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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

#411

Post by WalterBright »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #397
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 f…

Of course, implementing such a program will have details that need to be worked out. I've posted this before, and get all kinds of "but ..." replies, all of which can be easily addressed with a moment's thought.

It could be hardly worse than the current system.

> 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.

Students are already assigned at random to teachers. So it will balance out.

> you've just disincentivized teachers from working with struggling students

The teachers currently have no incentive whatsoever to help struggling students. This proposal gives them $1000 reasons to help them.

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

#412

Post by siftrics »

bell-cot wrote: post #391
siftrics wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's not laborious. Just think for yourself. Don't delegate critical thinking to some random idiot or stranger.

Being marked as an oddball is a very minor downside compared to your kids not being able to read well.

It's called "common sense" and you're arguing against it.

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

#413

Post by siftrics »

nice2meetu wrote: post #334
rutthenut wrote: post #233

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 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 rea…

How could anyone take the advice "don't teach your kids" seriously? Are you insane? It makes no sense on any level.

How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.

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

#414

Post by duskwuff »

throwway120385 wrote: post #348
javajosh wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

https://xkcd.com/567/ comes to mind. :)

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

#415

Post by pitaj »

com2kid wrote: post #399
pitaj wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Full word reading works fine for a subset of kids, but it leaves a sizeable amount behind. Phonics is fundamental for teaching those kids how to read.

This is how the podcast explains what reading research has found about how people learn to read:

- First learn to associate letters with sounds

- By sounding out words, reinforce those associations

- And associate combinations of letters with known words from their spoken language

Our brains aren't wired for written language like they are for spoken language. We have to actively learn. And by associating letters with sounds, our brains are able to loop in the existing language areas of the brain into written language.

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

#416

Post by ugh123 »

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…

>"Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"

Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.

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

#417

Post by pitaj »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #380
pitaj wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Even in phonics, kids learn common words like "the" by sight. But that doesn't scale. People don't learn to recognize every word as an individual token.

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

#418

Post by anon291 »

com2kid wrote: post #399
pitaj wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words

Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.

From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually reads 'the whole word' (I don't think any adult spends any amount of time examining the minutiae of letter ordering in everyday life). However, the opposite does not work. As you pointed out, despite your high reading level, you weren't able to figure out basic phonetic rules until high school. This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example. Even ones not based on latin alphabet. The practice of blending sounds together is a fundamental part of reading.

A child who is using phonics is able to (1) understand, (2) sound out, (3) and speak the written word (which means they will be able to do things like read poetry). A child who is using the whole word approach may be able to understand, but if they cannot enunciate properly the words on the page, then they cannot do either 2 or 3, which means the reading is not complete. I don't see how we can consider this an acceptable replacement.

> 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.

This is not exceptional for an adult.

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

#419

Post by anon291 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #188
anon291 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding o…

> 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 logographic languages (Chinese really) all start with phonetic systems before the children then start memorizing the ideograms. There are dozens of chinese phonetic systems in use for teaching. The HTML standard has a whole element reserved just for asian pronunciation systems.

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

#420

Post by vuln »

siftrics wrote: post #413
nice2meetu wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

How could anyone take the advice "don't teach your kids" seriously? Are you insane? It makes no sense on any level. How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.

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