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How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

89 points by philipswood 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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bradley13 2y ago
Teaching reading without phonetics. The "new math". "Science" without the scientific method. History rewritten to match modern sensibilities. There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. Alternatively, for the conspiracy theory that it is trying to create compliant peasants rather than educated citizens.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  Tutors adapt to their students. Schools adapt to metrics. Why? A tutor can do trial and error and eventually find a way that helps the student understand. School system has a needlesly specific curriculum that is decided a priori, and it's not optional.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Kind of. I work with a lot of curricula. There are degrees of specificity. Common core is, notably, absurdly specific, and dense. It’s the US at its best, which is to say its worst. Including the fact that CC hasn’t ever really been touched since. This is seldom how curricula in actual developed jurisdictions are built. There are also degrees to which a teacher can ‘play it by ear’ in their classroom. This is informed by their ability to do so competently, and the freedom allowed by their school, school system, etc. The existence of a curricula, even in a public education context, doesn’t inherently disallow a teacher from attempting different teaching styles to get through to a kid, or changing what they focus on in order to teach to their students’ zone of proximal development. Schools “adapting to metrics” is very much moreso informed by the undeniably reality that, with any sizeable group of kids, and realistic constants on resources, you quickly need to start doing “formative assessment”, and doing assessment well is really hard. Above all though, schools adapt to metrics because it’s what’s demanded of them by their bosses. By that, I don’t mean ‘educational bureaucrats’, I mean…parents, taxpayers at large, etc. ‘Hold hands under a rainbow and nothing bad ever happens’ individualised education is simply very hard to monitor, it’s very hard to hold anyone to account. Stakeholders hate this. They want measurement. They want numbers. And numbers invite systems, and putting people into boxes. We get exactly what we deserve here. Nothing more and nothing less.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I’ve been very impressed with the “awful” common core math. It teaches kids to think about numbers the way my friends and I do. (Context: I’m not a mathematician, but won lots of state math contests in high school. I didn’t choose to specialize in it but neither do I suck at it.) It’s very different from the dreadfully boring memorization-based curriculum I had to endure.
  - drivebyhooting 2y ago
    The problem is you shouldn’t be thinking deeply about addition and multiplication when you’re just number crunching or working through algebraic manipulation. Understanding is well and great, but instant and effortless arithmetic recall is table stakes.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      I've yet to find anyone who hasn't written part of a CAS that understands what algebraic manipulation even is, let alone how to do it outside of hand picked artificial examples. I find it astonishing that term rewriting systems are considered esoteric mathematics that you don't see unless you work in a very specific and niche fields of mathematics or computer science.
      - drivebyhooting 2y ago
        Never met a physicist? Or even someone from engineering department? Plenty of college students are doing multiple pages of derivations for their coursework.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        And yet, give them something as innocuous as $$ \frac{\frac{a}{b}}{c \times \frac{d}{\frac{e}{f}}} \times \frac{\frac{g}{h \times \frac{i}{j}}}{k} $$ And watch 98% of them fail to bring it to normal for a simple fraction.
        2y ago
- r0ckarong 2y ago
  > There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. The world is full of people who are not smart and don't want to feel inferior. No conspiracy needed, we've collectively decided it's best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included. That's what you're seeing here. To a degree this is part of a good society but it also removes incentives to escape mediocrity.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    >we’ve collectively decided it’s best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included What are some examples of this?
    - tivert 2y ago
      > What are some examples of this? Perhaps attempts to abolish gifted and talented programs in schools?
      - drivebyhooting 2y ago
        And abolish algebra until high school.
      - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
        This is a fantastic comment because of how right you think you are, how utterly wrong you are in reality, and the context being the assertion that people don’t like to feel stupid. Thank you so much for this. In the metaphorical galaxy brain comic of this situation, “GATE programs fell out of fashion because of tall poppy syndrome” is the first or AT BEST the third frame. It’s the line of thinking held by the ‘uninformed self-described smart guy’ contingent, that knows nothing about education, yet think that they can intuit their way through it. It’s unrealistic, naive, and utterly condescending. It’s no surprise that I see it so much in tech people.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
- bsder 2y ago
  > There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. You get what you pay for. Pennsylvania attempted to put minimum standards on teachers; a big chunk of the teachers failed. When faced with the huge amount of money the state would have to shell out for teachers who could pass, Pennsylvania dumped the standards and never tried again. Pay in education is garbage relative to all the other jobs a teacher is qualified to be doing instead. And then we complain that education is dominated by the unqualified. And so it goes.
  - complaintdept 2y ago
    Teachers unions also negotiate for things that make it nearly impossible to fire an underperforming teacher.
    - bsder 2y ago
      This is the "welfare queen" dog whistle of anti-union propaganda. Please stop spreading it. Yes, school management has to genuinely document an "underperforming teacher". There is a full legal process that has to be followed and it takes time. Too bad, so sad. However, the problem is that school management doesn't want to produce that "documentation". It is genuine work and has the downside of maybe exposing that the teacher isn't underperforming and now a countersuit is incoming. In addition, attempting to fire a teacher almost always causes a kerfuffle in the community unless the teacher is complete garbage. And, see, if you, as a superintendent cause a kerfuffle, that is going to hit the local news and the Internet and is going to be a negative mark when you want your next job (superintendents tend to move on while most teachers do not). So, what your little shibboleth is advocating for is unlimited authority by the superintendent to punish anybody they deem a "troublemaker"--which is any teacher with the temerity to do something that might get in the way of their next promotion. And that optimizes for teachers who simply don't rock the boat under any circumstances irrespective of any teaching skill or educational results.
    - consteval 2y ago
      Yes unions are bad and if we have less union then everything would magically be better. Also if we continue to burn coal and nobody takes the Jab we'd all be smarter or something.
- deleted 2y ago
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yorwba 2y ago
