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

#261

Post by tdekken » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

numeromancer wrote: post #16

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…

This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian". E…

Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

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

#262

Post by Ialdaboth » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

freeopinion wrote: post #141

analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Rote memorization messed me so bad it made me miss my first year of elementary school.

Without going phonics thereafter I would probably have ended up as completely illiterate before middle school.

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

#263

Post by ajmurmann » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #243

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former? And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"? Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with p…

So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation, of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us we can create our own notations and methods to translate between the old and new, but then you get splitting and fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such a notation, and ma…

> Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?

While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature.

Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.

Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.

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

#264

Post by makeitdouble » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

numeromancer wrote: post #16

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…

This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian". E…

From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that.

You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Engelmann

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

#265

Post by 7thaccount » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

My kid is six and can read 100+ page kids books in about an hour (she doesn't do this super often though). It wasn't too hard to teach her to get there either, but repetition is key.

We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying various combinations until something made sense). We did that a few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You can't force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each night. She's in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading and I guess picked things up organically). It's pretty cool that she can pretty much just read anything now that isn't a very unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at words though that are wrong, so we're working on slowing down a little bit.

It's a balancing act though. You don't want to make it such a chore that they don't want to read later, but I just don't think the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I'm trying to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time, but lead to big successes.

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

#266

Post by humean_being » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #148

jasonhansel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In 1900 the literacy rate of the US was roughly 20%. Over the next century states and the federal government introduced mandatory educational requirements and expanded access to public education. By 2000 literacy is north of 80%.

Do you think literate citizens are less free to make choices than illiterate ones?

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

#267

Post by pitaj » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #188

anon291 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding o…

> Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills u…

The podcast goes into how this is exactly wrong. For phonetic languages, kids best learn to read via phonics.

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

#268

Post by euroderf » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

freeopinion wrote: post #141

analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

That's a good term, "phonetic landmarks".

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

#269

Post by alex_sf » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

nmca wrote: post #101

tgv wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

Just to steelman for a second but educational research is obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful ethical standards and consideration). I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.

The research being hard means progress will be slower, not that we should implement unproven things.

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

#270

Post by 7thaccount » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 4:05 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #27

analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell. Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way…

I think a family culture of reading is huge. They eventually pick up that it is important and fun and that leads to a lifetime of learning.