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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Think about all the mini sequences involved in reading: training the eye to look at small etchings next to each other from left to right; converting those etchings into an audible (and later, subaudible) sound based on pattern recognition; remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work; hearing the sound and making sense of the sound; combining it with the next sequence (the following word); combining these sequences together a la sentences and paragraphs.

Surely whichever approach contains the most motivated deliberate practice of the constituent parts will be the best. Honestly these can be converted into a computer game pretty easily and probably be as good as any public school teacher.

remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work

Somehow the Greeks with access to both the Minoan syllabary and the Phoenician abjad birthed the evils of the alphabet on the world and thousands of years later we are still paying the price.

Hey, I like my writing system to include vowels. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

You can have vowels as completely different symbols than the consonants, like in Hebrew or Korean. Reading Korean is ridiculously easy to learn thanks to that.

In my own experience, phonics wins here.*

Going into school, you already know how to talk. So being able to turn squiggles into sounds allows you to "talk" with texts.

*I was dropped into the American school system in first grade. I did even speak English. A few months in, I was speaking, read, writing English like all my other classmates.

As far as we know, the way the brain works is actually stacking all those parts on top of each other and they are all important.

There are multiple forms of Dyslexia but they all stem from a difficulty or inability to have the brain recognize a certain level of abstraction of this process. For instance being unable to map letters to syllables and then to sounds and having to do the harder task of mapping letter sequences directly to those.

I don't recall if phonics or the neurology that vindicates it came first. But given this knowledge all the holistic methods are doing really is betting on the kids figuring out those separate skills on their own.

Given the stated goals of the "vibes" this is quite ironic.

Yep. And for the stacking to work effectively you ought to master the constituent parts. We find this in other domains too; good luck solving a complex math problem when you don’t have mastery over the smaller sub-problems. Good luck learning a piano piece without working out the left hand and right hand alone, or not knowing how to sightread. Even things like driving require mastery over a bunch of small parts. Just placing a kid in a car and saying good luck is going to get him into an accident.

It’s good to remember that reading is a totally unnatural human activity. A human has built-in instincts for learning to walk and speak. But writing and reading is as artificial as unicycling while playing the violin. So it needs to be trained.

Artificial except for those lucky rare of us with hyperlexia. I don’t remember learning how to read, because it happened before the age of childhood amnesia. Reading, writing, and computer programming come as naturally to me as swimming to a duck.

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