(2019) I wonder whether "many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it" is still true now.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  There is a massive range of ability, knowhow, ongoing professional development, etc within “teachers”. The US is in itself a good example of this. In some areas, teaching is a white collar profession. In others, it’s blue collar. In my country it’s entirely white collar. In others, it’s entirely blue collar. This has a massive impact on teachers’ ability, willingness, means, etc to stay up to date. it can take decades for new ‘best practices’ to proliferate. This is ignoring the fact that Education is at BEST a social science and carries with it all the grey area, fads, flip-flopping on ‘best practices’, etc. There are schools of thought. Very valid schools of thought. It’s all very complicated.
llm_trw 2y ago
How can we expect kids to learn to read a language that's taken an alphabet and created a poor woman's logogram out of it? wi hæv ɔl ðə tulz wi nid tə tɝn ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ˈɪntu ə ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ wʌn kæn rid wɪðˈaʊt ˈnidɪŋ fɔr jɪrz ˈtutərɪŋ. jɛt wi doʊnt bɪˈkəz ɪd bi tu mʌtʃ wɝk.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  see also https://www.shavian.info https://www.shavian.info (the Achilles heel: any phonetically spelled language can only be correct for at most one dialect!)
  - d110af5ccf 2y ago
    Unless each spoken dialect corresponds to a matching written dialect. But that just sounds like an even messier system than modern english.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      That's an argument for why we should all use Chinese instead.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    You can always phonetically spell in the dialect. Which Finnish does often. So if you have a dialect you write it out phonetically. There might be slight deviation from standard phonetics(some vowel variations), but the dialect does get rather close. In the end, maybe it is inherently wrong take that same word in different dialects is the same word. Usually they are close enough to be relatively intelligible.
helpfulContrib 2y ago
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donatj 2y ago
I had a heck of a time reading as a kid. I was taught just to sound every single word out and reading a chapter book took me literally forever. Beyond the time factor, my comprehension was terrible because in taking the time to sound every single word out I would lose track of the overall meaning of the sentence and often need to start over. I would say I was a very poor reader into high school. Honestly the thing that really helped was just spending so much time on computers. Eventually something in my brain clicked and started memorizing shapes of the top of words. My eyes scan the top of the letters. I only fall through to looking at the individual letters when what I read didn't make sense. I can read pretty reasonably fast now.
- oaththrowaway 2y ago
  Do different fonts effect you or are they universal enough to not give you any problems?
  - donatj 2y ago
    Never really been much of a problem. I will say that OpenDyslexic is one of the hardest to read I have ever tried though.
- d110af5ccf 2y ago
  You might have something unusual going on there. At the beginning I, and to the best of my knowledge everyone I grew up around, was also taught to sound words out. At some point I stopped needing to do that. That happened quickly for the common words and more slowly for the uncommon ones. At the extreme end, for example extremely specific medical or chemical terminology, I still have to do that on account of never having encountered the word before. At no point did I intentionally memorize word shapes. At no point in my life have I ever been conscious of recognizing words by shape. That might well be what's happening under the hood, but if so it's not something I have any awareness of. I just see a word and (in most cases) instantly know what it is without thinking about it.
twelve40 2y ago
> Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters I'm really confused by this. Yes, this is what skilled readers do once they are skilled. But when any kid is starting out, they are by definition a poor (brand new) reader. Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! So how does this "new research" help?
- zeristor 2y ago
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  - stackghost 2y ago
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  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    …who are you talking to?
- jchw 2y ago
  Well, for one thing, it strongly suggests (and I absolutely agree) that phonics is the better way to go. I actually did struggle with learning how to read in early elementary school, and thank the Lord, I was lucky enough to get some phonics-based intervention that finally made things start clicking. Had that not occurred, I'm pretty confident I'd probably still be a relatively poor reader right now.
- fmbb 2y ago
  > Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! What makes you think so? Perhaps some kids pick this up really quickly and practice it. Some kids learn faster how to run and kick a ball, and some learn faster how to ride a bicycle.
  - twelve40 2y ago
    when you are starting on day 1, isn't it obvious you don't know any written words and you have no skills to put the letters together, because you are just starting out?? Then saying "just start recognizing word as a sequence of letters like the skillful readers do" is about as helpful as "just start reading" if you've never done this before.
ozim 2y ago
I read this or similar article like a year ago. I am an avid reader and I did not realize until I read about it that someone could struggle with reading because it is so effortless for me. It is my story “don’t take others experiences for granted “, I have a bit more empathy for people knowing that.
complaintdept 2y ago
Relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-and-fall-of-vibes-based-literacy https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...
WalterBright 2y ago
This "whole word" nonsense has reached new levels of absurdity with people trying to replace words with icons at every opportunity. The gawddamned icons on a car's instrument panels are a classic example of the suckiness of this approach. My old car says "hot" "cold" "defrost" on the controls. The new ones each invent their own incomprehensible icons. Most pictoglyphic written languages have evolved towards phonetics. Including Mayan, Egyptian, and western writing.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  I'd guess the new cars are probably sold into markets bigger than a single language. (still, that's no excuse not to have an industry group standardising the icons)
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    I've heard that rationale. The trouble with it is how are you going to look up an icon in a dictionary? People aren't born with the knowledge of what that wretched icon for on/off means. Or that a drawing of an ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp means oil pressure.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Perhaps that's the emoji U+1FA94 and is thus standard, and emoji will replace spelling until we end up with a morphographic writing system. Dictionaries will work like mushroom-identification handbooks, where you find the emoji by navigating through a tree of questions.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        I think he means https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/images/uploads/content/warning-lights-oil.png https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/images/uploads/content/warning-l... ? Walter, if I told you to pull out the magnitude of Saturn before starting and then push it back in after the engine has warmed up, would you know what I'm referring to?
al_borland 2y ago
