For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard.
Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.
Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.
The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices.
Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach.
It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel.
I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.
> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.
Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).
Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.
I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.
This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.
In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.
The article tries to claim that we should take those claims with a grain of salt because people have been complaining about kids' literacy rates since time immemorial. The difference is that now it is measurably true.
I also think that anecdotal evidence is evidence nonetheless. If teachers active for many years start to ring the bells they are probably onto something, even if the official statistics are yet to come.
One argument I've seen forwarded elsewhere is that school methods have tracked university methods.
According to the argument, watering down standards to increase retention (and revenue) gained legitimacy in the sixties as the higher education act empowered administrators to increase the size of their ranks and policy views at colleges across the country. These colleges trained education majors according to their new philosophy, who became a new rank of principals and superintendents in the eighties and onwards, promulgating the transactional and nihilistic view of the purpose of teaching.
On the one hand, it sounds farfetched. On the other hand, all five of the teachers and professors over 50 whom I've raised the topic to over the years agreed wholeheartedly.
When I was young, I was amazed at how they would try to teach us English grammar and spelling, then have us read books like Huckleberry Finn that undid 6 months to a year worth of English language education. When you are young and you do not really a firm grasp of the right way to do things, being forced to spend substantial time “reading” books that show the wrong way is counterproductive. It was like having a construction crew building a structure by day and a demolition crew destroying it by night.
It is a wonder we learned anything at all and it made English tests a hellish experience, since it was never clear what was actually correct. This was on top of English itself being a confusing language (see all of the words ending in ough if you need an example). English teachers seemed to assume we had some magical ability to know the right answer after confusing us with conflicting examples, and we rarely did. It is no wonder back then that they said the same things about us.
If they want to improve literacy, they should replace the required reading with books that have no flaws in the spelling and grammar to reinforce English lessons. Then we might see student literacy rise as students stop being so confused.
Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.
However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.
I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.
I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though
English is my first language. However, I had an undiagnosed learning disability until college.
That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.
The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.
To be generous, what this meant is either that you were below the reading level for the book or you misunderstand the core skill of reading and using style in the English language. Reading and understanding when rules are broken leads to knowing when they can be. We don't skip Shakespeare because the language is funny and archaic. Reading these authors is both a part of style and content literacy for the English language. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing them.
There is a difference between understanding a book’s contents and being able to read the book without having it rewrite your understanding of the English language such that you have no idea what is correct and incorrect because your grasp on that was tenuous in the first place. Children are expected to avoid being rewritten at stages where they are extremely impressionable and are easily rewritten and then they are blamed for it. It is fairly sadistic thing to do to children.
I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.
People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/
Hmm, I get where you're coming from and I'd agree if it was math or physics or chemistry but I'm not so sure about languages.
I learned English as a second language and while I did have formal lessons, the most bang for buck learning came from stuff like Huckleberry Finn and forums and random songs (especially hip hop) and cartoons. Not because they are "good english" but precisely because they are "bad english" but still capture the spirit of the language. The meaning is there and it's English as used by native speakers. i.e.: It helped me internalize the language. Maybe it was because I had no one around to practice informal English and I needed that and it's different for native speakers. Dunno.
I can't say it didn't confuse me but I know it didn't negatively impact my scores. Despite not doing my homework and not even having the required textbooks or studying properly, it was the subject I had the easiest time and best grades aside from math or programming. And it's not like the bar was low - we had to pass C1 on the CEFR and I've easily passed C2 and have almost 100% on TOEFL and similar.
Also I'm not particularly gifted with languages - I don't know grammar at all and I struggle speaking all the time even in my native language.
I do not speak that way and I do not know anyone else who speaks that way.
That said, being relatively average at English as a student because I was constantly confused by the literature I was forced to read did negatively affect my test scores.
Well yeah, it's not everyday English maybe but it's still English. By that I mean that those are examples of which and how many of the rules in the system can be broken or let's say - creatively interpreted and still fit in that system.
