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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 woul

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.

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

[dead]

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.