1/3 of US schools teach reading in a way that doesn't work.

[ahhell]

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

An infuriating story and naturally this hurts the poor kids and minorities more. Rich parents get their kids tutored. Basically, a bunch of teachers and schools bought into a teaching method about 30 years ago that doesn't work and the science was pretty clear at the time that it doesn't work.

There's also some classic skeptics stuff here. The folks profiting from the pseudoscience accuse big education of doing exactly that.

I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s. To be fair, before the science was clear.

Anyrate, if you have kids and their schools use a method other than phonics, go to the school board meetings and get them to stop.

Anything from Lucy Caulkins, Fountas and Pinnell, or Maire Clay, is bad bad bad.

 

[Brainster]

Love this bit:

The teacher shows the class photographs of avid readers and asks the children to discuss what they notice.

Then the children are sent off to find comfortable spots so they can practice avid reading. These are kindergarteners. Most of them don’t know how to read yet. But they’re supposed to spend 35 to 45 minutes reading independently, and with partners, and in small groups. The teacher circulates and observes and confers with the children. At some point, the teacher gets the attention of the whole class for what’s called a mid-workshop teaching point. She might share something she’s noticed. The example in the teacher guide is to say something like this: “Everywhere I look, you are reading avidly. I don’t need those photographs of strangers to see avid reading. No way! It’s right here in front of me!”

They spend 35-45 minutes looking at pictures, because of course they can't read.

 

[Delvo]

Telling them to be avid about it? What could anybody think is the point? Obviously you can't tell people how to feel about something and have that actually cause them to feel that way.

 

[novaphile]

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

However, John Taylor Gatto's books about reading are interesting.

Luckily, I was taught by my parents, and was reading relatively well before I attended school. My parents taught me how pronounce words phonetically, and how to use a dictionary to look up new words. Similarly, they taught me how to break a word down and how to attempt to decode the meaning that way.

According to JTG children are/were being taught whole word recognition of words, typically with flash-cards, with no attention given to the meaning of the letters, phonemes, syllables etc.

The problem with that approach, is that a new word is just a meaningless symbol and the student has no way to progress further.

Similarly, he argued that children's 'readers' were deliberately and desperately low in the new vocabulary that was introduced year by year. Resulting in children finishing primary school with a tiny vocabulary compared to children from 100 years ago.

(My own experience with this, was reading 'Wind in the Willows' to a friends children, including a couple of teenagers, a lot of time was spent explaining all the unfamiliar words.)



To this day, I hope that he was wrong/mistaken, because not being taught the basic skills I was given, would massively set the student back.

 

[theprestige]

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

 

[marting]

A nuanced discussion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educ...ding-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/

It's frankly appalling the way various "innovations" come along like some new religion and get adopted uncritically. Reminds me of the math wars.

Meanwhile parents pay attention to their own kids and do what they can. The more resources the parents have the more likely they can taylor their supplementation to their child's needs. And there are far more available now than ever before. And many are free.

 

[3point14]

Telling them to be avid about it? What could anybody think is the point? Obviously you can't tell people how to feel about something and have that actually cause them to feel that way.

Cargo cult reading..?

 

[Brainster]

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

There are transcripts of each segment.

 

[ahhell]

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

However, John Taylor Gatto's books about reading are interesting.

Luckily, I was taught by my parents, and was reading relatively well before I attended school. My parents taught me how pronounce words phonetically, and how to use a dictionary to look up new words. Similarly, they taught me how to break a word down and how to attempt to decode the meaning that way.

According to JTG children are/were being taught whole word recognition of words, typically with flash-cards, with no attention given to the meaning of the letters, phonemes, syllables etc.

The problem with that approach, is that a new word is just a meaningless symbol and the student has no way to progress further.

Similarly, he argued that children's 'readers' were deliberately and desperately low in the new vocabulary that was introduced year by year. Resulting in children finishing primary school with a tiny vocabulary compared to children from 100 years ago.

(My own experience with this, was reading 'Wind in the Willows' to a friends children, including a couple of teenagers, a lot of time was spent explaining all the unfamiliar words.)



To this day, I hope that he was wrong/mistaken, because not being taught the basic skills I was given, would massively set the student back.

