Reading rant: The Sequels
Sep. 30th, 2021 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnMy life for the past couple of weeks has been basically the sequel to my previous reading-rant posts :P So in case you were wondering how those turned out, here is an update!
1) Sequel to my post on Lucy Calkins: Turns out that at Back-to-School Night the 1st grade teacher at the swank gifted school my kids go to revealed that they use Lucy Calkins for a reading curriculum in first grade, thus leading to one of the other parents panicking (she has heard of the evils of this curriculum from her reading specialist friend), a lot of evening texting, a meeting with this parent and her friend the aforementioned reading specialist, and now I'm trying to set up a meeting with this parent and the school curriculum director. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me viscerally speaking, because my kid knows how to read and did before even starting kindergarten, but man am I glad he knew how to read already. (The other parent's child mostly knows how to read, but is not fluent.) I mostly am just trying to make sure they don't use three-cueing because come on, that's completely ridiculous. I tried asking A. about it with very leading questions and he didn't seem to think that the teacher had ever said anything that was similar to three-cueing, so I guess that's a good sign. (Although I asked him about phonics in kindergarten -- which I now know his kindergarten teacher used, because the other kids have learned it -- and he had no idea about that either, so he might just be really poor at answering those kinds of questions. But also since he knew how to read, it's possible she did phonics with other kids but not him.)
(Interestingly, the reading specialist we talked to said that older teachers often do a decent job of teaching kids to read even with an awful curriculum, because they don't feel like they have to slavishly follow the curriculum, they just mix in phonics because they know it actually works. Their Kindergarten teacher is, in fact, on the older side -- not old, but she's definitely taught for a while, and I haven't heard any complaint about parents worrying this teacher didn't teach their kid how to read well (and let's just say I have heard many complaints from other parents about various subjects and teachers, so I kind of feel like I would have heard about it).
2) Sequel to the post where I mentioned my niece's reading: to recap briefly, my niece, my sister's oldest child O., who I think is reasonably bright, had not learned how to read at the end of 2019, the year before she entered kindergarten. Mostly legit, most kids don't know how to read when they enter kindergarten, right? But she'd been exposed to "whole-word" methods with maaaaaybe a small smattering of phonics, and I was a little concerned, not about the not reading yet, but because when I played word games with her that Christmas she was displaying a somewhat worrying tendency to guess the word, and I didn't like that. We all talked about this and my sister elected to wait and see how she did in kindergarten.
Then her kindergarten year, of course, turned out to be severely disrupted by the pandemic, and I'm not sure how much she learned about anything that year. But here's the thing! My sister, and apparently her kindergarten teacher as well, thought she was actually reading.
Now it is the fall of 2021 and O. is entering first grade, and she just turned 7. At this point, my sister has realized O. does not actually know how to read. That by itself I would be okay with (I know it's still pretty common not to know how to read in first grade), but the way in which she doesn't know how to read is still this thing where she goes "I'm going to look at the first two letters and then guess what the word is." And this is good enough that she seems to be fooling her teachers that she is reading. It is not good enough, as you can imagine, that she actually likes reading, and I worry that O. looks like she's doing well enough that the underlying deficits are not going to get addressed.
If I lived near them, I'd probably buy a phonics curriculum (conuly recommended me some on the previous post, and I've forwarded them to my sister) and go over it with O. I don't, and my sister doesn't have the spoons to do something like that (even though she's doing better these days with medication). But fortunately our parents agreed to pay for a tutor, and I spent a decent chunk of time this weekend and this week researching and phone-interviewing reading tutors. (This kind of thing is also very hard for my sister these days, which is definitely autoimmune-related because she was the queen of organization and logistics before she got sick... but also I have the pedagogical interest.)
The two tutors I'd really have liked to retain from their online description weren't able to do it, sadly. (I had a brief email exchange with one of them, and I just reeeeallly liked her and although I guess I can't say for sure because I haven't talked to her at length, my sense is that I would hire her in a hot second if she were available.) The three I've interviewed so far are all retired teachers.
The first seemed very nice and very personable, and I think O. would love her, and she kept bringing up sight words and how phonics were all very well and good but she taught to the whole child, and at one point she asked how O.'s comprehension was. "It's great when someone reads to her," I said. "Oh, okay, so she's an auditory learner!" Nooooo, I mean, maybe she is?? But the proximate reason she can comprehend being read to better than reading herself is because she doesn't know how to read properly!!
The second potential tutor sounds older and not nearly as much fun. She did also bring up sight words a time or two, but at least after I described O.'s problems she agreed that she thought a systematic phonics program would work well for her, and she at least threw around names that are consistent with an analytic phonics program.
The third runs one of those learning centers (Sylvan) which seems to have a reasonable phonics program, but she brought up sight words too. IDK I know I am working from one data point and a fairly bright data point at that, but I never did a single sight word with A. (of course we talked about words that don't quite follow the phonetic pattern as he was sounding out words) and he learned to read fine :P
I have recommended #2 to my sister and we'll see how it goes.
