Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by mellavora » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

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…

You are right it is `required methodologies`, but wrong on the source.

The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.

Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.

How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.

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

#162

Post by tivert » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

epiccoleman wrote: post #155

freeopinion wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Even though it's definitely not sufficient for English spelling, I think it's pretty important to start with phonics. It teaches kids how the alphabet is supposed to work, and to be fair, it does work that way for most of the simple words young readers will encounter. It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of s…

> It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually.

That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education.

Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.

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

#163

Post by megmogandog » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

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…

Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.

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

#164

Post by riwsky » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

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…

It worked well enough for BERT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)

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

#165

Post by Izkata » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #39

camelite wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.

But there is no sense in which that's a skill required for effective reading. English spelling and pronunciation have too many random corners for it to be anything other than a distracting academic exercise. Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading. Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long…

Except that's wrong - there are rules to English pronunciation that work like 99% of the time. It's why most people would pronounce "ghoti" something like "go tee" or "go tie" instead of "fish".

Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly taught these rules.

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

#166

Post by Dnguyen » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven't read yet (higher level Dr. Suess's book) and he was able to read 20%. Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!. Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early, so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange. Sadly, with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more work, we didn't do the same routine. He was barely reading when he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of course we were there to help them along. I think reading is priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the world to them.

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

#167

Post by doubled112 » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

joelfried wrote: post #86

bregma wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored. Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. N…

We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.

I'm in this boat. Every kid is different.

My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore.

He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31.

My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do something else, he did. He's getting there though, and we'll get him there.

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

#168

Post by yamtaddle » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

tabbott wrote: post #136

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 th…

> 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".

This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used.

To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word.

They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness.

All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.

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

#169

Post by tivert » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #159

phoe-krk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?

> For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?

Yes, exactly.

If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).

English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.

* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?

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

#170

Post by vehemenz » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #110

patall wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is not what you mean.

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.

In the US, kindergarten starts at 5/6.