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Phonics will always be unpopular with teachers for at least 3 reasons. 1. Teachers are typically from good middle-class backgrounds, and will naturally assume
by wisty 7y ago
Phonics will always be unpopular with teachers for at least 3 reasons.
1. Teachers are typically from good middle-class backgrounds, and will naturally assume children will just learn to read because their parents basically tutored them for hundreds or thousands of hours and they just magically taught themselves.
2. It's hard for an individual practitioner to have any idea whether their methods are wonderful or absolute garbage. Look at how long it took doctors to figure out hand-washing - now think about how hard it is for a teacher with 20 students (all of various ability levels) to know whether their methods have any real impact. The kids grow up and are reading better after a year, it must be the teacher, their method must be good.
3. Boring stuff is boring for teachers. How are they meant to be entertained in class if it's just mindless drill and kill routines?
So you've got "professionals" with no idea what actually works, some weird notion that reading is easy (because they're good at it) and a choice between boring methods that some researcher claims works, and interesting methods that some other (not so nerdy) researcher also claims works (and they use bigger words that are harder to understand when they explain their ideas).
- jpfed 7y agoThis is not to contest your overall explanation, but I should note that teaching with phonics can be fun. When I would give baths to my kids, we used foam letters that stuck to the bath walls. They would randomly pick letters to build a nonsense word with, and we would take turns trying to pronounce it. So they might randomly grab GSLKJUH and stick it on the wall and I would say "Guhslickjuh!" as I moved my finger across the letters in time with my pronunciation. It's super silly and fun. To make the associations of letters and sounds more obvious, we built our "words" iteratively, one letter at a time.
- hutzlibu 7y agoWell, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are effective or not. As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are individuals, but usual still average. So you could experiment. In real life you probably can't as (at least in germany) it is pretty strict and fixed what is about to be teached in class, when and how. That kills all creativity and creates boredom in the teacher and his class.
- wisty 7y ago> Well, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are effective or not. Any evidence? Doctors could figure out that not washing hands was killing patients, but didn't. > As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are individuals, but usual still average. So you could experiment. There will always be multiple things a teacher does differently so it will be, in practice, impossible to attribute success or failure to any particular practices. That's aside from random noise (which might be more systematic - what if some random good / bad kid happens to have a large influence on the whole class?). Remember how Skinner proved pigeons could develop superstitions? Or look at any other profession that deals with a little bit of randomness (human factors / biology) and see the stupid stuff they used to believe.