It's killing me, though, that there's a good chance O. will learn to read only because she's got an aunt who is interested in pedagogy and grandparents who are well-to-do enough to pay for tutoring. I think about all those other kids out there who don't have that and it makes me really sad. UGH.
1) Sequel to my post on Lucy Calkins: Turns out that at Back-to-School Night the 1st grade teacher at the swank gifted school my kids go to revealed that they use Lucy Calkins for a reading curriculum in first grade, thus leading to one of the other parents panicking (she has heard of the evils of this curriculum from her reading specialist friend), a lot of evening texting, a meeting with this parent and her friend the aforementioned reading specialist, and now I'm trying to set up a meeting with this parent and the school curriculum director. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me viscerally speaking, because my kid knows how to read and did before even starting kindergarten, but man am I glad he knew how to read already. (The other parent's child mostly knows how to read, but is not fluent.) I mostly am just trying to make sure they don't use three-cueing because come on, that's completely ridiculous. I tried asking A. about it with very leading questions and he didn't seem to think that the teacher had ever said anything that was similar to three-cueing, so I guess that's a good sign. (Although I asked him about phonics in kindergarten -- which I now know his kindergarten teacher used, because the other kids have learned it -- and he had no idea about that either, so he might just be really poor at answering those kinds of questions. But also since he knew how to read, it's possible she did phonics with other kids but not him.)
(Interestingly, the reading specialist we talked to said that older teachers often do a decent job of teaching kids to read even with an awful curriculum, because they don't feel like they have to slavishly follow the curriculum, they just mix in phonics because they know it actually works. Their Kindergarten teacher is, in fact, on the older side -- not old, but she's definitely taught for a while, and I haven't heard any complaint about parents worrying this teacher didn't teach their kid how to read well (and let's just say I have heard many complaints from other parents about various subjects and teachers, so I kind of feel like I would have heard about it).
2) Sequel to the post where I mentioned my niece's reading: to recap briefly, my niece, my sister's oldest child O., who I think is reasonably bright, had not learned how to read at the end of 2019, the year before she entered kindergarten. Mostly legit, most kids don't know how to read when they enter kindergarten, right? But she'd been exposed to "whole-word" methods with maaaaaybe a small smattering of phonics, and I was a little concerned, not about the not reading yet, but because when I played word games with her that Christmas she was displaying a somewhat worrying tendency to guess the word, and I didn't like that. We all talked about this and my sister elected to wait and see how she did in kindergarten.
Then her kindergarten year, of course, turned out to be severely disrupted by the pandemic, and I'm not sure how much she learned about anything that year. But here's the thing! My sister, and apparently her kindergarten teacher as well, thought she was actually reading.
Now it is the fall of 2021 and O. is entering first grade, and she just turned 7. At this point, my sister has realized O. does not actually know how to read. That by itself I would be okay with (I know it's still pretty common not to know how to read in first grade), but the way in which she doesn't know how to read is still this thing where she goes "I'm going to look at the first two letters and then guess what the word is." And this is good enough that she seems to be fooling her teachers that she is reading. It is not good enough, as you can imagine, that she actually likes reading, and I worry that O. looks like she's doing well enough that the underlying deficits are not going to get addressed.
If I lived near them, I'd probably buy a phonics curriculum (
conuly recommended me some on the previous post, and I've forwarded them to my sister) and go over it with O. I don't, and my sister doesn't have the spoons to do something like that (even though she's doing better these days with medication). But fortunately our parents agreed to pay for a tutor, and I spent a decent chunk of time this weekend and this week researching and phone-interviewing reading tutors. (This kind of thing is also very hard for my sister these days, which is definitely autoimmune-related because she was the queen of organization and logistics before she got sick... but also I have the pedagogical interest.)The two tutors I'd really have liked to retain from their online description weren't able to do it, sadly. (I had a brief email exchange with one of them, and I just reeeeallly liked her and although I guess I can't say for sure because I haven't talked to her at length, my sense is that I would hire her in a hot second if she were available.) The three I've interviewed so far are all retired teachers.
The first seemed very nice and very personable, and I think O. would love her, and she kept bringing up sight words and how phonics were all very well and good but she taught to the whole child, and at one point she asked how O.'s comprehension was. "It's great when someone reads to her," I said. "Oh, okay, so she's an auditory learner!" Nooooo, I mean, maybe she is?? But the proximate reason she can comprehend being read to better than reading herself is because she doesn't know how to read properly!!
The second potential tutor sounds older and not nearly as much fun. She did also bring up sight words a time or two, but at least after I described O.'s problems she agreed that she thought a systematic phonics program would work well for her, and she at least threw around names that are consistent with an analytic phonics program.
