Reading rant: The Sequels

[cahn]

My 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.

Comments

[cahn]

(btw, you never need to apologize for derailing -- this is all fascinating and I'm so glad you brought this up!)

Hmm, this is really interesting to me because it does kinda map into how I feel about learning -- generally speaking I hate hate hate podcasts and audiobooks and things like that, it's usually not a preferred way for me to ingest information. But it's not because I can't learn things aurally, it's because I get impatient with the audio feed (I think because my brain perceives it as inefficient, as I can read more quickly than i can listen) and my mind wanders off. (I've also learned that crocheting dramatically increases my patience with ingesting things aurally, lol, because I have something else to focus on but that doesn't interrupt the information-gathering part of the process.) So I definitely wouldn't say I have a "learning style" in the sense of the above articles, but it's certainly true that I'm going to be happier if I have more visual material to refer to.

[crystalpyramid]

I actually kind of wonder if what's actually going on is something like this:

* teaching in a variety of modalities is better, superior pedagogy, works better, prepares kids better for being able to do stuff in a variety of modalities later, etc.
* teachers are people and telling us that something is superior pedagogy just goes in one ear out the other because people are *constantly* telling us all kinds of different contradictory random stuff is superior pedagogy (how on earth is whole-word such a popular thing at the same time as common core math which is built on the exact opposite philosophy??)
* "kids have different learning modalities and you have to serve them all* is a resonant narrative that works and gets teachers to teach better, because teachers joined this profession to help children, not to go along with whatever the current educational fads are, so it sticks around.
* BUT this also leads some people to overgeneralize that and think they need to try to educate some kids exclusively in one modality, which seems obviously wrong and bad to anyone actually thinking about it
* and then that gets debunked by people who like saying that the entire establishment of education, all teachers, and all institutions that train people to teach are wrong

I really wish there could be more work to fix the absurd inequity of our educational system and less attacks on teachers, most of whom are doing the best they can with too many obligations and not nearly enough resources.

Also I totally agree with you that there's a pacing problem with audiobooks. I could read it so much faster and it's so boring to wait for them to get anywhere. Although for me, I'm not sure if I'm actually good at absorbing spoken text at the speed I read at -- that seems like it would be exhausting.

[conuly]

* teachers are people and telling us that something is superior pedagogy just goes in one ear out the other because people are *constantly* telling us all kinds of different contradictory random stuff is superior pedagogy (how on earth is whole-word such a popular thing at the same time as common core math which is built on the exact opposite philosophy??)

1. Common core math is not a teaching philosophy, it's just a list of things to be taught at various grade levels. Quite a wide variety of curriculum with a lot of different approaches can honestly claim to be "common core aligned" even while teaching arithmetic in wildly different ways from the start. Source: OMG I have done so much ridiculous research into math curricula when the kids were little and we were "afterschooling" math, it is absurd. And yeah, the range of things which are all common core aligned runs the gamut in so many different directions.


2. But yeah, I do know what you mean, and honestly, I think the common element here is the appearance of freedom from rote learning. Which is wrong on multiple levels, but I've witnessed many teachers earnestly swearing that "whole words" methods and materials are less boring and "rote" than phonics and many of the more commonly derided newer math curricula (Everyday Math springs to mind) are notable for the lack of time devoted to practice. Presumably they figure the parents shore it up at home or something, which honestly seems to me to be the product of people who have never met any parents.

3. Just gonna point out that there was never any golden age when most Americans were getting a superior education in math or, honestly, even an adequate education in arithmetic. We were always falling behind, with materials entirely too heavy on memorization of algorithms and light on conceptual understanding, from when they first started comparing American textbooks and children to others internationally, right after WWII. Which - even then, our students were underperforming those who had been bombed. The trouble is that it's hard to improve the system when most people who have solid math skills do not become elementary school teachers, and also, parents really resent not knowing how to help their kids with the subject and also do not understand either a. how long it took them to learn math (so many people have tried to tell me that their teacher taught the entire class long division in a single day and I'm like, what the hell did you do the rest of the year then, and also, if your education is so superior why are you confused when I do division by extracting prime factors?) and b. what, exactly it is they don't understand about the subject and why understanding really is important over rote memorization.

