6 ms·

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for tryin

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words. Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.

dash2 4mo ago
I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English. Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
- burnt-resistor 4mo ago
  In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
  - rustcleaner 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - stevenwoo 4mo ago
      I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
    - spudlyo 4mo ago
      "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
      - HappMacDonald 4mo ago
        To me that all sounds lovely and evocative, hmm. Maybe an inspiration for some of the vibe in the game Little Inferno?
  - shimman 4mo ago
    I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!
simiones 4mo ago
I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially. Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").
- Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
  > Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language …I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
  - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
    i did Latin in HS. it's not simple, and classical Latin is "static" compared to modern Latin-based languages, which have evolved. Good for getting SAT scores, but 3 years of actual French or Spanish would have done far more for me.
  - simiones 4mo ago
    (Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms. Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king"). Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns). Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.
burnt-resistor 4mo ago
Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads. This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.
acamerer 4mo ago
Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.
tdb7893 4mo ago
My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at). My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.
freediddy 4mo ago
The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.
aomix 4mo ago
I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words. Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.
thinkingtoilet 4mo ago
I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.
defterGoose 4mo ago
As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no. Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.
camgunz 4mo ago
It's way more comprehensive than just phonics: - Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing - Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools— for phonics and other aspects of literacy - Large-scale efforts to train teachers - Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade Lifted directly from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-books https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-... It's also worth saying a lot of the gains evaporate when you factor in learning loss from COVID and Mississippi suddenly screening/helping kids for dyslexia (etc). But, still there's something to learn, just not simply phonics.

dash2 4mo ago

I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English. Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.

burnt-resistor 4mo ago
In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
- rustcleaner 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - stevenwoo 4mo ago
    I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
  - spudlyo 4mo ago
    "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
    - HappMacDonald 4mo ago
      To me that all sounds lovely and evocative, hmm. Maybe an inspiration for some of the vibe in the game Little Inferno?
- shimman 4mo ago
  I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!

simiones 4mo ago

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially. Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language …I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  i did Latin in HS. it's not simple, and classical Latin is "static" compared to modern Latin-based languages, which have evolved. Good for getting SAT scores, but 3 years of actual French or Spanish would have done far more for me.
- simiones 4mo ago
  (Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms. Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king"). Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns). Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.

burnt-resistor 4mo ago

Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads. This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.

acamerer 4mo ago

Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.

tdb7893 4mo ago

My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at). My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.

freediddy 4mo ago

The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.

aomix 4mo ago

I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words. Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.

thinkingtoilet 4mo ago

I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.

defterGoose 4mo ago

As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no. Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

camgunz 4mo ago

It's way more comprehensive than just phonics: - Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing - Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools— for phonics and other aspects of literacy - Large-scale efforts to train teachers - Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade Lifted directly from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-books https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-... It's also worth saying a lot of the gains evaporate when you factor in learning loss from COVID and Mississippi suddenly screening/helping kids for dyslexia (etc). But, still there's something to learn, just not simply phonics.