The method under discussion is basically teaching kids to figure out the words based on context. So, looking at any pictures and guessing the words based on the sentance. Maire Claire claimed this is what good readers did. The research since has shown the exact opposite, its the bad readers that do that. Its basically the homoeopathy of reading. When she came up with the method, nobody knew any better and it was based on her observational "research".

It also has parallels with theraputic touch. The methods feel empowering to teachers but really aren't. Much like Theraputic touch feels empowering to nurses.

 

[Delvo]

That sounds like something that was going around in the 1960s-70s called "see & say": see the whole word, say the whole word. It was one of the two reasons why my parents put all of us in a private school which still treated the alphabet as an alphabet instead of the local public school district.

The public schools later figured out how terrible it was and went back to acting as if English were English not Chinese. But it's no surprise that something like it would come back around. Something about the profession of education-administration incentivizes its people to come up with changes and rush them to implementation immediately, and, whenever what you've been doing has been working fine, changes just for the sake of changing things break it.

 

[smartcooky]

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

An infuriating story and naturally this hurts the poor kids and minorities more. Rich parents get their kids tutored. Basically, a bunch of teachers and schools bought into a teaching method about 30 years ago that doesn't work and the science was pretty clear at the time that it doesn't work.

There's also some classic skeptics stuff here. The folks profiting from the pseudoscience accuse big education of doing exactly that.

I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s. To be fair, before the science was clear. Anyrate, if you have kids and their schools use a method other than phonics, go to the school board meetings and get them to stop. Anything from Lucy Caulkins, Fountas and Pinnell, or Maire Clay, is bad bad bad.

100% agree with this. Marie Clay has literally ****** up the reading skills of hundreds of thousands of kids.. Her stupid, ill-founded, ill thought-out ideas have directly lead to an explosion of illiteracy in this country.

I was fortunate in that I was taught to read when schools in this country were still using phonics and hadn't yet adopted Clay's bat-**** crazy ideas about teaching kids to read.

 

[alfaniner]

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

Agree 100% here. A lot of times I have a question about a procedure and the first several hits are videos. It's always a potluck because you can't tell which are front-loaded with ads. It's the rare instance where I have to actually see something in motion (like assembling something) that the video is preferred.

 

[ahhell]

100% agree with this. Marie Clay has literally ****** up the reading skills of hundreds of thousands of kids.. Her stupid, ill-founded, ill thought-out ideas have directly lead to an explosion of illiteracy in this country.

I was fortunate in that I was taught to read when schools in this country were still using phonics and hadn't yet adopted Clay's bat-**** crazy ideas about teaching kids to read.

To be fair to her, she came up with the ideas before the science had really been done. She was actually one of the first people to try and do some research on teaching literacy. But, its a bit like Freude. He was the first but he was wrong about almost everything. Now, she never backed down even when the science had become clear. So, there is that. The podcast was fascinating. Of the three folks pushing these ideas, only Lucy Caulkins as changed her mind. I still wouldn't trust her curriculum, she's changing it but how would a parent know if the local school has adopted the new version or is coasting on the old.

 

[theprestige]

To be fair to her, she came up with the ideas before the science had really been done. She was actually one of the first people to try and do some research on teaching literacy.

I would like to be fair, but I would also like to understand whose idea it was to promulgate her system of education before the research had been completed and the scientific results were in. Because if it was some jackass secretary of education or misguided but influential school board or something, that grabbed her half-baked idea and ran with it? Then yeah, stop blaming her for other people's jackassery. But if it was her? Then I don't think she can 'well ackshully' her way out of it by saying she hadn't tested her idea before applying it to schoolchildren.

 

[ahhell]

I would like to be fair, but I would also like to understand whose idea it was to promulgate her system of education before the research had been completed and the scientific results were in. Because if it was some jackass secretary of education or misguided but influential school board or something, that grabbed her half-baked idea and ran with it? Then yeah, stop blaming her for other people's jackassery. But if it was her? Then I don't think she can 'well ackshully' her way out of it by saying she hadn't tested her idea before applying it to schoolchildren.

Also to be clear, she never did back down on her belief in the system even after the science was in.