[crystalpyramid]

I suppose it's very exciting to stumble through reading, never having any idea what any word is or any way to find out. It's always a surprise! But it seems like it would also be unnecessarily stressful.

I've spent most of my career trying to avoid being a math teacher, so I've mostly missed having to teach any of the new curricula that are supposed to be aligned with the common core standards, but from everything I've seen of the standards, it sounds like it's at least supposed to be about explicitly teaching the rules people are using to figure stuff out, instead of just asking people to memorize things without understanding why they are true. (Whether any specific common-core-aligned curricula actually achieve that is a question I can't really answer.) And that goal seems very phonics-like. Yes, you end up memorizing lots of stuff for speed and fluency, but memorization fails sometimes and it's really important to be able to work things out the long way by understanding how they work. Or check your answer. Or handle something you haven't seen before.

They're also probably trying to adapt math to a world where everyone has calculators on their phones. I don't think we've really quite figured out what to do about that, as a society.

And yeah, definitely no golden age. Maybe we had a golden age where the elite were learning math pretty well, but they probably weren't even using normal textbooks. And totally agreed that elementary school teachers being terrified of math is causing a lot of problems. (And I wonder if elementary school teachers being terrified of math is tied to the thing I see where half the ninth-grade girls come in with pretty severe math anxiety.)

How did you learn to do division by extracting prime factors? That's cool.

[conuly]

How did you learn to do division by extracting prime factors? That's cool.

By not wanting to do long division, basically! We were covering fractions - and something many people are very vague on, ime, is the fact that a fraction is just another way of writing a division equation - and it occurred to me that reducing fractions could work for division as well. And it can, though it was tricky with remainders until I realized I could just write those as fractions or decimals as well.

I eventually did work out long division.

From everything I've seen of the standards, it sounds like it's at least supposed to be about explicitly teaching the rules people are using to figure stuff out, instead of just asking people to memorize things without understanding why they are true.

That certainly is the explicit goal, though I agree that results are... mixed. But I don't think the people picking out the curriculum are really thinking clearly about their goals at all times. (And I know they're not the teachers!)

Something which really ought to give everybody pause is the number of new teachers who will admit outright that they didn't understand basic arithmetic until they were being taught on how to use this method or that to teach them. They're not specially bad at math. They're about average, it's just that many Americans either wildly overestimate their abilities or think math anxiety is normal AND still manage to overestimate both their abilities (thinking they're bad but not as bad as all that) and everybody else's.

And I wonder if elementary school teachers being terrified of math is tied to the thing I see where half the ninth-grade girls come in with pretty severe math anxiety.

Studies say yes! (I will not google those studies now, though, so just take my word for it.) The better the skills and confidence of the early-grades teachers, the better the skills and confidence of the students even a decade later, especially the girls.

I suppose it's very exciting to stumble through reading, never having any idea what any word is or any way to find out. It's always a surprise! But it seems like it would also be unnecessarily stressful.

It surely is, but they superficially read very well at a very young age. Right up until they don't. It's the same with teaching arithmetic by having them memorize algorithms - it works pretty well (with the possible exception of The Scary Word Problems, aka the entire reason we have to learn to do arithmetic in the first place!) until their ability to memorize starts to falter, sometimes as early as the 3rd or 4th grade, and then they are totally screwed because they don't have the bedrock they need to make sense of the later material and they don't know how to change their habits.

But no, the argument - and it is an thoroughly inane argument which only is repeated because the people making it have never bothered to examine the evidence for themselves - is that phonics readers are boring and fake and that real books is the way to go (with the bridge of controlled vocabulary readers first), and if you've ever compared basic phonics readers to basic controlled vocabulary readers you'll rapidly form an opinion as to which is more boring. (Frequently the people making these arguments will get so caught up that they'll venture the opinion that Dick and Jane books are a good example of the perils of bad phonics teaching. They really don't know what they're talking about in that case, and I don't mind saying so.)

