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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

#351

Post by mattmcknight »

oxfordmale wrote: post #95
michaelcampbell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)

As the petition calls for, it should be left to the teachers to decide. Even if the succes rate is 90%, are you happy to throw the remaining 10% under the reading bus ?

But so many teachers have been miseducated and they try to leave it out. Wyse and Bradbury at UCL are pushing non-evidence based approaches on the false authority of Margaret Meek Spencer [1] by making up a strawman of teaching only phonics, as if people that advocate teaching phonics claimed that were the only step in learning to read.

[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse_The%20...

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

#352

Post by xapata »

brookst wrote: post #326
tivert wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

"Mommy, how come birds can fly and we can't?" "Well, you see, the universe can be thought of as a quantum foam..."

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #300
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…

You are saying "the evidence is bullshit", right?

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by 4bpp »

leoc wrote: post #332
4bpp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would be surprised if it were (a clean split between academics and teachers). However, it seems like your link at least isn't at odds with the idea that there may be a clean split between those who seek to optimise for the declared learning outcome (reading proficiency, in this case) and those who optimise for the advancement of some political goal to which the learning outcome is at best conditionally conducive, and almost certainly secondary. (Just look at the tag collection in the sidebar.)

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

#355

Post by setgree »

Khaine wrote: post #236
setgree wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people belong in gaol. Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were. Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy. FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Te…

This isn't a free speech issue. This is a matter of fraud. Claiming you have methods of teaching literacy when you don't is fraud. Lying or pressuring congressman to get government grants is equally fraud.

Fraud is generally defined as intentionally deceiving others for personal or financial gain. I think it’s pretty clear here that these people were wrong, and arguably deceiving themselves, but certainly not intentionally deceiving others (which implies knowing true facts and withholding them). And I also think their main aim was to improve the lives of children, not personal enrichment.

Again, not everything that’s wrong or bad is illegal.

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

#356

Post by LambdaComplex »

bluGill wrote: post #308
DocTomoe wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.

Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling, so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read. There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two). In reverse there are often several different phonetic ways to pronounce a written word. As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it w…

> There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two).

And "two" isn't even a phonetic spelling!

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

#357

Post by xapata »

nostromo wrote: post #325
brodouevencode wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: > If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible. So, maybe not the best analogy.

Well, the old food pyramid hasn't been used in almost 20 years now.

> hasn't been used

What has it been replaced with? I try to keep up with health literature and am not familiar with the food pyramid's replacement. Perhaps it hasn't received as much advertisement as the food pyramid did.

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

#358

Post by xapata »

setgree wrote: post #355
Khaine wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a free speech issue. This is a matter of fraud. Claiming you have methods of teaching literacy when you don't is fraud. Lying or pressuring congressman to get government grants is equally fraud.

Fraud is generally defined as intentionally deceiving others for personal or financial gain. I think it’s pretty clear here that these people were wrong , and arguably deceiving themselves, but certainly not intentionally deceiving others (which implies knowing true facts and withholding them). And I also think their main aim was to improve the lives of children, not personal enrichment. Again, not everything that’s…

Whether they knew or not is something for the courts to decide. A prominent example of this determination is Dominion v Fox, currently on trial.

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

#359

Post by analog31 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #206
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…

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…

I think we started with books that happened to have words that were easy to decode. After that point, we admitted that the English language is actually quite a mess. And once the kids got some momentum, then they began figuring things out for themselves, or asking. We continued reading to them, and would occasionally stop to ask them if they knew a particular word.

To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language.

And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.

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