"bad english" by expert native speakers is different than "bad english" from poor native speakers is different than "bad english" from still-learning non-speakers. IMO the first two both benefit your understanding of the language and help with reading comprehension because they expand your personal knowledge base of how many ways you can convey the same meaning in English with different words, order, grammar, etc and that is crucial for a flexible language like English.
But your reply reminded me of a friend that's very good with languages but only languages that have a rigid structure - he's from the UK but he struggles with English yet he's amazing in German and Chinese and several others I don't remember.
I think you’re pointing out a real problem, but the solution is backwards. English, like any language, is not a formal rigid system like a programming language. “Undoing” the supposed ‘rules’ of language with good literature shows that the true rules of language are more complex and nuanced than the heuristics we use to teach children, and that these exceptions create richness, variety, and culture. Ultimately it really is “what sounds right” no matter what the rules say.
Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds.
Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate.
Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…
I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me.
> Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently.
I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.
> Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books
I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).
If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.
If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.
A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.
Reading level is ambiguous here. Are you referring to whether someone can read the book, comprehend what it says and discuss it, or whether they can do all of that without having their understanding of the English language rewritten? Young children can easily do the former if you do not mind the latter happening. However, it is rather sadistic to put them in such situations and then expect them to pass exams for proper English. It is even more sadistic to do this to them, when they are at a point in their lives where they still need to gain a firm grasp of what is correct, such that it affects their test scores and can affect their prospects for getting into good universities.
This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension?
If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished?
Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to be open-minded about what comes next.
Not sure. To me, there is something about reading that grabs my attention more than video or images. As I'm reading, I can stop and think without having to hit pause. I can reread a sentence or paragraph without rewinding. I proceed at the pace of my understanding, not at the pace of the video.
And certainly, although video creation is pretty easy today, it's still dependent on a lot of technology. I can write with a pencil and a notebook.
The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory.
Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poems can you recite from memory?
Marshall McLuhan warned that each extension of what people can do aided by technology is accompanied by an amputation of what folks will do/learn/be capable of unaided:
It wasn't that long ago that books were so rare/valuable/difficult to have access to that folks would read and memorize pretty much everything they could lay their hands on.
It is because you read the translation that intentionally translated them into obscure hard to understand and interpret language. So that they poem feels more ancient and "serious" to reader.
But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.
Big "it depends". Video can be used to present good information in more ways simultaneously than text; it can be a more involving artistic experience; but is it? Is the incentive structure in fact to produce youtube-face clickbait four hour videos about why Star Wars is woke now?
Most comprehension is down, and seemingly purposefully so, not on the part of the students but in the effects of the environment the student must participate in.
Waiting for Superman (2010) pretty much covers most of the issues, but can't sufficiently convey the students whose futures were wasted from bad tutelage.
The problem is text as a form of media consumption is just the easy, arguably unimportant bit. Text comprehension is essential for modern life.
* Understanding legal documents like contracts
* Filing taxes
* Filling out job applications
* Basically all forms of asynchronous communication
* Every form you’ve ever filled out
Like I’ve read tear jerking accounts of how rat fucked you are in life if you can’t read. A brutal combination of being setup to fail in every interaction, general humiliation, and being utterly left out of society to a shocking degree.
>>> “A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,” says Forzani. “But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.”
Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” <<<
Huh?
"Higher level" analysis while have to be built on top of basic comprehension.
And how exactly is phonics (very early "what words are on the page") displacing comprehension (much later; something you do with those words once you have them)?
“They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”.
Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years?
At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention.
Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.
Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.
I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.
> Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.
My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books.
Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading:
Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading?
Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight".
Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics?
Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only.
Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all?
Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all!
Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'?
Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above.
Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'?
Teacher: We teach that.
Me: How do you teach that?
Teacher: We show them the word next to the number.
Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words?
TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...
Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized.
For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.
But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
Literacy should probably be defined like this: the person can read and write their language as well as they can speak and listen. Illiterate people possess language, just not reading and writing.
Being able to read, write and think deeply, analytically and critically is setting the goalposts beyond literacy.
(I understand it's hard to draw hard lines. Literacy affects the degree of language acquisition. People who become literate acquire more language in so doing than people who remain illiterate.)
I understand the gist of the comic, but don't think it truly applies.
Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus.
I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.
There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
> I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
I read all the time, research papers included. What I discovered is that when I arm tired in the afternoons I can read and reread a paper and not really understand much, but if I read a paper first thing in the morning I never have to reread it for understanding.
language is one of the basic mechanisms for social differentiation and status. in academia specialized language is how different disciplines are differentiated and abstruse literary references are how people demonstrate their knowledge and status in the field.
knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.
Knowing how to read is partial literacy and the first step toward literacy, regardless of anyone's lust for pretense. From an academic perspective most academics are illiterate.
Reading could be less important if reaching one's IQ potential is less important. The content doesn't matter much, aside from basic literature references that constitute a part of English literacy. Though, relatively more complex style and a wider range of vocabulary helps. But a volume of reading is indisputably a developmental accelerant. At least up until the brain slows its development in the mid-twenties.
https://archive.md/lru6Q
For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard.
Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.
Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.
The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices.
Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach.
It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
For my sins... I appreciate your deep intentions in that
At some AI going to be the best teacher for any children
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel.
I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.
> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.
Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).
Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.
I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.
This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.
In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.
The article tries to claim that we should take those claims with a grain of salt because people have been complaining about kids' literacy rates since time immemorial. The difference is that now it is measurably true.
I also think that anecdotal evidence is evidence nonetheless. If teachers active for many years start to ring the bells they are probably onto something, even if the official statistics are yet to come.
One argument I've seen forwarded elsewhere is that school methods have tracked university methods.
According to the argument, watering down standards to increase retention (and revenue) gained legitimacy in the sixties as the higher education act empowered administrators to increase the size of their ranks and policy views at colleges across the country. These colleges trained education majors according to their new philosophy, who became a new rank of principals and superintendents in the eighties and onwards, promulgating the transactional and nihilistic view of the purpose of teaching.
On the one hand, it sounds farfetched. On the other hand, all five of the teachers and professors over 50 whom I've raised the topic to over the years agreed wholeheartedly.
When I was young, I was amazed at how they would try to teach us English grammar and spelling, then have us read books like Huckleberry Finn that undid 6 months to a year worth of English language education. When you are young and you do not really a firm grasp of the right way to do things, being forced to spend substantial time “reading” books that show the wrong way is counterproductive. It was like having a construction crew building a structure by day and a demolition crew destroying it by night.
It is a wonder we learned anything at all and it made English tests a hellish experience, since it was never clear what was actually correct. This was on top of English itself being a confusing language (see all of the words ending in ough if you need an example). English teachers seemed to assume we had some magical ability to know the right answer after confusing us with conflicting examples, and we rarely did. It is no wonder back then that they said the same things about us.
If they want to improve literacy, they should replace the required reading with books that have no flaws in the spelling and grammar to reinforce English lessons. Then we might see student literacy rise as students stop being so confused.
Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.
However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.
I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.
I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though
English is my first language. However, I had an undiagnosed learning disability until college.
That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.
The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.
To be generous, what this meant is either that you were below the reading level for the book or you misunderstand the core skill of reading and using style in the English language. Reading and understanding when rules are broken leads to knowing when they can be. We don't skip Shakespeare because the language is funny and archaic. Reading these authors is both a part of style and content literacy for the English language. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing them.
There is a difference between understanding a book’s contents and being able to read the book without having it rewrite your understanding of the English language such that you have no idea what is correct and incorrect because your grasp on that was tenuous in the first place. Children are expected to avoid being rewritten at stages where they are extremely impressionable and are easily rewritten and then they are blamed for it. It is fairly sadistic thing to do to children.
