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]

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.