

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

#149

Post by phoe-krk »

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…

>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

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

#150

Post by jerry1979 »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #100
bradleyjg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to study at a college that emphasized field-based experience, because it was the only degree-related value that I left with…

What's the easiest way for me to learn about this ideology? Is there a test prep or similar?
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