You'll also hear them vastly overstate the difficulty of learning to grasp English orthography via phonics. Now, I'll be the first to say that the English spelling system could do with some improvements, and that, annoyingly, the "rulebreakers" are most likely to occur in high frequency words than rarer ones - but it's not really as bad as all that and anyway, these people inevitably will say things like "You can't sound out the word ride" (or me, sleep, car, house, or any of a dozen other common words that actually is very easy to sound out using basic phonics rules). For some reason that utterly baffles me they never choose an actually difficult word like "two" or "eye" as their example, which I suppose just goes to show... well, something. It definitely shows *something*, and it's quite frightening to hear these opinions coming from first grade teachers.

They also seem to think that there's a lot of drill in phonics education. It's a fair cop - but it's not like there isn't any drill in memorizing sight words! We all hate to admit it, but practice is the name of the game when it comes to learning, and it ain't always fun.

[crystalpyramid]

They're about average, it's just that many Americans either wildly overestimate their abilities or think math anxiety is normal AND still manage to overestimate both their abilities (thinking they're bad but not as bad as all that) and everybody else's.

I think they're also misunderstanding what math IS. Math is about being able to understand wtf is going on, not just perform rote activities and get the right answer. My math ed coursework, for all its many failings, was very consistent about that message and I totally agree.

Studies say yes!

I believe you! I think I've seen some linked in the past, too, but they definitely match up with my observations, so they're easy to believe. Causality goes both ways in an endless loop. Teaching high schoolers, I never know what I should say to the math-anxious kids who want to go into elementary ed. I guess I should frantically try to shore up their math abilities or something.

phonics readers are boring and fake and that real books is the way to goBob books seemed pretty boring when my mom tried to teach my sister to read with them. But the textbooks are not the methodology -- this feels like something people are getting confused all over the place. Using phonics rules to decode books allows you to ever learn new words and not be trapped in controlled-vocabulary readers that make it look like you can read when you can't.

And expecting kids to guess phonics rules from repeated exposure to memorized words rather than teaching them the rules and hoping they memorize some words through repeated exposure feels like a misunderstanding of which parts are easy and which parts are hard. Memorization is easy but if you give people the rules they don't have to memorize as much and can do it more efficiently.

As someone who's studied other languages with more predictable orthography, I don't get why people can't understand that "ride" is perfectly phonetic. Russian has spelling rules too, things that don't spell exactly as they're pronounced. You learn the rules and then it's fine. "Ride" follows very straightforward rules. See also the meme that uses "neighbor" in an example of how the "i before e except after c" rule doesn't work in English. (Because that's not the entire rule.)

There's a lot of drill in everything learning-related, yeah. You learn a rule, you apply the rule. It's at least more interesting drill than straight up memorization, right? There's actually a cognitive step of analyzing words.

[conuly]

Bob books seemed pretty boring when my mom tried to teach my sister to read with them.

Oh they certainly are! But they're infinitely less boring than even the most interesting controlled vocabulary reader - Dick and Jane are a positively interesting and readable example of the genre. I remember flat out removing the kids predictable texts from their bags after school and having them read something else, ANYthing else with me instead. (Also - reciting I like to eat X a million times where X can be "apple" or "watermelon" or "birthday cake" is not reading, and it's not really something they could have read either. Over a decade later and I still have Very Strong Feelings about this.)

And yes - when you've had enough practice with phonics, you don't need to use readers. Anything can be the reader.

See also the meme that uses "neighbor" in an example of how the "i before e except after c" rule doesn't work in English. (Because that's not the entire rule.)I think they're also misunderstanding what math IS. Math is about being able to understand wtf is going on, not just perform rote activities and get the right answer. My math ed coursework, for all its many failings, was very consistent about that message and I totally agree.

