3 ms·

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

sitkack 2y ago
rebuttal to this podcast series The Misrepresentation of Marie Clay in “Sold a Story” https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-clay-in-sold-a-story/ https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-c... I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word. Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading. Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.
- taeric 2y ago
  My experience leans more to the Sold a Story line. Schools were quite active in not teaching phonics. To the point that I am meeting people with the absurd notion that "English is not a phonetic language." It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book. I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."
  - sitkack 2y ago
    My kid pulled that trick on me when she was about 4. She memorized a passage, and could point to each word as she read it and tricked us that she could read, she took such great joy in it. "Ha ha, not so smart now are you adults!" :) I don't know what all the root causes are, but these kids should be getting read to, questioned about what they heard and then reading out loud themselves. Not defending Clay, but on the surface, "figure it out" is a pretty good heuristic. But we should be sounding out a word, breaking it apart, understanding what it could mean in that context, looking it up somewhere else. But if all you do is kinda fake it from the context, that might help in an emergency, but learning to read shouldn't be an emergency. We should be creating children that are curious enough to want to solve the puzzle of meaning when they encounter words they don't understand or know how to pronounce. The CNN article is just a jumble of numbers, cribbed from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/national-trends/?grade=4 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... (which itself doesnt load its charts properly). Reading comprehension is for all people, at an all time low, and I don't know the causes.
    - taeric 2y ago
      Exactly. And I think this anecdote really underlines another point. It isn't that the kids are dumb! Quite the contrary, the better their memory and the better they are at connecting other things, the easier it is for them to skirt through without learning to read!
      - sitkack 2y ago
        Totally, those little RL agents call us out when we just teach to the test. I think we ask too much out of kids in the now and too little in the long term, this reinforces adult exceptionalism, that kids aren't capable. By in the now, I mean that the kid has to show great 1 or 0 shot performance. Nearly everything is slow to start but gets bigger than we can imagine. More gradual slopes with a slight acceleration. You mentioned video games in another thread, it was interesting to see the gradient in the combat mechanics in Street Fighter as you beat more characters. I was watching that same kid play, and you could see the difficulty gradient teaching, rewarding and ultimately training the player to feed quarters into is mechanical mouth. I think there is a lot of overlap between game design and learning theory.
        taeric 2y ago
        Agreed that there is a lot of interaction between game design and learning. It is difficult, as I think you can learn a lot of conflicting lessons depending on you look at things. The largest lesson for me, at the moment, is that people love complaining about "rote memorization" but throw out the baby with the bath water, as it were. Memory is a large part of learning, such that trying to do anything that doesn't lean on it feels wrong. And I don't mean just recall memory. Learning to juggle is one that showed me that memory can be a full body activity. Same for running/cycling. And getting good at things means doing it a lot. Yes, "deliberate practice" is different than "rote practice." But they look an awful lot like each other. And I don't think anyone has a good trick for how to skip straight to deliberate.
        sitkack 2y ago
- gladiatr72 2y ago
  The rebuttal was to the conversation about the purported efficacy of Reading Recovery (or lack thereof) reaching enough of a critical mass that policy makers started paying attention (in 2024) and threatening its publisher's revenue stream. (the final podcast episode aired in 2022) Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms. It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors. There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems. If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone. Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen. In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for. If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Excellent, thank you. I was and am not defending Reading Recovery. I will admit that I was not able to get to the core of the thesis in the podcast (s) and that I was being led around. I never experienced Reading Recovery first hand. 3-queuing seems like a heuristic that escaped the lab. Useful, but it should be the method of last resort if you can't ask an adult or find a dictionary. I am also not saying that everything needs to have a scientific study to be shown effective. I learned to read by being read to, and having the joy of reading instilled at a very young age. I was encouraged to ask about passages or words I don't know. Your writing is excellent. Even if it wasn't intended, anything that as a byproduct, encourages kids to makeup definitions of words or skip over anything is an affront to our collective body of knowledge.