This is how I felt when I first tried to figure out what common core math was, after I kept hearing about it. It sounded like the people who made it were trying to create a process around what I would do in my head to try and solve a problem when I didn’t have paper or a calculator handy. What common core, and this reading approach, seem to miss is that those are things that come after learning the foundations and rules. I was taught with phonics, but 99% of words I read today are simply seen and recognized. Much like the 3 queuing method tries to create a process around. However, I think that is something that naturally develops through repetition. When someone reads the word “horse” and “house” enough times, the need to sound it out or read each letter goes away, but that’s not the starting point. As much as I like to think I can determine a word’s meaning through context, when put to the test, I often miss the mark. Reading on an e-reader lowers the barrier to looking up unfamiliar words and I find myself doing it more often. I find my assumption based on context can often be less than correct. Maybe I’m close, but there is more nuance to the actual definition. Sometimes I’m completely wrong and the whole meaning of the paragraph changes. Not to mention, if I look a word up to learn the actual meaning, it might be something I can introduce into my own speech and writing without sounding foolish. I relied on context a lot growing up, because I was too lazy to look things up. These days, with it being so easy, I don’t know why kids wouldn’t be encouraged to look up words they don’t know. I think my vocabulary would be much better had I grown up learning the words I didn’t know, instead of simply bypassing them.
- ra120271 2y ago
  I agree there is a development path to learning to read. My son is learning and during the phase of learning the phonics he would use the pictures a lot to help get context. You could tell because he would pause on each new page as he observed the graphics. But as he became more proficient he started using the graphics as a crutch to guess the words rather than sound them out and blend them. So I started covering the pictures with my hand as I turned the pages and his progress jumped ahead in the following weeks. He is still learning and falls into guessing patterns too easily. However through accompanied parent reading every night he is progressing well (IMO).
- threatofrain 2y ago
_vrtq 2y ago
This is why I think public education is idiotic. Why don’t parents take personal responsibility for educating kids? My mom taught me how to read when I was 3. She sat there with the book and helped me through it. Heck I even remember my dad teaching me about the word “the”. I thought it was so funny that it was pronounced “thuh”. Thanks to my parents I had zero problems with reading. I think the only way to truly solve these problems is to teach parents the importance of loving kids!
- Aeolun 2y ago
  The problem is that some kids respond very badly to parents teaching, and very good to a third party.
- mkaic 2y ago
  Unfortunately, many parents do not have the time or energy to spend this much time teaching kids to read. There are parents who have to work all the time so they can feed their kids, there are single parents who work even more to feed their kids, and there are parents who are raising multiple kids and can't give much time to each individual child as a result. There are also parents who struggle with reading themselves, and therefore aren't capable of teaching their kids! I agree that in a perfect world, all kids would receive personalized reading instruction from their parents. In reality, though, the poor/disadvantaged kids who need such instruction the most are also least likely to have parents capable of giving it to them. Well-funded public education is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers we have and it's crucial that we continue to support and expand it.
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- consteval 2y ago
  Most parents are dumb. Some parents are a dangerous level of the dumb. The level of dumb where they're unable to admit their flaws and will never say outloud "I'm dumb". That's a big problem, because it means you can't convince them of anything. And then when little timmy is functionally illiterate they'll somehow convince themselves that's fine. > teach parents These types of solutions don't work. "Teach people not to smoke" "Teach people to workout" "Teach people to be better people". We need real, actual solutions. As in processes we can take that prove better outcomes. Some hand-wavy "well just do better" isn't a solution. If anything, it's an anti-solution, as in it prevents real solutions getting through. If you want to reduce crime for example, you reduce poverty via social programs and industry. That is proven, without a doubt, to work. "people need to be better" doesn't work.
iamflimflam1 2y ago
One of the key things any parent should be doing is making sure their children are exposed to books from a very young age. And please make sure you take the time to read with your child.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  We’ve been reading since mine was very young. His comprehension is great, but trying to make him read or sound out the words? It’s not even that he can’t if you force him, the motivation is just not there. I really hope school will change something there.
  - larusso 2y ago
    All my kids went through this. We read a lot of books together and every kid when starting school was eagerly awaiting the time they finally read by themselves. And every one of them struggled with the phonetics part. They argued that it’s too hard and the lessons are not fun. But we knew that we learned like this and that it worked for us. So with more work it finally clicked. They are all very good readers now. They read tons of books and comics and can sound out words or names they don’t know. I think the system of teaching the phonetics is the best way but how we can keep kids motivated during the boring lessons is something we should tackle. By the way my experiences come from a German background.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      To be fair, English phonetics are a pain in the ass. Sounds change with no rhyme or reason to them, and the only way to learn all the different permutations is to see them all.
      - larusso 2y ago
        German has strict grammatical rules but we also have tons of words coming from Latin and close relative French. But I know what you mean. Being thought pronunciation in school in Oxford English taught by a teacher with heavy German accent wasn’t helpful. I learned most words and pronunciation from TV shows and movies but I can’t really spell a lot of words by heart. Reading is different because I know a lot of words. But the reverse doesn’t work for me. Luckily I write with assistance of my computer. To be fair I struggled with this also in German. Writing correctly was always a pain.
jjmarr 2y ago
Alternative alphabets have been kicking around for ages as a way to make it easier to learn English; mainly because our existing alphabet is inconsistent and doesn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence of letters to sounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet Sequoyah famously brought the Cherokee from 0% to 90% literacy in a decade after he invented a syllabic writing system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabar... Literacy could be much easier if we switched orthography and now with technology everything can be auto-transliterated.
card_zero 2y ago
The article isn't completely coherent, because it disapproves of "memorizing a bunch of words" while at the same time approving of storing words in memory for instant recognition. ...Is it really saying that to only memorize a bunch of words is insufficient, compared to memorizing lots? Is that the point being made there? Wasn't clear.
- hennell 2y ago
