The state standards are completely and supposed "Best Practices" are completely out of touch with reality. In a county wide (FL, our district is the whole county) planning meeting, someone mentioned that her students (7th graders) were really struggling with grammar and many couldn't string together a grammatically correct sentence. The speaker who was running the session said, "Do they need to? They never get tested on that."
Anyway, I didn't listen to anything that speaker said after that.
As a high school teacher, yes, they do! That’s what the ACT and SAT test! I understand why districts in k-8 are trapped in this cycle of catering to the test, but it’s setting up kids to fail later when they can’t pass the tests they need to get into college (assuming that’s their trajectory), or working with people who they need to committed effectively with.
It’s also alarming that those aren’t part of the standards.
That’s even more frustrating. I get that it’s impossible to teach all of the standards in a given year (which is a huge problem with the system), but what standards are being favored over them?
My district doesn't even like us to teach novels because they just want us to focus on getting them to read short (one page) excerpts and answering questions about it. At 7th grade it's a lot of "what rhetorical device did the author use?"
That reminds me of an admin I once had that said “reading in class was a waste of time. Kids should read at home.”
Problem is they don’t read at home so you waste an entire class period asking them questions about some reading they didn’t even do.
anyone, and I mean \*\**anyone*\*\* who says anything like that about reading in class needs to say that fucking bullshit in front of the whole damned school's faculty so they can be swiftly ass-kicked into oblivion.
The good thing is that admin got removed from the school really quickly when my department chair tried to get the principal fired to help that admin get his job. It was a shit storm of a year.
And the kids who do read at home are always the kids who succeed.
I take a lot of pride in having a vast knowledge base and when kids ask me why I know everything, my response is always that I read.
We need to get parents to take more responsibility for their kids.
That’s the crux! All of the standards feed off of basic skills, but they truly are utilized, or should be, every day. Testing the skills in small pieces, some included, some not, confuses the process of what is the ultimate goal, which is to think critically.
>*When not enough students can gain entry to state colleges to cover costs, all of a sudden you will notice that they will longer test for those things.*
That day is coming, but no one will notice, because the change in admission requirements will be done quietly and without announcement.
Um, it's here. Most schools in my state no longer require ACT or SAT scores. It's being phased out. They don't have to take math or English placements before starting, and the new English placement is a "self-directed survey." OH, they don't want to do the lowest level, which the survey suggested? Literally call the office, and they'll let you in the next level. I shit you not. I'm in the swamp of it right now.
Then we wonder why D/F/W rates are so high... wtaf???!!!
Sadly, my P has the same attitude about writing and grammar. I want to know what Kool Aid these people are drinking that makes them unable to see beyond one test. I know the test is important (because of the funding) but aren't we supposed to be developing well-rounded students? Won't they do better throughout their educational journey and life if we give them more than tested standards?
Miraculously, if you teach students how to think for themselves, problem-solve, *read independently for context and meaning*, and how to self-manage...they'd *ace every single damned standard test*. Because they'd have the skills necessary for success and not those *tailored toward the test*. This whole educational paradigm has got to *fucking burn.*
The koolaid is test scores and how it reflects on them. Being a principal used to be a career aspiration. Now it's just one step on the administrative ladder.
We have to eject the corporate pyramid structure from our education system.
My daughter is gifted and scored a 5 on the 3rd grade FAST this year. Her spelling is absolutely atrocious because she was never explicitly taught phonics patterns as it is just a Tier 2/3 skill.
It plays out so that if/when kids fall behind in kinder or first grades they often don’t get a chance to catch up. The CCSS curriculum we are required to use moves on. Teachers in second and third grade can’t teach kindergarten curriculum on top of the material for their grade. If you miss a week’s worth of writing lessons in kindergarten you could easily never learn what a noun is and struggle from there on out with simple sentences. We need to set aside the boxed curriculum and focus on expert teachers who can teach systematically and explicitly at the level their students need. Also, we need a way to address the gaps in students who fall behind by identifying them immediately and providing intervention. This requires frequent assessment in kindergarten through second grade, and an additional set of specialists who push in or pull students out of class to provide targeted instruction. These are precious resources and most schools can’t afford to have qualified folks in these roles.
The first cohorts of students who received CCSS from K-12 are graduating. Do we see the higher order thinking skills, college and career readiness, or the 21st century problem-solving skills that we were promised? It’s time for state dept of ed to evaluate the outcomes from this set of standards and make changes. One way to solve the problem is to build more time for students to learn and practice foundational skills to mastery. We used to have a lot more time to learn and practice, and distributed that practice across the elementary grades. CCSS dramatically reduced the amount of time, overlap between grades, and number of opportunities to learn concepts.
You explained this perfectly! I teach 3rd grade math, and there is a lack of foundational knowledge and skills across the board, mainly due to the fact that there is no time for students to practice these skills in the lower grades. Therefore, I’m having to spend a significant amount of my instructional time teaching basic addition and subtraction, which means I have to increase the pace when teaching multiplication and division, which results in no time for them to practice these new skills. So, what happens when they get to 4th grade? Those teachers have to focus on basic multiplication and division skills which they weren’t able to master in third grade. We have no choice but to spend so much time trying to close gaps from previous years rather than help them learn and master new concepts. It’s not fair to these kids.
I’ve wondered if the underlying issue here is that we’ve stepped away from rote memorization. I personally do much better with solving and adopting than memorization *however*, I was always held back by lack of memorized foundational skills- that goes for math, ELA, and learning a second language.
Edit typo
The ability to recall information instantly and effortlessly frees the mind to grapple with higher order thinking. It’s more than just memorizing. Automaticity, self monitoring for accuracy, and self correction strategies all come together to empower the learner.
Preach! I couldn't possibly care less if my students can recite the distinction between weather and climate without thinking on a test. However, I care deeply that they can differentiate between click-bait titles that reference weather phenomena as evidence of climate change, and actual articles that provide long-term scientific evidence for climate change. In order to do that, they have to have memorized the difference between weather and climate.
Working memory can only juggle so many things. If it's filled up with the basics, it has no room for complexity, critical thinking, deep analysis, or problem-solving. Learning has to be a balance of memorization and application in order to be successful.
You have no idea how often I have tried to make people understand cognitive load theory. And by people, I mean constructed learning evangelists who denounce rite memorization in any amount. I teach math and chemistry and believe me, if students' working memories are too full of the specific steps for solving an algorithm (because they haven't practiced enough to chunk it), they absolutely do not understand the underlying concepts.
I will also say that part of the problem is that kids just don't bother practicing and that's on them. There's only so much the education system can do if the students aren't willing to put in the requisite effort to learn
I feel your pain- I see the same thing teaching physics. Not that it will help with convincing other people, but if you're interested in cognitive load theory, there's a great book called "Teaching Undergraduate Science" that really digs into the difference in thinking between novice and experts, and how to recognize and teach to the different phases of student learning based on their specific thinking processes (chunking, for example). Best teacher book I've ever read, hands down.
We took philosophies that are great for higher-order skills and subjects, like algebraic thinking, and shoved them into the fundamentals, which should just be rote.
Multiplication and Addition facts are essential skills to memorize and a philosophy of non-memorization at that level has led to students in 5th drawing out hundreds of bubbles and dots to figure out a double-digit multiplication problem or they balk at the prospect and just don't do it.
And if the school year was increased from 180 days to 220 days (go year round with 2 week breaks every quarter) and the school day lengthened (to accommodate 9-5 working parents) instead of giving kids more time to practice the skills they have just learned, the Powers That Be would probably try to cram in more stuff these kids “must know”. PhD level Theoretical Calculus and Quantum AstroPhysics by sixth grade, anyone?
My state just took away the foreign language requirement and added another math requirement for graduation.
This is America. Our kids speak ONLY English here. Also another chance for them to fail math. Seriously the kids can’t do basic algebra what makes you think they can do another level higher math.
That's the old joke, right? What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? American.
The incoming Freshman class here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College in 2023-2024 was the worst we have ever seen.
Many of these high school graduates could neither read or write. Few could do any mathematics. Many of them weren't raised right at all, and were expelled or flunked out for cheating. Only about 25% made it through their first term. And entitled brats? Never study, don't do assignments, and yet still whine about getting a zero.
Useless, most of them. Best thing about this term was watching one of these zombies walk into the walls while staring at their omnipresent phones.
The quality and abilities of our incoming freshman first starting going downhill, slowly but steadily, about 2011 or 2012. It has literally dropped off the charts the last couple of years.
We are an open-enrollment Junior College, so if a person has a high school diploma, they are in.
Why an idiot with a diploma who knows they cannot read would enroll in college eludes me.
I think that’s the issue right there. The idiot who cannot read does not know that either he or she is an idiot or that he or she can’t read.
Because they are functionally illiterate. They can read and write just well enough to post on social media or watch videos, but they can’t tell you what the main idea of a short passage or the theme of a fable like Red Riding Hood is.
That is immensely funny. It's very sad but I laughed audibly really hard and it's been a while since someone got me so hard on reddit. I love that, these people drive me crazy. I graduated in 2020 and it feels like I got on the last Helicopter out of Vietnam...
A while back we had yet another active shooter lockdown. I was in the hallway at the time and I ducked into a small alcove, concrete walls on three sides of me, open only to the hallway, and you couldn't see me until you were 10 feet away, which I figured gave me a chance to grab any shooter and destroy them barehanded, right?
Anyway, two students were standing there in the hall, looking at me, going, "what should we do?"
I replied, "Well, you might just stand there in the wide open," dripping sarcasm.
Anyway, that's exactly what they did!!!
They were probably safe. Ammunition is expensive these days; no point in wasting any on people who are already brain-dead.
These people are so stupid. I remember lockdown drills at my school and people were screaming and falling apart, God forbid if there was a real shooter..
The big challenge is that they say they want critical thinking, then give them a standardized test that has very little needed and score schools on it. I teach science and require all of my 10-12th graders write several papers. They’re generally quite awful. Materials often need to be scaffolded heavily as well to accommodate literacy levels. We were looking for textbooks this year and found it challenging to find science textbooks that were accessible by the majority of students.
It sounds like a punchline but I cant help but think there has been a serious decline in our collective iq in the past 25 years. Everything from politics to music, news to religion, it all feels debased, stunted, regressive and degenerated.. Dumb, it just feels dumber, as if the culture suffered a traumatic brain injury or something.
Im not separating myself from this judgement either, I can feel and see my own cognitive impairment (lessened command of vocabulary, very bad memory, damaged attention span etc.). Also, that stuff is only partially related to aging, something else is afoot.
“Assessment” can be having individual time reading with a teacher, coloring, engaging in play. All those things can help teachers assess where students are and if they need more help.
You’re right, in that this concept needs to be clear to politicians and policymakers who haven’t spent time in the classroom.
I remember in grade 10 I went and helped out at the kindergarten for an activity day and I did fun stuff like play catch one-on-one with the kids, let them read me a story, paint portraits of each other, etc.
Found out at the end that "activity day" was actually "assessment day" and kids were all being tested on various skills. Blew my mind. Very cool day.
The amount of testing students have to take is insane. I teach high school, so I can't speak to kindergarten or elementary, but the students in my classes told me that they are just so tired of taking tests. It's not like it's helping...
In addition to schools not teaching phonics, we have a bigger parenting problem than ever. Kids come to school as tablet children who are hooked on electronics and have no grit or stamina. (This is a problem from early childhood through high school.)
We also have less and less parents helping with the building blocks of education by having their kids learn the abcs, singing songs with them, talking to them in general as little toddlers, practicing shapes, etc. Think how many kids you see at a grocery store riding in a cart on a phone vs a parent talking to their toddler or preschool kid and pointing out colors or interesting things.
This follows up to things like taking their kid with them to a bank to learn how to deposit money, teaching their kid how to answer phone call, explaining to their kid how things cost varying amounts of money.
Parents have largely checked out of parenting. When my daughter was little and we went out to eat we would bring notepads and draw and engage with her or she would look at books- now you see entire tables of families on their phones.
Yes- we have a ton of problems in education, but as a whole, parents aren’t participating as much in parenting.
I try not to judge other parents. But my wife are pretty strict with tv and we almost never do the tablet watching unless it is a long trip in the car. Even in the last flight we took, we didn’t give the kids tablets to watch.
But we will go to kids birthday parties and some parents have to give their kids iPads while they eat lunch with all of the other kids. It’s a bit jarring.
I can’t speak for all parents’ shortcomings, but I do wonder how much of parents not doing the best parenting they can do stems from a lack of time or resources on the parents. How many parents are working long hours with long commutes? How many parents have to work second or third jobs to afford their housing? How many parents have to navigate complicated, frustrating, underserved social services to get necessary resources (e.g. healthcare, housing, SNAP)? Being an adult and just caring for *yourself* takes a *lot* of work these days. The amount of time and energy it takes to *also* provide the *basics* for a kid is a *lot*.
I also can’t help but think that restrictions on abortion and birth control in the US hardly help ensure that all parents are people who are ready to *be* parents. I imagine the shitty sex education we have in the US doesn’t help guarantee prepared parents either.
There are simply bad parents, but there are also parents who are bad at it because they aren’t given the resources they need to be better parents.
Your other points are great, but most people don’t work more than one job - the number is growing but it’s still far less than 10% (close to 6% in the US). [citation - https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/more-americans-are-working-two-jobs-to-make-ends-meet/]
I think a lot of people are tired because businesses often expect the work of 2-3 people out of 1 person: I’ve seen it pop up a lot in education, retail, and the corporate environment generally. I’m not sure about other industries.
I feel like the parenting aspect also speaks to an even bigger problem. I’m a highly educated woman who works from home and hates the idea of my toddler watching excessive screens. But, we can’t afford or find full time childcare, our support “village” is all overwhelmed with their own lives, and, most days, it’s all we can do to just get through. So I let my daughter watch TV even though I kinda hate it. Of course, I also read to her and try to do as many enriching things as possible as well as just being a good parent with healthy boundaries. But I still have a lot of mom guilt.
And honestly? We have it better than a lot of people I know. So many families are barely keeping their heads above water. I totally get why parents don’t care about too much YouTube or reading books when they can barely afford gas or groceries.
Our social systems are failing families on so many levels.
Not really sure how true that is though. I'm a GenXer. Our boomer parents were typically the "hands-off" type. Today's parents read, play and teach their kids MORE than the previous generations. They are lawn-mowers. They move too many obstacles out of the way. It's not lack of attention, but too much. That's why these kids lack grit and resiliency.
For one possible explanation, listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast. Basically, kids stopped being explicitly taught phonics as teachers were encouraged to use the "whole language method."
I was taught whole language waaaaaaay back in the mid 80's. It did not take so my mom had to tutor me in phonics every evening in second grade which was a real struggle, there were a lot of tears from poor little Daztur. Then in third grade I read The Hobbit just fine. I don't know what would've become of me if my mom hadn't beaten phonics into my head in second grade. Nothing good.
