This podcast is going kind of viral right now among parents and educators, and for good reason. It talks about the fundamental flaws in American education's approach to teaching reading --...
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
This podcast is going kind of viral right now among parents and educators, and for good reason. It talks about the fundamental flaws in American education's approach to teaching reading -- problems that we have brought up on Tildes before:
In fact, the author of the 2018 and 2020 articles, Emily Hanford, is the creator and narrator of this podcast.
I'm not done listening to all of it yet so I can't give my full final thoughts, but I can say already that I enthusiastically recommend it. It's compelling listening for anyone even remotely interested in the topic, and Hanford does a great job at telling the story of the issue.
One thing that the podcast format does that articles can't really capture is actual student reading. Early on in the podcast, Hanford tells the story of a mom who had to administer a home reading assessment to her child during COVID. She recorded audio of the assessment and it's used in the podcast (with permission). You can hear her son struggle to read aloud even simple words, though he was doing fine according to class assignments. As a teacher, hearing student reading struggles is an everyday thing for me, but I think it's especially powerful to hear it if you're not someone that works regularly with kids.
Posting again to say that I finished this. I can now comfortably say that it is fantastic from start to finish. If you have even a marginal interest in the topic, I strongly encourage you to...
Posting again to say that I finished this. I can now comfortably say that it is fantastic from start to finish.
If you have even a marginal interest in the topic, I strongly encourage you to listen to this.
If you have elementary-age kids or younger in US schools, please listen to this. I promise it is worth your time.
There is a lot of educational discourse out there that I think is misguided at best or of only limited utility, but this podcast is the real deal.
So, just a perspective from a different culture I thought may be interesting: on the subject of learning to read by phonetics and "sounding out" words vs the approach where you "guess" the word by...
So, just a perspective from a different culture I thought may be interesting: on the subject of learning to read by phonetics and "sounding out" words vs the approach where you "guess" the word by context, you are basically forced to do the latter in China.
That's by necessity, because Chinese is not a phonetic language. There is no direct correlation between any part of a character and it's pronunciation - even worse, the same character can be pronounced differently depending on the characters around it. There is also no equivalent to katakana in Chinese - loan words are constructed with similar sounding words. That is to say, it would be like if the city Frankfurt in English were "frank fort". If you read that, and thought it was talking about a very candid military encampment... you'd be wrong. So there's also now not necessarily a correlation between a character's meaning... and it's meaning in a sentence.
So you must learn by context. And it is similar in Japanese and Korean; China, Korea, and Japan all have literacy rates >99%, as opposed to 79% in the US.
That being said, it's not as if that necessary means it's better or anything. The culture is just very different. In particular, the part where student and teacher are encouraged to just go through the motions so the student appears to succeed. If you could not read in an East Asian educational setting, your teacher and your parents would kill you, and that's only half metaphorical. But there would absolutely be no mercy in the instructor's detecting reading ability, and if you needed to be forced to study for 18 of the 24 hours in the day, teacher and parent would make it so that you WOULD do that until you can perform. Not an exaggeration. Which in many ways may be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
That English can be learned phonetically may very well be a positive attribute, and one that should be targeted as much as possible in the educational process.
In any case, while listening I thought it was interesting.
Definitely interesting and insightful as well. I can’t speak to the differences in language structures or how that affects their acquisition, but in regards to cultural differences, the US has an...
Definitely interesting and insightful as well.
I can’t speak to the differences in language structures or how that affects their acquisition, but in regards to cultural differences, the US has an almost completely inverted pressure to the one you identified. You talked about how a student would be shown no mercy by a teacher in their assessment in East Asian educational settings.
In the US, meanwhile, the teacher is generally the one facing no mercy for a failing student. If a student is not performing, it is seen primarily as our fault. While this can sometimes be the case, it’s taken to an extreme to the point that many of our bedrock educational institutions (e.g. standardized testing, prescribed curricula) are designed with it in mind.
If teachers in the US were fully honest about all of our students’ actual performance, we would be eviscerated for it. Every school I’ve worked in has had systematized methods of grade inflation to help get around this.
