good parent ☺️

montessori is crazy, we’ve been doing lovery and their toys are so well designed

You're so lucky you can afford not only kids, but private school as well. I really hope you appreciate your privilege.

1 in 4 people you see walking on the street in America are functionally illiterate. More than half can only read at somewhere around a 6th grade level or below. The US glorifies and revels in ignorance.

yep. tis why my wife laments ever setting feet in turtle island. she knew she was part the 3% able to recite, sign, and localize curricula with goals, criteria, and pedigree for a generation that will never surpass her. Traumas are mitigatable, but not the isolation that no peer like her will ever exist.

Oh, this is worse than that: it’s not just about their vocabulary being stunted, it’s that they can’t even recognize words they know because they don’t know how to sound out a word. Grim stuff.

Meanwhile during my childhood I moved many many times and I remember arriving at a school in upstate New York for 7th grade, getting out of our life skills class which is like Home Ec for head injuries, going to lunch and then after lunch going out for recess.

The life skills class focused on important things like don't talk to strangers which I thought was childish enough and then we went out for recess. We were in Middle School, and we had recess.

The kids I met there were the most behind of any kids at any school I ever went to. I was constantly accused of having my parents help me with my homework and projects. It seemed impossible to explain to them how little time my mother had to pay attention to me at all since she worked 2 jobs.

The problem with three-cuing is that it teaches people to skip words they don't know. Having people just not read half the words in comments they are replying to explains so much. No wonder people have bad reading comprehension.

overworked AND lazy? make yourself make sense lol

Shouldn't really need parental involvement at all to be honest. The school system should be wholly responsible for making sure the kids coming go out the other end meet the educational standards to prepare them for life. Leaving the ones with shitty families to their fate is fucked. That does of course require that schools be properly funded with staff trained to address the various issues the kids may have.

There's some truth to that, but it's also important that phonics lay down the foundation for reading, and let young readers identify the complexities behind the rules, and then internalize the meta-rules governing which rules apply where.

It's frustrating that tough doesn't rhyme with though or through or bough (or that none of those others rhyme with each other). Or that many homographs aren't homophones, to where you need to rely on context to know which pronunciation or meaning applies to words like "read," "lead," or "unionized."

Still, how else are you gonna do it? Lay down the basics, then layer on some exceptions that generally come in as loanwords (entree) or proper nouns (Xi Jinping), but always building on a foundation where new words can be encountered and pronounced. We can read and pronounce newly invented words easily, whether it's slang like "mogging" or fanciful corporate trademarks like "Reddit." We can deal with the exceptions as they come up.

blowing in the wind.

wind the clock.

Definitely something I struggled with, perhaps due to ADHD/Dyslexia - a lot of words will lead you astray with how it sounds (such as colonel and squirrel).

Probably still a useful skill to teach, but probably not the pinnacle of teaching either.

(with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course)

INB4 that user who insists on using thorn characters shows up to fight the good fight.

Here's the comment I made last time this idea popped up in a thread:

Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it's impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.

This has already happened with hangul, probably the paradebeispiel for successful intentionally designed phonetic systems: spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.

So, in addition to the dialect problem, you'd end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you'd be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades which b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.

Not to mention the fact that spelling things the way we currently do preserves etymological information (though imperfectly) about the words in question.

That isn't to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention that comes with its own significant downsides.

*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense

https://www.vice.com/en/article/gen-z-is-the-first-generation-dumber-than-their-parents-neuroscientist-claims/

Nah. You should be getting mad that they're a full generation in to trying to make your kid less competent, with new and improved techniques for encouraging illiteracy against all odds.

If you were taught how to sound out words you weren’t taught the way a lot of kids are taught to read today. Being able to read the whole sentence and guessing based on context already puts you significantly ahead of kids who have been taught with the three cueing method.

The technique isn't the issue, rather it's the fact that American kids are taught to use context before they're taught to differentiate the words from one another, apparently.

These not context clues in text but in picture. Little different.

I'm also in my 40s and the wiki article sounded exactly how I read, so I did a little searching and turns out this was the method used in schools in Ontario in the late 80s and 90s although not a formal part of the curriculum until 1997. So no, not a new thing. It was reversed after an inquiry by the human rights commission in 2022.

That might explain why my spouse who grew up in a different part of the province uses phonics and I use... word shapes, idk? I read extremely fast with good comprehension, but can't spell worth a damn lol.

This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”

What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.

The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.

Common core math is how high performers in math tend to already approach math concepts. The controversial examples focused on "number sense" do instill good habits and instincts for error correction (especially important in the age of calculators and computers), and don't detract from the importance of the actual mathematical operations. Either way, common core math curriculum as a whole is good, and continues to be a good set of goals for learning math. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that the math standards are too high and leave some kids behind, but that's less a problem with the standard and more a problem with our ability to get kids up to that perfectly reasonable standard, of what we should hope that all adults should know.

The main criticisms of common core that I sympathize with are that they deemphasize the humanities too much, but that's not exactly a problem with the math standards themselves.

Agreed I sub in multiple schools in rural PA. They're all doing heavy phonics. More phonics then I was a kid for sure.

I knew the kids couldn’t read because I have multiple English teachers in my family, but until I listened to season 1 of that podcast (working through season 2 now) I had no idea it was from them not even being taught the basics of how to read! One guy they interviewed who learned to read fluently as an adult was basically like ‘when I learned I was like, that’s all you do? Why the fuck didn’t anyone teach me this?’

That’s awesome! And yeah, everything about American education is regional for better or worse. From what I understand it was implemented the most on the west coast and northeast, but some schools in every state used it.

No, when we were teaching our child to read they would try to do this instead of sounding out or reading the words and just make up whatever the pictures looked like. It wasn't taught that way to them as far as I know, it was just a sneaky way of cheating, which didn't work. Now they can read at 2 grade levels higher than they are because we taught them how to sound out words correctly.

Sure, but the obvious implication is that they will stay that way. "You need to learn how to read to know how to read" is the whole point

I think it’s bad to teach the strategies used exclusively by the worst readers and not strategies used by fluent readers (such as sounding out words), didn’t think that would be controversial. And yes, a large amount of schools specifically didn’t teach sounding out words due to a program they were sold. Look up Reading Recovery and Marie Clay if you want to learn more. Or talk to an American middle/high school teacher to see how well this turned out.

I love everything about this comment

Then your kids are going to a good school that, hopefully intentionally, uses evidence-based techniques to educate them. This was several years ago, but my elementary-aged niece's parents were having to teach her phonics at home because the school district was using three cuing.

Many states have already enacted legislation promoting evidence-based early reading instruction, and requiring districts to stop using three cuing educational materials.

Decline of phonics is real. They either didn't follow the trend, or switched. It wasn't universal