Oh, yeah, that's a huge common factor in what they misunderstand. This is why they get so het up over children being taught to estimate, or do mental math procedures, or getting partial credit (like they didn't get partial credit on multi-step problems as kids, they totally did and have forgotten). They just don't understand why any of this.

Teaching high schoolers, I never know what I should say to the math-anxious kids who want to go into elementary ed.

Honestly, maybe honesty is the best policy: "It's not just storytime and science projects, you do have to teach arithmetic and understand it at a much higher level than you're teaching it. If you are sincere about this, I think you should do some self-study to shore up your math skills now." (But say it nicer? And recommend some materials?)

[cahn]

tbh this is the one argument I see in favor of teaching kids to read early, because my 3-year-old thought bob books were just fine, but he probably would have rather less patience for them at age 6-7 :)

Using phonics rules to decode books allows you to ever learn new words and not be trapped in controlled-vocabulary readers that make it look like you can read when you can't.

And expecting kids to guess phonics rules from repeated exposure to memorized words rather than teaching them the rules and hoping they memorize some words through repeated exposure feels like a misunderstanding of which parts are easy and which parts are hard. Memorization is easy but if you give people the rules they don't have to memorize as much and can do it more efficiently.

YES YES ALL THIS!!!! And I know that for a kid memorizing a word seems easier than memorizing a rule in the short run! But in the long run it's way harder! (Which is why I never gave A. any sight words at all. He figured out the concept for himself after figuring out phonics, and I maintain that's the correct order :P )

Wait, people are arguing that "ride" isn't phonetic? Whaaaaat?? WHAT?

[crystalpyramid]

Oh good point about tiny kids! If my almost-three-year-old could figure out how to read she'd probably be really into those super-repetitive books. Her favorite activities are all about repetition. (I think we watched the "count to 100" video three times this morning.)

[seekingferret]

! And I know that for a kid memorizing a word seems easier than memorizing a rule in the short run! But in the long run it's way harder!

I just want to push back against this rhetoric of 'long run' and falling behind again. The story of me learning long division is that at some point in elementary school it was taught and I didn't really understand it. I don't know, it was the most complicated algorithmic calculation we'd been taught at that point and I didn't have the mathematical sophistication to grasp it conceptually. I had some sort of workaround, I don't really remember what it was, but my memory was good enough and I was clever enough that I could solve enough problems to get by in class, without actually doing long division. And then I hit sixth grade and I was put in honors math and I couldn't do long division and I hit a wall where for the first time it wasn't enough to fake it...

So I went to my father and tearfully admitted I couldn't do long division and he taught me how to do it in about five minutes and after that I was fine.

I don't know, kids develop cognitively at different rates and it's messy and confusing but I'm not convinced it matters very much what technique they're introduced to first. In the long run there will be fits and starts in the learning process, not some clean linear path. (Admittedly a problem with this skepticism of mine is that I'm also skeptical of the quality of education research so I don't have good ways of figuring out what actually is true other than leaning on my own flawed intuitions and experiences.)

[cahn]

So -- as a counter anecdote, there's the kid I tutored in physics, where it became clear pretty quickly that she had taken a wrong turn in fractions around (I assume) fourth/fifth grade. I assume she got some sort of help/tutoring so that she could pass math class, but not in a way where she actually understood what was going on. When I tutored her she was in ninth grade, she'd had years of being told she was supposed to follow math that built on fractions but where she obviously didn't follow it at all, and then she was taking physics where she definitely needed to be able to understand not just fractions but a lot of stuff that came after fractions, and... it was a mess, and I couldn't fix it in an hour of tutoring a week, especially since I wasn't tasked to teach her math, I was tasked to get her to pass physics. I think she probably more-or-less understood fractions by the time we finished the semester, but I couldn't fix all the rest of her math in the limited time we had; if it had been my child we'd have had daily sessions until we fixed it.

