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

• lr4444lr 4y ago
  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 shipped. They may have even "observed developers" or "measured output" in constructing these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of dollars, along with training, books, etc. EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
  • ljf 4y ago
    It is a really interesting problem - my son and my daughter were both taught using phonics - my son had very little interest in reading and spelling (very much like me at his age) but reads at about the level he should (I personally think if he is anything like me, he is doing really well). My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name. But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
    • bityard 4y ago
      Wow, this sounds like my life. I honestly don't remember how I learned to read (although I might guess that it came from a desire to learn about how the world worked). But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.
    • johncalvinyoung 4y ago
      Random aside: > I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper I don't know your details, and your experience could stem from something like dysgraphia. But I personally did not have any such difficulties and still strongly preferred keyboards to ballpoint pens, until I discovered fountain pens. Within a few weeks of practicing taking notes with a fountain pen I found my handwriting improving dramatically, with much less wrist/hand strain--rediscovered a love of handwriting. (Writing with a fountain pen _requires_ less pen pressure on the paper, and writing with liquid ink moves much more fluidly and expressively than most ballpoint pens.) Might be worth a try at some point. I still type all day for my job, but don't flinch at the idea of taking pages of notes at a conference or church service, and I enjoy writing handwritten letters once again.
  • esotericimpl 4y ago
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  • wiredfool 4y ago
    That book worked well for my 3 kids, who are all voracious readers now. Generally did it at age 5 or 6.
  • theGnuMe 4y ago
    In this case the researchers know what works but the teachers aren't taught the science of reading. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why... https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...
    • Khaine 4y ago
      Sure, its not great that they weren't taught the science behind it, but on one episode they quoted a teacher who was taught the new way, and she rejected it because 'she didn't like it' From the transcript: "She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned." And from a later episode: "Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like. Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind." This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.
  • numeromancer 4y ago
    This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian". Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a work called Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.
    • tdekken 4y ago
      Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).
      • havercosine 4y ago
        Hello :) . Pleasantly surprised and happy to see folks who know about Engelmann and DISTAR here. Random tidbit: I too quit software work to launch experiment in ed-tech two years back. Randomly stumbled on Englemann through a rabbit hole. I'm obsessed with his ideas around sequencing the lessons correctly. Beyond reading, I was interested in using it to improve how we teach Maths. Unsuccessfully tried that mixed with video games. But I agree that Engelmanns research on theory of instruction remains a treasure trove, as it came from his practice and not writing a PhD thesis. I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book. She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education using his methods.
        • tdekken 4y ago
  • oxfordmale 4y ago
    Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.
    • mandmandam 4y ago
      Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"? In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.
      • camelite 4y ago
        The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.
        • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
          But there is no sense in which that's a skill required for effective reading. English spelling and pronunciation have too many random corners for it to be anything other than a distracting academic exercise. Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading. Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard to be learned. For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard them. They know what the words mean, but the correct pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling. The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.
  • analog31 4y ago
    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 at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT. Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      > ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
      • zaphar 4y ago
        Phonics based approaches to reading have been a mainstay of private and home school programs for decades. It creates a silly disparity between those who can afford or are willing to sacrifice enough to put there children through them and those who have to use the public school system. Every once in a while the parents will have enough and revolt somehow. I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there. Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    Superficially, it seems similar to the method I used to learn to read. It dates from the 1890s, don't know if it had any scientifically basis.
  • gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of entertainment.
  • bonthron 4y ago
    "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" is an amazing book. I taught my daughter to read before kindergarten. It works.
    • patall 4y ago
      What does "before kindergarten" mean? In the mornings? Or before she was old enough to go there? I started kindergarten at age 2 (like described in Wikipedia) and I suspect that is not what you mean.
      • bonthron 4y ago
        She was 5. Most kids in the US start first grade about 6.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        At least here in the USA, age 2 is generally when you start pre-school. Kindergarten starts at age 4 and lasts for 2 years, K4 and K5. Then 1st grade at age 6.
        • Auracle 4y ago
          For what it’s worth, that doesn’t sound typical to me. I’d say pre-school, it’s it’s done at all, is done at the age of 4 - maybe 3 if you’re doing it super early. I’ve never heard of “K4” and “K5,” and most kids start kindergarten at age 5 and only do one year of it. Where do you live?
          • Izkata 4y ago
            Same here, I did one year of each immediately before first grade. Never heard of two years of kindergarten before.
          • nemo44x 4y ago
            I did a lookup and a lot of places refer to what called “K4” as “Pre-k”. Where I grew up I had preschool and then K4 and then K5. My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.
  • KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
    The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students at scale. If parents are willing to spend more time coaching their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to student ratio for a reason. Bloom's 2 sigma problem is very real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor pedagogy can yield results.
    • bradleyjg 4y ago
      I don’t know if it’s utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That’s the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        I'm cautiously optimistic that it's utopian-ish. If we do it right and supplant it with human interaction and assessment then kids will be better off. They'll be able to learn at their own pace with content that is built around their interests and style of learning best. They can learn when they feel like learning instead of having to use the typical rigid and regimented structure of today's classroom. I'm not trying to be all hippy about it - kids still need assessment and evidence that learning occurred and there needs to be accountability. And teachers aren't going away. Human leadership is important and someone needs to be accountable for what a kid has learned, etc. A dystopian implementation would be no teacher and a parent just gets a daily report.