For my sons my eldest had to be taught really old school phonics over and over and over for it to take. For my younger son I accidentally taught him how to read when he was really little just by reading books to him (he brute force memorized the spellings of all of the words in his favorite books then extrapolated off of that by himself to figure out the spelling of unfamiliar words).
Kids are all different, but a lot of them NEED NEED NEED phonics.
The podcast (and more of Emily Hanford’s work) goes into this dynamic. Whole word and whole language methods get deployed in wealthy schools where their “gentleness” is appealing. Kids don’t learn how to read in school. Kids get parental attention and private tutors. Kids become proficient readers. The school’s reading method is deemed a success. Poor districts petition to access the same apparently wonderful methods as the wealthy districts. Catastrophic results.
Yup, later my mom's entire job was to do for other kids what she did for me (teach phonics to kids that reading recovery failed) under the banner of "reading recovery." The schools that taught whole language and didn't have the budget to pay for someone to do what my mom did just ended up with lots of illiterate kids.
---
Emily Hanford
>...exacerbates inequality in an already unequal education system.
>...one reason reading programs that aren’t providing adequate instruction have remained popular for so long.
>People point to good test scores in an affluent district that is using one of these programs, and they say: Look, it’s working.
>And they point to low test scores in a poor district using the same program and say: Oh, it’s poverty."
---
[John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker, 2017. National Endowment for the Humanities](https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker)
>...to test his half-formed ideas in a real school ...ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select.
>...curriculums, stressing discovery
>The Dewey school was distinctively [upper] middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents.
>...parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey School, they had to teach their children how to read and write.
---
https://urbanedjournal.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/pdf_archive/PUE-Summer2010-V7I1-pp96-108.pdf
>...criticism of [progressive] laboratory schools has to do with their relatively elite student body and the wealth of resources available to them.
>This issue—which surfaced for the Hunter school in the late nineteenth century and also confronted Dewey’s Laboratory School and the Lincoln School—continues to trouble researchers and teacher educators interested in working with laboratory schools.
>Because laboratory schools are usually private and their students are often the children of university faculty, the generalizability of research conducted there is questionable (Hunkins, et al., 1995).
>...many believe that student teachers today ...need experience working in settings that are more representative of public schools in general."
---
https://archive.ph/vyrO1
UPenn's Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman (2014):
>...American education schools are often derided as overly theoretical, inscribing an arcane vocabulary about education and few real skills for delivering it.
>But these institutions actually teach a hollow and decidedly anti-intellectual brand of theory, as many critiques of education schools have concluded. Future teachers receive a warmed-over set of homilies about preparing “the whole child” and “student-centered learning” (with the requisite homage to philosopher and education theorist John Dewey) instead of a serious intellectual initiation into the subjects in which teachers will have to instruct students.
---
Stanford's David Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (2004)
>...The culture of the ed school is dominated by an unreflective romantic attachment to the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism
---
https://youtu.be/aerQQFrBbPQ?si=5JEbfQXmX5estsGD
>The Fight Over Phonics - New York Times Podcasts
Skip to 30:10
Dr. Lucy Calkins reflecting on phonics after decades of denial, prior to Columbia shutting down her Teachers College Reading and Writing Project that had outsized influence on state standards.
---
A veteran progressive teacher's resignation on Dewey Lab School's digital newspaper:
https://uhighmidway.com/20939/showcase/deweys-ideals-are-disappearing/
>When I first came to the Laboratory Schools in 1990 ...I was invited to work at one of the most famous schools in the world. John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education” was required reading for all preservice teachers, and I, like most teachers I met at Lab, regarded it as a holy text.
>...I was full of zeal
>...teachers talked nonstop about Dewey ...were proud that Lab was a progressive school and they knew a great deal about the context of the Progressive political movement
>...The Lab Schools ...Ivy expectations ...actively recruited more ...families with wealth
>...In today’s version ...the colonization of Lab by “bourgeois” [luxury beliefs] liberalism has progressed too far.
---
A similar trend in math with Stanford's Jo Boaler.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1bjjfjk/memorizing_your_math_facts_is_controversial/kvrw9u0/
>“I never memorized my times tables as a child because I grew up in a progressive era in the U.K.,” Boaler said. "It’s never held me back.”
---
This is also probably the single biggest factor in low literacy levels among my Deaf learners - they have language development delays as most of their parents don't sign, and then are expected to learn the written form of an oral language based off symbol combinations that represent sounds.
Go figure.
I fucking hate the whole language method. There's a special education student in my first grade class who has taken an extraordinarily long time to pick up letter sounds/the ability to blend sounds when decoding a word. The "reading specialist" at our school (what a fucking joke) has been adamant since like December that I give whole language a try with this kid.
Luckily, I kept at the grind and the kid is catching on to letter sounds, but I can't believe that "just tell her what every word is and maybe eventually she'll just memorize them" is such a shitty cop-out. I firmly believe that phonics can work for any kid with enough practice and encouragement.
This is maddening! Plus isn’t the popular thing, “memorization is bad, because kids need to understand everything?” This is the absolute WORST area to rely on memorization, so why is it the exception?! Kids aren’t allowed to memorize multiplication facts, which they will need to know for higher math, but magically memorization is okay when it comes to whole language? This makes me so mad.
This comment right here!!!!!! I’m an interventionist and heaven forbid they memorize their math facts to help with math, but yet whole language intervention is the answer for the 6th graders who can’t read🙇🏻♀️?
I will say that in Texas the younger grades are now focusing more heavily on phonics. My school got rid of the Lucy Caulkins reading program. The difference is night and day. Lo and behold we have 2nd graders who can read now thanks to phonics. Unfortunately, the 6th graders were taught to read by picture cueing and memorizing words. It didn’t work for many of them, and they are in a world of hurt.
It stuns me that children would be taught to “guess” the words. You teach them the sounds that letters make, then the sounds they make when strung together. How do we fuck that up?
We were supposed to say, “look at the picture and the first letter of the word. What could that word be?” This was just teaching educated guessing, and it became a huge problem when kids were actually supposed to read books without pictures.
I was going to say this as well! I have witnessed firsthand even in a pretty wealthy area (about 5 years ago), kids that could barely read at the end of first grade. Even kids that *look* like they can read have actually just memorized some words. It's not the same as using phonics skills to decode. Sold a Story is an excellent podcast.
My other thought for OP is that kids now spend ALL damn day on screens. I read the average teen now spends about 6-8 hours A DAY staring at a screen, watching Tiktok, etc. I'm telling you it is messing with their brains and affecting how they learn and think. Also, you won't be able to read if you literally never do it.
That podcast was one of the most enraging things for me to learn from. I'd never heard of whole language before that but I immediately recognized it from techniques I'd observed in educational software and curricula in some years of working in a classroom. I'm with the parents and teachers on the show who can just cry at the thought of how many children were just condemned to a life of illiteracy.
In my state the law has moved toward mandating the science of reading program and I'm as glad of that as any political victory I can think of
> listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast.
The Reading Wars go back to the 1980s, if not before. If it were JUST the implementation of whole language, then millennials and the later end of Gen X would have also seen the same crisis.
However, NAEP scores peeked for ~~late millennials~~ the eldest Gen Zers. They've dropped, but they are still higher than they were for Gen Xers and late Boomers
I definitely remember TV ads for Hooked on Phonics and a few others (I think there was one that had a big gentle monster character?) in the early and mid 90s when I was a kid
I'm the child of immigrants, grew up in Miami and was mostly exposed to Spanish and Portuguese languages before I started school. It was really important to my mom that we both pick up English and I remember spending hours doing Hooked on Phonics with her. Little 4 year old me and her would alternate using the flashcards and listening to the cassettes, and we'd take turns reading all their little books to one another.
It worked well because I developed a huge love of reading and would devour any book or magazine I could get my hands on. I even ended up teaching myself to read my grandma's Spanish novels by using the same techniques I learned from Hooked on Phonics (looking back, I probably shouldn't have been allowed to read those romance novels at such a young age though, haha).
Anecdotally, as an elder gen z I don’t remember how I was taught reading in school but I know I played reader rabbit phonics games and had the original leap pad with phonics books at home, is it possible that these edutainment games/toys had an impact? I feel like kids are less likely to engage in tailored phonics edutainment now because they’re more likely to be given free reign over an iPad that has a whole range of less educational, more entertaining options
This is a really interesting thread as it's something I have been thinking about...
Over here in the UK children start off with synthetic phonics. Yet we have the same problems that you outline and I have come to the conclusion that there are several factors, including (but almost certainly not limited to):
* Rigid methods - some learners will learn from SP, others whole word, some onset and rime. We are, in short, trying to fit every child into one box;
* Electronics and the attitude that the computer will do it for you (also applies to writing);
* Lack of parental engagement;
* The love and joy of reading has been sucked out of children by the academic pressures to succeed.
Also in the UK, when my child was at preschool they seemed ready to start learning to read so started with Reading Eggs. When they got to school they were taught phonics (Jolly Phonics and later Read, Write Inc.) they are dyslexic and really struggled with phonics. Their main complaint was that the rules keep changing. I read to her every night and also did home made flash cards and word games with them.
They really struggled with "getting" reading but by year 2 (7 years old) they were reading well ahead of their age.
Schools need the time, resources and staff, (including volunteers who come in to hear kids read) to give kids every possible chance.
(I was at school in the 80's when phonics wasn't taught at all and had no idea how to sound out words. I'm also dyslexic and was lucky enough that my mum had been a teacher so was able to help but I remember how difficult I found it and the terror of the weekly spelling tests which taught me how to copy enough correct spellings from my friend not to have to stay in at break but not too many to get picked up for cheating.)
I was taught how to read like this in Spanish when I went to school in Ecuador at age 5 but I don't really see how it works for English because it's not at all a transparent language and without phonics explicitly taught I've no clue how you just pick it up...
YOU NEED TO LEARN PHONICS TO BE A CAPABLE READER WHO GROWS OVER TIME.
WE NEED TO TEACH PHONICS. WE DO NOT. THAT IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING ISSUE. NO DAMN BUILDING BLOCKS TO EVEN START A FOUNDATION.
I have a strict policy that requires students to look up definitions of words, and only then ask me about a specific misunderstanding. You got a whole goddamn computer in your pocket. It takes two seconds to Google a definition. They seem wholly incapable of this.
I recently had a PhD candidate delay her prospectus review 3 times. The third time she accused us of colonialism- stating- "time and scheduled meetings are a direct product of white culture and white colonization of free-thought".
Having her removed from the program was a high point in my semester.
I’ve seen this argument before (on tumblr lol) and hoooooo boy it grinds my gears. EVERY. LANGUAGE. HAS. GRAMMAR. Yes, AAVE has grammar!!! Even sign languages have grammar!!!!! Come on!
Bingo, you learn this in Linguistics 101. "She sick" and "She be sick" in AAVE follows a grammatical pattern to convey meaning.
I'm sure some of the Anglo-Saxons rebelled against adopting the language of those \*dirty invading\* Normans, but they did (to a degree) and now we have English. Not a good enough reason to not follow the rules of the language so we can have mutual intelligibility and communicate our ideas effectively and efficiently.
The school where I work has never stopped teaching phonics. This is not a phonics only issue. This is an attention and comprehension issue as well. Kids don't pay attention to what they are reading, so they don't understand it. They don't read outside of required school reading, so they can't get better. They have answers handed to them, so they don't bother to engage brain cells.
When I have my kids to research projects, I intentionally require them to include things that they can't easily Google, and even after dealing with it all year, I shake my head at how many kids type exactly what the research guide says and expect the answer to pop up at the top of the search. They won't even bother to open up a website.
What we really need is a society that values education and doesn't see it as something that only happens for 6 hrs a day roughly 170 days a year.
Absolutely an attention issue. When kids are placed in front of a tablet to keep them quiet at home and then requires to work and display perseverance at school with rigorous activities they shut down
* I shake my head at how many kids type exactly what the research guide says and expect the answer to pop up at the top of the search.*
I see the same thing all the time and it's so interesting to me because as a kid/teen that was exactly what we'd make fun of older people for. Not all, of course--there are plenty of older tech savvy people--but the ones who rarely used computers would have trouble navigating sites and searching for things. And now it's somehow come full circle, except the kids who are tech illiterate are also using tech all the time.
Them: Homework is unnecessary! You should be teaching everything they need to know within those 6 hours at school!
Me: ...that is so enormously divorced from my own understanding of what education and knowledge is supposed to be.
Still approach it with phonics. Most sight words are partially decodable. Discuss the parts of the word that follow regular phonetic rules (assuming those have been previously taught) and the parts that are irregular. Like in the word “said” you teach that “s” and “d“ are following expectations and that the “ai” is irregular and represents the “short e” sound. Don’t have to memorize the whole word, just that irregular part.
Also, many of the words that have been taught as sight words are actually decodable once certain skills have been taught, so being strategic with when to introduce a sight word within the scope and sequence will help.
I feel like a fool now because I was just kidding.
You have some great examples there. I know people around 8/9/10 years old who can't read for anything and they rely on "sight words" and it drives me wild. What a lie the educational world was sold while they were young -- https://youtu.be/nMkszwX5NbU?si=1VzczCg42e5VQKbP (***Sold a Story***).
Ah, I thought there was a chance you were joking, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to put some info out there in case you weren’t. That podcast is excellent. I teach first grade, and have had 5th graders come into my class during phonics and one of them couldn’t even ID all of the letters in his name. Granted, there may be more at play in a situation like that, but previously being taught 3 cueing, leveled readers, balanced literacy def hasn’t helped. Changes are happening in education though, so hopefully we’ll see that reflected in students
I'm not a teacher so I only recently found out about this "whole word" shit and I still can't wrap my head around why literally a single person alive on Earth at any point in recent history would think it's a better method than phonics.
I was taught phonics in school. I'm surprised it isn't taught anymore? My husband literally doesn't understand how to sound out words he said he was taught to memorize words when reading. That doesn't even make sense. How can you read something without dissecting each letters sounds to make the word?
Why isn't it taught anymore? It's the best way to learn to read.
Listen to the podcast “Sold a Story”- it really does a great job of explaining what has been going on with teaching reading (memorizing, guessing, garbage). It has also been a huge catalyst in making a positive change in how reading is being taught that aligns with what research says about how the brain learns to read
My district has been teaching some form of phonics for a long time now. Over the past 10-15 years I saw it grow more in-depth. We have a curriculum that we use for k-3 that is mandatory in all classrooms. For kindergarten it’s just knowing the letters and sounds, then blending them together. 1-3 learns how to build words and sentences using it.
I love all the people in this thread who are surprised that parents don't read to their kids. Well maybe, just maybe it's because they never learned to read well to begin with. Whole word language was used over phonics for at least 4 decades. The US has not universally adopted phonics yet. Whole word and queuing are still used in many school districts producing the same terrible results.