IDK, maybe reading is more like long division than like fractions in that it's not conceptually needed to build on other things, and maybe easier to fix, but on the other hand I think there's a certain kind of "but I'm supposed to know how to do this already" and "this is how I learned how to do it but it's not working for me now" where you were able to push through and ask for help, but sometimes that doesn't work.

I mean, I get what you're saying about how kids develop cognitively at different rates, that's definitely true. My worry is pitched more to if she picks up from school that this memorizing-words stuff is the "right" way to learn -- what if your way of faking it was the way you'd been taught, so when you were in honors math you were like "huh, I'm doing it the right way and I'm still having problems and it's super frustrating, so I must not be good at math"? (But it's equally as likely I'm just being overexcited about the whole thing, of course! It's not even clear to me how you would tell with a specific child and subject.)

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I acknowledge that this happens to people and I can understand a mechanism by which bad pedagogy makes it more likely to happen, but I'm skeptical that pedagogy is the only factor involved. I dunno, anytime I look at research involving humans I approach it with the awareness that we're deep in the middle of a massive replication crisis. I've seen a bunch of research that shows that some educational intervention makes a dramatic difference X years down the road, I've also seen a bunch of research showing that many of the most dramatic educational intervention study results collapse into no change between cohorts after Y number of years.

My brother learned math from Everyday Math/Chicago Math and I didn't, and I was much more successful in math class and he found his math education frustrating and hard to grasp, and it's really tempting to blame Everyday Math*, but I had plenty of classmates in my year who found math frustrating and hard to grasp. There's all sorts of reasons for that. My brother is incredibly smart but he approaches the world analytically in very different ways than I do.

[cahn]

Ah! Yeah, I see what you mean. I think another thing confounding this is that because kids can go through such different paths, it's really not clear what "good pedagogy" even means a lot of the time; if you do research and find that pedagogical system A is able to successfully teach 80% of the kids and system B is only successfully teaching 30%, then obviously you'd use A, right? Unless B is reaching all of the 20% that A isn't... but I feel like studies don't necessarily capture that. I mean, I know people try to do those studies, but there's so much confounding to begin with that I don't know that it makes sense to have a whole lot of confidence in the results...

I have another anecdote in support of your point! :) In college, I had a friend whose high school kinematics background wasn't as strong as mine, so when we took kinematics together she'd sometimes be lost and I generally wasn't, so I'd try to explain things to her. Note that I had a really, really excellent high school physics teacher who as far as I'm concerned was amazing at physics pedagogy (and he thought about it a LOT and was current on recent studies, etc.). I'd try several different explanations, and none of them would work, and then I'd try another explanation in desperation that I thought was kind of silly and that would never work for me to understand it, and her eyes would light up and she'd clearly have gotten it. And this happened more than once, it was very weird to me.

[seekingferret]

I was going through old drafts and I found a draft response to this comment that I guess I never considered finished, but I think it has value. Even years later I wanted to share with you, especially in light of our discussion of Sold a Story.

if you do research and find that pedagogical system A is able to successfully teach 80% of the kids and system B is only successfully teaching 30%, then obviously you'd use A, right?

I mean, yes, with lots of caveats? If system A is beat the students if they get questions wrong, and system B is give positive reinforcement if they get questions wrong, obviously you use system B. But that's a bad example. What about this one... What if system A is able to successfully teach 80% of the kids and system B is only able to teach 30% of the kids, but then you break down the numbers and the reason system A is able to teach 80% of the kids is because the sample group was 90% white and actually system A is great at teaching white kids but terrible at teaching black kids, but system B is evenly successful at teaching students of all ethnicities 30% of the time?

