Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

features.apmreports.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 524 posts

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

#371

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever method. The remainder need different strategies or more time or both to help.

I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.

The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

xapata wrote: post #357
nostromo wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by xapata »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #244
legacynl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning by listening to something during your sleep doesn't work. Brains go into a sort of maintenance mode during sleep, and it's not possible for your brain to sleep and interpret & comprehend sensory input at the same time. Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory. So it's probably better for you to learn while yo…

It doesnt work but placebo is strong. If someone thinks it is working, while also learning in other ways, then its likely working.

The placebo effect is so strong that it even works if you know you're taking a placebo. Brains are amazing!

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

#374

Post by skywhopper »

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…

For what it’s worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it out for months. It didn’t go well and eventually we gave up. Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really learned to read in second grade. Now she’s a voracious reader, writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior year of college.

The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.

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

#375

Post by taeric »

Taywee wrote: post #212
michael_j_ward wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word (like Chinese or Japan). Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word lear…

English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The distinction wouldn't mean much.

If it is not phonemic, what is it? It is not necessarily "regular" or "uniform" in the phonemes that are represented, but you can't consider it anything other than phonetic, as the characters represent phonemes. Pretty much period.

As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.

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

#376

Post by kritiko »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #26
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…

> ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.

The public education system in the US is ~6 hours per day, ~180 days per year. Of course anybody with the means is supplementing that.

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

#377

Post by JBiserkov »

humean_being wrote: post #66

This is horrifying. If I understood this correctly, they are being taught effectively *next token prediction* instead of reading. The only children that will learn to read will probably be in spite of this system.

My "favorite" part was '"read" this word I have covered with a sticky note'.

You need X-ray vision like Superman to actually read that.

Scratch that, it was recorded video, so even Superman couldn't do that, you'd need a time machine in addition to the X-ray vision.

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

#378

Post by whoomp12342 »

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…

until you have felt the wrath of shipping a production stopping bug, you know nothing john snow.

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

#379

Post by avhon1 »

xapata wrote: post #357
nostromo wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The USDA Food Pyramid was replaced in 2005 with MyPyramid. http://web.archive.org/web/20050830024356/http://mypyramid.g...

In 2011, the pyramid was done away with altogether and replaced with MyPlate, which remains the USDA's current nutritional guide graphic. https://www.myplate.gov/

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

#380

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

pitaj wrote: post #267
dragonwriter wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> kids best learn to read via phonics.

parent comment didn't say "learn best", it said "learn first".

Post reply on HN