Live data from Hacker News

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

features.apmreports.org

511–520 of 524 posts

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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, cherry picking would be relatively easy to spot. What's actually hard is to determine what you actually measure.

What's an example?

The main problem is that teaching is only one of many things to influence what and how people learn. From teachers perspective ...

If I conclude after a lesson that learning took place then why? Is it because the way I taught (words and examples I used etc) or because kids had finally enough time to think about topic and things just fell into place and it really didn't matter how I taught? Or it didn't matter at all and they knew it already, but finally just realized what I asked from them? Was it learning at all or just memorizing? If learning didn't took place then why? Is it because of normal cognitive overload? Is because of lack of attention? If yes, then why? Tired? Hungry? Just a bad day? They just didn't like me? And these are only very basic and general questions. Normally there is 20+ kids in the classroom and they all might have different reason why they learnt or didn't. There is a lot of going on in every kids' mind and all these matter how they learn up to very big and complicated things like culture, family background and group dynamics. Every experienced teacher knows that depending on class results might be very different even if you use same methods, examples, words etc.

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

#512
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in the context of discussing "whole word" vs "phonetic" systems of learning the English language, it seems like outright deception.

I'm assuming it isn't deception as much as it is a bit plain ignorance. I confess I have harbored the thought that English is not phonetic in the past. Is a common thing for folks to say; especially when trying to point out that English is hard.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previously it was dialectic. To say that different spellings were used by different people dramatically understates the situation. You can find an author using different spelling to express the same word in different contexts in the same volume, because, well, that's the way it was spoken. I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece…

You need to learn something other than English! Spanish has easy spelling rules because it is one sound = one letter. (except for ll - and they consider that a separate letter). It is easy to spell in Spanish because each letter maps to exactly one sound, and each sound maps to exactly one letter. We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand language…

. if you reversed English/Spanish it would be called "jingoism" . then it wouldn't be English . good luck with that.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the easiest way for me to learn about this ideology? Is there a test prep or similar?

Oh, it's not a stated set of requirements. I would describe it as more of a culture. The review board didn't hand me a standardized test or anything. They just asked a lot of questions about my personal outlook on the field of education. I already mentioned this in another comment below, but what they really want to hear is "it's a mission".

I did some searches for teaching being a mission, and that's pretty distressing that they demand that you work for money and then also work extra because it is "a service".

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

#515
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fans of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" might wish to check out "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach" [0]. It uses a similar phonics approach but uses basic pattern matching to teach kids in a much simpler format. Be sure to check out the reviews for the original and newer edition. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814311156?psc=1

Whoa, this book appears to be $50-$500?

That's for out-of-print copies.

I snagged a used copy for $70 because I wanted to compare it to the newer 2nd edition which is way more affordable [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example?

The main problem is that teaching is only one of many things to influence what and how people learn. From teachers perspective ... If I conclude after a lesson that learning took place then why? Is it because the way I taught (words and examples I used etc) or because kids had finally enough time to think about topic and things just fell into place and it really didn't matter how I taught? Or it didn't matter at all…

So: too many variables, impossible to pinpoint cause and effect, hence any conclusions are flawed.

Yes/no?

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

#517
post #323
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…

There is a significant portion of academia entranced by novelty, the joy of forbidden or secret knowledge, and other such things. For these people, an idea is not valuable because it is true, or useful, or well-established by experience or science. In fact these are graded as points against an idea. Boring. Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the roo…

1) Do you mean "Academic Art" the style, or "Academic" art as a type of person producing the art? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art

2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?

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

#518
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe we're talking past each other a bit here. First I agree that phonics alone is insufficient and in and of itself does not lead to reading comprehension. I think the evidence is clear there. It also seems clear from the report that England is wielding it like a hammer. > I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for gett…

Yeah I think this is mostly fair. I had to read it multiple times to form a reasonable opinion because it's written in this disjointed style. I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.

Sorry, I was writing it on my phone so the prose is lacking and for what it’s worth I was subjected to the whole language approach.

Fortunately I think the US is so disjointed that we might see some good experimentation with different complementary approaches.

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

#519
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, this book appears to be $50-$500?

That's for out-of-print copies. I snagged a used copy for $70 because I wanted to compare it to the newer 2nd edition which is way more affordable [0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...

Ah, gotcha. Confusing that even on that link, it shows that there's a newer version (which is triple the cost and is from 1969!).

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

#520
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think this is mostly fair. I had to read it multiple times to form a reasonable opinion because it's written in this disjointed style. I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.

Sorry, I was writing it on my phone so the prose is lacking and for what it’s worth I was subjected to the whole language approach. Fortunately I think the US is so disjointed that we might see some good experimentation with different complementary approaches.

Oh shit no, I meant the article haha. It just slaps the two sides together with little contextualizing. Your post was :ok_hand:
Post reply on HN