  It's active memorization vs passive memorisation. What words do you need to teach a kid to memorise for them to read Harry Potter? What if they get into Lord of the Rings instead? So you teach kids to sound out the words. To decode them. Mug-el = Muggle. But you're not sounding it out for long, you'll memorise it pretty fast. And if you forget it, you'll decode it again. The point is the memorization will happen automatically to avoid doing the recognition. But if you just jump to memorization you've got no fallback and no way to ever memorise more, you have to actively learn it again. It's like putting cache layer above a database for recently retrieved values. Hell of a lot easier than trying to cache everything or manually predict the best values to cache.
hintymad 2y ago
Maybe the only way to be good at reading for basic proficiency is to just reading more? Not sure why there are so many theories and practices. I have two anecdotes. Not that they count, but in case other people had similar experiences: One is that I didn't know how to read when I entered my first grade. For the entire first grade, I read only my textbook, which was too simple to help me read other books. And then in the summer time after my first grade, I picked up a book for fairy tales of animals, and I read along. I didn't look up a dictionary, I skipped the words that I didn't understand. And miraculously reading was never a problem for me any more. I repeated the pattern when I started to learn English. In English it was a graded reading by National Geographic, if I recall correctly, and later popular fictions by Sidney Sheldon. And then Japanese and then Spanish. I repeated the same pattern. In Japanese I started with 多読, and for Spanish La Alchimista, and Si Hubiera un Mañana after some graded readers. The reading just naturally became easier over time. Another anecdote was that even the most struggled students in my classes, throughout my middle school and high school, had no problem reading popular fictions. And by struggle I mean they would fail pretty much every subject and could barely graduate high school. However, there were a few extremely popular novels when I grew up, and everyone talked about them. So, every student read them. The novels were written in pretty elegant language with lots of sophisticated words, yet my classmates had no problem understanding them.
- hazbot 2y ago
  >>> Maybe the only way to be good at reading is to just reading more? Perhaps at some point you plateau and need to practice "micro skills". e.g. there's a point with chess where you stop getting better playing more games - but training puzzles can bump you out of the plateau.
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  Teachers bought into three cueing because as it turns out, a good portion of students will learn to read on their own. However, another portion of students won't. "Just reading more" doesn't work for these students because they don't know how to decode word sounds in the first place. This is why three cueing was so cruel. These kids were basically having to fake it out of embarrassment.
hazbot 2y ago
Retraining as a math teacher here, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how kids learn stuff at the moment. At one point in the article it states that indeed the trio of semantic/syntactic/graphophonic cues are used by readers. The article kind of dances around the point that even if these cues tend to be used by competent readers, it doesn't mean that training them directly is how novice readers need to learn. I'm really coming round to this belief that there is no substitute for the "rote" drilling of basic skills.
- d110af5ccf 2y ago
  > "rote" drilling of basic skills I think it depends on the nature of the task for which the skill is used. But I agree. There are certain things that are just not realistic to master without rote drilling of some sort of supporting material. At the same time I think rote drilling gets a bad reputation because poor teachers will tend to fall back on it in instances where it isn't particularly useful. I personally had a low opinion of it until university, where I encountered two independent topics where it was clearly necessary.
larusso 2y ago
Interesting article. I’m from Germany and I learned to read with the phonetics and sounding out words approach. My kids as well. It’s the first time I heard about this style of teaching how to read. My first reaction while reading was: “and how do some kids manage to read at all with only this system?” It’s very late into the article where they mention that first some kids will learn how to read no matter what and second that the problem is a mixed message as schools do teach phonetics but that the mean approach taught when seeing unknown words is to use a simpler system. I myself never look at queues or pictures when reading unknown texts. While learning English I read English books and used the context approach. But I had to first learn a lot of vocabulary to even start that.
joaomacp 2y ago
If you want to know about this in podcast form: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ Takes more time than reading the article, but the podcast has IMO a nice pace of leaving you curious and giving you info. It includes opinions from teachers, parents, etc.
barnabyjones 2y ago
I think the backlash against phonics is because English just has too many exceptions which makes it frustrating, but it's still important to teach simple phonics (common uses of short and long vowel sounds). Beyond that, any rigid approach is bound to fail because kids just need to get used to the general guidelines of English spelling and learn the exceptions one by one, through guided read-along practice. But the process of making educated guesses on how to say a word based on spelling is part of the learning process.
- markhahn 2y ago
  I'm imagining a reading curriculum that regards the irregularities as funny little foibles, oddities to point out and wonder about. Like if you go to a park and there's that one place it's too steep to walk, or the other that always floods and is muddy, or the place where mushrooms grow. Complaining about orthographic exceptions is like saying everything should be perfectly flat lawn, a giant grotesque golf course.
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  I wonder how much of it is how, for adults who already understand phonics, teaching it can being repetitive and monotonous. Three cueing offered a teaching theory where kids all sat around with a book with very little teacher intervention.
juped 2y ago
Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are already fairly resistant). It's really common for me to encounter adults doing things like reading sentences haltingly, substituting in a completely wrong word with the same first letter now and then, or just giving up on a sentence, and these are just the ones with English as a first language. Test yourself: what did you do when you encountered the words casphetato brolganic alvolamina sooveg in this sentence? A fluent English reader will just read them; I made them plausible and decodable, not like zprxapsi mnoqlkzb which I pulled out of a random number generator and a fluent reader may well do a double take at.
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MichaelRo 2y ago
Well there's two tests to figure out if a kid is a fast enough reader: 1) Have them read subtitles out loud (from a different language so they can't rely on audio). 2) Have them skimp through the text and provide a summary afterwards. I'm not very sure however how to GET there apart from the boring "read a lot". And reading a lot in today's video-infested age is simply, not realistic. When I grew up in communist Romania there was virtually no video content so much like a century before, the only form of ENTERTAINMENT was reading books. I read them because I was motivated by pleasure. Hated school-mandated readings, never did them or just cheated if no alternative but I did read a fuckton on my own volition because I repeat, that was the most powerful form of entertainment available. If I were brought up today surrounded by video content everywhere: addictive shorts, game tutorials, movies... I'm not at all sure I would have cared much for reading. It is what it is and we can't turn back time and expect today's kids to be as proficient readers as a gentleman of the 19th century, they just don't have the motivation anymore.