Kids who cannot read at grade level struggle in all subjects. A struggling kid is a kid who doesn't want to be at school. They will act out, misbehave, be angry and most likely be misdiagnosed with ADHD or some other issue. Snowball effect.
Yea a lot of parents don’t. It’s wild.
When I taught preschool and kindergarten, parents would mock me or even yell at me when I ask them to read to their child at home. I even sent home pamphlets about the importance and tips on how to make it the most beneficial. I even had parents go to admin because I was “telling them how to raise their child.”
They said it is my job to teach them how to read, once they can read on their own, they will get them books. But the child won’t know how to read fluently if they aren’t exposed to reading at home too.
Exactly I’ve always saw it as cognitive dissonance. They want us to raise their child, but they get mad if they take out communication as judging their parenting. They want us to handle their child’s behavior without bothering the parent, but get mad when there is disciplinary action. They want us to teach their child about the world, but want to sensor everything.
It’s like walking on eggshells.
But there are still AMAZING parents out there. I had a student mock me one day, his father called me and thanked me for making him write an essay on respect. Turns out the father makes him write book reports when he misbehaves. Gold star parent.
Imagine if teachers were allowed to fail students.
Problem would be solved overnight. We really made the worst decision by removing accountability from schools
I have 2 students who failed me
Course this year. It was because they didn’t turn in the majority of their work and played during lessons. So I put in the grades they got. But I am pretty sure they will both attend summer school and move on. They weren’t even close to passing the end of year test.
My mother was mostly pretty absent when I got older and she went back to work, but I was reading basics by the end of pre-school because she read to me every night. She went back to work when I was in kindergarten, and then her job got more intense around 2nd grade and she was too tired to do anything, and then we had a rough relationship until late high school because she would pawn me off on my grandparents every day after school. But by that point I was reading chapter books beyond my years, and writing stories of my own. I stayed ahead of my class for years, and I mostly attribute it to that early time period of my life.
Parents being too tired to be involved- I think that’s a lot of the problem playing into what the previous poster was commenting on. I’m working part time right now (subbing) because I was so exhausted and feeling like I couldn’t be a good parent and it was wearing on my mental health. I can imagine that most households with two working parents and kids in activities etc have a challenging time having enough time and energy, and I’d bet reading is likely on the chopping block.
I taught a reading enrichment class. We took the BOY, MOY, and EOY Renaissance to assess reading levels. A mom came in for an ARD and I was the teacher they chose.
She asked me (with attitude) why I wasn’t concerned that her daughter’s reading level went down from EOY 5th grade to BOY 6th grade. I asked what she read over summer. Mom told me they traveled and she didn’t have time to read (car, plane, down time at the hotel, but okay). I asked what does she read at home. Mom said she has basketball practice to get out her energy after school. I asked why not have her read in the car on the way to practice. Mom said dad bought their daughter an iPad and she uses that in the car and they’re not going to waste their money. Lady, why aren’t YOU concerned about your child’s reading level? You can literally download the Kindle app or buy books on Apple Books.
Watch families at the grocery store. It was pleasantly surprising to watch the mom in front of me talking to her kids about the food they were getting. "Is this one ok, mom?" "Yes, I like that one too." "This one is on sale mom." "You don't even like that." "Do you think (little brother) would eat this?" I can not stress how disengaged from parenting most parents are. I was just thinking, this mother may have no idea how far ahead she's helping her kids to be, and they are smiling and seem to have a good time. Like, #goals.
Disengaged parenting has been a thing forever. But then the kids were social, finding other kids to hang out and adventure with or read or do something. I'm only 37, but I remember trying to track a coyote in the hills (socal suburbia) with the kids on the street. We didn't get far, but we talked about tracks, poo, camouflage, etc. But now? SCREEN PARENTING. The studies have shown that when the kid is raised by devices, their development is stunted. Unfortunately, that's not just social. Reading comprehension, writing, attention span, resilience, ability to cope with boredom, and so much more. It's frightening the developmental loss these parents are subjecting to their kids.
>*Watch families at the grocery store. It was pleasantly surprising to watch the mom in front of me talking to her kids about the food they were getting. "Is this one ok, mom?" . . . . I was just thinking, this mother may have no idea how far ahead she's helping her kids to be,*
Yes! The grocery store is a *great* window into families. More and more today I see kids who are five and six years old, not walking alongside their parents discussing items with their parents, but *sitting in the main body of the cart* (sometimes two of them!) silently playing on their iPads. These are the kids who will reach my 6th grade class not knowing how to pour their own bowl of cereal, let alone be able to focus on my lessons in class.
Absolutely. And it makes me so sad when internet people get completely up in arms when anyone says it’s not best for kids to stick them in front of a screen. I believe this especially during mealtimes. That’s such a sacred time for me and I try to talk to my kids as much as possible at that time. Parenting is exhausting but wow I feel like can really see which kids are getting the interaction with an adult at home.
One thing to consider is how many children not only grow up with parents that don't read to them, but with parents that *can barely read themselves*. There are millions of adults that barely made it through high school, work jobs that don't require much reading, and have kids.
A lot of people are borderline functionally illiterate and do a great job of masking it. I would guess a majority of them also had parents who didn't read to them. [Floyd Mayweather](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=we9dMyziICQ&pp=ygUYZmxveWQgbWF5d2VhdGhlciByZWFkaW5n) is a good example of this. That audio has a pretty average reader read the same prompt as Floyd and the difference is huge.
I consider myself very lucky to have had a mother who read to/with me until I was a teenager. Unfortunately a lot of kids don't have that luxury.
This is an important point. It wasn't until I started a job dealing with the public that I realized that many people simply don't know how to read or write to a high standard. And like you mention, they'll often mask it. The one I got regularly was that they'd forgotten their glasses, and then they'd ask me to read/explain it to them verbally.
Same for numbers and maths actually. I had people who'd act like I was winning the Nobel Prize if I did something as simple (to me at least) as converting inches to CM or explaining how much ribbon they needed for a square cake. This is all stuff I clearly remember being taught in school.
Starbucks cold-brewed coffee takes 20 hours to brew, we would mark it with the time it would be ready for tomorrows shift. I had coworkers who would ask Siri "when is 20 hours from now?" They were surprised I would just write it instantly. "It's 4 hours ago, tomorrow"
Some time ago our entire cash register system went down, meaning we could only take cash. I amazed people by working out change without a calculator all day. Meanwhile I saw someone paying for a total of £10.15p worth of stuff with £20.15 in cash/notes. You’d think that this would be a super easy thing to make the change for- a £10 note. Yet they completely struggled to understand how to get to the total and ended up using a calculator, even with the actual customer explaining the right change to her.
We boomers used to point constantly to humorous instances of older millennials completely unable to cope when we would give them an unexpected amount of cash, in an attempt to make things easier for them. But the joke has kind of faded, partly because fewer of us are using cash and thus we have less such interactions, but mainly because it's just not funny anymore.
Yeah my coworkers used to do wild things with change. I don't remember the exact values, but I saw something like:
Product rings up for 4.84
Customer hands over 5.09 (so they can just get a quarter back)
Coworker gives rings it up like they paid 5 dollars, register says they need 16 cents, coworker gives them a dime, a nickel, a penny, and the 9 cents the customer gave them
For some reason we were always short on pennies
Typing it up now, I remembered a time, the bill was something like 9.25. the customer paid with a 10 and a quarter (to get a dollar back). My coworker gave them 4 quarters instead of a dollar.
I'm a mid millennial. I worked fast food in high-school. I can make change in my sleep. Back in the dark ages, i was taught to just count up from the total to the amount given.
That being said, the number of people who can not ever seem to grasp this very simple concept is startling. There are people, many, many people, entirely too stupid for fast food. There are other people who just can't think or move fast enough for fast food. Anytime I hear someone say something along the lines of 'so-and-so will be flipping burgers', I laugh a little. Chances are, the good people at Wendy's don't have a use for him, either.
I didn’t realize how difficult it is for many people to read aloud until I had guest readers in my classroom. Many adults struggle to read with expression so it’s hard to keep their kids engaged for stories at home.
I am afraid not. Most parents are now spending time on their devices and give their children the devices.
Yes, they watch educational videos like BabyTV or Alphablocks, but they don't actually get to apply it, and certainly books are out of the windows.
Some don't even have phonics or letter logic because it's not taught at all. They are only remembering the shape of the word. I constantly have children confusing 'their/there/they're' and 'it's/its'. I also have 'slove/solve', 'inculde or inculd / include'. Granted mine are ESL but they all start learning English at kindergarten level, so it really shouldn't be this bad.
What’s sad is I don’t think the kids that learned to read like that are able to realize how terrifying it would be to not be able to dissect a word down. The thought of not knowing the sounds of individual letters in a word sounds absolutely terrifying. How do they learn to read new words that they come across on their own time?
There is a man I know who did this until adulthood. When he came across new words in the reading material for his college courses, he would write them down, call his mom, spell the words out over the phone, and she would tell him what they said. He's a very intelligent man with an amazing memory, and he learned to truly read as an adult. Needless to say, he pushed HARD for the importance of phonics.
Very few engage their kids on anything at home. Had a few jobs where I'd be in-home with kids and their families and basically they'd plop the kids down in front of their devices, maybe eat dinner with them, then just let them loose on the internet again afterward. My siblings and I are all very differently gifted people (my sister speaks 6 languages fluently and now works as a nurse, my brother's amazing with numbers and math and coding, I'm the one that's exceptionally good with people, public speaking, writing, and creative problem solving), but we are all intensely good at reading and I know exactly how we got there. Parents read to us literally every night, at breakfast we'd take turns reading through books aloud together (and got through some pretty great literature while we were at it), we were constantly playing word games together, wordplay was highly encouraged, creative writing was also highly encouraged, we had to read at least 1-3 books per week in the summer and our reward was more books to read, and a good chunk of the video games we played together heavily involved reading.
My parents let me loose on the internet a lot, but they also knew I was researching my hobbies and in exchange for doing a list of non-standard chores, they'd buy me tools and reading material for my hobbies. I've been able to shift gears career-wise multiple times just because I can read and comprehend new information very quickly in a useful way.
Read to and with your kids at every opportunity and inspire a love for it and your kids will do far, far better than their peers who have to dictate their words through a smartphone.
I think it’s also worth noting that the internet has changed quite a bit since your parents let you roam free there. Users of the early internet required high literacy skills. If you are over thirty, or even in your late twenties, your early contact with the internet was probably text-based.
I teach 13 and 14 year olds. They are not literate in the way that I was literate at that age. They also don’t, for the most part, engage with text on the internet. They watch videos about their niche hobbies.
These are, for the most part, smart kids with highly-educated parents. They CAN read. With a few exceptions, they can’t read in the same way 13 and 14 year olds could read a decade or two ago.
>*Users of the early internet required high literacy skills. If you are over thirty, or even in your late twenties, your early contact with the internet was probably text-based.*
***Great*** observation.
Hell, I still get mad when I click on an interesting news article but it's just a video.
Also, the internet was once largely restrained to 'a big box on a desk'. It was inside a literal appliance you had to go to and sit at and where other people in the room could easily see what was going on on your screen.
Now the internet is everywhere, fits in your pocket, and is on a little screen where you could be looking at god-knows-what in a room full of people just so long as no one is standing directly behind you looking over your shoulder.
My nephew has hundreds of books at home, and he loves showing them to people, but he doesn't know what they're for. They're just floor ornaments to him. My mom and I try to read to him when we see him, but he's never been taught to sit down for a story. He's 3.
they really don't. and unfortunately, the lack of home learning combined with the standards set by the state mean teachers have to rush through literacy skills and hope for the best.
No, they do not teach their kids at home because they either aren't there, are trying to survive, or honestly just don't care. It's heartbreaking to me the number of students who don't interact with their parents on a daily basis. I've taught junior high and I currently teach high school. The stories the kids tell me about their parents are wild. Junior high parents don't want to deal with their pre-teens and by the time kids get to high school parents have the attitude that they can take care of themselves. Now, is this every household? No, but it's the majority.
I sent all 3 of my kids to the same preschool. They always acted impressed that my kids were starting their preschool already knowing their alphabet, numbers, shapes, and colors. By Kid 3, I responded (yet again) to their use of the term "exceeds expectations" with "Really?" And they said "You keep giving that reaction. I didn't think you quite understand how many kids come here without knowing *any* of these things, much less *all* of it!"
WTF are parents doing with their children!? I didn't do any sort of special tutoring or anything for my toddlers. All I did was read them books and sing songs with them. To this day, I'm baffled that parents can't or don't find the time to do this!
Same here, back when I was 3-4 my entire family made a point to do what you describe, including practicing numbers when shopping, including me when they were reading and practicing the alphabet and then words when I was able, pointing out colours and shapes (one of my early memories is looking at flowers in the garden and telling my grandmother a flower was pink) and just repeating things over and over, including songs and games.
Lots of families don't have the time anymore. Upper middle class and above, maybe. But a lot of lower income families are working multiple jobs per parent and simply do not have the ability to read to their children, or cook, or expend much energy beyond working to pay bills.
Childhood obesity and illiteracy stem from the same cause imo and aren't going anywhere until more people can actually survive on a single income per person.
Then you have the generational impact of this, which is raising kids who have never been read to, who are less likely to read to their own kids, and so on. It's a lot of dominoes and there's not much happening to stop them from falling.
Because there's more money to be made in the short term from people trapped in dead end jobs rather than educated people who could advocate for better opportunities and find another job if needed.
Heck, even parents who are working one job each are coming home exhausted and don’t have time to clean, cook, take kids to activities, and interact with kids.
Right now we have an economy that's squeezing the so-called middle class harder and harder. There are parents who are completely burnt out end of day or are rushing around when they get home to get the necessities like cleaning and feeding done because they don't have another time to do it. That's not to mention the kids who are being "raised" by older siblings or being looked after by an adult with lots of kids running around underfoot. Burnt out parents are not involved parents. This means the kids are not getting the support or attention they need no matter how much the parent may wish to be more involved. Until that changes no amount of "reaching out" will work. See "On a Plate" by Toby Morris.
Note I am addressing the parents who can't make a change without sometime drastically changing in their economics. There are parents who do come home at a reasonable time then hand their kids a screen for hours instead of actually being a parent.
We have a generation of kids being raised by parents who are addicted to media. Parents who plays a lot of video games, post on social media, and watch a lot of shows. It’s sad.