The third runs one of those learning centers (Sylvan) which seems to have a reasonable phonics program, but she brought up sight words too. IDK I know I am working from one data point and a fairly bright data point at that, but I never did a single sight word with A. (of course we talked about words that don't quite follow the phonetic pattern as he was sounding out words) and he learned to read fine :P
I have recommended #2 to my sister and we'll see how it goes.
It's killing me, though, that there's a good chance O. will learn to read only because she's got an aunt who is interested in pedagogy and grandparents who are well-to-do enough to pay for tutoring. I think about all those other kids out there who don't have that and it makes me really sad. UGH.
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Date: 2021-10-01 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 04:01 pm (UTC)I do think everything is being pushed earlier and earlier (math is like this too; I remember doing simple addition and subtraction in second grade but they're working on it in first and sometimes even in K), which is good for some kids (I'd have loved to do it earlier!) but not great for others.
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Date: 2021-10-01 02:15 pm (UTC)Mid-first grade I suddenly saw the point of being able to read independently and skipped right to stealing all my older sister's chapter books.
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Date: 2021-10-01 04:05 pm (UTC)But wait, why would memorizing/guessing words keep the experience of being read to as long as possible? I think O. gets read to less now because she's now expected to be able to read books herself (which of course she hates doing, since she's really just guessing at words).
(I had the opposite experience, lol; I wanted to keep reading books to my kids but as soon as they learned how to read, they didn't want me to read to them any more, except that A. will sometimes ask me to read a book silently that he's also reading, and he will let me read him Shel Silverstein poems :) )
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Date: 2021-10-01 05:00 pm (UTC)We didn't actually stop reading aloud afterwards! But when I was tiny "read me a book" always worked and I had already seen that shift to "why don't you read it on your own" with my sister. (I was getting "read it on your own" already too and was delaying partly out of stubbornness over that, I think. I don't want to read it by myself! So I won't enjoy it, so there!)
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Date: 2021-10-01 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-02 01:39 pm (UTC)It's not really better now. In the US, at least, school systems will do virtually anything they can to avoid having to diagnose dyslexia, probably because if they admitted that it exists they'd have to remediate it.
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Date: 2021-10-02 01:50 pm (UTC)These days I get the impression that at least kids who are diagnosed get something, though I'm sure that too really depends on the school.
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Date: 2021-10-02 01:54 pm (UTC)They are supposed to, though you'll have to go private to even get a diagnosis of dyslexia.
As soon as what the schools are supposed to do costs money, it's amazing how quickly they'll decide your child does not really need it. My niece's school is quite happy to give her extended time on tests - but somehow they talked my sister out of a scribe for tests, pre-typed notes for her classes, and the one thing she urgently needs, orton-gillingham instruction in reading and writing. (They did agree to speech therapy.)
And this is a good school which is actually considered pretty accommodating for students with disabilities!
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Date: 2021-10-02 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 03:55 pm (UTC)And on the other hand,
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Date: 2021-10-02 11:44 am (UTC)I think they've tried to push the ages in different grades a bit later, now, too -- I know the state I live in has changed the cutoff for kindergarten admission.
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Date: 2021-10-02 01:44 pm (UTC)Interesting fact that your mother would never believe: If you compare students who started learning to read at the age of 7 with those who started learning at the age of 5, by 9 they're reading on about the same level - especially if you spend age 5 and 6 doing things like intensive hands-on instruction in science and art and nature study and drama and field trips to various places.
Even more interesting fact: Every time I've pointed this out to people (even back when I had the URLs to various studies on hand, which I no longer do), somebody would say that you can't wait until 7 to start teaching reading because then they'd be behind and not able to switch to "reading to learn". Those people who started reading before their peers also say that they were "bored" for several years while their peers caught up and they can't imagine how much worse it would have been if they'd had to wait until 7 for their peers to be taught to read.
Which just goes to show that even if you can read, that doesn't mean that your comprehension doesn't still absolutely suck.
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Date: 2021-10-02 05:56 pm (UTC)Huh, I wasn't particularly bored at school while I was waiting for everyone else to learn how to read. I mean, to be honest I found the phonics workbooks boring, but I think I would have regardless of whether I knew how to read or not.
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Date: 2021-10-02 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-05 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 06:58 am (UTC)You might not be wrong, though I'll note that the USA has been addicted to various forms of "look say" or "whole words" or, now, "balanced literacy" for a really long time.
And, to be fair, even though it's the obviously inferior method, enough students do manage to learn to read this way. (Admittedly, those who live in highly literate households with parents who a. read for fun and information and b. read to their kids are much more likely to have enough exposure to the written word to work around it, and also are more likely to have a broad vocabulary and a variety of life experiences that help them figure out unfamiliar reading with context. So maybe that's it. Maybe it's classism/racism - it's good enough for those kids!)
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Date: 2021-10-06 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 06:59 am (UTC)