        • germinalphrase 4y ago
          I taught for about ten years at the high school level, but I work as a consultant in the tech industry now. While the curricular piece might seem like the natural starting point, the nut to crack would be increasing the trustability of in-class assessments as accurate data on a student's knowledge/abilities are required for that kind of curricular individualization. Good teachers do this kind of assessment, of course - but it's difficult at scale. It's easier for curricular content that is hierarchical in nature, but a great deal of content is not. Assessment is a pretty mature research space (and AI advances to help generate/curate assessment content could be game changing), but there is a block - for some reason - preventing assistive instructional tools for teachers becoming prevelant. It remains, largely, an analog process. That said, I would love to leverage my teaching experience to help design and build such a tool.
  • kenjackson 4y ago
    Used that book for my son at around age 4. He never learned to love reading, but he’s a good reader. One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.
  • rahimnathwani 4y ago
    > book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" > Anecdote: it worked for my kid. It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends' kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN comment I wrote. If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon delivers) is the best time to start.
  • woolcap 4y ago
    An excellent book. I taught all of my kids to read with it. All are strong readers. By lesson 70 or so, most of them had caught the gist and didn't need to finish it out. Highly recommended.
  • mellavora 4y ago
    You are right it is `required methodologies`, but wrong on the source. The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach. Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it. How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.
    • davemp 4y ago
      The US Gov really needs to start in-housing critical tools if only to build internal competency. There also probably needs to be more incentives for individuals inside the USG to excel and produce value. There are too many perverse incentives for unscrupulous contractors to milk tax payers (see the national parks situation [0]). There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise. Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect. [0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    I can also personally vouch for Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It accelerated my ability to teach my kiddo to read by doing exactly what I wasn't an expert in - designing a reading pedagogy. We worked though the book in pandemic kindergarten and I can't help but attribute his current reading success to the work we did back then. It was a silver lining in a time of uncertainty and the memories I have of us working through the book together are memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      I've tried this book. My son won't follow the instructions exactly. And the book makes it clear they must be followed exactly. i don't know what to do.
      • lr4444lr 4y ago
        I recommend trying just one activity in each lesson per day at first - start really slowly.
  • arthurjj 4y ago
    +1 to "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". It's step by step and doesn't require a large amount of planning or thinking from the parent. Which means it's easy, which means you'll do it. Even when busy
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    My wife mixed reading with spelling, starting when each boy was four. She'd work on simple letter sounds, then make a list of 'rhyming' words: sat, pat, fat, cat, mat and so on. They would sound out the list, then come up with some more, even some silly ones like dat or jat. Hilarious! for a four-year-old. So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
  • jerf 4y ago
    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 root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary. Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough. Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better". Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems. In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.
    • rovolo 4y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art 2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?
  • sailfast 4y ago
    FWIW We used the 100 easy lessons book for all of our kids and they read very well for their ages and enjoy reading.
  • jkubicek 4y ago
    We also used "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" for both of our kids. It works outrageously well and we've recommended it to all our friends with young children.
  • skywhopper 4y ago
    For what it’s worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it out for months. It didn’t go well and eventually we gave up. Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really learned to read in second grade. Now she’s a voracious reader, writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior year of college. The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.
  • whoomp12342 4y ago
    until you have felt the wrath of shipping a production stopping bug, you know nothing john snow.
  • ugh123 4y ago
    >"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.
  • sn9 4y ago
    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 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814311156?psc=1
    • gnicholas 4y ago
      Whoa, this book appears to be $50-$500?
      • sn9 4y ago
        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-Barnhart/dp/0814334555 https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...
        • gnicholas 4y ago
          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!).
  • kthejoker2 4y ago
    Just wanted to +1 Teach Your achild ... taught all my 4 kids over the summer after they turned 4 with minimal fuss. Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.
• kleiba 4y ago
  I 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 understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress? If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside? I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way? Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.
  • Vanderson 4y ago
    Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...
    • bluGill 4y ago
      I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.
• gumby 4y ago
  Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.
  • droopyEyelids 4y ago
    Let that be a warning to anyone who gets excited about this podcast! Wow it stinks. It's like the creators were trying to replicate a Dragonball series of cliffhangers without any substance. In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through some emotional manipulation.
    • gumby 4y ago
      A good application for a Transformer system like GPT to listen to the podcasts and generate the single sentence inside.
  • neogodless 4y ago
    I think a lot of what they're going for is in this article: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries. I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time for my time. That's why I say it's rude. To be honest, the reason I'm reading the comments is in the hope of finding a proper summary.
    • droopyEyelids 4y ago
      It's not an exaggeration to say that most episodes of the podcast could be summarized with a single sentence. The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to teach many kids to read."
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Vanderson 4y ago
  Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.
  • tdekken 4y ago
    Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).
    • Vanderson 4y ago
      I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids. I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception) What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
      • tdekken 4y ago
        Thanks so much for your response Vanderson! I wish I had known about How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons when I was teaching my daughter. I definitely fumbled my way through it :). > I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception) I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper. > What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"? Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::. Thanks again for sharing your DI story.
• phkahler 4y ago
  For learning to read English at age 3 or 4, I often recommend a video called "The Letter Factory" and its first sequel "The Word Factory". Not a fan of the 3rd one, but these 2 are amusing cartoons that my kid liked a lot, and now really enjoys reading. Just one data point, take it or leave it ;-)
• isaacfrond 4y ago
  Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)
  • boomboomsubban 4y ago
    There was a NYT article about this podcast posted yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589013
  • mikeryan 4y ago
    There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the reading curriculum. I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year) She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonics” teaching for reading but I’m not sure the rest of the schools have pivoted as quickly.