It is school boards, teachers, an influential publishing house, and at least one well respected college of education that have really pushed this into US schools.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Agree 100% here. A lot of times I have a question about a procedure and the first several hits are videos. It's always a potluck because you can't tell which are front-loaded with ads. It's the rare instance where I have to actually see something in motion (like assembling something) that the video is preferred.

Concisely and helpfully showing you the answer to your query would take a few seconds. The channel owner won't get paid unless you watch for longer than that.

The way YouTube works specifically selects against brief, useful and non-frustrating clips.

On topic, a few years after I was taught to read, there was an experiment with teaching phonetic spellings with the idea that kids could learn to work out reading with simplified regular rules, then be taught conventional spelling later. Of course it meant having to un-learn all the wrong spellings you had absorbed, and was quickly dropped.

 

[marting]

Math has had a similar experience.

https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/No-Such-Thing-As-Malpractice-In-Edu-Land-3318060.php

In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics released the trendy math standards -- which eschewed traditional math in favor of group work and discovery learning
...
Five years ago, the dissident math group Mathematically Correct was born when parents angry about the "exemplary" College Preparatory Mathematics realized the problem wasn't just in their three school districts, but had become widespread.

I have some familiarity with this. CPM's initial approach was to connect math with things the students were familiar with. This was expected to produce deeper understanding of the usefulness and application ubiquity. I can relate to this as it was how I learned even though my classes were conventional. I'd bounce from math to physics to chemistry and back again as new learning new science stuff required deeper math.

But it didn't work out well for most classrooms. Few teachers had the background or interest to explain the connections beyond (or even) what was in the texts. And the small group self learning approach failed in many cases. The slower kids got more frustated and stopped learning while the others weren't challenged.

And, of course, being able to read proficiently is a predicate to success in any other area.

 

[lomiller]

A nuanced discussion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educ...ding-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/

It's frankly appalling the way various "innovations" come along like some new religion and get adopted uncritically. Reminds me of the math wars.

Meanwhile parents pay attention to their own kids and do what they can. The more resources the parents have the more likely they can taylor their supplementation to their child's needs. And there are far more available now than ever before. And many are free.

Thanks, this is much better than the podcast in the OP. I actually tend to side with the phonics approach, but the podcast itself is long on advocacy, emotional appeals and repetition of "facts" for which no evidence has yet been presented. Sure they get around to providing some evidence eventually, but not until they have repeated their claims dozens of times.

This approach of repeating claims, making emotional appeals about those claims then "bringing it together at the end" with a little evidence pertinent to the claims is something I associate with promoting pseudoscience and woo. It could, of course, be used to promote real science but it still leaves a bad taste.

 

[ahhell]

Thanks, this is much better than the podcast in the OP. I actually tend to side with the phonics approach, but the podcast itself is long on advocacy, emotional appeals and repetition of "facts" for which no evidence has yet been presented. Sure they get around to providing some evidence eventually, but not until they have repeated their claims dozens of times.

This approach of repeating claims, making emotional appeals about those claims then "bringing it together at the end" with a little evidence pertinent to the claims is something I associate with promoting pseudoscience and woo. It could, of course, be used to promote real science but it still leaves a bad taste.

I think this is a valid criticism of the podcast. I tend to think they are largely correct however, mostly emotional appeal rather than evidence.

 

[novaphile]

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

Good grief! We may be long lost twins!

I routinely read at 3,000 words per minute, with 98% comprehension (yes I've been tested many times). Youtubers speak at about 100 words per minute and 90% of their speech is padding. I routinely skip past their introductions.

I think you read LOTR earlier than me, but I did have it taken off me in Primary school by an idiot teacher, who declared that it was 'too old for me'. That was the one time my parents took an active interest in anything that happened at school and they made an incredible fuss. The result of which, was the book being returned and the teacher apologising.

In grade seven, we had a 'reading age' test administered by education authorities, along with a vocabulary test. In both, I was assessed as being at post-graduate level.

I attribute all of that to early exposure to reading, and particularly my parents reading to me.

They decided that they would read a story every night and didn't waver. NB my brother had the same, and sometimes he'd read my story for me (he was four years older than me).

From what I've read about 'whole word' reading education and reading 'primers' it sounds like I dodged a massive bullet.

And this makes me wonder if that trend could be what has caused the 'reverse Flynn effect' where measured IQs are going down now, rather the previously trending up.