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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 06:04 am (UTC)You can't seem to convince teachers of this, but there is NO SUCH THING as "learning styles". She is not an "auditory learner" because that is not a thing that people are.
I honestly do not know what the hell is going on in ed schools, but they're teaching their graduates a whole bunch of garbage.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 10:14 am (UTC)Are you saying this doesn't exist? Is there research that backs this up?
Applogies for the derail. Obviously a child who can't absorb information by reading because she can't read isn't just "an auditory learner." But I'm guessing she might be better at auditory processing than I am, because I'm way better at getting information by reading than hearing it.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 10:39 am (UTC)https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/02/04/the-learning-styles-myth-is-still-prevalent-among-educators-and-it-shows-no-sign-of-going-away/
(This is mostly on studies about belief in learning styles, but it helpfully includes some links on studies showing that they're a myth)
https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-state-teacher-license-prep-materials-debunked-theory/
(No links here, but as it's a professional organization it may be more convincing?)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/
(And they summarize basically what the first two links said)
I know that I personally really struggle to get information from videos if I don't take notes on them, but I think this is sort of the opposite of most people.
I think it's more likely that many people really overestimate how much they really do comprehend and will retain from videos if they don't take notes or otherwise do some sort of review and practice of what they're trying to learn.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 11:42 am (UTC)It seems like the model you're going for is "everyone has the same strengths except for people with actual disabilities"? But we are never going to manage to diagnose all the kids with learning differences or convince their parents they have learning differences, and mainstream classes always include students with a variety of strengths and learning differences. And ability is always a spectrum. It seems unnecessarily pathologizing to pretend that everyone is the same except for people with disabilities. Why not instead depathologize the disabilities and try to be generally accessible?
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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 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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 03:49 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 03:55 pm (UTC)And on the other hand,
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 03:57 pm (UTC)If O. is on the brink of switching over and has been enjoying having people read to her, great, short stint with tutor, no big deal. If she isn't, then 7 seems a good age to break things down into phonics.
I read independently at 3.5 and had a year of phonics in school after it (that year was at a private school; from fourth grade on, public schools). It helped me speak more clearly; it's not as though phonics training is a loss even for kids who read fluidly above age-level expectation, any decade. As long as the tutor can keep a light touch, tutoring sounds potentially really helpful to me. And I read that early not because my L2 mother pushed it but because she kept up with me.
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.
no subject
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 :) )
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 04:17 pm (UTC)And yeah, that first candidate I talked to... I think she would be a really fun person to work with, and she might even help through having lots of fun activities and so on, but she just had so much educational jargon whenever I tried to pin her down on anything that I just... came out of it very uncertain as to what she knew about kids actually learning.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
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 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 05:43 pm (UTC)And ability is always a spectrum.
This.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 07:20 pm (UTC)(I vaguely remember doing phonics, but I could read super early. My sister was born when I was 3, and so my parents no longer had time to constantly read to me, and learning to do it myself was clearly the only solution. It was discouraged at the time for kids to be able to read before kindergarten - maybe in the 80s they didn't trust parents to do it themselves? but either way, both of us have advanced degrees in literature stuff now so it seems to have turned out okay.)
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 09:48 pm (UTC)I agree with Ashkitty (is that Ashura? s'mae!) that having parents who are readers is important. Something I have learned from my brief brushes with pedagogy is that motivation is super important, way more so than actual instruction for some subjects. Once you get the idea that something is frustrating and stupid and you'll look bad for not knowing it already, it's way harder to learn anything about it than if you get the idea that it's the key to Exciting Adult Stuff. My partner's kid learned arithmetic because there were always game-playing adults around, and it was always "we can't deal you in until you can add the numbers on the cards", and then the kid could do math and then about two years later the kid was winning.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 10:47 pm (UTC)* 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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-01 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-02 05:53 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-02 11:16 am (UTC)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.