    • fullstop 4y ago
      I'm wondering if I'm in the minority, but both of my kids learned to read before they started attending school. My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that. What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches) It's not important, of course, the kids will get there eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click" which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly, and when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
      • mikeryan 4y ago
        From my experience there’s a pretty wide range of abilities going into Kindergarten. I’d say that your kids knowing how to read would put them into a minority but a decent sized one, may 25-30%? Also a ton of variation there based on what kids did before kindergarten, at home or, definitely kids from Montessori schools had more reading then kids like mine who did full time preschool at one that didn’t have an “academic” focus.
• noirscape 4y ago
  What 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 to the same "guessing game". Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome. When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it's just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ significantly from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they're different compared to yours. I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.
  • nradov 4y ago
    I think your experience is atypical. Most students who learn a new language with a fairly "reasonable" alphabet like Korean or Russian find that to be the easiest part and remember most of the letters within a few days. I don't speak Greek but I've been there a few times and learned the alphabet just so that I could sort of read signs (forgot it now). As for Duolingo, is there any independent evidence that it's actually effective? Some of my friends have been using it consistently for a long time and yet don't seem to have learned much. The gamification features are effective at driving user engagement but I'm skeptical whether it's actually a good educational tool.
    • noirscape 4y ago
      For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one extra character added over the centuries?). The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore. The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching. As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.
• gavinmckenzie 4y ago
  My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on learning to write before reading, with an implication that this process will help with word recognition. I have no idea whether this method is better, but as a parent it certainly seemed like a very novel approach. Seeing my three-year-old daughter learning to write was (like many Montessori things) surprising.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    I never gave it much thought, but I am currently teaching my 3-year-old to write letters first because I think the recognition and muscle memory with the letters would help with stringing the letters together later. It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.
  • sdwr 4y ago
    Probably not really about word recognition, but about being an agent in the world. Reading is fundamentally a passive experience. The best reader in the world may as well be Stephen Hawking. From my understanding, Montessori is more about doing + engagement than passive learning, and the emphasis on writing would be a way to express those values.
  • bcrosby95 4y ago
    I know it's not your point, but learning to write by tracing at age 3 doesn't sound anything like the actual teachings of Maria Montessori. The whole point is child directed learning, and having kids at 3 trace things sounds pretty anti-ethical towards that. Most of this stuff is parent directed because they want little Johnny to be brilliant, but afaik goes against pretty much all early childhood development research.
    • taeric 4y ago
• soneca 4y ago
  Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology about?
  • jononomo 4y ago
    It became fashionable in early childhood education circles to teach children to read by looking at the accompanying pictures in the book instead of by deciphering the letters and sounding out the word. This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have dyslexia because they weren't learning to read. You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I listened to the entire series three times because I couldn't get over it. It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.
    • HeckFeck 4y ago
      > It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read. Indeed. We can debate the merits of letters vs ideograms as much as we like, but English is not Chinese. Reading an alphabet is a phonetic exercise, even with all the exceptions in spoken English. And yes, the 'dyslexia epidemic' is harrowing. Sure video-everywhere is part to blame, but how many readers and writers are we down due to children being given a label that says 'you will never spell' early in life. Even if well-intentioned the label is detrimental to your relationship with words.
  • Khaine 4y ago
    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.
• jononomo 4y ago
  Just wait until you get to the part in the podcast where the teacher intentionally covers up a word with a post-it note and then asks the kids to read it. Apparently, they are supposed to figure out the word from the context.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1 through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute teacher when grandma was sick, she was the only teacher those kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma's students. The only "central administration" that she had to care about was the little school district's Superintendent. He had no time, staff, nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible upsides if he got any "new ideas" about education. Grandma's own education was high school, plus maybe a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7. But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities. Old stuff that worked couldn't possibly get you ahead in that empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was incredibly boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education Establishment.
• wyldfire 4y ago
  This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago. It's pretty interesting stuff.
• theodorewiles 4y ago
  Can anyone suggest better materials / guides for early literacy development?
• tristor 4y ago
  I 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 world for me. The public schools where I lived did not use phonics, and when I entered the gifted program I shifted to public school. I met people in high school who were considered average students that had less literacy than I did in fourth grade. The overall literacy rate in our small city was lower than the national average as well.
  • darkerside 4y ago
    I learned to read so young that I don't remember learning to read. That must have been such a feeling of awakening.
• jimmar 4y ago
  I'm by no means a perfect dad, but one thing I've done well is reading to my kinds. In the past 14 years, I've read to my kids almost every night. They both tested in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension and vocabulary. I'd often be shocked when I'd read a complicated word and ask my 5th grade what it meant and she'd give me a great definition. Read to your kids.
• camgunz 4y ago
  All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are: - if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds - Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In particular Sold a Story was funded by The Hollyhock Foundation and others. I'm not saying this model is bad or impugning anyone's motives here; on the contrary I would say people are acting more or less in good faith. I'm just saying there are definitely agendas here. For a more well-reasoned, academic look at the science of reading (SOR), have a look here [0]. [0]: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
  • istjohn 4y ago
    Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.
    • numeromancer 4y ago
      Homines libenter id quod volunt, credunt.