I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.
People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/
Hmm, I get where you're coming from and I'd agree if it was math or physics or chemistry but I'm not so sure about languages.
I learned English as a second language and while I did have formal lessons, the most bang for buck learning came from stuff like Huckleberry Finn and forums and random songs (especially hip hop) and cartoons. Not because they are "good english" but precisely because they are "bad english" but still capture the spirit of the language. The meaning is there and it's English as used by native speakers. i.e.: It helped me internalize the language. Maybe it was because I had no one around to practice informal English and I needed that and it's different for native speakers. Dunno.
I can't say it didn't confuse me but I know it didn't negatively impact my scores. Despite not doing my homework and not even having the required textbooks or studying properly, it was the subject I had the easiest time and best grades aside from math or programming. And it's not like the bar was low - we had to pass C1 on the CEFR and I've easily passed C2 and have almost 100% on TOEFL and similar.
Also I'm not particularly gifted with languages - I don't know grammar at all and I struggle speaking all the time even in my native language.
> it's English as used by native speakers
I do not speak that way and I do not know anyone else who speaks that way.
That said, being relatively average at English as a student because I was constantly confused by the literature I was forced to read did negatively affect my test scores.
Well yeah, it's not everyday English maybe but it's still English. By that I mean that those are examples of which and how many of the rules in the system can be broken or let's say - creatively interpreted and still fit in that system.
"bad english" by expert native speakers is different than "bad english" from poor native speakers is different than "bad english" from still-learning non-speakers. IMO the first two both benefit your understanding of the language and help with reading comprehension because they expand your personal knowledge base of how many ways you can convey the same meaning in English with different words, order, grammar, etc and that is crucial for a flexible language like English.
But your reply reminded me of a friend that's very good with languages but only languages that have a rigid structure - he's from the UK but he struggles with English yet he's amazing in German and Chinese and several others I don't remember.
I think you’re pointing out a real problem, but the solution is backwards. English, like any language, is not a formal rigid system like a programming language. “Undoing” the supposed ‘rules’ of language with good literature shows that the true rules of language are more complex and nuanced than the heuristics we use to teach children, and that these exceptions create richness, variety, and culture. Ultimately it really is “what sounds right” no matter what the rules say.
People get plenty of this outside of school. If they get it in school too, they will always be confused, like I was.
I got it in school and was not confused.
Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds.
Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate.
Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…
> Are you being sarcastic?
I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me.
> Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently.
I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.
> Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books
I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).
If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.
If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.
A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.
I disagree. Reading style ("flaws") is a major part of literacy. Even for people with learning disabilities.
If you aren't on the reading level for a specific book, that's another issue.
Reading level is ambiguous here. Are you referring to whether someone can read the book, comprehend what it says and discuss it, or whether they can do all of that without having their understanding of the English language rewritten? Young children can easily do the former if you do not mind the latter happening. However, it is rather sadistic to put them in such situations and then expect them to pass exams for proper English. It is even more sadistic to do this to them, when they are at a point in their lives where they still need to gain a firm grasp of what is correct, such that it affects their test scores and can affect their prospects for getting into good universities.
This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension?
If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished?
Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to be open-minded about what comes next.
Not sure. To me, there is something about reading that grabs my attention more than video or images. As I'm reading, I can stop and think without having to hit pause. I can reread a sentence or paragraph without rewinding. I proceed at the pace of my understanding, not at the pace of the video.
And certainly, although video creation is pretty easy today, it's still dependent on a lot of technology. I can write with a pencil and a notebook.
The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory.
Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poems can you recite from memory?
Marshall McLuhan warned that each extension of what people can do aided by technology is accompanied by an amputation of what folks will do/learn/be capable of unaided:
https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/05/30/marshall-mcluhan-extens...