I think it's an interesting cultural difference of inversion. I'm Taiwanese-American. My mother used to teach high school in Taiwan. In parent-teacher conferences, she was always very deferential...
I think it's an interesting cultural difference of inversion.
I'm Taiwanese-American. My mother used to teach high school in Taiwan. In parent-teacher conferences, she was always very deferential towards my teachers and earnestly absorbed their feedback. In her past teaching experience, she ran a disciplined classroom and demanded and commanded the respect and attention of her students and their parents — an expectation she then later carried over on the other side of the table as a parent in the US.
It's also been commonly observed that non-Asian American students and their families are more likely to attribute smartness to being an innate quality. I also observed this in school, seeing students would say that they're "just not good at X" and then give up. My mother had a rather brute force approach to education: just practice over and over again until it sticks. I remember many evenings of being forced to sit at our kitchen table, repeating math problem sets and reading books.
There probably would have been more time-efficient approaches, but it worked in the end: I entered kindergarten knowing only Mandarin Chinese and zero English and came out the other end of the public K-12 pipeline with a 35 ACT composite score and admission to a great university.
As an outsider to the education field in the US, I get the impression that excessive energy gets spent on trying to find new silver bullets in curricula, methodologies, testing and metrics tracking, and so on. Politicians and parents place ridiculously unrealistic expectations on teachers to be their students' outside-the-home parents, mentors, therapists, protectors, and so on.
Among my Indian family we also attributed smartness as being an innate quality or aptitude, but it was just a determinant of how hard you'd need to work to meet the minimum basic standards...
It's also been commonly observed that non-Asian American students and their families are more likely to attribute smartness to being an innate quality.
Among my Indian family we also attributed smartness as being an innate quality or aptitude, but it was just a determinant of how hard you'd need to work to meet the minimum basic standards expected of you in school. I think the real gap was in expectations. We tended to approach grades from the standpoint of top marks being the baseline and anything less being a problem you must work to correct. I feel like others tended to act like it was okay to not get all A's and that was just an indicator of which subjects you were strong or weak at.
I think ur parents just tended to not think the expectations set by the education system were not nearly rigorous enough to where falling short of an A was acceptable.
When I taught English in China we did both simultaneously. Kids would learn about 1,000 words as sight words before mastering the letters of the alphabet and phonics and it worked surprisingly...
When I taught English in China we did both simultaneously. Kids would learn about 1,000 words as sight words before mastering the letters of the alphabet and phonics and it worked surprisingly well. I'm not sure if the success was mostly due to teaching practices, income, culture, or something else, but its a night and day difference between my former students in China and my current students in the US.
I have a vague impression that Chinese consists of several spoken languages sharing a common written language. I guess this is pretty political ("a language is a dialect with a navy"), but does...
I have a vague impression that Chinese consists of several spoken languages sharing a common written language. I guess this is pretty political ("a language is a dialect with a navy"), but does that make sense?
It kind of is. China used to be made up of a number of smaller kingdoms that were conquered and united long ago. That's one of the things that I really like about the language; it's kind of like a...
It kind of is. China used to be made up of a number of smaller kingdoms that were conquered and united long ago. That's one of the things that I really like about the language; it's kind of like a proto-esperanto except it's exclusive to text and you read it out loud in your own spoken language.
That is pretty interesting. I think a similar dynamic happens in English at lower literacy levels. I remember when my nephew was little he sort of tried to bluff me into pretending he could read...
That is pretty interesting. I think a similar dynamic happens in English at lower literacy levels.
I remember when my nephew was little he sort of tried to bluff me into pretending he could read once by pointing at various logos and "reading" them, but he just knew what the logos were for. He couldn't actually read the same words if I wrote them on a sheet of paper. That said, it did work as a useful way to help him link the word "power" in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers logo to the individual words written out. Eventually he could see the "P" in "power" and try to sound it out and figure out "ah that word must be power!"
The cadence with words on those karaoke type sing-a-longs where they have a little ball bounce on top of the word also seem to work pretty well in this way too.
The battle over Synthetic Phonics (sounding out individual letters) vs Analytic Phonics (identifying whole words) was pretty fierce in the UK, so the government got involved and they gradually...