My point isn't to play statistical (or rhetorical) games with confounding factors, my point is to remind us that there are all sorts of considerations that go into selection of a curriculum besides just academic effectiveness. What if System A requires every student to get a $300 book or a $2000 computer for it to work, and the budget won't support it? What if System A completely fails in a pandemic with remote learning, but System B is compatible with remote learning? What if System A only works if you have a thirty year veteran teacher, and otherwise is 10% effective, but System B keeps plugging along at 30% even with a first year teacher? What if System A is completely useless at actually teaching students to love reading but is really good at getting students to pass the state reading tests? What if System A is only better if it has buy-in and supplemental support from parents outside the classroom? When a school administrator is selecting a curriculum they may consider some or all of these things, as well as probably considering less noble things like whether they like the textbook salesman, how state law constrains their choices, and what the talk show host they agree with said on TV about education.

My professor who taught me vector calculus didn't give any partial credit. Her exams were four or five difficult problems, each of which required up to twenty calculations. if you made a sign error, you got the problem wrong. Two problems wrong and you failed the test. So the first couple tests I bombed, and then at some point in the class we were talking to her and she was telling us about her life working at a Soviet nuclear research facility, and it sort of clicked for all of us what 'partial credit' meant in that environment and then for the rest of the year when I took her exams I imagined that if I made a sign error it could blow up a nuclear reactor and I aced the remaining tests.

Needless to say this is not a good way to teach elementary school kids even if it works, but I sort of feel like that's the point. There are lots of productive ways to teach students that aren't actually good ways. I have done no studies on this, but it seems entirely plausible to me that the canonical early 1900s method of teaching math with corporal punishment if you make an arithmetic mistake had a bifurcated result: some fraction of the students were horribly traumatized, and some fraction of the students suffered no trauma whatsoever and became extremely careful and motivated students. It's absolutely not worth traumatizing any students to teach math, but what do you do if you're researching math education and your 'control group' standard treatment is abusive? Maybe you end up promoting a pedagogical method that doesn't work, because that's ethically the right thing to do?


I was good in math, and I had generally good math education that involved a mixture of rote and understanding concepts, but my perennial problem with my math education was that I'd be given a problem set with 30 or 50 problems for homework and after ten or fifteen it would stop being math homework and would literally just be handwriting homework, because I could solve the problems faster and more routinely than I could write them down, and it was incredibly frustrating and not educational. But I saw my classmates and my siblings do math, I'm aware that not everyone worked the same. My little brother needed to do all thirty problems to grasp a concept that I had down in fifteen. And sometimes I really did need to do all fifty problems, and sometimes I needed to do 30 problems and then make up my own problems to work to address a weakness in my comprehension. As an engineering student I always said that my intention was not to learn calculus so well that I could still do any algorithm now twenty years down the line, my intention was to learn it well enough conceptually that if I needed to use a technique I could re-learn it in five or ten minutes. I have no idea how to integrate by parts now, but if I did for some reason need to, doing another fifty problems twenty years ago probably wouldn't help.

[cahn]

It surely is, but they superficially read very well at a very young age. Right up until they don't.

THIS right here is what I worry about with my niece, and why it's more concerning to me that her kindergarten teacher thought she could read than that she actually can't read. If she were just like "yeah I don't know how to do the thing," I'd be like, okay, it hasn't clicked yet, that happens. But I'm so worried that her school thinks she can superficially read, and she's doing well enough so that she doesn't see a need to change what she's doing, and then in two years she'll be, as you say, royally screwed.

It's the same with teaching arithmetic by having them memorize algorithms - it works pretty well (with the possible exception of The Scary Word Problems, aka the entire reason we have to learn to do arithmetic in the first place!) until their ability to memorize starts to falter

Yeah, that's fair. I heard so much railing from other kids about the Scary Word Problems growing up. Though interestingly, I remember tutoring kids around my age in high school in physics, where they'd just be completely lost as to how to do a kinematics problem but when I was like, "well, you drive, right? So you're in a car and going from point A to B and going this speed," and then suddenly they'd magically understand how to do the problem, because of course everyone understands driving and that going sixty miles an hour means that in an hour you've gone sixty miles (which was the kind of thing they'd swear they didn't understand before). So I wonder if there's math anxiety mixed in as well, or something.

these people inevitably will say things like "You can't sound out the word ride"

Whoops, I replied to crystalpyramid on this, but -- what? WHAT??

