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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 no

by 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
        I agree on memorization, it is very important esp in a complex domain where you have many concepts that are close and mislabeled, you cannot redetermine their local ordering every single time, at some point you have to remember things. I think because our tests have generally sucked, and people like easy answers to problems, that leaning really hard on rote practice seemed like an easy win. It is necessary, but it is just a small part of a greater understanding. My philosophy is the following. Memorization enables fast recall and composition of concepts, which encourages one to be in the flow state, which is very rewarding. But overfitting by too much memorization prevents creative exploration. My kid doesn't have instant recall for all the products through 12x12, but they can fill in the missing pieces pretty quickly. This is improving, but I also showed them how to round and make back of the envelope approximations, so they aren't calculating the number of eggs needed in a recipe to 3 places of accuracy. I think the memorization portion of education should see the task of memorizing certain facts as a toolbox, and that with that toolbox you will be able to fluidly work on these kinds of problems. Without out, you will be knee deep in mud. Damn it is fun to learn a new skill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruMW7gsuFb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruMW7gsuFb0

by taeric 2y ago

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
      I agree on memorization, it is very important esp in a complex domain where you have many concepts that are close and mislabeled, you cannot redetermine their local ordering every single time, at some point you have to remember things. I think because our tests have generally sucked, and people like easy answers to problems, that leaning really hard on rote practice seemed like an easy win. It is necessary, but it is just a small part of a greater understanding. My philosophy is the following. Memorization enables fast recall and composition of concepts, which encourages one to be in the flow state, which is very rewarding. But overfitting by too much memorization prevents creative exploration. My kid doesn't have instant recall for all the products through 12x12, but they can fill in the missing pieces pretty quickly. This is improving, but I also showed them how to round and make back of the envelope approximations, so they aren't calculating the number of eggs needed in a recipe to 3 places of accuracy. I think the memorization portion of education should see the task of memorizing certain facts as a toolbox, and that with that toolbox you will be able to fluidly work on these kinds of problems. Without out, you will be knee deep in mud. Damn it is fun to learn a new skill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruMW7gsuFb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruMW7gsuFb0