The battle over Synthetic Phonics (sounding out individual letters) vs Analytic Phonics (identifying whole words) was pretty fierce in the UK, so the government got involved and they gradually ratcheted up synthetic phonics.
When I read the title, I thought that you, @kfwyre, was sharing a story that you sold to a website to publish. Which made sense to me, given the fact that you're such a good writer. ;)
When I read the title, I thought that you, @kfwyre, was sharing a story that you sold to a website to publish. Which made sense to me, given the fact that you're such a good writer. ;)
This podcast is going kind of viral right now among parents and educators, and for good reason. It talks about the fundamental flaws in American education's approach to teaching reading -- problems that we have brought up on Tildes before:
2018: Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?
2020: At a loss for words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers
2022: Inside the massive effort to change the way kids are taught to read
In fact, the author of the 2018 and 2020 articles, Emily Hanford, is the creator and narrator of this podcast.
I'm not done listening to all of it yet so I can't give my full final thoughts, but I can say already that I enthusiastically recommend it. It's compelling listening for anyone even remotely interested in the topic, and Hanford does a great job at telling the story of the issue.
One thing that the podcast format does that articles can't really capture is actual student reading. Early on in the podcast, Hanford tells the story of a mom who had to administer a home reading assessment to her child during COVID. She recorded audio of the assessment and it's used in the podcast (with permission). You can hear her son struggle to read aloud even simple words, though he was doing fine according to class assignments. As a teacher, hearing student reading struggles is an everyday thing for me, but I think it's especially powerful to hear it if you're not someone that works regularly with kids.
Posting again to say that I finished this. I can now comfortably say that it is fantastic from start to finish.
If you have even a marginal interest in the topic, I strongly encourage you to listen to this.
If you have elementary-age kids or younger in US schools, please listen to this. I promise it is worth your time.
There is a lot of educational discourse out there that I think is misguided at best or of only limited utility, but this podcast is the real deal.
So, just a perspective from a different culture I thought may be interesting: on the subject of learning to read by phonetics and "sounding out" words vs the approach where you "guess" the word by context, you are basically forced to do the latter in China.
That's by necessity, because Chinese is not a phonetic language. There is no direct correlation between any part of a character and it's pronunciation - even worse, the same character can be pronounced differently depending on the characters around it. There is also no equivalent to katakana in Chinese - loan words are constructed with similar sounding words. That is to say, it would be like if the city Frankfurt in English were "frank fort". If you read that, and thought it was talking about a very candid military encampment... you'd be wrong. So there's also now not necessarily a correlation between a character's meaning... and it's meaning in a sentence.
So you must learn by context. And it is similar in Japanese and Korean; China, Korea, and Japan all have literacy rates >99%, as opposed to 79% in the US.
That being said, it's not as if that necessary means it's better or anything. The culture is just very different. In particular, the part where student and teacher are encouraged to just go through the motions so the student appears to succeed. If you could not read in an East Asian educational setting, your teacher and your parents would kill you, and that's only half metaphorical. But there would absolutely be no mercy in the instructor's detecting reading ability, and if you needed to be forced to study for 18 of the 24 hours in the day, teacher and parent would make it so that you WOULD do that until you can perform. Not an exaggeration. Which in many ways may be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
That English can be learned phonetically may very well be a positive attribute, and one that should be targeted as much as possible in the educational process.
In any case, while listening I thought it was interesting.
Definitely interesting and insightful as well.
I can’t speak to the differences in language structures or how that affects their acquisition, but in regards to cultural differences, the US has an almost completely inverted pressure to the one you identified. You talked about how a student would be shown no mercy by a teacher in their assessment in East Asian educational settings.
In the US, meanwhile, the teacher is generally the one facing no mercy for a failing student. If a student is not performing, it is seen primarily as our fault. While this can sometimes be the case, it’s taken to an extreme to the point that many of our bedrock educational institutions (e.g. standardized testing, prescribed curricula) are designed with it in mind.
If teachers in the US were fully honest about all of our students’ actual performance, we would be eviscerated for it. Every school I’ve worked in has had systematized methods of grade inflation to help get around this.