rebuttal to this podcast series The Misrepresentation of Marie Clay in “Sold a Story” https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-clay-in-sold-a-story/ https://readingrecovery.org/the-misrepresentation-of-marie-c... I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word. Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading. Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.

taeric 2y ago
My experience leans more to the Sold a Story line. Schools were quite active in not teaching phonics. To the point that I am meeting people with the absurd notion that "English is not a phonetic language." It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book. I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."
- sitkack 2y ago
  My kid pulled that trick on me when she was about 4. She memorized a passage, and could point to each word as she read it and tricked us that she could read, she took such great joy in it. "Ha ha, not so smart now are you adults!" :) I don't know what all the root causes are, but these kids should be getting read to, questioned about what they heard and then reading out loud themselves. Not defending Clay, but on the surface, "figure it out" is a pretty good heuristic. But we should be sounding out a word, breaking it apart, understanding what it could mean in that context, looking it up somewhere else. But if all you do is kinda fake it from the context, that might help in an emergency, but learning to read shouldn't be an emergency. We should be creating children that are curious enough to want to solve the puzzle of meaning when they encounter words they don't understand or know how to pronounce. The CNN article is just a jumble of numbers, cribbed from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/national-trends/?grade=4 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... (which itself doesnt load its charts properly). Reading comprehension is for all people, at an all time low, and I don't know the causes.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Exactly. And I think this anecdote really underlines another point. It isn't that the kids are dumb! Quite the contrary, the better their memory and the better they are at connecting other things, the easier it is for them to skirt through without learning to read!
    - sitkack 2y ago
      Totally, those little RL agents call us out when we just teach to the test. I think we ask too much out of kids in the now and too little in the long term, this reinforces adult exceptionalism, that kids aren't capable. By in the now, I mean that the kid has to show great 1 or 0 shot performance. Nearly everything is slow to start but gets bigger than we can imagine. More gradual slopes with a slight acceleration. You mentioned video games in another thread, it was interesting to see the gradient in the combat mechanics in Street Fighter as you beat more characters. I was watching that same kid play, and you could see the difficulty gradient teaching, rewarding and ultimately training the player to feed quarters into is mechanical mouth. I think there is a lot of overlap between game design and learning theory.
      - taeric 2y ago
        Agreed that there is a lot of interaction between game design and learning. It is difficult, as I think you can learn a lot of conflicting lessons depending on you look at things. The largest lesson for me, at the moment, is that people love complaining about "rote memorization" but throw out the baby with the bath water, as it were. Memory is a large part of learning, such that trying to do anything that doesn't lean on it feels wrong. And I don't mean just recall memory. Learning to juggle is one that showed me that memory can be a full body activity. Same for running/cycling. And getting good at things means doing it a lot. Yes, "deliberate practice" is different than "rote practice." But they look an awful lot like each other. And I don't think anyone has a good trick for how to skip straight to deliberate.
        sitkack 2y ago
gladiatr72 2y ago
The rebuttal was to the conversation about the purported efficacy of Reading Recovery (or lack thereof) reaching enough of a critical mass that policy makers started paying attention (in 2024) and threatening its publisher's revenue stream. (the final podcast episode aired in 2022) Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms. It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors. There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems. If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone. Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen. In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for. If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
- sitkack 2y ago
  Excellent, thank you. I was and am not defending Reading Recovery. I will admit that I was not able to get to the core of the thesis in the podcast (s) and that I was being led around. I never experienced Reading Recovery first hand. 3-queuing seems like a heuristic that escaped the lab. Useful, but it should be the method of last resort if you can't ask an adult or find a dictionary. I am also not saying that everything needs to have a scientific study to be shown effective. I learned to read by being read to, and having the joy of reading instilled at a very young age. I was encouraged to ask about passages or words I don't know. Your writing is excellent. Even if it wasn't intended, anything that as a byproduct, encourages kids to makeup definitions of words or skip over anything is an affront to our collective body of knowledge.