Thom

I read the APM story on the Reading Recovery strategies in 2019 and I could not believe teachers were literally teaching kids how to guess words instead of reading them

And it's absolutely what I'm seeing in my younger classmates. Reading out loud and skipping words, making up words that kind of make sense and start with the same letter as the one they skipped, etc.

Not to derail, but I'm glad it's not just me: articles are really getting shorter. Every time I finish an article lately I'm left feeling confused, like--where's the rest of it? I assumed for a while that nobody could afford to pay for long-form journalism anymore, but maybe it's more the case that fewer people can read it.

god yes, and there is a stigma around illiteracy that just makes it harder to even admit you may need help, so the whole concept of reading and learning is cloaked in this horrible shame

yeah i'm sure it all contributes, there's also just a lot of veneration of STEM and denigration of everything else in the zeitgeist lately

i was gonna get into this in my last comment but it felt like it was going off the rails, but basically in the 1940s and early 1950s there was a very successful movement to make school almost all humanities and no stem. the idea was that science and math were unneeded in daily life but humanities was what was important to be a good member of society.

then sputnik and the space race happened and when the US gov’t looked for engineers and scientists they found a massive dearth of them. so there was basically a massive reform that turned the focus of the US education system to producing as many calculus knowing stem folks as possible. it’s why HS math targets calculus instead of statistics even though statistics is more broadly relevant AND teaches critical thinking. then with the US “winning” the space race and the tech booms that followed, the focus on STEM became greater than ever.

if you mix in how standardized testing punishes actual critical thinking in the reading sections (ie any q about themes will always be answered explicitly in the text not in interpretation to make it “standardized”). add to it the other aspects and now reading/writing feel rote and boring while stem has had loads of educational content and engaging activities.

As an adult student in college taking macroeconomics and accounting, at least these math courses are absolute garbage and frequently just sort of toss out ideas and don't go into depth on them that is expected in tests, leaving the entire class baffled. And I feel like my whole life I've encountered this sort of problem in every single math class I've taken: The book gives a few examples, then the questions use forms of the equations that the book didn't go over and I'm supposed to reverse engineer this, somehow.

I do think I missed a lot of basic things that people seem to treat as normal, so maybe I was just in school before math classes got better and so missed out on any benefit I might have had and am now missing an entire foundation.

Or maybe this IS the better math class, and I would just be incredibly depressed if I actually sat in a basic English class by comparison, since I had no trouble learning reading but math has always been an exercise in frustration.

different languages definitely play a part of this too because of how much of a nightmare englush orthography is

read through, i don't think i've heard of this specific method before, most times i hear of whole language or similar stuff it's about allowing kids to write poems or whatever and focusing on the joy of it rather than correcting spelling mistakes. (i am also well over a decade out of date on what's been going on in education studies)

i will say this article reads a little weird to me, because i don't remember seeing any of the three cue stuff as a 90s kid in elementary school. maybe i just didn't know where to look when i was seven, but i know there were lots of vocabulary tests and weekly spelling quizzes, not to mention lots of ads for hooked on phonics presented by alex trebek. i feel like i lived in a world where phonics was the primary focus of reading education, and the apm article comes from the berenstain dimension. (maybe that dimension's just california?)

sorry this is a rant, i am just truly horrified by what i just read in that apm article you just linked.

i am reading this article and screaming-crying-throwing up how is this real. i was in elementary school from the 90s to early 00s and it was always phonics. this feels like, literally like i want this to be a hoax, i want this to be a weird joke. this is so upsetting to my brain. i feel like i have suddenly realized that i am in a horror movie. like, its always upsetting knowing how much cognitive and sociological research gets ignored in how schools are structured. but the fact that like, we had this right with Phonics like, a goddamn century ago, but then threw it in the trash because??? why??? all i can think is that the cueing method would work really well to get children who are reading below grade level to pass a multiple choice test that includes pictures. tests can be written with the cue-ing method in mind to, basically, give kids hints so that if they cant read they will still be able to pick the correct of four options and pass the test. which is just horrific.

like, we cant get the school day moved later so teens are not subjected to borderline torture conditions of sleep deprivation, despite decades of research saying that is what we are doing to them, but we can implement this utter nonsense that has barely any supporting research and just reams and reams of disproving research. like, if im understanding the timeline from the article correctly, this was proposed in the late 60s, debunked in the 70s, had 2 more decades of debunking research, and then began being implemented in a widespread way in the 2000s? because why???? Schools are so resistant to evidence-based change, why is it that one of the few things they changed was scrapping PHONICS???

Is it possible that, in addition to standardized tesing, it in any way comes down to the fact that sounding-out words in a classroom context means allowing all the kids to be making noise while they read, and the 3 cues can all be done silently?

Its just like, I need to be understood: I would not rely solely on my gut reaction if there was not a ton of cog-sci research supporting phonics. But given that the research supports it, it also just seem so mind-numbingly obvious that you should connect oral language-acquisition with written language acquisition. like, the way the 3-cues ppl are dismissive of KNOWING WHAT THE WORDS ON THE PAGE ARE is, idk, Orwellian? It disgusts me. Im glad I know this now??? But also yikes!!

my classmate just hadn’t scrolled down to the last page of the PDF

ok I have done that before because I simply will not pay attention lol