I think it's an interesting cultural difference of inversion.
I'm Taiwanese-American. My mother used to teach high school in Taiwan. In parent-teacher conferences, she was always very deferential towards my teachers and earnestly absorbed their feedback. In her past teaching experience, she ran a disciplined classroom and demanded and commanded the respect and attention of her students and their parents — an expectation she then later carried over on the other side of the table as a parent in the US.
It's also been commonly observed that non-Asian American students and their families are more likely to attribute smartness to being an innate quality. I also observed this in school, seeing students would say that they're "just not good at X" and then give up. My mother had a rather brute force approach to education: just practice over and over again until it sticks. I remember many evenings of being forced to sit at our kitchen table, repeating math problem sets and reading books.
There probably would have been more time-efficient approaches, but it worked in the end: I entered kindergarten knowing only Mandarin Chinese and zero English and came out the other end of the public K-12 pipeline with a 35 ACT composite score and admission to a great university.
As an outsider to the education field in the US, I get the impression that excessive energy gets spent on trying to find new silver bullets in curricula, methodologies, testing and metrics tracking, and so on. Politicians and parents place ridiculously unrealistic expectations on teachers to be their students' outside-the-home parents, mentors, therapists, protectors, and so on.
Among my Indian family we also attributed smartness as being an innate quality or aptitude, but it was just a determinant of how hard you'd need to work to meet the minimum basic standards expected of you in school. I think the real gap was in expectations. We tended to approach grades from the standpoint of top marks being the baseline and anything less being a problem you must work to correct. I feel like others tended to act like it was okay to not get all A's and that was just an indicator of which subjects you were strong or weak at.
I think ur parents just tended to not think the expectations set by the education system were not nearly rigorous enough to where falling short of an A was acceptable.
When I taught English in China we did both simultaneously. Kids would learn about 1,000 words as sight words before mastering the letters of the alphabet and phonics and it worked surprisingly well. I'm not sure if the success was mostly due to teaching practices, income, culture, or something else, but its a night and day difference between my former students in China and my current students in the US.
I have a vague impression that Chinese consists of several spoken languages sharing a common written language. I guess this is pretty political ("a language is a dialect with a navy"), but does that make sense?
It kind of is. China used to be made up of a number of smaller kingdoms that were conquered and united long ago. That's one of the things that I really like about the language; it's kind of like a proto-esperanto except it's exclusive to text and you read it out loud in your own spoken language.
That is pretty interesting. I think a similar dynamic happens in English at lower literacy levels.
I remember when my nephew was little he sort of tried to bluff me into pretending he could read once by pointing at various logos and "reading" them, but he just knew what the logos were for. He couldn't actually read the same words if I wrote them on a sheet of paper. That said, it did work as a useful way to help him link the word "power" in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers logo to the individual words written out. Eventually he could see the "P" in "power" and try to sound it out and figure out "ah that word must be power!"
The cadence with words on those karaoke type sing-a-longs where they have a little ball bounce on top of the word also seem to work pretty well in this way too.
The battle over Synthetic Phonics (sounding out individual letters) vs Analytic Phonics (identifying whole words) was pretty fierce in the UK, so the government got involved and they gradually ratcheted up synthetic phonics.
Here's a bit of the uk history: https://rrf.org.uk/2018/07/30/phonics-developments-in-england-from-1998-to-2018-by-jenny-chew/
Here's current UK (although it only applies to England because of devolution) government advice: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/choosing-a-phonics-teaching-programme/list-of-phonics-teaching-programmes
Despite the seemingly strong evidence base many teachers are still anti-synthetic phonics. And it doesn't seem to be that they're focussed on a small number of people who don't cope with synthetic phonics, it seems that they're saying SP is a useful tool but all children need a wider approach. https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/article/government-urged-to-reform-the-use-of-phonics-as-it-is-failing-children
As a parent, it's pretty weird and scary.
When I read the title, I thought that you, @kfwyre, was sharing a story that you sold to a website to publish. Which made sense to me, given the fact that you're such a good writer. ;)
That is very kind of you, lou! Thank you. ❤️