89 points by philipswood 2y ago

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Teaching reading without phonetics. The "new math". "Science" without the scientific method. History rewritten to match modern sensibilities. There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. Alternatively, for the conspiracy theory that it is trying to create compliant peasants rather than educated citizens.

loa_in_ 2y ago
Tutors adapt to their students. Schools adapt to metrics. Why? A tutor can do trial and error and eventually find a way that helps the student understand. School system has a needlesly specific curriculum that is decided a priori, and it's not optional.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Kind of. I work with a lot of curricula. There are degrees of specificity. Common core is, notably, absurdly specific, and dense. It’s the US at its best, which is to say its worst. Including the fact that CC hasn’t ever really been touched since. This is seldom how curricula in actual developed jurisdictions are built. There are also degrees to which a teacher can ‘play it by ear’ in their classroom. This is informed by their ability to do so competently, and the freedom allowed by their school, school system, etc. The existence of a curricula, even in a public education context, doesn’t inherently disallow a teacher from attempting different teaching styles to get through to a kid, or changing what they focus on in order to teach to their students’ zone of proximal development. Schools “adapting to metrics” is very much moreso informed by the undeniably reality that, with any sizeable group of kids, and realistic constants on resources, you quickly need to start doing “formative assessment”, and doing assessment well is really hard. Above all though, schools adapt to metrics because it’s what’s demanded of them by their bosses. By that, I don’t mean ‘educational bureaucrats’, I mean…parents, taxpayers at large, etc. ‘Hold hands under a rainbow and nothing bad ever happens’ individualised education is simply very hard to monitor, it’s very hard to hold anyone to account. Stakeholders hate this. They want measurement. They want numbers. And numbers invite systems, and putting people into boxes. We get exactly what we deserve here. Nothing more and nothing less.
kstrauser 2y ago
I’ve been very impressed with the “awful” common core math. It teaches kids to think about numbers the way my friends and I do. (Context: I’m not a mathematician, but won lots of state math contests in high school. I didn’t choose to specialize in it but neither do I suck at it.) It’s very different from the dreadfully boring memorization-based curriculum I had to endure.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  The problem is you shouldn’t be thinking deeply about addition and multiplication when you’re just number crunching or working through algebraic manipulation. Understanding is well and great, but instant and effortless arithmetic recall is table stakes.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    I've yet to find anyone who hasn't written part of a CAS that understands what algebraic manipulation even is, let alone how to do it outside of hand picked artificial examples. I find it astonishing that term rewriting systems are considered esoteric mathematics that you don't see unless you work in a very specific and niche fields of mathematics or computer science.
    - drivebyhooting 2y ago
      Never met a physicist? Or even someone from engineering department? Plenty of college students are doing multiple pages of derivations for their coursework.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        And yet, give them something as innocuous as $$ \frac{\frac{a}{b}}{c \times \frac{d}{\frac{e}{f}}} \times \frac{\frac{g}{h \times \frac{i}{j}}}{k} $$ And watch 98% of them fail to bring it to normal for a simple fraction.
        2y ago
r0ckarong 2y ago
> There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. The world is full of people who are not smart and don't want to feel inferior. No conspiracy needed, we've collectively decided it's best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included. That's what you're seeing here. To a degree this is part of a good society but it also removes incentives to escape mediocrity.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  >we’ve collectively decided it’s best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included What are some examples of this?
  - tivert 2y ago
    > What are some examples of this? Perhaps attempts to abolish gifted and talented programs in schools?
    - drivebyhooting 2y ago
      And abolish algebra until high school.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      This is a fantastic comment because of how right you think you are, how utterly wrong you are in reality, and the context being the assertion that people don’t like to feel stupid. Thank you so much for this. In the metaphorical galaxy brain comic of this situation, “GATE programs fell out of fashion because of tall poppy syndrome” is the first or AT BEST the third frame. It’s the line of thinking held by the ‘uninformed self-described smart guy’ contingent, that knows nothing about education, yet think that they can intuit their way through it. It’s unrealistic, naive, and utterly condescending. It’s no surprise that I see it so much in tech people.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
bsder 2y ago
> There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. You get what you pay for. Pennsylvania attempted to put minimum standards on teachers; a big chunk of the teachers failed. When faced with the huge amount of money the state would have to shell out for teachers who could pass, Pennsylvania dumped the standards and never tried again. Pay in education is garbage relative to all the other jobs a teacher is qualified to be doing instead. And then we complain that education is dominated by the unqualified. And so it goes.
- complaintdept 2y ago
  Teachers unions also negotiate for things that make it nearly impossible to fire an underperforming teacher.
  - bsder 2y ago
    This is the "welfare queen" dog whistle of anti-union propaganda. Please stop spreading it. Yes, school management has to genuinely document an "underperforming teacher". There is a full legal process that has to be followed and it takes time. Too bad, so sad. However, the problem is that school management doesn't want to produce that "documentation". It is genuine work and has the downside of maybe exposing that the teacher isn't underperforming and now a countersuit is incoming. In addition, attempting to fire a teacher almost always causes a kerfuffle in the community unless the teacher is complete garbage. And, see, if you, as a superintendent cause a kerfuffle, that is going to hit the local news and the Internet and is going to be a negative mark when you want your next job (superintendents tend to move on while most teachers do not). So, what your little shibboleth is advocating for is unlimited authority by the superintendent to punish anybody they deem a "troublemaker"--which is any teacher with the temerity to do something that might get in the way of their next promotion. And that optimizes for teachers who simply don't rock the boat under any circumstances irrespective of any teaching skill or educational results.
  - consteval 2y ago
    Yes unions are bad and if we have less union then everything would magically be better. Also if we continue to burn coal and nobody takes the Jab we'd all be smarter or something.
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yorwba 2y ago

