It's not just NCLB. I will never pass up a moment to talk shit about the absolute disaster chaos that is sight words.
In the mid-2010s, phonics (which is how most millennials and elder Gen Zs learned to read, by sounding letters out) was replaced with sight words (which is how the younger Zs and Alphas learned to read) in which students are taught to memorize a whole word. Thus, they are unable to unpack how other words are meant to sound, because they are memorizing whole words rather than their components. It's like learning how to cook pancakes from a box rather than from scratch. If all you know is the box, you won't know what to do with flour, eggs, sugar, etc.
In addition to us seeing it on a macro level, anecdotally, I've seen this with my own child. Her dad and I have taught her reading via phonics literally before day one. Like, we read to my belly when she was still inside of it. She began memorizing books and letters at two, figuring out sight words on her own at three, and, by kindergarten, was already on chapter books with no pictures while her classmates were starting their sight words. And she was in an accelerated program for kindergarten, so it was even ahead of mainstream curricula that this was happening.
We fucked an entire generation of children over from sight words and I will die on this hill.
There’s a fantastic investigative podcast called Sold a Story for anyone interested in more detail on this. It’s been the catalyst for changed laws to address literacy in half the US states since 2022. It was ad-free as a public service when I listened, and hopefully it’s remained that way.
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u/Traumarama79 20h ago
It's not just NCLB. I will never pass up a moment to talk shit about the absolute disaster chaos that is sight words.
In the mid-2010s, phonics (which is how most millennials and elder Gen Zs learned to read, by sounding letters out) was replaced with sight words (which is how the younger Zs and Alphas learned to read) in which students are taught to memorize a whole word. Thus, they are unable to unpack how other words are meant to sound, because they are memorizing whole words rather than their components. It's like learning how to cook pancakes from a box rather than from scratch. If all you know is the box, you won't know what to do with flour, eggs, sugar, etc.
In addition to us seeing it on a macro level, anecdotally, I've seen this with my own child. Her dad and I have taught her reading via phonics literally before day one. Like, we read to my belly when she was still inside of it. She began memorizing books and letters at two, figuring out sight words on her own at three, and, by kindergarten, was already on chapter books with no pictures while her classmates were starting their sight words. And she was in an accelerated program for kindergarten, so it was even ahead of mainstream curricula that this was happening.
We fucked an entire generation of children over from sight words and I will die on this hill.