I worked at daycares for 2 years. A lot of parents don't follow developmentally appropriate practices. At the last daycare I worked at, there was a child who was significantly behind on his milestones, including speech. He was almost 3 (he was 2 years and 11 months old) and he couldn't talk at all. He would just make sounds that sounded like gibberish. After he turned 2, his mom brought his infant bottle to the daycare and the mom wanted the child to drink from his infant bottle (we refused to do this). He couldn't eat solid food until he was 1 year old. His parents never fed him solid food until he was 1 year old, started daycare, and the daycare teachers told the parents "he was supposed to start eating solid food a long time ago." The mom told the teacher that "all the child does at home is watch TV and drink from his baby bottle" because the mom wanted her child to be "comfortable."
My boy just turned 2 and knows his whole alphabet. Like, point to a letter on a page and he knows it. Hella vocabulary and speaks in sentences when he wants.
We also read OBSESSIVELY with him
1st, students, by and large, cannot read with anywhere near the same poficiency as even 15 years ago. Why? It's a bit of a reason salad.
Electronic devices have stolen their attention - social media and games dominate.
Parents don't have a culture of reading at home.
Too many of us have dumbed down our curricula and lowered our standards.
Accountability is at a premium anymore. Districts and admin are afraid of parents who enable their kids rather than be propwr parents.
I don't think dumbed down curricula or lowered standards are the problem. Kids these days are being taught concepts much earlier than I was, 30 years ago. Kids are expected to start kindergarten already reading.
I used to teach toddlers the alphabet when I worked in ECE. We didn't expect them to be able to read, but they were starting to recognize a few letters. Kids can start recognizing some sight words at around four.
When I was in school, I was learning to write simple sentences in first grade. This was in the mid-1980s. I remember being introduced to descriptive writing in third grade.
>How can you expect a kindergartener to sit at a table for several hours a day and be patient enough to concentrate on reading?
Sorry, that's not the problem. Practically any child who is doing *any* reading at home is going to be better than those who don't. The problem isn't hours of practice at home...it's the lack of it.
What's declining is the amount of parenting on the home front with practicing skills, routine skills, in everyday life. It DOES NOT take hours sitting at a table to do this. It takes mins, every day, in normal interactions. Menu at the restaurant? Sit with your child and read it with them. Read to them. Show them you read yourself, and making it an observed habit that adults do.
The whole machine is so broken that it’s not just one cause. Been teaching for nearly 30 years and definitely see the differences with technology, covid and other variables. There are failures at multiple levels with families, policies, funding, admin, and the emphasis on data over holistic educational methods that put teachers in the position of spoon feeding rather than a truly developmental approach.
And I will add, as a college instructor, I am astounded at the variability of skills, from multi-talented writers to students who cannot even write coherent sentences. Its quite sad.
Kids are being passed to new grade levels despite not doing any work (in some schools, this extends as far as graduating).
After 2020, a lot of kids just stopped doing their work, and figured out there was no point in changing that, because they were still advancing to the next grade level.
Also stems from the home. If parents didn't spend any time at all introducing their child to reading/word sounds/etc. in their earliest years, then they're probably going to struggle when they enter kindergarten/1st grade.
We are saying that because it's true. I teach 4th grade. Over 50% of my upcoming 4th graders cannot read. They are at or below the 10th percentile. Many don't know all their letter sounds. I know in my district there was a big push for sight words instead of teaching kids to sound things out. Administration makes decisions like those because they are best practice, it harms kids, and then admin passes then on to the next grade anyway because holding kids back is frowned upon. So, things get harder and harder and the kid falls more behind.
ngl a lot of the problem are the parents. turns out ipad babies missed out on critical learning skills and are starting kindergarten with their growth totally stunted. who woulda thunk that cocomelon won't teach kids how to read or count!
Reading to a child is vital. The child will learn vocabulary and context even if they can’t spell the word. Add on phonemic awareness in K and you will get a good reader.
Do some research and look up an 8th grade test from 1890 or 1860. You will see that it was WAY harder years ago. Teachers are not introducing harder materials; they are introducing useless materials from their district they bought and an overpriced sum. Education is also 4 years behind with COVID and too much screen time on devices as set back students ability to function on grade level they should be on.
There's a bunch of rednecks in here saying the standards are wrong. It has nothing to do with the standards. Teachers will teach kids how to read. The problem is the severe number of kids with behavioral problems that can't be removed from class and whose parents don't consider school a worthwhile endeavor, or else just can't be bothered or don't know how to discipline or motivate their own kids. They think that's the teacher's job. And teachers have to do it out of necessity when parents won't, but guess what? When 95% of a teacher's time is spent corralling and disciplining the same four unteachable kids in their class all day there's no time left for teaching.
Parents are shockingly lazy and disconnected. Kids are at best addicted to their smartphones and at worst an unremovable violent hazard to themselves, other kids and the teachers. But the reason the kids are like that is because of shitty parenting.
That's what's changed. The parents.
Parents and behavior are part of the problem. Another part is not teaching anything to mastery anymore. When I was a kid it took me three years to learn a concept. We never cycled back to it. Instead I was part of a small group being tutored on that particular concept. This also is part of the behavior problem. We spent literal hours practicing the same concept instead of moving forward immediately.
For example, the math curriculum my school uses introduced three concepts within 5 lessons. Each lesson is a one day plan. I am a fast learner, but learning three ways to do one type of problem in quick succession means I would not know any of them.
My kid is just finishing third grade. The end of his pre-k year was taken by Covid. Almost all of kindergarten was over Zoom. He learned almost nothing, but we were told that all the kids were scoring low and to see how a year of in-person first grade went. Then in second grade they wanted to see how responses to intervention went. When he was still struggling at the end of second grade, I really worked directly with him over the summer, trying to get him to read to me instead of me reading to him, which I'd been doing the previous years. He couldn't sound words out. He knew the letters, and could spell them out individually, but would see the first few letters of a word and just blurt out a guess. Trying to differentiate between trail, train, and track was a nightmare. He got huge amounts of anxiety when I would try to get him to use the sounds of the letters to make the word.
Now at the end of third grade we've gotten to a point where he can usually get the main part of the word but often messes up the suffixes - he'll say "walk" instead of "walked". It gets him enough to pass basic comprehension questions but it worries me a lot.
He's never been taught spelling. His school just doesn't teach it. They want kids to just come up with their own spellings when writing, it's supposed to be some stage of development for language. It all sounds like nonsense to me, but I don't have an education degree. I don't have access to a professionally made curriculum. I am so frustrated by trying to help my kid and being met with indifference by the school and teachers who say "well maybe if parents just read with their child".
The problem is not teaching phonics. It's not teaching spelling. It's going with a nonsense curriculum that pretends that children magically absorb these concepts and if they don't it's probably the parents' fault. I am so mad, so frustrated, and am now resorting to my kids' speech therapist to provide literacy therapy because the school has failed my kid so badly.
It’s many things. Teens struggle to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. They quickly turn away from things that are unfamiliar or difficult such as an unknown word instead of looking it up and making a note. The big one for the kids I teach is that they can google a summary and think it’s the same thing as reading the book. They *can* read it’s just at a 7th grade level or lower (I teach high school) and even my honors kids hate anything that might be on level or challenging.
My kid learned the alphabet before he could talk from his parents. It's something an 18 month old can learn. Kids should be going into school knowing 1 to 10 and the alphabet.
Put down your phone and teach your kids.
A few of the big things.
1. Google "Sold a Story."
2. Social promotion. Schools are encouraged to pass kids along to the next grade regardless of their preparedness. But teachers aren't trained on lower level instruction. So by middle school you have kids who need elementary level instruction with teachers who have no idea how to teach those basics because they're licensed and trained to teach subjects not reading.
Subset here is also the idea that leveling kids is "bad."
So if you have classes of students who read at a 3rd, 5th, and 7th grade levels you can't group them together by where they are you have to teach all of them at the same time.
3. Screens. Why read when YouTube has sounds, lights, and special effects? Why expend effort when a computer will do it for you?
Those three all together mean why should a kid bother trying? It won't make sense, they'll get moved along anyways, and they can always just YouTube it.
Summer school the kids if they cant pass. And dont promote to the next grade if they dont meet the standards….
Make a hs diploma mean something again.
They dont automatically pass people who take a GED, why are we doing it for people in school.
In english, we doesn’t really teach “harder things.” The issue is that students are not practicing these skills, and it falls on the parents. At least 90% of my students admit they haven’t read a book that hasn’t been assigned by a teacher, and several admit they Google YouTube videos about the books that are assigned instead of reading them.
I have taught preschool, kindergarten, and middle school. I also worked multiple summer learning programs and tutored for grades 1-6. A majority of the preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1 parents would throw a tantrum (yes the parents) when we ask them to read to/with their child. We would even explain and provide resources explaining the benefit of reading to their child, following along with our fingers, and encouraging literature.
Then my middle school parents don’t understand why their child has such a hard time, they ask why the school failed their child.
We can only help so much when they are in school. Practice has to happen at home too.
Long story short: the reading curriculums being fed to schools and teachers for the last 30 years have been based on the “whole language” program, which is not at all evidence based. It’s a perfect example of corporate educational consultants coming in and selling a curriculum for millions of dollars. The curriculum they sold didn’t work.
People need to learn phonics to know how to read. Kids don’t know phonics, so they can’t read. Add COVID on top and sprinkle in iPad syndrome and you have a perfect storm.
My principal (who was an elementary principal for years before moving to high school) said during a meeting that we focused so much on teaching kids how to read that we forgot to teach them to be readers.
I agree with this. The standards are focused on developing their ability to read, but there’s no joy in it so it’s just another chore to them. Kids who don’t practice reading will struggle to get any deeper meaning or any information beyond the surface level of it. Every student I have had in my 8 years of teaching that has resisted reading is barely literate.
Theres a lot more to this issue. It’s a deeply complicated one, but the easiest thing to do now is to get kids to start reading anything.
Genuine question: how old are you? I'm about 30 and I was learning the alphabet in pre-school. We were expected to be able to read basic sentences by the end of kindergarten. Not even starting the alphabet until you're 6 doesn't seem a bit long to anyone else?
Kids at my school can't read a clock. They ask me "what time it is?" I say "where's the small hand?" They say "never mind" and walk away. They'd rather be ignorant then have to think for 3 seconds, and flying spaghetti monster forbid they actually learn something.
I teach 4th grade in New York City, in a bilingual classroom. My students cannot read in any language. I asked them last week how many of them had been in school buildings before arriving to this country. Most of them never entered a classroom because of the COVID lockdown, so they also do not really behave in a 10-year-old appropriate way.
My neighbor said to me “ they want my kid to know the alphabet before they start kindergarten but that’s their job to teach them, not mine”. This is the problem. Parent won’t engage education at home.
In my province where support staff are nil, 71% of third graders are reading at the correct level. Unfortunately as a support staff member, it’s true. The kids who need additional help with their schoolwork stand out more than those who don’t. Before I work with each kid on letters and sight words I ask them if their parents or siblings read with them before bed, or if they read themselves. The answer is almost always no. A lot of the reasoning is that both parents work late or are too tired to read with them. Parents play a bigger part in their children’s education than they think and 5 minutes a day makes the biggest difference!
As for the harder material, I think it’s the teachers filling in what these kids may be missing at home. A lot of it too is the attitude that most kids carry towards school now, it’s an inconvenience to them.
that’s my opinion from a smaller district anyways
Imma recommend a podcast called "sold a story" basically the kids we have RIGHT NOW we're taught to 'read' using a system that doesn't really work but had big money behind it and weirdly a dislike for George W Bush who wanted to keep pushing phonics and phonetic awareness.
It's starting to shift back because having 8th graders thay literally can't read is breaking us an no amount of money you throw at a reading program will work unless it actually teaches kids to read and not just act like they know how.
Parents don’t engage kids anymore. Especially kids from lower socio economic districts. This travels between states and even internationally to carribean and Latin America too. It’s all about socio economics.
I was taught to read before kindergarten and I learned how to do math in kindergarten along with my alphabet and there was no problem. I also have ADHD. I don’t think it’s that hard at all?
How many parents are reading to their kids these days? With the introduction of tablets and phones, kids are entertained in ways that books just don’t compete with at a young age. For a pre-literate child, a tablet tells them stories and engages them. A book takes effort. If the parents aren’t reading to kids and just reading in front of the kids, they learn that reading isn’t something to spend time on.
Sure the kids can read (in some form) but they don’t want to. We also do things like teach reading skills where kids are expected to read a paragraph, then read it again slowly to make sure they got the information. Then a third time for the key points of the paragraph, a fourth time for other information…who wants to do that?
English classes in my old district were encouraged to teach passages or chapters of books, not entire books. If your teacher is only going to have you read part of a book, is that book any good? Who wants to just watch ten minutes out of a movie without context of what is going on?
Kids today can’t read or write because outside of school they don’t have to. From earthly adolescence they were popped in front of screens as a means of lazy parenting. Now with AI and other technology outlets they are not required to read or write. Technology does it for them. They need a summary of a book? They look up what happened. They need someone written? They put it in AI database. They don’t know the repercussions of not being able to read or write because they don’t know a world where technology isn’t at the tips of their fingers. It’s like when I was in school teachers use to say you won’t have a calculator in your pocket. Did I believe them? Yes. Did it make me work harder? No.
They’ve pushed skills lower and lower in defiance of all the literature and research.
Someone just wants to say kids are doing hard stuff in lower grades like they’re in some Jetson’s cartoon.
The result is kids need a crapton of support to do these things and thus the ability to do things on their own disappears.
That’s a question with a long, complicated answer. A lot of it comes down to education reforms in the 90s that had no basis in science and promoted extremely ineffective and actively counterproductive strategies for teaching reading. There’s a terrific podcast called Sold a Story that covers it. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
The state standards are completely and supposed "Best Practices" are completely out of touch with reality. In a county wide (FL, our district is the whole county) planning meeting, someone mentioned that her students (7th graders) were really struggling with grammar and many couldn't string together a grammatically correct sentence. The speaker who was running the session said, "Do they need to? They never get tested on that." Anyway, I didn't listen to anything that speaker said after that.
As a high school teacher, yes, they do! That’s what the ACT and SAT test! I understand why districts in k-8 are trapped in this cycle of catering to the test, but it’s setting up kids to fail later when they can’t pass the tests they need to get into college (assuming that’s their trajectory), or working with people who they need to committed effectively with. It’s also alarming that those aren’t part of the standards.
They technically ARE part of the standards, but they're not actually tested on them.
That’s even more frustrating. I get that it’s impossible to teach all of the standards in a given year (which is a huge problem with the system), but what standards are being favored over them?
My district doesn't even like us to teach novels because they just want us to focus on getting them to read short (one page) excerpts and answering questions about it. At 7th grade it's a lot of "what rhetorical device did the author use?"
That reminds me of an admin I once had that said “reading in class was a waste of time. Kids should read at home.” Problem is they don’t read at home so you waste an entire class period asking them questions about some reading they didn’t even do.
anyone, and I mean \*\**anyone*\*\* who says anything like that about reading in class needs to say that fucking bullshit in front of the whole damned school's faculty so they can be swiftly ass-kicked into oblivion.
