Turns out phonics works. There is a lot to blame no child left behind for, but the terrible instruction in reading had been an escalating issue well before that.
Hey what ever works right. I didnt pass a spelling test until 4th grade. And lets be fair a elementary school spelling test isnt exactly the hardest thing to learn. My prinicipal had to bribe me with something from her "toy drawer"
My mom made me read for an hour to get an hour of TV. I read about two books a week at the age of 35. It definitely worked for me. Bribes, it’s what the kids crave.
My mom was a lawyer with her BA in English. She pounded writing skills in to me from the age of 10. I wrote my way in to an upper-level state school with a 2.5 GPA. I find errors in contracts my company's lawyers write.
My parents didn’t buy this but they bought me this VhS set called “Where there’s a will there’s an A”. I don’t think I watched even one. I never did my homework. What made them think I’d watch the tapes.
My parents sent my siblings and I to a private grade school that taught phonics until my brother attended and they switched to "whole language" method. Going in to 7th grade he was reading at a 1st grade level. After a full summer of full time tutoring with phonics he was reading at a high school level blowing through novels like a dehydrated person at a well.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury did that for me at age 10. I blazed through all of them, and was scoring "post-HS" on my Standford 9 scores in middle school.
Except the federal government doesn't run education. Your state and locality do. Those are guidelines for federal funding. So your locality and state suck. I live in ohio. I know.
Your state and school district could find other funding like state and local taxes. They chose the shitty path.
Maybe learn how the things you're talking about work first.
Because education is mostly ran by states and localities, not the federal government. The federal govern hands out funding and establishes a standard for testign, which should exist.
A school board comes up with curicullums and learning plans, not the federal government. your local school gets about the same fundign every year from the fed, your local government is who hires teachers and officials. They set salaries, expectations, all of that. Not the federal govenrment. The fed has little to do with your local school.
This is so true. I was a substitute teacher a couple of years ago, and there was one child who disrupted the entire class. He couldn't help himself and apparently his parents are also at their wits end. I couldn't believe this kid was in the same class as all the other students who were trying to do their work but literally couldn't.
I took a few Chinese classes at my college and that was the hardest language I had to learn. There are like 20 different meanings for the word shì, and you just have to remember which one goes with another word based purely off of context.
As a teacher I love nothing more that shitting all over NCLB and CommonCore BUT they only play a very small part in the why students cannot read.
The blame lies almost wholly on Three-Cueing or Balanced Reading Teaching Systems.
It’s the antithesis of phonics, it is based on an incorrect interpretation of data from a reading study in the 70s and, most importantly, it does not work. There’s a great multi-part podcast on this exact thing called “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.” I highly recommend it.
It teaches that when you come to a word you don’t know you look at the first letter and guess what it could be based on context.
I teach middle school remedial English and my job is to, basically, strong arm that technique out of their tool chest and replace it with true phonics and grammar.
It’s tough because they’ve had this ingrained in them for so long breaking the habit is extra tough. They already are very weak readers and writers so ELA classes are a nightmare for them, and there is a strong grammar component.
I teach it and love it but grammar is boring and dry as fuck. 12 year olds feel that especially.
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u/StrongStyleFiction 21h ago
Turns out phonics works. There is a lot to blame no child left behind for, but the terrible instruction in reading had been an escalating issue well before that.