      • istjohn 4y ago
        Sapere aude
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    AFAIK (I know lots of teachers) "whoops, phonics was actually right all along" was back to being the state-of-the-art like 15+ years ago, among the academic-side of teacher education. Whole language only hung around because it had a lot of True Believers already in the classroom, and some districts were (and still are) slow to correct, but it was pretty clear years and years ago that it was harmful. This isn't some new revelation, someone just made a podcast about it and got traction at this moment for whatever reason.
• stuaxo 4y ago
  I guess you guys in the US could try curriculums from other English speaking countries ?
  • josho 4y ago
    American exceptionalism leaves some Americans with the mis-guided belief that there is nothing to learn from other countries. I couldn't help but laugh seeing your comment was downvoted at the time I read this. What Americans should consider is removing charter/private schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy families have time and resources to influence school boards to improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not just an already elite cohort. Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and further disadvantage them. Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a result none of these options will be implemented.
    • rsynnott 4y ago
      Though, in this case, the problematic technique seems to have been imported from New Zealand.
    • zackmorris 4y ago
      Ya the main problem with US education is lack of funding due to segregation. This should be the headline, not microanalysis of one specific symptom like reading comprehension. I'm growing more concerned with each passing year that we're so distracted playing whack-a-mole with each of the thousand crises facing us that we've become blind to systems-level thinking. When I was growing up in the 80s, we were taught that we lived in a meritocracy where anyone could be president someday, for example. Today I see that everyone has equal dignity, meaning that the sum of each individual's talents is the same. But some talents are rewarded more than others. Mainly the ability to generate profit, which has roots in othering, prejudice, maintaining the status quo, tax evasion, lobbying, corruption, but especially cheating. That's what wokeism is about. Once one sees that it's not about individual talent, but the rigging of the system to prevent any disruption of the power of the status quo, it's impossible to unsee. So a phrase like "tax the rich" (to put an end to generational wealth inequality and heal the division) means to pull the plug on that power structure. But people misinterpret it through their own trauma, get triggered, and project against it as a perceived threat, because even the smallest benefit like one's gender or the color of their skin is conflated with their earning potential, because the system truly rewards injustice.
• humean_being 4y ago
  This 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.
  • Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Well, I was taught using phonics, and then I wrote a paper that basically applied the idea to LLMs for constrained text generation. I'd say mission accomplished.
    • humean_being 4y ago
      This is a chance, stay with me here, that humans and LLMs learn differently.
  • JBiserkov 4y ago
    My "favorite" part was '"read" this word I have covered with a sticky note'. You need X-ray vision like Superman to actually read that. Scratch that, it was recorded video, so even Superman couldn't do that, you'd need a time machine in addition to the X-ray vision.
• somishere 4y ago
  IMHO reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom. Kids need to be interested in reading, and that's up to the parents more than it is to the school. My very unique / personal take. Have been doing sight words with my 5yo for the last two weeks. He just started his second term of prep (pre year 1). He's not advanced as far as I can't tell, but I'll tell you it's exhilarating to watch his progress. He absolutely loves the challenge of it. And he's already sounding out and reading short, repetitive books based on known words. He's a lucky kid for so many reasons. Not a great case in point for the same. All kids are different, with unique needs, and schools should be expected to adapt to these. But it's a two way street. If an individual isn't reading by fourth grade, after four years of schooling, then something is going on .. either at home or in a cognitive sense. If a whole class isn't reading, then sure - look at the curriculum ... but there's probably something more systemic at play.
  • jasonhansel 4y ago
    > that's up to the parents more than it is to the school. The reality is that some parents simply do not have the time and resources to provide this sort of support. The purpose of our educational system is to educate kids, not to supervise them while their parents do so.
    • ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
      Why have parents be involved with raising their kids at all? Just let the state do everything.
      • humean_being 4y ago
        In 1900 the literacy rate of the US was roughly 20%. Over the next century states and the federal government introduced mandatory educational requirements and expanded access to public education. By 2000 literacy is north of 80%. Do you think literate citizens are less free to make choices than illiterate ones?
  • josho 4y ago
    > reading competency starts at home, not in the classroom. You are correct. Those students that read with their parents and learn at home have a significant advantage. Our education system however should do everything that it can to help those children that didn't have this advantage to catch up. I've read research in the past that shows good schools to bring those kids up to the same level, evidently reading the comments here it seems the US school system has significant issues.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tempaway45752 4y ago
  I think if you did a study of Agile vs Waterfall and then took out all the nuance and then wrote an angry podcast about one side or the other it would be somewhat equivalent to this. i.e. reducing complex things (like project managment or teaching) to 'this way is wrong other way is right'. The skills/experience of the teachers/project managers are probably the biggest factor
• Ajedi32 4y ago
  I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that. For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry. Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.
  • fikama 4y ago
    Your example sentence was incredibly hard to read for me. To be fair English isn't my primary language. But still, I think it could be that different people read in different ways, so some depend more on context than others, etc.
  • naasking 4y ago
    I think they've extended the meaning of "reading" to include a certain level of "understanding what you just read". Your nonsense sentence can't pass the latter test because there is no understanding to be gleaned, but it's not at all obvious that that should how we view reading exactly for that reason.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bcrosby95 4y ago
      Correct, but I don't know if they've extended anything. When you say someone reads at the 12th grade level, it has never meant that they can superficially sound out every word, it means they can understand what the text is trying to say.