[conuly]

Whoops, I replied to [personal profile] crystalpyramid on this, but -- what? WHAT??

Yeah. And I want to be clear, this is not hyperbole. I'm not exaggerating their claim to make fun of them, nor making it out like more people saying this than there really are.

[cahn]

(And I wonder if elementary school teachers being terrified of math is tied to the thing I see where half the ninth-grade girls come in with pretty severe math anxiety.)

Arrrrgh, I definitely believe it! And then there's a whole girl thing too -- one of my friends reported that his daughter (who was great at math) came home one day from middle school and was like "Math is hard," because apparently her friends had been saying that to her...

[cahn]

I think the common element here is the appearance of freedom from rote learning. Which is wrong on multiple levels, but I've witnessed many teachers earnestly swearing that "whole words" methods and materials are less boring and "rote" than phonics and many of the more commonly derided newer math curricula (Everyday Math springs to mind) are notable for the lack of time devoted to practice.

ARRRRRGH yes I have definitely noticed this with my kids' educational journeys. My kids whole school philosophy seems to be dead set against rote learning and practice, which infuriates both me and, thankfully, E's math teacher (so she does get practice in math, yay). And it's not just them, of course.

Interestingly, the teacher I loved and still love most from my elementary school days was not the one who didn't do rote learning with us, but who figured out ways to make the rote learning fun. (Which is also the case with E's fabulous math teacher.)

Presumably they figure the parents shore it up at home or something, which honestly seems to me to be the product of people who have never met any parents.

I don't think this is exactly true, at least on the teachers' part, they just seem to think... idk... that learning will magically happen? But in our case, we are definitely shoring it up at home -- both implicitly, like having the kids figure out multiples and fractions when cooking, or playing rhyming games, and explicitly, like we shored up E's math for years until she got her current Fabulous Math Teacher, and now that E's in 6th grade I've started having her take online classes in grammar and writing because they don't teach that either in any kind of systematic or practicing way (except the one year she had Great Lead Teacher who actually cared that they were learning any grammar).

But again, I am a parent who a) is interested in pedagogy and b) understands the material my kids are learning well enough to teach it to them, and c) was lucky enough to have a couple of excellent teachers (such as my favorite teacher referenced above) who did give me some grounding in how to tackle this for my own kids. Most other parents I know don't have those kinds of skills, though I know a couple who have money instead, so they've been able to fill the gap with tutors. So, I mean, talk about inequity -- it's the people with the privilege of money or education who can actually educate their kids, gah.

with materials entirely too heavy on memorization of algorithms and light on conceptual understanding

Yeah, that's fair, although I do kind of feel like the pendulum has gone the other way when my child doesn't want to do long division because she can't face doing all that writing (although she understands perfectly well how it works). It does seem like there's a balance there that we keep missing (though see below).

when I do division by extracting prime factors?

Lol! This is the way my kid likes to do division too. But of course when we were talking about large prime factors that method doesn't work so well -- though crystalpyramid has a point about calculators/computers below, and in fact it's rare that as an adult I have to do actual long division without a calculator/computer, and much more frequently that I have to estimate division problems to a factor of 2 or even 10. So maybe it's OK that she understands the algorithm and could program it in a computer and doesn't really want to ever have to do it by hand.

[crystalpyramid]

I found polynomial long division really magical, because it still worked with the same algorithm, and it sort of made it clearer how the algorithm was working too -- I don't think I thought about it until I got to polynomial long division.

[cahn]

Agreed! I hadn't had the slightest idea how long division worked (it was just a Magical Algorithm) until polynomial long division.

[cahn]

Heh, I totally buy that series of events!

But yes, that's a good point about absorbing spoken text at speed -- there's a guy at work who talks extremely quickly and it really is both exhausting and I never feel like I get more than a quarter of the information I'm supposed to be getting from him.