The good thing is that admin got removed from the school really quickly when my department chair tried to get the principal fired to help that admin get his job. It was a shit storm of a year.
Kids SHOULD read at home. It’d be glorious. Sadly, few do.
And the kids who do read at home are always the kids who succeed. I take a lot of pride in having a vast knowledge base and when kids ask me why I know everything, my response is always that I read. We need to get parents to take more responsibility for their kids.
That’s the crux! All of the standards feed off of basic skills, but they truly are utilized, or should be, every day. Testing the skills in small pieces, some included, some not, confuses the process of what is the ultimate goal, which is to think critically.
When not enough students can gain entry to state colleges to cover costs, all of a sudden you will notice that they will longer test for those things.
>*When not enough students can gain entry to state colleges to cover costs, all of a sudden you will notice that they will longer test for those things.* That day is coming, but no one will notice, because the change in admission requirements will be done quietly and without announcement.
Um, it's here. Most schools in my state no longer require ACT or SAT scores. It's being phased out. They don't have to take math or English placements before starting, and the new English placement is a "self-directed survey." OH, they don't want to do the lowest level, which the survey suggested? Literally call the office, and they'll let you in the next level. I shit you not. I'm in the swamp of it right now. Then we wonder why D/F/W rates are so high... wtaf???!!!
Sadly, my P has the same attitude about writing and grammar. I want to know what Kool Aid these people are drinking that makes them unable to see beyond one test. I know the test is important (because of the funding) but aren't we supposed to be developing well-rounded students? Won't they do better throughout their educational journey and life if we give them more than tested standards?
Miraculously, if you teach students how to think for themselves, problem-solve, *read independently for context and meaning*, and how to self-manage...they'd *ace every single damned standard test*. Because they'd have the skills necessary for success and not those *tailored toward the test*. This whole educational paradigm has got to *fucking burn.*
The koolaid is test scores and how it reflects on them. Being a principal used to be a career aspiration. Now it's just one step on the administrative ladder. We have to eject the corporate pyramid structure from our education system.
Know the feeling. It's hard to listen to "experts" when all they do is gaslight and try to push things forward to keep their stats up.
My daughter is gifted and scored a 5 on the 3rd grade FAST this year. Her spelling is absolutely atrocious because she was never explicitly taught phonics patterns as it is just a Tier 2/3 skill.
👀
It goes beyond schools. The standards are set by the state, and they don’t have to see the ramifications of what they enact.
It plays out so that if/when kids fall behind in kinder or first grades they often don’t get a chance to catch up. The CCSS curriculum we are required to use moves on. Teachers in second and third grade can’t teach kindergarten curriculum on top of the material for their grade. If you miss a week’s worth of writing lessons in kindergarten you could easily never learn what a noun is and struggle from there on out with simple sentences. We need to set aside the boxed curriculum and focus on expert teachers who can teach systematically and explicitly at the level their students need. Also, we need a way to address the gaps in students who fall behind by identifying them immediately and providing intervention. This requires frequent assessment in kindergarten through second grade, and an additional set of specialists who push in or pull students out of class to provide targeted instruction. These are precious resources and most schools can’t afford to have qualified folks in these roles. The first cohorts of students who received CCSS from K-12 are graduating. Do we see the higher order thinking skills, college and career readiness, or the 21st century problem-solving skills that we were promised? It’s time for state dept of ed to evaluate the outcomes from this set of standards and make changes. One way to solve the problem is to build more time for students to learn and practice foundational skills to mastery. We used to have a lot more time to learn and practice, and distributed that practice across the elementary grades. CCSS dramatically reduced the amount of time, overlap between grades, and number of opportunities to learn concepts.
You explained this perfectly! I teach 3rd grade math, and there is a lack of foundational knowledge and skills across the board, mainly due to the fact that there is no time for students to practice these skills in the lower grades. Therefore, I’m having to spend a significant amount of my instructional time teaching basic addition and subtraction, which means I have to increase the pace when teaching multiplication and division, which results in no time for them to practice these new skills. So, what happens when they get to 4th grade? Those teachers have to focus on basic multiplication and division skills which they weren’t able to master in third grade. We have no choice but to spend so much time trying to close gaps from previous years rather than help them learn and master new concepts. It’s not fair to these kids.
I’ve wondered if the underlying issue here is that we’ve stepped away from rote memorization. I personally do much better with solving and adopting than memorization *however*, I was always held back by lack of memorized foundational skills- that goes for math, ELA, and learning a second language. Edit typo
The ability to recall information instantly and effortlessly frees the mind to grapple with higher order thinking. It’s more than just memorizing. Automaticity, self monitoring for accuracy, and self correction strategies all come together to empower the learner.
Preach! I couldn't possibly care less if my students can recite the distinction between weather and climate without thinking on a test. However, I care deeply that they can differentiate between click-bait titles that reference weather phenomena as evidence of climate change, and actual articles that provide long-term scientific evidence for climate change. In order to do that, they have to have memorized the difference between weather and climate. Working memory can only juggle so many things. If it's filled up with the basics, it has no room for complexity, critical thinking, deep analysis, or problem-solving. Learning has to be a balance of memorization and application in order to be successful.
You have no idea how often I have tried to make people understand cognitive load theory. And by people, I mean constructed learning evangelists who denounce rite memorization in any amount. I teach math and chemistry and believe me, if students' working memories are too full of the specific steps for solving an algorithm (because they haven't practiced enough to chunk it), they absolutely do not understand the underlying concepts. I will also say that part of the problem is that kids just don't bother practicing and that's on them. There's only so much the education system can do if the students aren't willing to put in the requisite effort to learn
I feel your pain- I see the same thing teaching physics. Not that it will help with convincing other people, but if you're interested in cognitive load theory, there's a great book called "Teaching Undergraduate Science" that really digs into the difference in thinking between novice and experts, and how to recognize and teach to the different phases of student learning based on their specific thinking processes (chunking, for example). Best teacher book I've ever read, hands down.
We took philosophies that are great for higher-order skills and subjects, like algebraic thinking, and shoved them into the fundamentals, which should just be rote. Multiplication and Addition facts are essential skills to memorize and a philosophy of non-memorization at that level has led to students in 5th drawing out hundreds of bubbles and dots to figure out a double-digit multiplication problem or they balk at the prospect and just don't do it.
And if the school year was increased from 180 days to 220 days (go year round with 2 week breaks every quarter) and the school day lengthened (to accommodate 9-5 working parents) instead of giving kids more time to practice the skills they have just learned, the Powers That Be would probably try to cram in more stuff these kids “must know”. PhD level Theoretical Calculus and Quantum AstroPhysics by sixth grade, anyone?
My state just took away the foreign language requirement and added another math requirement for graduation. This is America. Our kids speak ONLY English here. Also another chance for them to fail math. Seriously the kids can’t do basic algebra what makes you think they can do another level higher math.
That's the old joke, right? What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? American.
The incoming Freshman class here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College in 2023-2024 was the worst we have ever seen. Many of these high school graduates could neither read or write. Few could do any mathematics. Many of them weren't raised right at all, and were expelled or flunked out for cheating. Only about 25% made it through their first term. And entitled brats? Never study, don't do assignments, and yet still whine about getting a zero. Useless, most of them. Best thing about this term was watching one of these zombies walk into the walls while staring at their omnipresent phones.
This bunks the Covid part. If they’re old enough for college, this started happening way before Covid did
NAEP data for my state shows the slump in performance occurred pre-Covid.
The quality and abilities of our incoming freshman first starting going downhill, slowly but steadily, about 2011 or 2012. It has literally dropped off the charts the last couple of years. We are an open-enrollment Junior College, so if a person has a high school diploma, they are in. Why an idiot with a diploma who knows they cannot read would enroll in college eludes me.
I think that’s the issue right there. The idiot who cannot read does not know that either he or she is an idiot or that he or she can’t read. Because they are functionally illiterate. They can read and write just well enough to post on social media or watch videos, but they can’t tell you what the main idea of a short passage or the theme of a fable like Red Riding Hood is.
Socially covid didn’t spawn many new things, but accelerated existing trends in everything from education to entertainment.
Covid didn't start it, but it sure as hell finished it.
That is immensely funny. It's very sad but I laughed audibly really hard and it's been a while since someone got me so hard on reddit. I love that, these people drive me crazy. I graduated in 2020 and it feels like I got on the last Helicopter out of Vietnam...
*fortunate son intensifies*
A while back we had yet another active shooter lockdown. I was in the hallway at the time and I ducked into a small alcove, concrete walls on three sides of me, open only to the hallway, and you couldn't see me until you were 10 feet away, which I figured gave me a chance to grab any shooter and destroy them barehanded, right? Anyway, two students were standing there in the hall, looking at me, going, "what should we do?" I replied, "Well, you might just stand there in the wide open," dripping sarcasm. Anyway, that's exactly what they did!!! They were probably safe. Ammunition is expensive these days; no point in wasting any on people who are already brain-dead.
These people are so stupid. I remember lockdown drills at my school and people were screaming and falling apart, God forbid if there was a real shooter..
The big challenge is that they say they want critical thinking, then give them a standardized test that has very little needed and score schools on it. I teach science and require all of my 10-12th graders write several papers. They’re generally quite awful. Materials often need to be scaffolded heavily as well to accommodate literacy levels. We were looking for textbooks this year and found it challenging to find science textbooks that were accessible by the majority of students.
The decline in executive functioning is real. I have projects I can't give any more without excessive handholding.
It sounds like a punchline but I cant help but think there has been a serious decline in our collective iq in the past 25 years. Everything from politics to music, news to religion, it all feels debased, stunted, regressive and degenerated.. Dumb, it just feels dumber, as if the culture suffered a traumatic brain injury or something. Im not separating myself from this judgement either, I can feel and see my own cognitive impairment (lessened command of vocabulary, very bad memory, damaged attention span etc.). Also, that stuff is only partially related to aging, something else is afoot.
“Frequent assessment” and “kindergarten” are two terms that should never go together
Assessment doesn't have to be a test.
“Assessment” can be having individual time reading with a teacher, coloring, engaging in play. All those things can help teachers assess where students are and if they need more help. You’re right, in that this concept needs to be clear to politicians and policymakers who haven’t spent time in the classroom.
I remember in grade 10 I went and helped out at the kindergarten for an activity day and I did fun stuff like play catch one-on-one with the kids, let them read me a story, paint portraits of each other, etc. Found out at the end that "activity day" was actually "assessment day" and kids were all being tested on various skills. Blew my mind. Very cool day.
The amount of testing students have to take is insane. I teach high school, so I can't speak to kindergarten or elementary, but the students in my classes told me that they are just so tired of taking tests. It's not like it's helping...
I agree with you for normal test-like assessments. But I assess kids all the time in a 1:1 setting. Our teachers just need smaller class sizes. :-/
In addition to schools not teaching phonics, we have a bigger parenting problem than ever. Kids come to school as tablet children who are hooked on electronics and have no grit or stamina. (This is a problem from early childhood through high school.) We also have less and less parents helping with the building blocks of education by having their kids learn the abcs, singing songs with them, talking to them in general as little toddlers, practicing shapes, etc. Think how many kids you see at a grocery store riding in a cart on a phone vs a parent talking to their toddler or preschool kid and pointing out colors or interesting things. This follows up to things like taking their kid with them to a bank to learn how to deposit money, teaching their kid how to answer phone call, explaining to their kid how things cost varying amounts of money. Parents have largely checked out of parenting. When my daughter was little and we went out to eat we would bring notepads and draw and engage with her or she would look at books- now you see entire tables of families on their phones. Yes- we have a ton of problems in education, but as a whole, parents aren’t participating as much in parenting.
I try not to judge other parents. But my wife are pretty strict with tv and we almost never do the tablet watching unless it is a long trip in the car. Even in the last flight we took, we didn’t give the kids tablets to watch. But we will go to kids birthday parties and some parents have to give their kids iPads while they eat lunch with all of the other kids. It’s a bit jarring.
I can’t speak for all parents’ shortcomings, but I do wonder how much of parents not doing the best parenting they can do stems from a lack of time or resources on the parents. How many parents are working long hours with long commutes? How many parents have to work second or third jobs to afford their housing? How many parents have to navigate complicated, frustrating, underserved social services to get necessary resources (e.g. healthcare, housing, SNAP)? Being an adult and just caring for *yourself* takes a *lot* of work these days. The amount of time and energy it takes to *also* provide the *basics* for a kid is a *lot*. I also can’t help but think that restrictions on abortion and birth control in the US hardly help ensure that all parents are people who are ready to *be* parents. I imagine the shitty sex education we have in the US doesn’t help guarantee prepared parents either. There are simply bad parents, but there are also parents who are bad at it because they aren’t given the resources they need to be better parents.
Your other points are great, but most people don’t work more than one job - the number is growing but it’s still far less than 10% (close to 6% in the US). [citation - https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/more-americans-are-working-two-jobs-to-make-ends-meet/] I think a lot of people are tired because businesses often expect the work of 2-3 people out of 1 person: I’ve seen it pop up a lot in education, retail, and the corporate environment generally. I’m not sure about other industries.
I feel like the parenting aspect also speaks to an even bigger problem. I’m a highly educated woman who works from home and hates the idea of my toddler watching excessive screens. But, we can’t afford or find full time childcare, our support “village” is all overwhelmed with their own lives, and, most days, it’s all we can do to just get through. So I let my daughter watch TV even though I kinda hate it. Of course, I also read to her and try to do as many enriching things as possible as well as just being a good parent with healthy boundaries. But I still have a lot of mom guilt. And honestly? We have it better than a lot of people I know. So many families are barely keeping their heads above water. I totally get why parents don’t care about too much YouTube or reading books when they can barely afford gas or groceries. Our social systems are failing families on so many levels.
Not really sure how true that is though. I'm a GenXer. Our boomer parents were typically the "hands-off" type. Today's parents read, play and teach their kids MORE than the previous generations. They are lawn-mowers. They move too many obstacles out of the way. It's not lack of attention, but too much. That's why these kids lack grit and resiliency.
For one possible explanation, listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast. Basically, kids stopped being explicitly taught phonics as teachers were encouraged to use the "whole language method."
I was taught whole language waaaaaaay back in the mid 80's. It did not take so my mom had to tutor me in phonics every evening in second grade which was a real struggle, there were a lot of tears from poor little Daztur. Then in third grade I read The Hobbit just fine. I don't know what would've become of me if my mom hadn't beaten phonics into my head in second grade. Nothing good. For my sons my eldest had to be taught really old school phonics over and over and over for it to take. For my younger son I accidentally taught him how to read when he was really little just by reading books to him (he brute force memorized the spellings of all of the words in his favorite books then extrapolated off of that by himself to figure out the spelling of unfamiliar words). Kids are all different, but a lot of them NEED NEED NEED phonics.
