BlackHeart Biohazards

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This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy

They didn’t teach children phonics for TWENTY YEARS because they just hoped this “balanced literacy” bs would magically work out???

this still kills me. 20 years. that’s nearly every public school gen z kid in the US

There’s a really good five-part podcast series about this that recently came out from American Public Media called Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. It does a great job of explaining this issue and goes into the political situation and profit motives that kept balanced literacy going for so long even when there was, this can’t be emphasized enough, *zero research* to back it up.

One of my personal big takeways from listening to this was the danger of turning facets of education policy into politicized issues along left/right lines–according to this podcast one of the reasons for why phonics didn’t catch on earlier is because it was being promoted by the second Bush administration, which led to teachers unions and other left-of-center people to be suspicious of it. I think that’s really unfortunate and sadly we saw that same dynamic play out during the pandemic, when in so many school districts how to handle public education became a culture war battle more than anything else.

Obviously everything is political in some way and it’s always worth analyzing who is promoting which ideas–but I think when aspects of public health/science/medicine/education become polarized we all lose out because the issue becomes so much harder to analyze on their merits. And it’s especially awful when the people most impacted are children who are still developing the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves.

oh that sounds worth a listen

I’m fucking gobsmacked. Firstly, here’s the link to the full article for anybody who wants to read the entire thing, or can’t view the image text:

The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy

Secondly, I’m just… is this not basically the gist of the scam in The Music Man? Y’know, where Harold Hill—who can’t play of note of music—passes himself off as a band leader, telling everyone he has a “revolutionary new method called The Think System where you don’t bother with notes,” and says ““If you want to play the Minuet in G, think the Minuet in G”? Like sure, context is helpful for reading, but having it be the basis is… WILD. I’m so sorry Gen Z 😭

Guys. Guys is this not how you learned to read. Bc this is how I learned to read.

NO THIS IS NOT HOW WE LEARNED TO READ WHAT THE FUCK

In the rest of the English-speaking world, children are taught to read phonically. There are multiple systems for this, from “winging it based on usage” to structured, tiered systems like Jolly Phonics. They’re taught the sounds that letters make, then the sounds that dipthongs and unusual combinations (like “magic E vowels”) make, and they are taught how to string the sounds together to sound out the words. Common words with unusual spellings/rules (or just really common words that the kid needs to know before they know the relevant rules, like “the” and “should”) are taught as “sight words” and expected to be memorised rote (although research suggests that children don’t memorise these words, but memorise whatever the tricky part is as an exception and read them normally, by phonically sounding them out in their head). This is so that children can get to reading common sentences and simple stories as quickly as possible, providing them with valuable practice and motivation.

As children get practice reading over many years, the most common words get memorised via repetition, and new words are sounded out and memorised if they come up enough. (This is why it’s common for people who read more than they watch tv/converse to mispronounce words for many years – I was over 20 before I knew the correct pronunciation of ‘misled’ or ‘rendezvous’.)

We certainly weren’t taught to check the first letter and then guess based on vibes. If you read like that then there’s no point in the rest of the word being written down. How would you learn new words and advance your skill that way?

Well, this explains a lot about how people in my notes process my posts.

I was taught to read using Saxon Phonics, which teaches you how to associate letters with sounds, chunk words into phonetic segments, and then string them together.

I can read, write, and speak much better than most of my peers, and I’m sure this is why. I actually learned how to extract information from letters, rather than trying to recognize each word as a symbol for a concept. Phonics are essential for reading comprehension.

oh my god is this why no one else knew how to read in my class

Ok, so like. Allow me to explain myself on this.

I was born on the turn of the century in the year 2000. This… technically makes me a zoomer. The fundamental difference between me and most of my classmates, however, is that I did not begin with traditional schooling– before I was 4 years old, I had an at-home tutor that I frequently saw several times a week (there was a government program for it back then, I don’t remember the specifics), and frequently read books both during bedtime and during the day with my mom.

When I went to public school for first grade in 2007, I had a lot of culture shock. But probably the most unusual and disturbing thing to me was my classmates’ almost universal incapability to read properly. With the exception of the handful of other gifted kids, I quickly discovered that I was one of about 5 kids all the way to high school in any given class that understood phonics. I knew how to sound words out, I knew how to comprehend metaphor and simile.

I’m 22 years old now and a college-educated adult, and I still have classmates that. Can’t read??? And I don’t mean they have stage fright or aren’t good at presenting, I mean they don’t understand the words they are reading and saying. Now naturally I understand that the American education system failed us, sure, but seeing this really puts into perspective how much it did. I really did not have any idea as to why 20-somethings at a private university failed so often to comprehend basic texts or sound out words, but now? Now I GET it. And I suppose it falls to me to make absolutely certain my younger brothers do not wind up the same.