• patwolf 4y ago
  My kids go to a school that teaches phonics. Some of my teacher friends have told me that phonics is antiquated, so it does make me happy to see that perhaps it is the best method of learning to read. It has worked well for kids so far. I will say though that the school's method of teaching phonics is much more rigorous than anything I ever learned as a kid. They have a long list of graphemes (letters and letter combinations), and they need to be able to recite all the phonemes (sounds) that each grapheme can make. I have a hard time answering their phonics questions, like if they ask me what sounds "ou" makes. It can make at least four sounds, e.g. sour, group, court, country. I can't confidentially help them without a cheatsheet.
• cpif 4y ago
  This reminds me of an article in the Atlantic I liked [1], which argued that the real problem for American education is that it places too much emphasis on the mechanics of reading comprehension, leaving content-oriented coursework such as history, science, and sociology on the back burner. Three-cueing or any other inference-based approach to reading isn't going to work when kids don't have enough knowledge about the world to make good inferences. It's good to hear that phonics are making something of a comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too. I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university -- when a kid stumbles over a word like "infrastructure," one senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties of printed text. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-rad...
• rkapsoro 4y ago
  Me, I stick with Stephen Krashen's hypothesis, borne out by my own experience: compelling, comprehensible input is the key. This applies to both your first language acquired when you are young and any other languages later. Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too. I have many criticisms of the education I received as a youngster, but they did get this right.
• fwlr 4y ago
  The fact that the education system managed to forget how to teach kids how to read is unbelievably infuriating. I have been guilty in the past of rolling my eyes at “teachers are heroes, teachers should be paid like rockstars”. I don’t feel guilty anymore!
  • CalRobert 4y ago
    If teachers were paid like rockstars we'd be able to get better teachers.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      In my neck of the woods, if we paid teachers as well, by mid career, as gas station managers, we'd get better teachers.
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    Don't know how anyone who went through school would ever feel guilty about rolling their eyes at that.
    • fwlr 4y ago
      I went to a selective-entry single-gender public school, I have always just assumed my school experiences aren’t reflective of schools in general and refused to draw conclusions from my experiences.
  • gshubert17 4y ago
    A similar tragedy was losing an effective treatment for scurvy, later rediscovered and connected with Vitamin C. https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
• nmca 4y ago
  This is one of the most shocking things I have heard about in ages. Because kids can't vote and don't have money they really do seem to get shafted in the US.
• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  They broke training fresh neural networks for people while AI training gets the most careful and best supported and financed training. Which is already going exponential. What could go wrong?
• techaqua 4y ago
  as a non-native english speaker. i don't understand and can't relate at all.
• piclib 4y ago
  [flagged]
• edtechdev 4y ago
  Educational researcher here. There's no such thing as a "science of reading." It's part of the highly politicized "reading wars" (see also the "math wars" which has been going on for decades). It's no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm various teaching strategies. Phonics has its place, contexts where it is appropriate and beneficial, but it is not the sole strategy that works or should be used in every context. A recent meta-analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Analysis_of_the_Impact_of_Reading_Interventions_for_Students_in_the_Primary_Grades https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338494581_Meta-Anal... and the What Works Clearinghouse have summaries of the evidence for different strategies for improving early reading skills: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14 Direct Instruction (also championed by one political side) is not an effective strategy: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139 https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/139 Here's just one post with a little more info on the political context: https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-of-reading-fulfill-social-justice-equity-goals-in-education/ https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/01/14/does-the-science-o... A bigger scandal is how states like Florida game the system to make their reading score rankings look higher: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-education-system-is-vastly-underperforming-column/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/01/05/floridas-educati... The good news is there are a lot of strategies that help with reading in various contexts. There's even research on how reading to dogs (or even robots) helps students with reading :)
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    I notice that the study you cite is measuring effectiveness in reading interventions. Obviously, that's where the data is coming from because we don't carefully track readers who learn successfully at a much earlier age. However, I wonder if the ideal pedagogy would be different for younger students (maybe pre-K to 1st) who have less knowledge and smaller vocabularies? It's a bit tricky because a lot of the students who need intervention probably need remedial instruction in other areas too, but some of them may have been good students who struggled with reading.
• mcv 4y ago
  I can't help but think of my youngest son. He's been having language development problems his whole life; barely spoke at 3. He got help, and he quickly become a very adept speaker, using complex sentence structures, though he does have a bit of a speech impediment. I already expected him to have trouble learning to read, and he did. It was hard, he hated it, and we received a lot of help with it. One thing that struck me from this story is kids only wanting to read books they already know. My son was like that. He loves Dr Seuss books and has read the easier ones a dozen times, so he always proposes to read that instead of the new book we're trying to read. Still, he reads a lot better now than some of the kids in the story. He's starting to pick up on random texts he runs into, reading subtitles (he's too slow though), so there's definitely progress. He's 8, which I think corresponds to grade 3 in the US system? He's about a year behind in reading, so if American kids a year older than that read worse than he does, that's not good. Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    > Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages... Sure, a language like Turkish (29 characters, 29 sounds) will be more phonetic, but English's eccentricities are overstated, with most boiling down to "unstressed vowels get shortened, shwa-ed, or skipped". Once you clear the first 50 or so words by frequency, it gets pretty sound-it-out for a good long time before you start hitting weird loan words.
• nateburke 4y ago
  No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing. They are reading. OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. There is a nonzero chance that it could be interpreted by the child as the parent watching a video. Or playing a game. Children have a very powerful desire to imitate, and it should not be ignored in the debate on literacy.
  • mbrudd 4y ago
    100%! We read to our kids a TON from the day they were born -- no tricks or gimmicks, we just read to them. A lot. And they've always seen us reading actual books. YMMV, but our kids learned to read early and well and they both still enjoy reading. A lot.