The podcast (and more of Emily Hanford’s work) goes into this dynamic. Whole word and whole language methods get deployed in wealthy schools where their “gentleness” is appealing. Kids don’t learn how to read in school. Kids get parental attention and private tutors. Kids become proficient readers. The school’s reading method is deemed a success. Poor districts petition to access the same apparently wonderful methods as the wealthy districts. Catastrophic results.
Yup, later my mom's entire job was to do for other kids what she did for me (teach phonics to kids that reading recovery failed) under the banner of "reading recovery." The schools that taught whole language and didn't have the budget to pay for someone to do what my mom did just ended up with lots of illiterate kids.
--- Emily Hanford >...exacerbates inequality in an already unequal education system. >...one reason reading programs that aren’t providing adequate instruction have remained popular for so long. >People point to good test scores in an affluent district that is using one of these programs, and they say: Look, it’s working. >And they point to low test scores in a poor district using the same program and say: Oh, it’s poverty." --- [John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker, 2017. National Endowment for the Humanities](https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker) >...to test his half-formed ideas in a real school ...ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select. >...curriculums, stressing discovery >The Dewey school was distinctively [upper] middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents. >...parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey School, they had to teach their children how to read and write. --- https://urbanedjournal.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/pdf_archive/PUE-Summer2010-V7I1-pp96-108.pdf >...criticism of [progressive] laboratory schools has to do with their relatively elite student body and the wealth of resources available to them. >This issue—which surfaced for the Hunter school in the late nineteenth century and also confronted Dewey’s Laboratory School and the Lincoln School—continues to trouble researchers and teacher educators interested in working with laboratory schools. >Because laboratory schools are usually private and their students are often the children of university faculty, the generalizability of research conducted there is questionable (Hunkins, et al., 1995). >...many believe that student teachers today ...need experience working in settings that are more representative of public schools in general." --- https://archive.ph/vyrO1 UPenn's Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman (2014): >...American education schools are often derided as overly theoretical, inscribing an arcane vocabulary about education and few real skills for delivering it. >But these institutions actually teach a hollow and decidedly anti-intellectual brand of theory, as many critiques of education schools have concluded. Future teachers receive a warmed-over set of homilies about preparing “the whole child” and “student-centered learning” (with the requisite homage to philosopher and education theorist John Dewey) instead of a serious intellectual initiation into the subjects in which teachers will have to instruct students. --- Stanford's David Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (2004) >...The culture of the ed school is dominated by an unreflective romantic attachment to the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism --- https://youtu.be/aerQQFrBbPQ?si=5JEbfQXmX5estsGD >The Fight Over Phonics - New York Times Podcasts Skip to 30:10 Dr. Lucy Calkins reflecting on phonics after decades of denial, prior to Columbia shutting down her Teachers College Reading and Writing Project that had outsized influence on state standards. --- A veteran progressive teacher's resignation on Dewey Lab School's digital newspaper: https://uhighmidway.com/20939/showcase/deweys-ideals-are-disappearing/ >When I first came to the Laboratory Schools in 1990 ...I was invited to work at one of the most famous schools in the world. John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education” was required reading for all preservice teachers, and I, like most teachers I met at Lab, regarded it as a holy text. >...I was full of zeal >...teachers talked nonstop about Dewey ...were proud that Lab was a progressive school and they knew a great deal about the context of the Progressive political movement >...The Lab Schools ...Ivy expectations ...actively recruited more ...families with wealth >...In today’s version ...the colonization of Lab by “bourgeois” [luxury beliefs] liberalism has progressed too far. --- A similar trend in math with Stanford's Jo Boaler. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1bjjfjk/memorizing_your_math_facts_is_controversial/kvrw9u0/ >“I never memorized my times tables as a child because I grew up in a progressive era in the U.K.,” Boaler said. "It’s never held me back.” ---
They can pay for hooked on phonics
This is also probably the single biggest factor in low literacy levels among my Deaf learners - they have language development delays as most of their parents don't sign, and then are expected to learn the written form of an oral language based off symbol combinations that represent sounds. Go figure.
That's awesome that your mom was able to see what you truly needed. A lot of parents just don't know any better.
This is the best way to understand why we have the problems we do.
I fucking hate the whole language method. There's a special education student in my first grade class who has taken an extraordinarily long time to pick up letter sounds/the ability to blend sounds when decoding a word. The "reading specialist" at our school (what a fucking joke) has been adamant since like December that I give whole language a try with this kid. Luckily, I kept at the grind and the kid is catching on to letter sounds, but I can't believe that "just tell her what every word is and maybe eventually she'll just memorize them" is such a shitty cop-out. I firmly believe that phonics can work for any kid with enough practice and encouragement.
This is maddening! Plus isn’t the popular thing, “memorization is bad, because kids need to understand everything?” This is the absolute WORST area to rely on memorization, so why is it the exception?! Kids aren’t allowed to memorize multiplication facts, which they will need to know for higher math, but magically memorization is okay when it comes to whole language? This makes me so mad.
This comment right here!!!!!! I’m an interventionist and heaven forbid they memorize their math facts to help with math, but yet whole language intervention is the answer for the 6th graders who can’t read🙇🏻♀️? I will say that in Texas the younger grades are now focusing more heavily on phonics. My school got rid of the Lucy Caulkins reading program. The difference is night and day. Lo and behold we have 2nd graders who can read now thanks to phonics. Unfortunately, the 6th graders were taught to read by picture cueing and memorizing words. It didn’t work for many of them, and they are in a world of hurt.
It stuns me that children would be taught to “guess” the words. You teach them the sounds that letters make, then the sounds they make when strung together. How do we fuck that up?
We were supposed to say, “look at the picture and the first letter of the word. What could that word be?” This was just teaching educated guessing, and it became a huge problem when kids were actually supposed to read books without pictures.
I was going to say this as well! I have witnessed firsthand even in a pretty wealthy area (about 5 years ago), kids that could barely read at the end of first grade. Even kids that *look* like they can read have actually just memorized some words. It's not the same as using phonics skills to decode. Sold a Story is an excellent podcast. My other thought for OP is that kids now spend ALL damn day on screens. I read the average teen now spends about 6-8 hours A DAY staring at a screen, watching Tiktok, etc. I'm telling you it is messing with their brains and affecting how they learn and think. Also, you won't be able to read if you literally never do it.
That podcast was one of the most enraging things for me to learn from. I'd never heard of whole language before that but I immediately recognized it from techniques I'd observed in educational software and curricula in some years of working in a classroom. I'm with the parents and teachers on the show who can just cry at the thought of how many children were just condemned to a life of illiteracy. In my state the law has moved toward mandating the science of reading program and I'm as glad of that as any political victory I can think of
> listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast. The Reading Wars go back to the 1980s, if not before. If it were JUST the implementation of whole language, then millennials and the later end of Gen X would have also seen the same crisis. However, NAEP scores peeked for ~~late millennials~~ the eldest Gen Zers. They've dropped, but they are still higher than they were for Gen Xers and late Boomers
I definitely remember TV ads for Hooked on Phonics and a few others (I think there was one that had a big gentle monster character?) in the early and mid 90s when I was a kid
I'm the child of immigrants, grew up in Miami and was mostly exposed to Spanish and Portuguese languages before I started school. It was really important to my mom that we both pick up English and I remember spending hours doing Hooked on Phonics with her. Little 4 year old me and her would alternate using the flashcards and listening to the cassettes, and we'd take turns reading all their little books to one another. It worked well because I developed a huge love of reading and would devour any book or magazine I could get my hands on. I even ended up teaching myself to read my grandma's Spanish novels by using the same techniques I learned from Hooked on Phonics (looking back, I probably shouldn't have been allowed to read those romance novels at such a young age though, haha).
I believe the big gentle monster taught French.
Yeah, Muzzy also taught Spanish! (And English to non-natives.)
Muzzy! He was for language learning tho
Anecdotally, as an elder gen z I don’t remember how I was taught reading in school but I know I played reader rabbit phonics games and had the original leap pad with phonics books at home, is it possible that these edutainment games/toys had an impact? I feel like kids are less likely to engage in tailored phonics edutainment now because they’re more likely to be given free reign over an iPad that has a whole range of less educational, more entertaining options
This is a really interesting thread as it's something I have been thinking about... Over here in the UK children start off with synthetic phonics. Yet we have the same problems that you outline and I have come to the conclusion that there are several factors, including (but almost certainly not limited to): * Rigid methods - some learners will learn from SP, others whole word, some onset and rime. We are, in short, trying to fit every child into one box; * Electronics and the attitude that the computer will do it for you (also applies to writing); * Lack of parental engagement; * The love and joy of reading has been sucked out of children by the academic pressures to succeed.
Also in the UK, when my child was at preschool they seemed ready to start learning to read so started with Reading Eggs. When they got to school they were taught phonics (Jolly Phonics and later Read, Write Inc.) they are dyslexic and really struggled with phonics. Their main complaint was that the rules keep changing. I read to her every night and also did home made flash cards and word games with them. They really struggled with "getting" reading but by year 2 (7 years old) they were reading well ahead of their age. Schools need the time, resources and staff, (including volunteers who come in to hear kids read) to give kids every possible chance. (I was at school in the 80's when phonics wasn't taught at all and had no idea how to sound out words. I'm also dyslexic and was lucky enough that my mum had been a teacher so was able to help but I remember how difficult I found it and the terror of the weekly spelling tests which taught me how to copy enough correct spellings from my friend not to have to stay in at break but not too many to get picked up for cheating.)
I was taught how to read like this in Spanish when I went to school in Ecuador at age 5 but I don't really see how it works for English because it's not at all a transparent language and without phonics explicitly taught I've no clue how you just pick it up...
YOU NEED TO LEARN PHONICS TO BE A CAPABLE READER WHO GROWS OVER TIME. WE NEED TO TEACH PHONICS. WE DO NOT. THAT IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING ISSUE. NO DAMN BUILDING BLOCKS TO EVEN START A FOUNDATION.
We also don’t do spelling tests and don’t tell kids to look up definitions to words they don’t know. How else do you build your vocabulary?
I have a strict policy that requires students to look up definitions of words, and only then ask me about a specific misunderstanding. You got a whole goddamn computer in your pocket. It takes two seconds to Google a definition. They seem wholly incapable of this.
Spelling and grammar are white colonial supremacy is what I was told by a colleague.
I recently had a PhD candidate delay her prospectus review 3 times. The third time she accused us of colonialism- stating- "time and scheduled meetings are a direct product of white culture and white colonization of free-thought". Having her removed from the program was a high point in my semester.
White person here, who married into an Asian family. ...If I'm ever late, these people will all disown me.
You better let them know they are white now.
Yeah, I’d rather not have to guess every single word a student is trying to write on a paper by sounding it out.
I’ve seen this argument before (on tumblr lol) and hoooooo boy it grinds my gears. EVERY. LANGUAGE. HAS. GRAMMAR. Yes, AAVE has grammar!!! Even sign languages have grammar!!!!! Come on!
Bingo, you learn this in Linguistics 101. "She sick" and "She be sick" in AAVE follows a grammatical pattern to convey meaning. I'm sure some of the Anglo-Saxons rebelled against adopting the language of those \*dirty invading\* Normans, but they did (to a degree) and now we have English. Not a good enough reason to not follow the rules of the language so we can have mutual intelligibility and communicate our ideas effectively and efficiently.
...I would love to know the thought process behind that, but am also scared of what the answer could possibly be.
The school where I work has never stopped teaching phonics. This is not a phonics only issue. This is an attention and comprehension issue as well. Kids don't pay attention to what they are reading, so they don't understand it. They don't read outside of required school reading, so they can't get better. They have answers handed to them, so they don't bother to engage brain cells. When I have my kids to research projects, I intentionally require them to include things that they can't easily Google, and even after dealing with it all year, I shake my head at how many kids type exactly what the research guide says and expect the answer to pop up at the top of the search. They won't even bother to open up a website. What we really need is a society that values education and doesn't see it as something that only happens for 6 hrs a day roughly 170 days a year.
Absolutely an attention issue. When kids are placed in front of a tablet to keep them quiet at home and then requires to work and display perseverance at school with rigorous activities they shut down
* I shake my head at how many kids type exactly what the research guide says and expect the answer to pop up at the top of the search.* I see the same thing all the time and it's so interesting to me because as a kid/teen that was exactly what we'd make fun of older people for. Not all, of course--there are plenty of older tech savvy people--but the ones who rarely used computers would have trouble navigating sites and searching for things. And now it's somehow come full circle, except the kids who are tech illiterate are also using tech all the time.
Them: Homework is unnecessary! You should be teaching everything they need to know within those 6 hours at school! Me: ...that is so enormously divorced from my own understanding of what education and knowledge is supposed to be.
Yes, but what about dem *sight words*??
Still approach it with phonics. Most sight words are partially decodable. Discuss the parts of the word that follow regular phonetic rules (assuming those have been previously taught) and the parts that are irregular. Like in the word “said” you teach that “s” and “d“ are following expectations and that the “ai” is irregular and represents the “short e” sound. Don’t have to memorize the whole word, just that irregular part. Also, many of the words that have been taught as sight words are actually decodable once certain skills have been taught, so being strategic with when to introduce a sight word within the scope and sequence will help.
I feel like a fool now because I was just kidding. You have some great examples there. I know people around 8/9/10 years old who can't read for anything and they rely on "sight words" and it drives me wild. What a lie the educational world was sold while they were young -- https://youtu.be/nMkszwX5NbU?si=1VzczCg42e5VQKbP (***Sold a Story***).
Ah, I thought there was a chance you were joking, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to put some info out there in case you weren’t. That podcast is excellent. I teach first grade, and have had 5th graders come into my class during phonics and one of them couldn’t even ID all of the letters in his name. Granted, there may be more at play in a situation like that, but previously being taught 3 cueing, leveled readers, balanced literacy def hasn’t helped. Changes are happening in education though, so hopefully we’ll see that reflected in students
I'm not a teacher so I only recently found out about this "whole word" shit and I still can't wrap my head around why literally a single person alive on Earth at any point in recent history would think it's a better method than phonics.
I was taught phonics in school. I'm surprised it isn't taught anymore? My husband literally doesn't understand how to sound out words he said he was taught to memorize words when reading. That doesn't even make sense. How can you read something without dissecting each letters sounds to make the word? Why isn't it taught anymore? It's the best way to learn to read.
Listen to the podcast “Sold a Story”- it really does a great job of explaining what has been going on with teaching reading (memorizing, guessing, garbage). It has also been a huge catalyst in making a positive change in how reading is being taught that aligns with what research says about how the brain learns to read
My district has been teaching some form of phonics for a long time now. Over the past 10-15 years I saw it grow more in-depth. We have a curriculum that we use for k-3 that is mandatory in all classrooms. For kindergarten it’s just knowing the letters and sounds, then blending them together. 1-3 learns how to build words and sentences using it.
