sirocyl

I know, it's horrifying

Yeah that pedagogy just doesn't really work for me either. I wonder how connected it is!

there's also a different way, taught to our parents, that required only learning whole words, which didn't work out very well either

Yeah, there's something interesting happening here around the value of context for understanding things, and as a kid I actually did learn a lot from techniques very like cueing. If I didn't know what a word meant, I could usually figure it out from the full meaning of the sentence; I remember learning that there was more than one meaning for the word "instruments" from a Bunnicula book because musical instruments didn't make sense. But the critical thing was that even if I had never encountered a particular word before, I could read it. I was trying to figure out the significance of the word from cues, not how the letters form a word and how the word fits in a sentence.

I did a bit more digging and see two concerns repeatedly coming up in the counterarguments against the phonics-based approach: 1) that exclusively teaching phonics will mean neglecting opportunities to teach kids critical thinking skills and explore the meaning of what they're reading, and 2) that phonics is so boring that it'll make kids hate the whole thing. In some ways I can see where the concern over the first one is coming from; it's not like there have been zero examples of an approach claiming to be based in Science demanding priority over anything grounded in compassion and emotion (along with treating those things as mutually incompatible with Science).

But also it seems like there's a disconnect over the meaning of "reading" here, where some people are taking it to mostly mean "comprehending the meaning of the text" and others are specifically talking about the thing your brain does where it looks at a string of letters and interprets it as a word you already know how to say. And seeing how dismissive one of the lead proponents of these methods is toward people being able to identify a writer's deliberate word choices...I don't think you actually can teach critical thinking skills through reading under those circumstances. At the very least, you have to be able to agree on which words are on the page before you can start to talk about what they mean in context.

my partner sometimes pronounces it "exasturbate" and i finally understand why

Totally, but the description of the pedagogy is what really threw the ??? for me. How can you say you're teaching kids to read when one of the lessons involves covering up the word you're supposed to be learning?

I'm definitely open to learning more about this, and I'm sure the perspective of the reporter influences how much information is presented, but I also don't understand how this strategy helps once, like, picture context clues aren't in the materials you're trying to read.

lmao I just got to the "follow the money" episode and they're really trying to turn this into something sinister. sorry publishers make scadzillions of dollars I guess? this part is not super convincing

I believe in some areas during the 60s or 70s the Unifon orthography was taught, though I know the army base grade school my Dad attended as an army brat only taught reform spellings with the standard alphabet, which still made life difficult for my father when my grandfather left the service and they returned to Connecticut. (The school my Dad attended there didn't adopt either. It also didn't help that he had undiagnosed dyslexia.)

The Catholic grade school I attended in the 90s took major pride in distinguishing itself from the local public school by shunning things like 'new new math' and 'whole-word reading', so I'm slightly chagrin to see that attitude being justified by this reporting.

grim

god i can just imagine them sending PRs full of copilot dross to you for review too