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    I'm not sure how you are reading to your kid but mine usually sits on my lap. He knows what is on the screen whether it's words or something else. There's a "nonzero chance" your dead tree book is a game too ala Sudoku.
  • roydivision 4y ago
    Great point. Children also have a powerful desire to know their parents are paying attention to them. Phones disrupt this as well.
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    Yup. Kids think my phone === games/videos. They know it can do other stuff but why would anyone use all those boring apps when games or videos are available?
  • euroderf 4y ago
    My 3yo gets about 10m a day of Khan Academy on my phone. That and video calls to mom are ALL he gets on my phone. Hopefully this is setting expectations for this particular technology/medium.
• tabbott 4y ago
  For those readers who are skeptical whether this curriculum is really in widespread use, it definitely still is. I have young kids and before listening to this podcast, my wife and I spent a bunch of time last Fall looking at schools for our eldest to start Kindergarten, because San Francisco's lottery system means there's no default school. A lot of schools, even fancy private schools, used materials designed for this three cues reading curriculum. We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear". These books had two problems that were obvious to us as parents: You don't need to know how to read in order to appear to read the book (just be shown the pattern for what to say on each page), and the books are _incredibly boring_ -- even our 2-year-old wouldn't be interested in reading such a book. The teachers we talked to said things that in retrospect echo the marketing lines for this curriculum that you here about in this podcast. We Googled why these stupid books are being used in schools at all, and found https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... (An earlier article the by the host of the Sold a Story podcast). I recommend the article for folks who want to read something on the topic, though the podcast is the result of her considerably deeper investigation into why this is happening, and I highly recommend it as well for those who have the time. We ended up sending our daughter to a Montessori school; we picked it for several reasons, but one observation is that because they have their own philosophy about how to teach reading and writing, they're relatively resilient to this sort of fake "science" based fad. (Other things we saw visiting schools that made me sad included plentiful posters about the CUBES math strategy, which felt like an algorithm for being able to produce the correct answer to a word problem without actually reading and understanding the words -- i.e. an adaptation of the math curriculum to a world where many children struggle to read).
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear". This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used. To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word. They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness. All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  A bit offtopic, but i find it interesting, how young kids ask A LOT of questions... "how does that work? why is that like that? Where did that come from? How come this is that? How do you do that? How did we do that befire this? ....", and then we put those kids through the schooling system, and the kids seem uninterested in anything, the questions stop and teaching them stuff becomes a pain for many.
• Khaine 4y ago
  From the podcast: "Here’s what’s happening to many children in this country. They go to a “balanced literacy” school that uses Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. They’re taught the cueing strategies. Their reading ability is measured using leveled books. If they’re struggling – and someone notices – they might get Reading Recovery in first grade, where they get cueing and leveled books. And if they’re still struggling after that, many of them get Leveled Literacy Intervention. More cueing. More leveled books. Struggling readers keep getting more of the same. That’s what happened to Matthew. Missy’s son. In Gwinnett County, Georgia. She and her husband ended up hiring a private tutor to help Matthew. She remembers calling the tutor. Purcell: And she was like, “You finally arrived at the place where most of us arrive.” She had given up on the idea that the school was going to teach her son how to read. And she’d decided she was going to have to take care of the problem herself. It’s what Corinne Adams did with her son Charlie. It’s what Lee Gaul did in New York City with his daughter Zoe. It’s what Kenni Alden in California wishes she had done with her son. Missy says the private tutoring helped Matthew. But she felt like the balanced literacy instruction he was getting at school was undercutting what he was learning from his tutor. His tutor was teaching him how to decode words. At school he was being taught the cueing system. So last year she and her husband pulled him out of public school, and they put him in a private school for kids with dyslexia. Matthew’s in sixth grade now. And Missy says he’s doing really well. After just one year at the private school, she says he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing. For Missy, what’s especially painful about all this is that she had been a teacher. She advocated for Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell in her school district. She taught other teachers how to do balanced literacy with the cueing and the leveled books."
• Dnguyen 4y ago
  This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to different book and he was able to read a few sentences. I tried a book we haven't read yet (higher level Dr. Suess's book) and he was able to read 20%. Taking turn on the pages made it fun and I tried to exaggerate some of the words to make it more dramatic, like CRASH!!!. Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Being a public support station, they tend to have sponsor promotions quite a bit, so my son was listing to classical music and people talking. I believe the music and the talking sound got him to be familiar with English phonic early, so when it comes to reading, the rhythm is not so strange. Sadly, with the second son, we had to split time with two kids and more work, we didn't do the same routine. He was barely reading when he got into kindergarden. But thank God he had a great teacher in 1st grade, over zoom she taught most of the class to read. My kids actually excelled during pandemic teaching over zoom. Of course we were there to help them along. I think reading is priority one for any kid. Once they learn to read, they are more independent, read menu and decide for themselves, read instructions to build LEGOs, read street names, really open the world to them.
  • passion__desire 4y ago
    > Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that. Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German. https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56 https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56 So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.
    • legacynl 4y ago
      Learning by listening to something during your sleep doesn't work. Brains go into a sort of maintenance mode during sleep, and it's not possible for your brain to sleep and interpret & comprehend sensory input at the same time. Most likely the noise will have a negative effect on the length and quality of your sleep, which does have a proven negative effect on memory. So it's probably better for you to learn while your awake and just sleep at night.