I couldn't even read those books. Forget about memorizing them.
It wasn't that long ago that books were so rare/valuable/difficult to have access to that folks would read and memorize pretty much everything they could lay their hands on.
It is because you read the translation that intentionally translated them into obscure hard to understand and interpret language. So that they poem feels more ancient and "serious" to reader.
But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.
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Big "it depends". Video can be used to present good information in more ways simultaneously than text; it can be a more involving artistic experience; but is it? Is the incentive structure in fact to produce youtube-face clickbait four hour videos about why Star Wars is woke now?
Most comprehension is down, and seemingly purposefully so, not on the part of the students but in the effects of the environment the student must participate in.
Waiting for Superman (2010) pretty much covers most of the issues, but can't sufficiently convey the students whose futures were wasted from bad tutelage.
There is an opportunity cost for everything.
The problem is text as a form of media consumption is just the easy, arguably unimportant bit. Text comprehension is essential for modern life.
* Understanding legal documents like contracts
* Filing taxes
* Filling out job applications
* Basically all forms of asynchronous communication
* Every form you’ve ever filled out
Like I’ve read tear jerking accounts of how rat fucked you are in life if you can’t read. A brutal combination of being setup to fail in every interaction, general humiliation, and being utterly left out of society to a shocking degree.
total parent hours spent per child tracks this, no change in literacy when this is controlled for.
Do you have a source? I spent a while trying to find a source and couldn't find any.
That's and interesting and sensible claim. Do you remember where you learned that?
Hmm, it seems that time spent with children has actually been increasing
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/01/parents-children-par...
That article doesn't cover the period of the decline in reading scores (peak was 2013).
>>> “A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,” says Forzani. “But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.”
Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. “They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,” she says. “But then they’ve also seen, ‘Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.’” <<<
Huh?
"Higher level" analysis while have to be built on top of basic comprehension.
And how exactly is phonics (very early "what words are on the page") displacing comprehension (much later; something you do with those words once you have them)?
“They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”.
Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years?
At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention.
Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.
Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.
I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.
> Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.
My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books.
Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading:
Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading?
Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight".
Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics?
Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only.
Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all?
Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all!
Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'?
Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above.
Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'?
Teacher: We teach that.
Me: How do you teach that?
Teacher: We show them the word next to the number.
Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words?
TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...
Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized.
For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.
But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
Literacy should probably be defined like this: the person can read and write their language as well as they can speak and listen. Illiterate people possess language, just not reading and writing.
Being able to read, write and think deeply, analytically and critically is setting the goalposts beyond literacy.
(I understand it's hard to draw hard lines. Literacy affects the degree of language acquisition. People who become literate acquire more language in so doing than people who remain illiterate.)
Maybe reading books is less important than ever, and the kids are adapting to the new world.
I am reminded of this xkcd, which I just realized Im about a decade behind on.
https://xkcd.com/1414/
I understand the gist of the comic, but don't think it truly applies.
Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus.
I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.
literacy is only important if you don't want to live a subsistence poverty lifestyle. other than that, completely useless.
There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
> I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.
I read all the time, research papers included. What I discovered is that when I arm tired in the afternoons I can read and reread a paper and not really understand much, but if I read a paper first thing in the morning I never have to reread it for understanding.
language is one of the basic mechanisms for social differentiation and status. in academia specialized language is how different disciplines are differentiated and abstruse literary references are how people demonstrate their knowledge and status in the field.
knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.
Knowing how to read is partial literacy and the first step toward literacy, regardless of anyone's lust for pretense. From an academic perspective most academics are illiterate.
Reading could be less important if reaching one's IQ potential is less important. The content doesn't matter much, aside from basic literature references that constitute a part of English literacy. Though, relatively more complex style and a wider range of vocabulary helps. But a volume of reading is indisputably a developmental accelerant. At least up until the brain slows its development in the mid-twenties.
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