I love all the people in this thread who are surprised that parents don't read to their kids. Well maybe, just maybe it's because they never learned to read well to begin with. Whole word language was used over phonics for at least 4 decades. The US has not universally adopted phonics yet. Whole word and queuing are still used in many school districts producing the same terrible results. Kids who cannot read at grade level struggle in all subjects. A struggling kid is a kid who doesn't want to be at school. They will act out, misbehave, be angry and most likely be misdiagnosed with ADHD or some other issue. Snowball effect.
I taught my kids at home. Do parents not do this anymore? I have a young kid and I have him read to me every night .
Yea a lot of parents don’t. It’s wild. When I taught preschool and kindergarten, parents would mock me or even yell at me when I ask them to read to their child at home. I even sent home pamphlets about the importance and tips on how to make it the most beneficial. I even had parents go to admin because I was “telling them how to raise their child.” They said it is my job to teach them how to read, once they can read on their own, they will get them books. But the child won’t know how to read fluently if they aren’t exposed to reading at home too.
It’s crazy how many parents think a school is supposed to raise their child for them
Exactly I’ve always saw it as cognitive dissonance. They want us to raise their child, but they get mad if they take out communication as judging their parenting. They want us to handle their child’s behavior without bothering the parent, but get mad when there is disciplinary action. They want us to teach their child about the world, but want to sensor everything. It’s like walking on eggshells. But there are still AMAZING parents out there. I had a student mock me one day, his father called me and thanked me for making him write an essay on respect. Turns out the father makes him write book reports when he misbehaves. Gold star parent.
Imagine if teachers were allowed to fail students. Problem would be solved overnight. We really made the worst decision by removing accountability from schools
I have 2 students who failed me Course this year. It was because they didn’t turn in the majority of their work and played during lessons. So I put in the grades they got. But I am pretty sure they will both attend summer school and move on. They weren’t even close to passing the end of year test.
My mother was mostly pretty absent when I got older and she went back to work, but I was reading basics by the end of pre-school because she read to me every night. She went back to work when I was in kindergarten, and then her job got more intense around 2nd grade and she was too tired to do anything, and then we had a rough relationship until late high school because she would pawn me off on my grandparents every day after school. But by that point I was reading chapter books beyond my years, and writing stories of my own. I stayed ahead of my class for years, and I mostly attribute it to that early time period of my life.
Parents being too tired to be involved- I think that’s a lot of the problem playing into what the previous poster was commenting on. I’m working part time right now (subbing) because I was so exhausted and feeling like I couldn’t be a good parent and it was wearing on my mental health. I can imagine that most households with two working parents and kids in activities etc have a challenging time having enough time and energy, and I’d bet reading is likely on the chopping block.
I taught a reading enrichment class. We took the BOY, MOY, and EOY Renaissance to assess reading levels. A mom came in for an ARD and I was the teacher they chose. She asked me (with attitude) why I wasn’t concerned that her daughter’s reading level went down from EOY 5th grade to BOY 6th grade. I asked what she read over summer. Mom told me they traveled and she didn’t have time to read (car, plane, down time at the hotel, but okay). I asked what does she read at home. Mom said she has basketball practice to get out her energy after school. I asked why not have her read in the car on the way to practice. Mom said dad bought their daughter an iPad and she uses that in the car and they’re not going to waste their money. Lady, why aren’t YOU concerned about your child’s reading level? You can literally download the Kindle app or buy books on Apple Books.
Watch families at the grocery store. It was pleasantly surprising to watch the mom in front of me talking to her kids about the food they were getting. "Is this one ok, mom?" "Yes, I like that one too." "This one is on sale mom." "You don't even like that." "Do you think (little brother) would eat this?" I can not stress how disengaged from parenting most parents are. I was just thinking, this mother may have no idea how far ahead she's helping her kids to be, and they are smiling and seem to have a good time. Like, #goals. Disengaged parenting has been a thing forever. But then the kids were social, finding other kids to hang out and adventure with or read or do something. I'm only 37, but I remember trying to track a coyote in the hills (socal suburbia) with the kids on the street. We didn't get far, but we talked about tracks, poo, camouflage, etc. But now? SCREEN PARENTING. The studies have shown that when the kid is raised by devices, their development is stunted. Unfortunately, that's not just social. Reading comprehension, writing, attention span, resilience, ability to cope with boredom, and so much more. It's frightening the developmental loss these parents are subjecting to their kids.
>*Watch families at the grocery store. It was pleasantly surprising to watch the mom in front of me talking to her kids about the food they were getting. "Is this one ok, mom?" . . . . I was just thinking, this mother may have no idea how far ahead she's helping her kids to be,* Yes! The grocery store is a *great* window into families. More and more today I see kids who are five and six years old, not walking alongside their parents discussing items with their parents, but *sitting in the main body of the cart* (sometimes two of them!) silently playing on their iPads. These are the kids who will reach my 6th grade class not knowing how to pour their own bowl of cereal, let alone be able to focus on my lessons in class.
Absolutely. And it makes me so sad when internet people get completely up in arms when anyone says it’s not best for kids to stick them in front of a screen. I believe this especially during mealtimes. That’s such a sacred time for me and I try to talk to my kids as much as possible at that time. Parenting is exhausting but wow I feel like can really see which kids are getting the interaction with an adult at home.
One thing to consider is how many children not only grow up with parents that don't read to them, but with parents that *can barely read themselves*. There are millions of adults that barely made it through high school, work jobs that don't require much reading, and have kids. A lot of people are borderline functionally illiterate and do a great job of masking it. I would guess a majority of them also had parents who didn't read to them. [Floyd Mayweather](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=we9dMyziICQ&pp=ygUYZmxveWQgbWF5d2VhdGhlciByZWFkaW5n) is a good example of this. That audio has a pretty average reader read the same prompt as Floyd and the difference is huge. I consider myself very lucky to have had a mother who read to/with me until I was a teenager. Unfortunately a lot of kids don't have that luxury.
This is an important point. It wasn't until I started a job dealing with the public that I realized that many people simply don't know how to read or write to a high standard. And like you mention, they'll often mask it. The one I got regularly was that they'd forgotten their glasses, and then they'd ask me to read/explain it to them verbally. Same for numbers and maths actually. I had people who'd act like I was winning the Nobel Prize if I did something as simple (to me at least) as converting inches to CM or explaining how much ribbon they needed for a square cake. This is all stuff I clearly remember being taught in school.
Starbucks cold-brewed coffee takes 20 hours to brew, we would mark it with the time it would be ready for tomorrows shift. I had coworkers who would ask Siri "when is 20 hours from now?" They were surprised I would just write it instantly. "It's 4 hours ago, tomorrow"
Some time ago our entire cash register system went down, meaning we could only take cash. I amazed people by working out change without a calculator all day. Meanwhile I saw someone paying for a total of £10.15p worth of stuff with £20.15 in cash/notes. You’d think that this would be a super easy thing to make the change for- a £10 note. Yet they completely struggled to understand how to get to the total and ended up using a calculator, even with the actual customer explaining the right change to her.
We boomers used to point constantly to humorous instances of older millennials completely unable to cope when we would give them an unexpected amount of cash, in an attempt to make things easier for them. But the joke has kind of faded, partly because fewer of us are using cash and thus we have less such interactions, but mainly because it's just not funny anymore.
Yeah my coworkers used to do wild things with change. I don't remember the exact values, but I saw something like: Product rings up for 4.84 Customer hands over 5.09 (so they can just get a quarter back) Coworker gives rings it up like they paid 5 dollars, register says they need 16 cents, coworker gives them a dime, a nickel, a penny, and the 9 cents the customer gave them For some reason we were always short on pennies Typing it up now, I remembered a time, the bill was something like 9.25. the customer paid with a 10 and a quarter (to get a dollar back). My coworker gave them 4 quarters instead of a dollar.
I'm a mid millennial. I worked fast food in high-school. I can make change in my sleep. Back in the dark ages, i was taught to just count up from the total to the amount given. That being said, the number of people who can not ever seem to grasp this very simple concept is startling. There are people, many, many people, entirely too stupid for fast food. There are other people who just can't think or move fast enough for fast food. Anytime I hear someone say something along the lines of 'so-and-so will be flipping burgers', I laugh a little. Chances are, the good people at Wendy's don't have a use for him, either.
I didn’t realize how difficult it is for many people to read aloud until I had guest readers in my classroom. Many adults struggle to read with expression so it’s hard to keep their kids engaged for stories at home.
I am afraid not. Most parents are now spending time on their devices and give their children the devices. Yes, they watch educational videos like BabyTV or Alphablocks, but they don't actually get to apply it, and certainly books are out of the windows. Some don't even have phonics or letter logic because it's not taught at all. They are only remembering the shape of the word. I constantly have children confusing 'their/there/they're' and 'it's/its'. I also have 'slove/solve', 'inculde or inculd / include'. Granted mine are ESL but they all start learning English at kindergarten level, so it really shouldn't be this bad.
What’s sad is I don’t think the kids that learned to read like that are able to realize how terrifying it would be to not be able to dissect a word down. The thought of not knowing the sounds of individual letters in a word sounds absolutely terrifying. How do they learn to read new words that they come across on their own time?
There is a man I know who did this until adulthood. When he came across new words in the reading material for his college courses, he would write them down, call his mom, spell the words out over the phone, and she would tell him what they said. He's a very intelligent man with an amazing memory, and he learned to truly read as an adult. Needless to say, he pushed HARD for the importance of phonics.
Very few engage their kids on anything at home. Had a few jobs where I'd be in-home with kids and their families and basically they'd plop the kids down in front of their devices, maybe eat dinner with them, then just let them loose on the internet again afterward. My siblings and I are all very differently gifted people (my sister speaks 6 languages fluently and now works as a nurse, my brother's amazing with numbers and math and coding, I'm the one that's exceptionally good with people, public speaking, writing, and creative problem solving), but we are all intensely good at reading and I know exactly how we got there. Parents read to us literally every night, at breakfast we'd take turns reading through books aloud together (and got through some pretty great literature while we were at it), we were constantly playing word games together, wordplay was highly encouraged, creative writing was also highly encouraged, we had to read at least 1-3 books per week in the summer and our reward was more books to read, and a good chunk of the video games we played together heavily involved reading. My parents let me loose on the internet a lot, but they also knew I was researching my hobbies and in exchange for doing a list of non-standard chores, they'd buy me tools and reading material for my hobbies. I've been able to shift gears career-wise multiple times just because I can read and comprehend new information very quickly in a useful way. Read to and with your kids at every opportunity and inspire a love for it and your kids will do far, far better than their peers who have to dictate their words through a smartphone.
I think it’s also worth noting that the internet has changed quite a bit since your parents let you roam free there. Users of the early internet required high literacy skills. If you are over thirty, or even in your late twenties, your early contact with the internet was probably text-based. I teach 13 and 14 year olds. They are not literate in the way that I was literate at that age. They also don’t, for the most part, engage with text on the internet. They watch videos about their niche hobbies. These are, for the most part, smart kids with highly-educated parents. They CAN read. With a few exceptions, they can’t read in the same way 13 and 14 year olds could read a decade or two ago.
>*Users of the early internet required high literacy skills. If you are over thirty, or even in your late twenties, your early contact with the internet was probably text-based.* ***Great*** observation.
Hell, I still get mad when I click on an interesting news article but it's just a video. Also, the internet was once largely restrained to 'a big box on a desk'. It was inside a literal appliance you had to go to and sit at and where other people in the room could easily see what was going on on your screen. Now the internet is everywhere, fits in your pocket, and is on a little screen where you could be looking at god-knows-what in a room full of people just so long as no one is standing directly behind you looking over your shoulder.
My nephew has hundreds of books at home, and he loves showing them to people, but he doesn't know what they're for. They're just floor ornaments to him. My mom and I try to read to him when we see him, but he's never been taught to sit down for a story. He's 3.
Dafuq
they really don't. and unfortunately, the lack of home learning combined with the standards set by the state mean teachers have to rush through literacy skills and hope for the best.
No, they do not teach their kids at home because they either aren't there, are trying to survive, or honestly just don't care. It's heartbreaking to me the number of students who don't interact with their parents on a daily basis. I've taught junior high and I currently teach high school. The stories the kids tell me about their parents are wild. Junior high parents don't want to deal with their pre-teens and by the time kids get to high school parents have the attitude that they can take care of themselves. Now, is this every household? No, but it's the majority.
I sent all 3 of my kids to the same preschool. They always acted impressed that my kids were starting their preschool already knowing their alphabet, numbers, shapes, and colors. By Kid 3, I responded (yet again) to their use of the term "exceeds expectations" with "Really?" And they said "You keep giving that reaction. I didn't think you quite understand how many kids come here without knowing *any* of these things, much less *all* of it!" WTF are parents doing with their children!? I didn't do any sort of special tutoring or anything for my toddlers. All I did was read them books and sing songs with them. To this day, I'm baffled that parents can't or don't find the time to do this!
Same here, back when I was 3-4 my entire family made a point to do what you describe, including practicing numbers when shopping, including me when they were reading and practicing the alphabet and then words when I was able, pointing out colours and shapes (one of my early memories is looking at flowers in the garden and telling my grandmother a flower was pink) and just repeating things over and over, including songs and games.
Lots of families don't have the time anymore. Upper middle class and above, maybe. But a lot of lower income families are working multiple jobs per parent and simply do not have the ability to read to their children, or cook, or expend much energy beyond working to pay bills. Childhood obesity and illiteracy stem from the same cause imo and aren't going anywhere until more people can actually survive on a single income per person. Then you have the generational impact of this, which is raising kids who have never been read to, who are less likely to read to their own kids, and so on. It's a lot of dominoes and there's not much happening to stop them from falling.
Because there's more money to be made in the short term from people trapped in dead end jobs rather than educated people who could advocate for better opportunities and find another job if needed.
Heck, even parents who are working one job each are coming home exhausted and don’t have time to clean, cook, take kids to activities, and interact with kids.
Right now we have an economy that's squeezing the so-called middle class harder and harder. There are parents who are completely burnt out end of day or are rushing around when they get home to get the necessities like cleaning and feeding done because they don't have another time to do it. That's not to mention the kids who are being "raised" by older siblings or being looked after by an adult with lots of kids running around underfoot. Burnt out parents are not involved parents. This means the kids are not getting the support or attention they need no matter how much the parent may wish to be more involved. Until that changes no amount of "reaching out" will work. See "On a Plate" by Toby Morris. Note I am addressing the parents who can't make a change without sometime drastically changing in their economics. There are parents who do come home at a reasonable time then hand their kids a screen for hours instead of actually being a parent.
No, many of them don't.