(2019) I wonder whether "many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it" is still true now.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
There is a massive range of ability, knowhow, ongoing professional development, etc within “teachers”. The US is in itself a good example of this. In some areas, teaching is a white collar profession. In others, it’s blue collar. In my country it’s entirely white collar. In others, it’s entirely blue collar. This has a massive impact on teachers’ ability, willingness, means, etc to stay up to date. it can take decades for new ‘best practices’ to proliferate. This is ignoring the fact that Education is at BEST a social science and carries with it all the grey area, fads, flip-flopping on ‘best practices’, etc. There are schools of thought. Very valid schools of thought. It’s all very complicated.

llm_trw 2y ago

How can we expect kids to learn to read a language that's taken an alphabet and created a poor woman's logogram out of it? wi hæv ɔl ðə tulz wi nid tə tɝn ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ˈɪntu ə ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ wʌn kæn rid wɪðˈaʊt ˈnidɪŋ fɔr jɪrz ˈtutərɪŋ. jɛt wi doʊnt bɪˈkəz ɪd bi tu mʌtʃ wɝk.

082349872349872 2y ago
see also https://www.shavian.info https://www.shavian.info (the Achilles heel: any phonetically spelled language can only be correct for at most one dialect!)
- d110af5ccf 2y ago
  Unless each spoken dialect corresponds to a matching written dialect. But that just sounds like an even messier system than modern english.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    That's an argument for why we should all use Chinese instead.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  You can always phonetically spell in the dialect. Which Finnish does often. So if you have a dialect you write it out phonetically. There might be slight deviation from standard phonetics(some vowel variations), but the dialect does get rather close. In the end, maybe it is inherently wrong take that same word in different dialects is the same word. Usually they are close enough to be relatively intelligible.

helpfulContrib 2y ago

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donatj 2y ago

I had a heck of a time reading as a kid. I was taught just to sound every single word out and reading a chapter book took me literally forever. Beyond the time factor, my comprehension was terrible because in taking the time to sound every single word out I would lose track of the overall meaning of the sentence and often need to start over. I would say I was a very poor reader into high school. Honestly the thing that really helped was just spending so much time on computers. Eventually something in my brain clicked and started memorizing shapes of the top of words. My eyes scan the top of the letters. I only fall through to looking at the individual letters when what I read didn't make sense. I can read pretty reasonably fast now.

oaththrowaway 2y ago
Do different fonts effect you or are they universal enough to not give you any problems?
- donatj 2y ago
  Never really been much of a problem. I will say that OpenDyslexic is one of the hardest to read I have ever tried though.
d110af5ccf 2y ago
You might have something unusual going on there. At the beginning I, and to the best of my knowledge everyone I grew up around, was also taught to sound words out. At some point I stopped needing to do that. That happened quickly for the common words and more slowly for the uncommon ones. At the extreme end, for example extremely specific medical or chemical terminology, I still have to do that on account of never having encountered the word before. At no point did I intentionally memorize word shapes. At no point in my life have I ever been conscious of recognizing words by shape. That might well be what's happening under the hood, but if so it's not something I have any awareness of. I just see a word and (in most cases) instantly know what it is without thinking about it.

twelve40 2y ago

> Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters I'm really confused by this. Yes, this is what skilled readers do once they are skilled. But when any kid is starting out, they are by definition a poor (brand new) reader. Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! So how does this "new research" help?

zeristor 2y ago
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- stackghost 2y ago
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- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  …who are you talking to?
jchw 2y ago
Well, for one thing, it strongly suggests (and I absolutely agree) that phonics is the better way to go. I actually did struggle with learning how to read in early elementary school, and thank the Lord, I was lucky enough to get some phonics-based intervention that finally made things start clicking. Had that not occurred, I'm pretty confident I'd probably still be a relatively poor reader right now.
fmbb 2y ago
> Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! What makes you think so? Perhaps some kids pick this up really quickly and practice it. Some kids learn faster how to run and kick a ball, and some learn faster how to ride a bicycle.
- twelve40 2y ago
  when you are starting on day 1, isn't it obvious you don't know any written words and you have no skills to put the letters together, because you are just starting out?? Then saying "just start recognizing word as a sequence of letters like the skillful readers do" is about as helpful as "just start reading" if you've never done this before.

ozim 2y ago

I read this or similar article like a year ago. I am an avid reader and I did not realize until I read about it that someone could struggle with reading because it is so effortless for me. It is my story “don’t take others experiences for granted “, I have a bit more empathy for people knowing that.

complaintdept 2y ago

Relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-and-fall-of-vibes-based-literacy https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

WalterBright 2y ago

This "whole word" nonsense has reached new levels of absurdity with people trying to replace words with icons at every opportunity. The gawddamned icons on a car's instrument panels are a classic example of the suckiness of this approach. My old car says "hot" "cold" "defrost" on the controls. The new ones each invent their own incomprehensible icons. Most pictoglyphic written languages have evolved towards phonetics. Including Mayan, Egyptian, and western writing.

082349872349872 2y ago
I'd guess the new cars are probably sold into markets bigger than a single language. (still, that's no excuse not to have an industry group standardising the icons)
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I've heard that rationale. The trouble with it is how are you going to look up an icon in a dictionary? People aren't born with the knowledge of what that wretched icon for on/off means. Or that a drawing of an ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp means oil pressure.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Perhaps that's the emoji U+1FA94 and is thus standard, and emoji will replace spelling until we end up with a morphographic writing system. Dictionaries will work like mushroom-identification handbooks, where you find the emoji by navigating through a tree of questions.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      I think he means https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/images/uploads/content/warning-lights-oil.png https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/images/uploads/content/warning-l... ? Walter, if I told you to pull out the magnitude of Saturn before starting and then push it back in after the engine has warmed up, would you know what I'm referring to?

