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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

#341

Post by nkrisc »

oxfordmale wrote: post #229
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?

English is an alphabetic language not a phonetic one. In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation. Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently. You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.

It uses a phonetic script. The symbols of the script represent sounds.

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

#342

Post by nemo44x »

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?

I did a lookup and a lot of places refer to what called “K4” as “Pre-k”. Where I grew up I had preschool and then K4 and then K5.

My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.

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

#344

Post by thegrimmest »

tgv wrote: post #18
kleiba wrote: post #4

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…

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…

There's lots of very good research on learning going back decades. For instance the work of Paul Pimsleur.

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

#345

Post by Khaine »

Again from the podcast:

"This is Sarah Gannon. She’s a teacher you met in Episode 3. She trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins

Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.

Gannon: Teacher friends were like, “Did you read this Emily Hanford? And I was like, “I read it.” And we were like, “What is she talking about?” She was outraged. Because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading.

And then, her daughter, Maeve.

(Music) Maeve wasn’t learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her. But it wasn’t working. So Sarah went looking for answers. And discovered the research.

Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing with Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who didn’t like George Bush.

One day, when Carrie’s daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, “I have something to tell you.”

Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and anxious, and she just says, “I can’t read.” The school hadn’t said there was a problem. Carrie hadn’t noticed a problem either. But her daughter knew.

Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret when they’re struggling. They can look like they’re reading for a while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart.

(Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in.

Chee: And I just kept saying, “Well keep trying.” And then when they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try. And what I’m haunted by is, when it wasn’t working, I blamed it on children. Carrie Chee isn’t sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren’t for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff.

Gannon: I don’t know if I could be convinced and that’s what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who, it’s just like, hold fast to old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it’s OK to be wrong. Like, I was wrong."

How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an engineer who didn't look into the structural properties of a material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this practices?

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

#346

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

Music notation is pretty much the archetypal example of something designed by power users for power users. As someone who has done some orchestra conducting and composing, it's incredibly powerful and expressive, and the fact that you can usefully conduct an orchestra on an unknown piece with nothing but a score (no recordings) is amazing. Music notation hits a very powerful level of abstraction, and is so information-dense that all the information required to recreate a symphony fits in a small book.

When I was a child trying to learn music reading for piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build a mental model of a score.

I should also add that young pianists and organists have the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on other instruments can have trouble reading piano music, which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).

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

#347

Post by nice2meetu »

nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #280
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…

That's interesting because in the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird (widely taught in the US and well-known in other countries), there's a scene where the character Scout is criticized in school by her teacher, when it's discovered that Scout learned to read ahead of the curriculum, from her father at home. The teacher expressed the concern that Scout might end up learning how to read incorrectly. If I remember correc…

Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis on us as parents taking an active role in reading with them and encouraging them at home.

I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.

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

#348

Post by throwway120385 »

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…

2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?

Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto the rod.

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

#349

Post by tomjakubowski »

generalizations wrote: post #297
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…

Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a combination of several older languages, saxon and french included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which language the word construction originated in. English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.

"tough", "rough", "though" and "borough" all come from Old English, without any French influence. The wackiness in pronouncing "ough" is sadly not predictable from any set of rules and as you'd probably expect varies between dialects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

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

#350

Post by mattmcknight »

camgunz wrote: post #76
zaphar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is pretty strong evidence[0] [1] [2] that phonics is a critical part of learning to read for everyone no matter who they are or what their personality is. It's not the only piece of the puzzle but if you leave it out you will handicap the student intended to or not. Without phonics when you encounter a new word you can't pronounce it. If you can't pronounce it you can't use it in conversation. You can't use it…

You and op are both correct. The problems are teaching only phonics (which a lot of SOR advocates want) and not teaching phonics at all (which happens in a fair number of classrooms).

I can't find anyone out there that advocates teaching only phonics. It's a step in the process of learning to read that, if left to teachers that were taught under a non-evidence based approach, many try to skip.
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