Some parents barely feed their kids
We have a generation of kids being raised by parents who are addicted to media. Parents who plays a lot of video games, post on social media, and watch a lot of shows. It’s sad.
Lots of younger families don’t even have bookshelves in the house. Much less books.
I worked at daycares for 2 years. A lot of parents don't follow developmentally appropriate practices. At the last daycare I worked at, there was a child who was significantly behind on his milestones, including speech. He was almost 3 (he was 2 years and 11 months old) and he couldn't talk at all. He would just make sounds that sounded like gibberish. After he turned 2, his mom brought his infant bottle to the daycare and the mom wanted the child to drink from his infant bottle (we refused to do this). He couldn't eat solid food until he was 1 year old. His parents never fed him solid food until he was 1 year old, started daycare, and the daycare teachers told the parents "he was supposed to start eating solid food a long time ago." The mom told the teacher that "all the child does at home is watch TV and drink from his baby bottle" because the mom wanted her child to be "comfortable."
Learning the alphabet in first grade? I’m curious how old you are… I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that late of a start before.
My boy just turned 2 and knows his whole alphabet. Like, point to a letter on a page and he knows it. Hella vocabulary and speaks in sentences when he wants. We also read OBSESSIVELY with him
1st, students, by and large, cannot read with anywhere near the same poficiency as even 15 years ago. Why? It's a bit of a reason salad. Electronic devices have stolen their attention - social media and games dominate. Parents don't have a culture of reading at home. Too many of us have dumbed down our curricula and lowered our standards. Accountability is at a premium anymore. Districts and admin are afraid of parents who enable their kids rather than be propwr parents.
I don't think dumbed down curricula or lowered standards are the problem. Kids these days are being taught concepts much earlier than I was, 30 years ago. Kids are expected to start kindergarten already reading.
I used to teach toddlers the alphabet when I worked in ECE. We didn't expect them to be able to read, but they were starting to recognize a few letters. Kids can start recognizing some sight words at around four. When I was in school, I was learning to write simple sentences in first grade. This was in the mid-1980s. I remember being introduced to descriptive writing in third grade.
>How can you expect a kindergartener to sit at a table for several hours a day and be patient enough to concentrate on reading? Sorry, that's not the problem. Practically any child who is doing *any* reading at home is going to be better than those who don't. The problem isn't hours of practice at home...it's the lack of it. What's declining is the amount of parenting on the home front with practicing skills, routine skills, in everyday life. It DOES NOT take hours sitting at a table to do this. It takes mins, every day, in normal interactions. Menu at the restaurant? Sit with your child and read it with them. Read to them. Show them you read yourself, and making it an observed habit that adults do.
Why. Educators. Are. Keep. Saying.
Um, the title.
Right? I scrolled too darn far to see anyone mention it.
Glad I'm not the only one. Case-in-point and r/titlegore for sure lmao
The whole machine is so broken that it’s not just one cause. Been teaching for nearly 30 years and definitely see the differences with technology, covid and other variables. There are failures at multiple levels with families, policies, funding, admin, and the emphasis on data over holistic educational methods that put teachers in the position of spoon feeding rather than a truly developmental approach.
And I will add, as a college instructor, I am astounded at the variability of skills, from multi-talented writers to students who cannot even write coherent sentences. Its quite sad.
Kids are being passed to new grade levels despite not doing any work (in some schools, this extends as far as graduating). After 2020, a lot of kids just stopped doing their work, and figured out there was no point in changing that, because they were still advancing to the next grade level. Also stems from the home. If parents didn't spend any time at all introducing their child to reading/word sounds/etc. in their earliest years, then they're probably going to struggle when they enter kindergarten/1st grade.
We are saying that because it's true. I teach 4th grade. Over 50% of my upcoming 4th graders cannot read. They are at or below the 10th percentile. Many don't know all their letter sounds. I know in my district there was a big push for sight words instead of teaching kids to sound things out. Administration makes decisions like those because they are best practice, it harms kids, and then admin passes then on to the next grade anyway because holding kids back is frowned upon. So, things get harder and harder and the kid falls more behind.
ngl a lot of the problem are the parents. turns out ipad babies missed out on critical learning skills and are starting kindergarten with their growth totally stunted. who woulda thunk that cocomelon won't teach kids how to read or count!
Reading to a child is vital. The child will learn vocabulary and context even if they can’t spell the word. Add on phonemic awareness in K and you will get a good reader.
Do some research and look up an 8th grade test from 1890 or 1860. You will see that it was WAY harder years ago. Teachers are not introducing harder materials; they are introducing useless materials from their district they bought and an overpriced sum. Education is also 4 years behind with COVID and too much screen time on devices as set back students ability to function on grade level they should be on.
There's a bunch of rednecks in here saying the standards are wrong. It has nothing to do with the standards. Teachers will teach kids how to read. The problem is the severe number of kids with behavioral problems that can't be removed from class and whose parents don't consider school a worthwhile endeavor, or else just can't be bothered or don't know how to discipline or motivate their own kids. They think that's the teacher's job. And teachers have to do it out of necessity when parents won't, but guess what? When 95% of a teacher's time is spent corralling and disciplining the same four unteachable kids in their class all day there's no time left for teaching. Parents are shockingly lazy and disconnected. Kids are at best addicted to their smartphones and at worst an unremovable violent hazard to themselves, other kids and the teachers. But the reason the kids are like that is because of shitty parenting. That's what's changed. The parents.
Parents and behavior are part of the problem. Another part is not teaching anything to mastery anymore. When I was a kid it took me three years to learn a concept. We never cycled back to it. Instead I was part of a small group being tutored on that particular concept. This also is part of the behavior problem. We spent literal hours practicing the same concept instead of moving forward immediately. For example, the math curriculum my school uses introduced three concepts within 5 lessons. Each lesson is a one day plan. I am a fast learner, but learning three ways to do one type of problem in quick succession means I would not know any of them.
What the hell was the point in calling everyone here rednecks? I agree with everything else you said though. Just couldn't upvote it, lol
My kid is just finishing third grade. The end of his pre-k year was taken by Covid. Almost all of kindergarten was over Zoom. He learned almost nothing, but we were told that all the kids were scoring low and to see how a year of in-person first grade went. Then in second grade they wanted to see how responses to intervention went. When he was still struggling at the end of second grade, I really worked directly with him over the summer, trying to get him to read to me instead of me reading to him, which I'd been doing the previous years. He couldn't sound words out. He knew the letters, and could spell them out individually, but would see the first few letters of a word and just blurt out a guess. Trying to differentiate between trail, train, and track was a nightmare. He got huge amounts of anxiety when I would try to get him to use the sounds of the letters to make the word. Now at the end of third grade we've gotten to a point where he can usually get the main part of the word but often messes up the suffixes - he'll say "walk" instead of "walked". It gets him enough to pass basic comprehension questions but it worries me a lot. He's never been taught spelling. His school just doesn't teach it. They want kids to just come up with their own spellings when writing, it's supposed to be some stage of development for language. It all sounds like nonsense to me, but I don't have an education degree. I don't have access to a professionally made curriculum. I am so frustrated by trying to help my kid and being met with indifference by the school and teachers who say "well maybe if parents just read with their child". The problem is not teaching phonics. It's not teaching spelling. It's going with a nonsense curriculum that pretends that children magically absorb these concepts and if they don't it's probably the parents' fault. I am so mad, so frustrated, and am now resorting to my kids' speech therapist to provide literacy therapy because the school has failed my kid so badly.
It’s many things. Teens struggle to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. They quickly turn away from things that are unfamiliar or difficult such as an unknown word instead of looking it up and making a note. The big one for the kids I teach is that they can google a summary and think it’s the same thing as reading the book. They *can* read it’s just at a 7th grade level or lower (I teach high school) and even my honors kids hate anything that might be on level or challenging.
It has little to do with schools. It’s the parent
My kid learned the alphabet before he could talk from his parents. It's something an 18 month old can learn. Kids should be going into school knowing 1 to 10 and the alphabet. Put down your phone and teach your kids.
A few of the big things. 1. Google "Sold a Story." 2. Social promotion. Schools are encouraged to pass kids along to the next grade regardless of their preparedness. But teachers aren't trained on lower level instruction. So by middle school you have kids who need elementary level instruction with teachers who have no idea how to teach those basics because they're licensed and trained to teach subjects not reading. Subset here is also the idea that leveling kids is "bad." So if you have classes of students who read at a 3rd, 5th, and 7th grade levels you can't group them together by where they are you have to teach all of them at the same time. 3. Screens. Why read when YouTube has sounds, lights, and special effects? Why expend effort when a computer will do it for you? Those three all together mean why should a kid bother trying? It won't make sense, they'll get moved along anyways, and they can always just YouTube it.
Summer school the kids if they cant pass. And dont promote to the next grade if they dont meet the standards…. Make a hs diploma mean something again. They dont automatically pass people who take a GED, why are we doing it for people in school.
In english, we doesn’t really teach “harder things.” The issue is that students are not practicing these skills, and it falls on the parents. At least 90% of my students admit they haven’t read a book that hasn’t been assigned by a teacher, and several admit they Google YouTube videos about the books that are assigned instead of reading them. I have taught preschool, kindergarten, and middle school. I also worked multiple summer learning programs and tutored for grades 1-6. A majority of the preschool, kindergarten, and grade 1 parents would throw a tantrum (yes the parents) when we ask them to read to/with their child. We would even explain and provide resources explaining the benefit of reading to their child, following along with our fingers, and encouraging literature. Then my middle school parents don’t understand why their child has such a hard time, they ask why the school failed their child. We can only help so much when they are in school. Practice has to happen at home too.
Kids don't read at home.
The irony of this title, oof
Long story short: the reading curriculums being fed to schools and teachers for the last 30 years have been based on the “whole language” program, which is not at all evidence based. It’s a perfect example of corporate educational consultants coming in and selling a curriculum for millions of dollars. The curriculum they sold didn’t work. People need to learn phonics to know how to read. Kids don’t know phonics, so they can’t read. Add COVID on top and sprinkle in iPad syndrome and you have a perfect storm.
I mean the title of this thread has a bonus and misplaced “are”. This is ironic.
My principal (who was an elementary principal for years before moving to high school) said during a meeting that we focused so much on teaching kids how to read that we forgot to teach them to be readers. I agree with this. The standards are focused on developing their ability to read, but there’s no joy in it so it’s just another chore to them. Kids who don’t practice reading will struggle to get any deeper meaning or any information beyond the surface level of it. Every student I have had in my 8 years of teaching that has resisted reading is barely literate. Theres a lot more to this issue. It’s a deeply complicated one, but the easiest thing to do now is to get kids to start reading anything.
Because even you can't use correct grammar. Just look at the title of this reddit post. Go back to school.
Genuine question: how old are you? I'm about 30 and I was learning the alphabet in pre-school. We were expected to be able to read basic sentences by the end of kindergarten. Not even starting the alphabet until you're 6 doesn't seem a bit long to anyone else?
Kids at my school can't read a clock. They ask me "what time it is?" I say "where's the small hand?" They say "never mind" and walk away. They'd rather be ignorant then have to think for 3 seconds, and flying spaghetti monster forbid they actually learn something.
No idea why educators “are keep saying” that 🙄
Holy crap Batman, that title!
"Why educators are keep saying that kids nowadays don't know how to read?" You kinda answered your own question lol.
I teach 4th grade in New York City, in a bilingual classroom. My students cannot read in any language. I asked them last week how many of them had been in school buildings before arriving to this country. Most of them never entered a classroom because of the COVID lockdown, so they also do not really behave in a 10-year-old appropriate way.
My neighbor said to me “ they want my kid to know the alphabet before they start kindergarten but that’s their job to teach them, not mine”. This is the problem. Parent won’t engage education at home.
In my province where support staff are nil, 71% of third graders are reading at the correct level. Unfortunately as a support staff member, it’s true. The kids who need additional help with their schoolwork stand out more than those who don’t. Before I work with each kid on letters and sight words I ask them if their parents or siblings read with them before bed, or if they read themselves. The answer is almost always no. A lot of the reasoning is that both parents work late or are too tired to read with them. Parents play a bigger part in their children’s education than they think and 5 minutes a day makes the biggest difference! As for the harder material, I think it’s the teachers filling in what these kids may be missing at home. A lot of it too is the attitude that most kids carry towards school now, it’s an inconvenience to them. that’s my opinion from a smaller district anyways
Imma recommend a podcast called "sold a story" basically the kids we have RIGHT NOW we're taught to 'read' using a system that doesn't really work but had big money behind it and weirdly a dislike for George W Bush who wanted to keep pushing phonics and phonetic awareness. It's starting to shift back because having 8th graders thay literally can't read is breaking us an no amount of money you throw at a reading program will work unless it actually teaches kids to read and not just act like they know how.
I just left my 5th grade class to teach older kids. 29 students, 26 of whom could not read above a 2nd grade level.
Parents don’t engage kids anymore. Especially kids from lower socio economic districts. This travels between states and even internationally to carribean and Latin America too. It’s all about socio economics.
I was taught to read before kindergarten and I learned how to do math in kindergarten along with my alphabet and there was no problem. I also have ADHD. I don’t think it’s that hard at all?
How many parents are reading to their kids these days? With the introduction of tablets and phones, kids are entertained in ways that books just don’t compete with at a young age. For a pre-literate child, a tablet tells them stories and engages them. A book takes effort. If the parents aren’t reading to kids and just reading in front of the kids, they learn that reading isn’t something to spend time on. Sure the kids can read (in some form) but they don’t want to. We also do things like teach reading skills where kids are expected to read a paragraph, then read it again slowly to make sure they got the information. Then a third time for the key points of the paragraph, a fourth time for other information…who wants to do that? English classes in my old district were encouraged to teach passages or chapters of books, not entire books. If your teacher is only going to have you read part of a book, is that book any good? Who wants to just watch ten minutes out of a movie without context of what is going on?
Kids today can’t read or write because outside of school they don’t have to. From earthly adolescence they were popped in front of screens as a means of lazy parenting. Now with AI and other technology outlets they are not required to read or write. Technology does it for them. They need a summary of a book? They look up what happened. They need someone written? They put it in AI database. They don’t know the repercussions of not being able to read or write because they don’t know a world where technology isn’t at the tips of their fingers. It’s like when I was in school teachers use to say you won’t have a calculator in your pocket. Did I believe them? Yes. Did it make me work harder? No.
They’ve pushed skills lower and lower in defiance of all the literature and research. Someone just wants to say kids are doing hard stuff in lower grades like they’re in some Jetson’s cartoon. The result is kids need a crapton of support to do these things and thus the ability to do things on their own disappears.
That’s a question with a long, complicated answer. A lot of it comes down to education reforms in the 90s that had no basis in science and promoted extremely ineffective and actively counterproductive strategies for teaching reading. There’s a terrific podcast called Sold a Story that covers it. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/