• shadowtree 4y ago
  China has a 99.7% youth literacy rate - isn't that enough proof in regards to which method works best?
• Khaine 4y ago
  Again from the podcast: Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s? Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours. These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal. Again from the podcast: "Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need. And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."
  • milesskorpen 4y ago
    Yes, early elementary reading education should include phonics. Calkins would agree - her first reading curriculum (which is relatively new compared to her writing work) tells schools using the program to supplement it with a phonics curriculum; That wasn't her specialty (just like she doesn't cover math and history). Reducing all reading instruction to phonics is wildly reductive, and her program does a good job at the non-phonics components (and possibly phonics too now? I believe they've added a lot more of that to the base curriculum with the recent revisions, but no personal experience).
    • 4y ago
• readthenotes1 4y ago
  Bob The Builder got my child started. I didn't read to her most nights, btw. I told her a multi-year bedtime story instead.
• HeckFeck 4y ago
  I have a young cousin, he's recently had his sixth birthday. Reading is completely novel for him. He loves it. Even though he doesn't fully understand the words, he will point to letters and sound them, then he will read the full word aloud. It is an almost majestic thing to witness; he is so pleased with himself when he gets the words right. He was reading everything he could find that had letters in my house. Let's put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be, it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don't think he'd have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said 'that shape means blue' or whatever. Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the same way?
• hitgeek 4y ago
  I heard of this story years ago, and was very dismayed. (There is no date on this website is this something new?) however the last 2 years I've experienced kids being taught to read in US public school kindergarten and the curriculum was nothing like was described in this series. They were taught phonics and memorized common non-phonetic words the same way I was taught 30 years ago.
  • pitaj 4y ago
    It's likely you got lucky or your state / school district already changed the curriculum. The podcast goes into how over the past few years, there has been a lot of activism to shift schools from cueing back to phonics. At various levels of government, including state laws.
• throwaway8503 4y ago
  Hot take, but: the same issue is present in math, with the aggressive deprioritization of rote learning of arithmetic. People need a foundation upon which to build higher concepts; knowing your times tables is necessary to grasp division algorithms. The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather than the boring learning is a problem.
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• game_the0ry 4y ago
  A couple of thoughts form my own anecdotal evidence: * My mother was a stay-at-home mom and some of the earliest memories I have is her teaching me to read. * I had difficulty in school and I did not fit in. My social issues spilled into the classroom, my grades suffered, i was picked on a lot, and I was usually put in remedial classes (you know those smaller classes with like 5 students). Yet I got a 1460 on my SATs, +700 on SATIIs, and went to USNews top 25 college (~20% acceptance rate at the time, ~12% now). I have gotten more social since, but it left me with the impression that public school can do more harm than good. I am pro school choice and will seriously consider homeschooling.
• WeylandYutani 4y ago
  We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does anything need to be changed? Invest in more teachers not new fancy methods.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > We've been teaching kids to read for 200 years so why does anything need to be changed? We've been gathering and making food for much longer than 200 years, and we keep changing that, too.
• 7thaccount 4y ago
  My kid is six and can read 100+ page kids books in about an hour (she doesn't do this super often though). It wasn't too hard to teach her to get there either, but repetition is key. We started when she was 4 by reciting all the sounds each letter could do each night. It used to take us almost an hour to get to Z, but eventually she got it down fast. I tried to make it as fun as possible. Then we would do two to three letter words and have her figure out the words by using those sounds (sometimes trying various combinations until something made sense). We did that a few nights each week for a few months while she was playing. You can't force it, but I could usually get a few words in here and there. Then we started very simple sentences with the various Bob, Learning Dynamics...etc books. This was a big shift, but became easy soon enough. After she got through ~50 of those short little books, we moved on to the beginning chapter books when she was almost 6. She could earn certain privileges like TV if she reads a book. I kept reading to her (story time) as well each night. She's in kindergarten and reads like a champ now. Her school work goes over additional phonics stuff which is good to fill in any gaps she got from my very non-academic methods (I never really learned the rules as a kid...I just liked reading and I guess picked things up organically). It's pretty cool that she can pretty much just read anything now that isn't a very unusual word you just have to know. She sometimes guesses at words though that are wrong, so we're working on slowing down a little bit. It's a balancing act though. You don't want to make it such a chore that they don't want to read later, but I just don't think the math and reading is very good at school so far, so I'm trying to supplement. Spending a few hours on reading and math outside of school each week seems to eat up a small amount of free time, but lead to big successes.
• obscurette 4y ago
  Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly disagree that "there is not enough evidence based science in teaching" etc. If there is something really to highlight what's wrong with education systems all over the world, it's too much "evidence based science". Every educational psychologist and his dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should be taught and have a ton of evidence why. And of course all generations of educators so far have been idiots. It's THE reason nobody wants to teach any more. "Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession." (https://archive.ph/MEqrK https://archive.ph/MEqrK) The truth every teacher faces is that there is no single silver bullet. There is no any "method" in education that can replace simple things – time, effort, motivation, affiliation etc.
  • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    You are saying "the evidence is bullshit", right?
    • obscurette 4y ago
      No. I mean that it's not hard to gather evidence to back even very stupid teaching methods if you simply put enough effort and time to it.
      • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        Ok, so: "cherry picked evidence means the conclusions are bullshit" ?
        • obscurette 4y ago
          No, cherry picking would be relatively easy to spot. What's actually hard is to determine what you actually measure.
