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What's wrong with sight words?
I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.
The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.
Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.
I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.
I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.
Because you are limited to knowing words you have memorized like they’re hieroglyphs, so when you grow up and you run into new words like “xylocarp” or “gubernatorial” you effectively can’t read or pronounce them. Which caps your reading level at sub-high school and leaves you unable to quickly parse large volumes of difficult text.
The "sight words" approach is perfectly fine for common short words with inconsistent pronunciation, IMO. My 5-year-old can sound out a variety of easy words at present, but still gets tripped up on issues like "do" and "go" having different vowel sounds, or "here" and "there", and I don't see any alternative to just having kids memorize them.
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Old English and modern Icelandic have thorn for this already. We can just bring it back.
I vote for eth. Old English used them interchangeably, eth fits the Latin alphabet better visually, and the distinction between upper and lower case is clearer.
Besides, everyone who sees the Ðragon Age logo should learn to groan as we have.
In Icelandic eth is for th in the, thorn is for th in thin. It would make sense for English to have a similar system today.
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Ðis is ðe way.
Huh. Is it a coincidence that it looks like stereotypical Jamaican pidgin? Or is it a relict?
The replacement of "th" (/ð/) with "d" (/d/) is a characteristic of Jamaican patois, and the similarity of ð and d (or Ð and D) is likely because people perceive the sounds to be similar, but I don't think there's a direct relation.
I just followed the advice of the guy above me and replaced Th with Ð. That’s all I did. If you think it’s Jamaican cool. I like the idea of simplifying th3 phonetic system, and I think adding ć for ch and ś for sh would be cool as well (both come from polish)
But of course it’s probably never happening, so the kids will have to suffer digraphs.
Śe sold seaśells at ðe seaśore just looks cool.
It is more common in other languages to write the sound which is associated with "sh" in English, as š than ś.
It is more common in other languages to write the sound which is associated with "ch" in English, as č than ć.
Of course now that we have put a checkmark over c and s, it is natural to also put it over z.
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You can just teach th, like ph and ch, has a special sound (actually 2, voiced and unvoiced). There's no need for something to be part of an official alphabet to teach its pattern.
oughis the main blocker, today.And in phonics that’s exactly what they do. I remember learning to read in Catholic schools(which did not rely on the whole word method) having to do tedious worksheets where the th/sh/ch had to be encoded to let the teacher know it was a single sound. Like written sounding out.
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I think the person you're replying to is referring to the whole language approach to reading. The popular implementations of this eschew phonics entirely, and instruct kids to use only context clues and pictures to figure out what word is on the page. The "Sold A Story" podcast dives deep into the origins of this and its many failures.
It's a great podcast, highly recommended. Among other things I learned that even this topic is culture war. George W. Bush's push for phonics based instruction was resisted hard by educators, apparently because it was coming from W.
Also very revealing in how much of education is driven by trendiness and personality cults. A dumb fad like Reading Recovery can damage a whole generation.
Phonics is also boring work for elementary school teachers in a way whole word is not.
It's frustrating to me that this would even be a consideration for teachers. At my job, when the company wants me to do something boring, I don't get to just decide to not do it. It should be the same way for teachers: we don't care you find it boring, it's effective, and your job is to teach not to be entertained.
I think it’s less about the teachers and more about the kids. Somehow teachers started to think that they need to be “entertaining” to get kids to learn things, so things that work (like learning phonics, or memorizing times tables, or memorizing the dates and people in historical events) but are boring for kids don’t happen. Instead, there are a lot of silly but fun trendy ways of teaching— dramas, artwork, imagining yourself as someone in that event, etc. they don’t work, but the kids have fun and that’s what matters especially for elementary school teachers. Then the kids who don’t know the basics eventually reach a plateau and the methods that they could use to figure out what they don’t know are things they never learned to do. Whole word and guessing based on pictures doesn’t work when you’re reading a dense textbook with no pictures.
I would be interested to read a novella length exploration of the situation. There are some tasks that are themselves fine, but almost nobody is willing to do them all day every day.