al_borland 2y ago

This is how I felt when I first tried to figure out what common core math was, after I kept hearing about it. It sounded like the people who made it were trying to create a process around what I would do in my head to try and solve a problem when I didn’t have paper or a calculator handy. What common core, and this reading approach, seem to miss is that those are things that come after learning the foundations and rules. I was taught with phonics, but 99% of words I read today are simply seen and recognized. Much like the 3 queuing method tries to create a process around. However, I think that is something that naturally develops through repetition. When someone reads the word “horse” and “house” enough times, the need to sound it out or read each letter goes away, but that’s not the starting point. As much as I like to think I can determine a word’s meaning through context, when put to the test, I often miss the mark. Reading on an e-reader lowers the barrier to looking up unfamiliar words and I find myself doing it more often. I find my assumption based on context can often be less than correct. Maybe I’m close, but there is more nuance to the actual definition. Sometimes I’m completely wrong and the whole meaning of the paragraph changes. Not to mention, if I look a word up to learn the actual meaning, it might be something I can introduce into my own speech and writing without sounding foolish. I relied on context a lot growing up, because I was too lazy to look things up. These days, with it being so easy, I don’t know why kids wouldn’t be encouraged to look up words they don’t know. I think my vocabulary would be much better had I grown up learning the words I didn’t know, instead of simply bypassing them.

ra120271 2y ago
I agree there is a development path to learning to read. My son is learning and during the phase of learning the phonics he would use the pictures a lot to help get context. You could tell because he would pause on each new page as he observed the graphics. But as he became more proficient he started using the graphics as a crutch to guess the words rather than sound them out and blend them. So I started covering the pictures with my hand as I turned the pages and his progress jumped ahead in the following weeks. He is still learning and falls into guessing patterns too easily. However through accompanied parent reading every night he is progressing well (IMO).
threatofrain 2y ago

_vrtq 2y ago

This is why I think public education is idiotic. Why don’t parents take personal responsibility for educating kids? My mom taught me how to read when I was 3. She sat there with the book and helped me through it. Heck I even remember my dad teaching me about the word “the”. I thought it was so funny that it was pronounced “thuh”. Thanks to my parents I had zero problems with reading. I think the only way to truly solve these problems is to teach parents the importance of loving kids!

Aeolun 2y ago
The problem is that some kids respond very badly to parents teaching, and very good to a third party.
mkaic 2y ago
Unfortunately, many parents do not have the time or energy to spend this much time teaching kids to read. There are parents who have to work all the time so they can feed their kids, there are single parents who work even more to feed their kids, and there are parents who are raising multiple kids and can't give much time to each individual child as a result. There are also parents who struggle with reading themselves, and therefore aren't capable of teaching their kids! I agree that in a perfect world, all kids would receive personalized reading instruction from their parents. In reality, though, the poor/disadvantaged kids who need such instruction the most are also least likely to have parents capable of giving it to them. Well-funded public education is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers we have and it's crucial that we continue to support and expand it.
- deleted 2y ago
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consteval 2y ago
Most parents are dumb. Some parents are a dangerous level of the dumb. The level of dumb where they're unable to admit their flaws and will never say outloud "I'm dumb". That's a big problem, because it means you can't convince them of anything. And then when little timmy is functionally illiterate they'll somehow convince themselves that's fine. > teach parents These types of solutions don't work. "Teach people not to smoke" "Teach people to workout" "Teach people to be better people". We need real, actual solutions. As in processes we can take that prove better outcomes. Some hand-wavy "well just do better" isn't a solution. If anything, it's an anti-solution, as in it prevents real solutions getting through. If you want to reduce crime for example, you reduce poverty via social programs and industry. That is proven, without a doubt, to work. "people need to be better" doesn't work.

iamflimflam1 2y ago

One of the key things any parent should be doing is making sure their children are exposed to books from a very young age. And please make sure you take the time to read with your child.

Aeolun 2y ago
We’ve been reading since mine was very young. His comprehension is great, but trying to make him read or sound out the words? It’s not even that he can’t if you force him, the motivation is just not there. I really hope school will change something there.
- larusso 2y ago
  All my kids went through this. We read a lot of books together and every kid when starting school was eagerly awaiting the time they finally read by themselves. And every one of them struggled with the phonetics part. They argued that it’s too hard and the lessons are not fun. But we knew that we learned like this and that it worked for us. So with more work it finally clicked. They are all very good readers now. They read tons of books and comics and can sound out words or names they don’t know. I think the system of teaching the phonetics is the best way but how we can keep kids motivated during the boring lessons is something we should tackle. By the way my experiences come from a German background.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    To be fair, English phonetics are a pain in the ass. Sounds change with no rhyme or reason to them, and the only way to learn all the different permutations is to see them all.
    - larusso 2y ago
      German has strict grammatical rules but we also have tons of words coming from Latin and close relative French. But I know what you mean. Being thought pronunciation in school in Oxford English taught by a teacher with heavy German accent wasn’t helpful. I learned most words and pronunciation from TV shows and movies but I can’t really spell a lot of words by heart. Reading is different because I know a lot of words. But the reverse doesn’t work for me. Luckily I write with assistance of my computer. To be fair I struggled with this also in German. Writing correctly was always a pain.

jjmarr 2y ago

Alternative alphabets have been kicking around for ages as a way to make it easier to learn English; mainly because our existing alphabet is inconsistent and doesn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence of letters to sounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet Sequoyah famously brought the Cherokee from 0% to 90% literacy in a decade after he invented a syllabic writing system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabar... Literacy could be much easier if we switched orthography and now with technology everything can be auto-transliterated.

card_zero 2y ago

The article isn't completely coherent, because it disapproves of "memorizing a bunch of words" while at the same time approving of storing words in memory for instant recognition. ...Is it really saying that to only memorize a bunch of words is insufficient, compared to memorizing lots? Is that the point being made there? Wasn't clear.

hennell 2y ago
It's active memorization vs passive memorisation. What words do you need to teach a kid to memorise for them to read Harry Potter? What if they get into Lord of the Rings instead? So you teach kids to sound out the words. To decode them. Mug-el = Muggle. But you're not sounding it out for long, you'll memorise it pretty fast. And if you forget it, you'll decode it again. The point is the memorization will happen automatically to avoid doing the recognition. But if you just jump to memorization you've got no fallback and no way to ever memorise more, you have to actively learn it again. It's like putting cache layer above a database for recently retrieved values. Hell of a lot easier than trying to cache everything or manually predict the best values to cache.

