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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

#331

Post by xyzzyz »

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…

> 1 - 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.

Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had.

German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.

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

#332

Post by leoc »

4bpp wrote: post #220
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…

I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening quote of an older article in Time ( https://time.com/62050…

There are plenty of academics who oppose or have reservations about the capital-letters Science of Reading https://radicalscholarship.com/2022/05/23/nyt-blasts-calkins... . Of course they, too, could be ideologically motivated or stubbornly attached to their existing beliefs, for all I know, but it's clearly not a clean split between academics and teachers.

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

#334

Post by nice2meetu »

rutthenut wrote: post #233
nice2meetu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started s…

>> We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions. Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?

Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.

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

#335

Post by brookst »

potta_coffee wrote: post #298
sdwr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I see this helpless, "leave it to the experts" attitude in a few places, and absolutely hate it.

It's one of the attitudes being pushed in the education system itself. After a couple of generations, "expertism" has embedded deeply into the American mindset. It's very dangerous to live in a culture where we don't question experts.

This is true, but like so many things America seems to have lost the ability to moderate. For every person who blindly follows "experts", there's someone who insists experts don't know anything at all and any random thought that pops into my head is just as valid as any expert opinion.

It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as any expert will tell you.

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

#337

Post by fwlr »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #324
fwlr wrote: post #90

The 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!

Don't know how anyone who went through school would ever feel guilty about rolling their eyes at that.

I went to a selective-entry single-gender public school, I have always just assumed my school experiences aren’t reflective of schools in general and refused to draw conclusions from my experiences.

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

#338

Post by nkrisc »

phoe-krk wrote: post #250
nkrisc wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's phonetic because the graphemes (whatever they look like) represent phonemes. If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?

I don't know what kind it uses, but it's not phonetic, because the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your claims. If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "fre…

> the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your claims.

I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phoneme is.

What does the symbol “c” represent, if not two different phonemes?

The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do you disagree?

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

#339

Post by nostromo »

obscurette wrote: post #289

Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly disagree that "there is not enough evidence based science in teaching" etc. If there is something really to highlight what's wrong with education systems all over the world, it's too much "evidence based science". Every educational psychologist and his dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should be taught and have a ton of evidence why. A…

I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons.

Actual evidence-based science would be fantastic. But a lot of what I've seen being touted as "science" in this field is flimsy or not science at all.

The primary cause is the downfall of research done by universities. Our institutions are churning out mountains of bullshit "science" in certain fields, including in education. This junk science is now being pushed down into the classroom and it's devastating for educators and students.

Once I was consulting a very large family foundation in this space and asked why there are no randomized trials in education. I was told that researchers in the space think it's unethical to conduct studies with control groups on students. (Which, to be clear, is moronic.) The result is there's very little in the way of solid evidence about what even works.

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