It's really hard to get special education assistants, for instance. They're paid poorly to follow around a severely disabled child with poor life prospects, who can't communicate with them very well, and watch them fail at a lot of ordinary and expected tasks. Sometimes the kids get frustrated and lash out at them, and hurt them. Then they quit, often after a couple of months. It's a bad job that can't be done by those who usually do bad jobs, like working in meat processing plants. Then it becomes worse when they're understaffed, which is most of the time. There's some legal liability as well. There are adjustments that could be made at the system level, but are not, for various legal and institutional reasons.
I'm especially curious about some of the ages involved. Five, six, and seven year olds mostly still seem happy to be learning to read and write, and it's important to have strong first grade teachers in a school, especially.
My state teaches phonics and is fine with it, but are now training upper elementary and middle school teachers in phonics, to try to re-teach those who didn't get it the first time. I'm not especially optimistic. I don't think there's necessarily a learning window for reading a semi-phonetic language like English, but if someone is in sixth grade and hasn't learned phonics yet, they must certainly have baggage around it. Their language arts teacher is unlikely to suddenly help them realize what consonant clusters involving "h" are all about.
I don’t think there’s a window, but I think the limit comes with the complexity of texts that would hold the attention of a child that age. First graders are fine with very simple stories using simple words and concepts. A fourth grader wants to read more complex stuff.
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There’s quite a lot that teachers do which makes me make a surprised face and go ‘really? And they’re not fired for this?’.
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This informs a lot about why education works the way it does
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
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Districts also have professional development budgets that firms are competing for.
In my district every Wednesday is an early release day so teachers can participate in professional development. This has got to be the only job in the world where 10% of your time is spent on training and you only work 9 months a year.
We used to have that, and have lost it. Test scores are the same, teachers are more stressed, but maybe parents pay less for childcare? I'm not actually sure if parents pay less for childcare or not, since the after district childcare for working parents is a lump sum amount, which increases in line with inflation.
My current district gives me a set amount, and lets me spend it attending art workshops. It may or may not be a good use of public funds, but is absolutely a better use than the other mandated trainings I've gone to.
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Yeah that’s another huge sector of waste that could use trimming since none of that training is even remotely useful, and a lot of its actively hostile political propaganda
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My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.
Same. My parents also recalled I had a fascination with signs, especially road signs and exit signs.
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I think we’re largely on the same page. I honestly think that most o& the trends end up hurting the below average kids. And when adding in the reduced instruction time to make room for The Narrative, those kids are toast. A smart kid can learn on his own so taking away class time for LGBTQ stuff or Black History or whatever isn’t a big deal. If you have a kid who’s falling behind, he needs every second of help he can get.
Although to be honest, I think most of the problem of education is that we don’t track kids as many other developed countries do. Every kid is put on the college bound track unless he specifically wants off, and the culture pushes college to an absurd degree meaning that unless they’re introduced to other tracks, the current will carry them to university and they won’t be able to keep up. If you track kids, not only can you tailor the methods o& instruction to what best serves that group of students, but you can make sure that they end up with skills they can use to support themselves.
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There’s a podcast called “Sold a Story” that’s worth listening to if you have a kid that age learning to read.
Basically the “sight reading” thing looks like students are progressing, but then soon hit a wall they can’t get past because they weren’t actually learning how to read just how to identify words.
Seriously check it out. Very well done, and also infuriating with regards to how education trends are pushed.
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Empirically, it's much harder for students to learn to read using the whole-word approach compared to phonics. Of course with phonics there are still words you'll need to just memorize (including "the").
Yes, but it's teaching it to children who don't know the longhand. It's skipping steps, which makes life harder. To make it worse, it tends to use nonstandard terminology that neither parents nor mathematicians will understand ("friendly numbers" is often singled out here). There are also problems where it uses some shortcut approach when it doesn't make sense, and then students who work it out another way that they've been taught get marked wrong. For instance, it might teach them to do 63 * 47 as 60 * 40 + 60 * 7 + 40 * 3 + 7 * 3 (and have them draw the lattice), when the longhand approach is no harder and a student taking the easiest approach (63 * 50 - 63 * 3) would be marked wrong.
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