Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read

Time ^ | August 11, 2022 | Belinda Luscombe

[TangoLimaSierra]

District of Columbia is demanding that ALL day care workers have a college degree.

Imagine the stink if they required all teachers be able to read.

[Myrddin]

I started reading in kindergarten in Hawaii. We moved back to San Diego for 2nd grade. That's where my teacher introduced me to phonics. From that point forward, spelling bees were dirt simple. When I decided to learn Welsh, it was just a matter of reviewing the phonetic rules. Dirt simple. I haven't achieved that level of mastery yet for Gaelic. The rules are more complex. German was easy, but there are implicit rules e.g. stein gets pronounced shtine...that "sh" is implicit, not written. Languages are fun. Each has a set of rules.

[GingisK]

My wife taught our two boys to read as each became three years old. She used the book "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons".

The oldest read "Ricky Ticky Tavi" to his first grade class, and even vocalized with a different voice for each character. The class was spellbound.

Teach you child to read. It is easy.

[GingisK]

I really despised the “Jo Jo the Monkey” math books.

[hanamizu]

Nope. A 1955 best-seller, WHY JOHNNY CAN’T READ by Rudolph Flesch,

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I know the phonics vs whole word argument reaches an almost religious fervor. I did have the Dick/Jane books in school but also remember ‘sounding things out’. Teachers in the 50s learned to read in the 30s and 40s and likely used techniques they themselves learned by. If you look at a text from that time, it is likely two or three years ahead of what is being used for the same grade now.

Besides the crazy fads that education (especially math education) seems to be susceptible to, the mass introduction of computer technology to the class room hasn’t helped. Instead of reading and attempting to understand from a book, kids get short lessons from their chromebooks. Short lessons, quickly forgotten and no real learning or understanding taking place.

Many younger teachers are quite enthusiastic about all this but being a geezer who subs, I am not happy with the results I see. It seems that only the very best students are actually learning sometimes in spite of what they are being ‘taught’.

[Colinsky]

I don’t remember if my elementary school taught phonics or not. I was already an experienced reader before kindergarten. Our version of the Dick & Jane books was totally interchangeable except for different names: Alice & Jerry and their dog Jip. I read whatever they required and went home and read Mark Twain.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

The next paragraph changes things significantly, I wish you had posted at least the first sentence:

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.

[Texan5]

When my dad was deployed or TDY, my mom, bro and I were at home on the little family ranch in a remote part of W Texas-I knew how to read a year or more before I went to kindergarten-at 5-because my mom was a teacher who believed teaching your cubs at home was also good parenting-and I do remember that I learned to read phonetically and I remember kids on neighboring ranches learning to read at home, too. When my sibling was old enough, he was taught the same way-we also were able to go to a nearby Catholic school because mom taught 4th grade there, and were both most definitely ahead of kids our age who were not exposed to that early in-home learning-both of graduated at 16 worked till 18 to learn and earn-to be an adult then went to college...

[Nifster]

Well duh. Why stick with what had worked for generations?

So glad my child had a teacher who was strong on phonics

[Nifster]

I love McGuffeys. They are perfect

[dfwgator]

It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences.

Kill my landlord
Kill my landlord
C-I-L-L my landlord

[aspasia]

Dont' forget, you need a parent for that book

[aspasia]

Ditto that.