hintymad 2y ago

Maybe the only way to be good at reading for basic proficiency is to just reading more? Not sure why there are so many theories and practices. I have two anecdotes. Not that they count, but in case other people had similar experiences: One is that I didn't know how to read when I entered my first grade. For the entire first grade, I read only my textbook, which was too simple to help me read other books. And then in the summer time after my first grade, I picked up a book for fairy tales of animals, and I read along. I didn't look up a dictionary, I skipped the words that I didn't understand. And miraculously reading was never a problem for me any more. I repeated the pattern when I started to learn English. In English it was a graded reading by National Geographic, if I recall correctly, and later popular fictions by Sidney Sheldon. And then Japanese and then Spanish. I repeated the same pattern. In Japanese I started with 多読, and for Spanish La Alchimista, and Si Hubiera un Mañana after some graded readers. The reading just naturally became easier over time. Another anecdote was that even the most struggled students in my classes, throughout my middle school and high school, had no problem reading popular fictions. And by struggle I mean they would fail pretty much every subject and could barely graduate high school. However, there were a few extremely popular novels when I grew up, and everyone talked about them. So, every student read them. The novels were written in pretty elegant language with lots of sophisticated words, yet my classmates had no problem understanding them.

hazbot 2y ago
>>> Maybe the only way to be good at reading is to just reading more? Perhaps at some point you plateau and need to practice "micro skills". e.g. there's a point with chess where you stop getting better playing more games - but training puzzles can bump you out of the plateau.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
Teachers bought into three cueing because as it turns out, a good portion of students will learn to read on their own. However, another portion of students won't. "Just reading more" doesn't work for these students because they don't know how to decode word sounds in the first place. This is why three cueing was so cruel. These kids were basically having to fake it out of embarrassment.

hazbot 2y ago

Retraining as a math teacher here, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how kids learn stuff at the moment. At one point in the article it states that indeed the trio of semantic/syntactic/graphophonic cues are used by readers. The article kind of dances around the point that even if these cues tend to be used by competent readers, it doesn't mean that training them directly is how novice readers need to learn. I'm really coming round to this belief that there is no substitute for the "rote" drilling of basic skills.

d110af5ccf 2y ago
> "rote" drilling of basic skills I think it depends on the nature of the task for which the skill is used. But I agree. There are certain things that are just not realistic to master without rote drilling of some sort of supporting material. At the same time I think rote drilling gets a bad reputation because poor teachers will tend to fall back on it in instances where it isn't particularly useful. I personally had a low opinion of it until university, where I encountered two independent topics where it was clearly necessary.

larusso 2y ago

Interesting article. I’m from Germany and I learned to read with the phonetics and sounding out words approach. My kids as well. It’s the first time I heard about this style of teaching how to read. My first reaction while reading was: “and how do some kids manage to read at all with only this system?” It’s very late into the article where they mention that first some kids will learn how to read no matter what and second that the problem is a mixed message as schools do teach phonetics but that the mean approach taught when seeing unknown words is to use a simpler system. I myself never look at queues or pictures when reading unknown texts. While learning English I read English books and used the context approach. But I had to first learn a lot of vocabulary to even start that.

joaomacp 2y ago

If you want to know about this in podcast form: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ Takes more time than reading the article, but the podcast has IMO a nice pace of leaving you curious and giving you info. It includes opinions from teachers, parents, etc.

barnabyjones 2y ago

I think the backlash against phonics is because English just has too many exceptions which makes it frustrating, but it's still important to teach simple phonics (common uses of short and long vowel sounds). Beyond that, any rigid approach is bound to fail because kids just need to get used to the general guidelines of English spelling and learn the exceptions one by one, through guided read-along practice. But the process of making educated guesses on how to say a word based on spelling is part of the learning process.

markhahn 2y ago
I'm imagining a reading curriculum that regards the irregularities as funny little foibles, oddities to point out and wonder about. Like if you go to a park and there's that one place it's too steep to walk, or the other that always floods and is muddy, or the place where mushrooms grow. Complaining about orthographic exceptions is like saying everything should be perfectly flat lawn, a giant grotesque golf course.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
I wonder how much of it is how, for adults who already understand phonics, teaching it can being repetitive and monotonous. Three cueing offered a teaching theory where kids all sat around with a book with very little teacher intervention.

juped 2y ago

Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are already fairly resistant). It's really common for me to encounter adults doing things like reading sentences haltingly, substituting in a completely wrong word with the same first letter now and then, or just giving up on a sentence, and these are just the ones with English as a first language. Test yourself: what did you do when you encountered the words casphetato brolganic alvolamina sooveg in this sentence? A fluent English reader will just read them; I made them plausible and decodable, not like zprxapsi mnoqlkzb which I pulled out of a random number generator and a fluent reader may well do a double take at.

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MichaelRo 2y ago

Well there's two tests to figure out if a kid is a fast enough reader: 1) Have them read subtitles out loud (from a different language so they can't rely on audio). 2) Have them skimp through the text and provide a summary afterwards. I'm not very sure however how to GET there apart from the boring "read a lot". And reading a lot in today's video-infested age is simply, not realistic. When I grew up in communist Romania there was virtually no video content so much like a century before, the only form of ENTERTAINMENT was reading books. I read them because I was motivated by pleasure. Hated school-mandated readings, never did them or just cheated if no alternative but I did read a fuckton on my own volition because I repeat, that was the most powerful form of entertainment available. If I were brought up today surrounded by video content everywhere: addictive shorts, game tutorials, movies... I'm not at all sure I would have cared much for reading. It is what it is and we can't turn back time and expect today's kids to be as proficient readers as a gentleman of the 19th century, they just don't have the motivation anymore.