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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

#391

Post by bell-cot »

siftrics wrote: post #386
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" seems to always preface failure and disappointment. How do people blindly trust random figures of authority? It's mind boggling.

Not trusting authority figures tends to be extremely laborious, give little benefit, and gets you socially marked as an oddball.

Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways into the future, and you'll have plenty of social acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable" misfortune.

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

#392

Post by darkerside »

Mezzie wrote: post #142
darkerside wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through

I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear. An…

I think what I'm most reacting to is the parenthetical "quotations", which are straw men, of course. There may be an element of truth to them, but if you're not literally quoting somebody, adopting their perspective needs to be done thoughtfully and empathetically.

I hear you that they are bring emotional, and that needs to be reflected, but just like there is truth in your post although it came of as a bit inflammatory to me, there is truth in those emotions as well. Distill that instead of dismissing it.

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

#393

Post by warner25 »

AlanYx wrote: post #160
patall wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is not what you mean.

The book itself recommends that most children start the program in the book at age 4, also noting that some advanced students may be ready at age 3.5.

A note on this: We used this book to teach our two oldest kids to read before they entered kindergarten. Kid #1 was asking to learn to read at age 3.5, and that's when we got the book. She could really read before her 4th birthday. It was indeed amazing. We then started trying to push it on kid #2 at age 4.5, since our expectations were set by kid #1, and we now regard this as a mistake. Nobody was having fun, so we ended up setting it aside for half a year. We picked it up again in the summer before kid #2 started kindergarten, and she finished learning to read with ease at that time. I think we're lucky that the initial attempt didn't ruin reading for her. We're being much more gentle about introducing it to kid #3.

Kid #1 was and still is an oddball in a number of ways. Learning to read so early seems to have given her some advantages, like being able to consume volumes of information at a young age, but she'll have a harder time in other ways.

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

#394

Post by gnicholas »

yowzadave wrote: post #131
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…

We taught our daughter to read at age 3 using the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I remember when we first brought her to kindergarten and mentioned that she was already a competent reader--her teacher seemed oddly insistent about downplaying her abilities, and kept correcting us to say that she was "decoding" the text, rather than reading it. OK, if you say so-…

We use the same book with our kids, and had a similar experience with educators. When she moved a to new school in first grade, they were extremely skeptical that she has able to read chapter books.

But I don't think it was specific to reading — they pulled the same crap when it came to other subjects. My sense is they don't want to admit when a student comes in with lots of skills because then they can't take credit for how well the student is doing at the end of the year. This is shown on report cards, where they never put down at/above grade level in the fall/winter quarters, even when the child is clearly multiple grade levels ahead. If they admitted that up front, they wouldn't be able to show "growth".

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

#395

Post by bradgranath »

TLDR: Adults don't like the sound of children sounding out words slowly and would prefer not to have to listen to it.

The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole words.

That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them several different strategies to guess what it is they are reading.

It turns out (no duh) that doesn't work either, but it does mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming later.

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

#396

Post by gnicholas »

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…

Sold a Story isn't alone; John McWhorter (a Columbia professor of linguistics) has a very similar take on phonics and has written about it in The Atlantic and the NYT.

As for bias, I understand SOS was funded by some foundation, though it's not clear what ideological bent the Hollyhock Foundation might have that would taint the reporting. I'm pretty sure Professor McWhorter is shooting straight here — he tends to speak his mind, regardless of how many friends it makes or (mostly, these days) loses him.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel...

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

#397

Post by CobrastanJorji »

WalterBright wrote: post #389

One reason for teaching so long using a failed method is public school teachers are not accountable for failure. There is zero downside for them failing (they just blame the parents) and no incentive whatsoever to do better. The fix is simple. Give teachers a $1000 bonus for every student of theirs that performs at grade level at the end of the year. It'll be the cheapest, most effective way to improve kids' educatio…

Metric-based rewards are hard to get right. For example, you've just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling students, and you've further incentivized teachers to work in the richest school districts. Since the metric is "how many at at grade level at the end of the year," you as a teacher are heavily rewarded for being handed students that are either already at grade level or have parents who can pay for additional tutoring.

The simplest fix you could slap on would be to make it a bonus for each student who tested as below grade level at the start of the year but above grade level at the end, but that also has complexities.

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

#398

Post by hn_version_0023 »

setgree wrote: post #223
Khaine wrote: post #181

Again from the podcast: Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research…

> 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…

> for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.

Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers actually do! Nice, thanks for that.

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

#399

Post by com2kid »

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.

This is one of those topics that people debate endlessly because what works "for most" does not work "for all".

I learned full word reading, it works great for me. I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. Pretty sure I didn't internalize "e at the end makes vowels long" until nearly high school.

I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.

I've met plenty of other people who are the same, but I will also acknowledge that this doesn't work for everyone.

But you know what? I bet a lot of chemists "read" chemical names the same way.

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

#400

Post by josefx »

rcoveson wrote: post #284
phoe-krk wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?

Spanish is "strictly phonetic" English is "[very] loosely phonetic" Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"

> Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"

Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?

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