          • 4y ago
• euroderf 4y ago
  A book I bought (its name escapes me ATM) said, make word-only flash cards (no pix needed) of things your kid can directly relate to. Like body parts. Then colors and numbers. It seemed to work. We could play a "body parts game" where I shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.
• aguynamedben 4y ago
  If you have a 3-4 year old: Bob Books
• hondo77 4y ago
  People are different. Phonics helped my sister. I had no use for them. We both know how to read.
• xkjyeah 4y ago
  So, Americans decided to make their language as difficult to read as Chinese?!? Well done...
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• bryansum 4y ago
  The Right to Read movie talks about this very topic, and features the author of this podcast: https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/ https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/
• Khaine 4y ago
  Again from the podcast: "This is Sarah Gannon. She’s a teacher you met in Episode 3. She trusted Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading. She believed in the cueing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out. Gannon: Teacher friends were like, “Did you read this Emily Hanford? And I was like, “I read it.” And we were like, “What is she talking about?” She was outraged. Because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading. And then, her daughter, Maeve. (Music) Maeve wasn’t learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her. But it wasn’t working. So Sarah went looking for answers. And discovered the research. Gannon: I changed because I had to. There was no choice. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing with Maeve. The same thing happened to Carrie Chee. She was one of the Lucy Calkins fans you met in an earlier episode. The one who didn’t like George Bush. One day, when Carrie’s daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, “I have something to tell you.” Carrie Chee: My child looked at me and she was really nervous and anxious, and she just says, “I can’t read.” The school hadn’t said there was a problem. Carrie hadn’t noticed a problem either. But her daughter knew. Chee: She knew. They know. You know, the kids know first. The parents know second. The teacher chimes in third. And then, you know, the hunt is on for help. Some kids try to keep it a secret when they’re struggling. They can look like they’re reading for a while. But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart. (Music ends) Carrie Chee was a 7th grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class. A lot of them. And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in. Chee: And I just kept saying, “Well keep trying.” And then when they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try. And what I’m haunted by is, when it wasn’t working, I blamed it on children. Carrie Chee isn’t sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren’t for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon too. If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff. Gannon: I don’t know if I could be convinced and that’s what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who, it’s just like, hold fast to old beliefs. And I think, I, honestly, I think I would be one of them. You know. But I guess you have to say, like, it’s OK to be wrong. Like, I was wrong." How many of their students have been irreparably damaged from their incompetence and unprofessionalism. It took for their family to be personally impacted that they actually looked into the research. If a doctor gave medicine that had terrible consequences without looking into it what would happen? Or an engineer who didn't look into the structural properties of a material and a bridge collapsed what would happen? What has happened to these educators, and those who advocated for this practices?
• samstave 4y ago
  Teaching a kid to read is about spending time with your kids seriously. It's parent child bonding Read to your kids as much as possible
• WalterBright 4y ago
  "Why Johnny Can't Read" from 1954 is as fresh as ever. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913401 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/0060913...
• WalterBright 4y ago
  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' education.
  • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    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 for additional tutoring. The simplest fix you could slap on would be to make it a bonus for each student who tested as below grade level at the start of the year but above grade level at the end, but that also has complexities.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      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.
• bradgranath 4y ago
  TLDR: Adults don't like the sound of children sounding out words slowly and would prefer not to have to listen to it. The old way of getting around this was having kids memorize whole words. That never really worked, so the new technique is to teach them several different strategies to guess what it is they are reading. It turns out (no duh) that doesn't work either, but it does mask the signs of illiteracy, so that intervention ends up coming later.
• timthorn 4y ago
  The UK faced the same challenge but has mostly ensured that now synthetic phonics is the standard method of instruction. The success of this programme has really been down to a single key politician in the Department for Education, Nick Gibb. He's never had a cabinet role so didn't get deeply caught up in reshuffles, and for most of the past 13 years he's been the Schools Minister. The TES ran a profile of him and his phonics drive recently, a good followup to the Sold a Story series: http://archive.today/ee9LA http://archive.today/ee9LA
• noufalibrahim 4y ago
  I'm a heavy advocate of homeschooling and did that with my kids for a while before personal circumstances made it impractical for me. I used the book "The Well trained mind" as a general curriculum guide and bought books which it recommended. The one it pushed for teaching reading was https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-teaching-reading/ https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-... I used this for my first two kids and am currently using it for my third. They pick up reading proficiency in a few months and you need to consistently spend about 20-30 minutes a day. The bonding that comes with your kids is an added bonus. After that, you establish a reading culture at home, blanket ban on electronic "entertainment" for the early years and they become good readers very quickly. I lived in a bit of a bubble and when I met my kids' friends when they went to school, it was painful to see how crippled they were with basics skills and also tragic to see my own kids regress to the average in these skills. The upshot of all this is that basic liberal education is not that hard to do for ones own kids and it gives them a lifelong advantage. I highly recommend it.
• rickdicker 4y ago
  On the final episode, something that kind of bothers me here is the generally antagonistic attitude towards the "get kids excited about reading" approach. The whole series focuses on the struggling students who were wronged by misguided one-size-fits-all teaching, and then the narrator goes on to assert that students don't need to be sold the joys of reading because, "look at these sound bites of kids learning to read - they sure seem excited to me!" Kind of annoying to see someone so dismissive of the notion after spending four hours talking about how not all kids pick things up through osmosis.
• pklausler 4y ago
  On a book suggestion subreddit that I follow there are way too many queries of the form "I've never read a book, can you recommend one to start with?"