I guess you guys in the US could try curriculums from other English speaking countries ?
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
#62What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back…
For all that is wrong with Duolingo (don't use duolingo as the only tool to learn a language), it does teach writing systems and how to pronounce individual words before throwing you into grammar.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#63I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…
From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all. There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators. The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded…
This was something that I and a friend found surprising when he was studying to become a primary school teacher in the UK. A lot of the education for teachers in the UK is effectively 18th century philosophy taught uncritically - the likes of Rousseau, etc...
We both have a university background in philosophy (we both did the US equivalent of "majoring" in it, and I went to graduate level) and what we found disturbing was how uncritical and non-evidence based the teaching of teachers was. It seems like a fair bit of non-practical teaching of teaching, at least in the UK, is ideological indoctrination. They aren't "doing philosophy" in the sense that you would in a philosophy course where you are meant to be critical in your engagement, but are being told to accept philosophical arguments as doctrine.
So in a way its not surprising to me that teachers fall for other doctrinal ways of teaching.
You go to linguistics departments and they actually do stuff around evidence based child language acquisition, meanwhile teaching colleges ignore that and teach an unreflective centuries old ideology about how children learn.
There appears to be a big cultural gap between say linguistics departments and education departments.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#64As 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…
We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day.
By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#65Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology about?
Basically, some kiwi (Marie Clay) looked into how good kids learn to read, but somehow identified all the things bad learners do. Turned this into an approach to help kids, had some apparent success in New Zealand. Basically it got kids to guess what words were based on the context of the statement, the initial letter, pictures accompanying the statement etc, rather than sounding out the word. It got imported to the states as the word of god, while at the same time science identified how kids actually learn. George Bush introduced No Child Left Behind which required science based teaching of literacy. Those who were profiting off Marie Clay's work pushed back because they wouldn't be funded, resulting in the current mess we have today.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#66This 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.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#67I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…
For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law. That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't…
I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#68Earlier 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…
On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell. Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way…
Starting X early is IMO a bit of a red herring with child development, especially when they're in the low single digits. Their minds grow in power recognizably on a weekly basis (particularly noticeable when you spend a week apart) that an amazing uphill achievement at time t can be a trivially picked up thing at time t+1.
I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new books and understands that they contain stories. A household without that is far more likely to cause issues with reading because the motivation will be missing.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#69Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
English doesn't have consistent rule-based writing spelling, so kids have to essentially memorize all word spellings. Since some kids suck at this game, there have to be compensation strategy to fill in the blanks. At some point it went too far and the last resort compensation strategy became the main method children are taugh (tough? tof? damn this language, it makes no sense) to read.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#70I was very lucky and my mother was a teacher at a private school when I was young, so I got to attend for free. I had phonics-based reading instruction, and learned to read acceptably in first grade. By fourth grade I was one of the best readers in the school, and ended up in a gifted program. I still remember and feel appreciation for my first grade teacher, Mrs. Drown, for teaching me to read. It opened an entire w…
I learned to read so young that I don't remember learning to read. That must have been such a feeling of awakening.