[mixedmath]

I'm disappointed that nowhere in this interview is there any actual indication of what is done badly, or what teachers should do to improve how kids are taught to read. I get that there is apparently a gap between how kids are taught to read and the science behind how kids should be taught read.

I would much prefer a single understandable, actionable insight. Without it, this interview seems rather hollow. From this interview, I'm led to expect that the real insight from the book is that "teachers should study behavioral science, congnitive science, and brain development," which is too loose a central thesis to capture my interest.

I suppose what I've really gathered from this interview is two things: firstly, I would like to know a bit more about the gap is between how kids learn to read and how they should learn to read; secondly, I do not intend on reading Seidenberg's book (i.e. the book this interview is centered around) to find out.

[dubya]

What is actually done is that teachers have children do tons of worksheets focusing on small aspects of reading. This allows teachers to check the boxes showing that they've covered the relevant standards, because this is what's supposedly covered on standardized tests. The standards are difficult to turn into lesson plans (even if that was a good idea), so often they use the clip-art encrusted crap available on the web (e.g. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/Grade-Level/First...)

Occasionally they will actually read short passages from readers. After they read anything they will have to fill in some sort of (standards aligned) paperwork. They will never have extended reading time in class.

As an example, a 1st grade reading teacher needs to cover CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.(1-10) (reading literature); CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.1.(1-10) (reading information text); and CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.(1-4) (but actually 15 substandards) (foundational skills).

Actual standards at http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/1/

[tootie]

My kids are in school doing common core and that's not what it's like at all. They do worksheets around learning specific small-bore topics, but otherwise do a ton of book reading and long-form writing assignments. Unless you have a cite, I don't think you're representing what the people in this article are talking about.

[dubya]

I wasn't addressing the article, just the GP. My experience was with my daughter's school. She was in 1st grade five years ago, but through 4th grade she was still bringing home piles of worksheets that had been done in class, and some more for homework(!). Talking with other parents at other schools at the time, they had similar experiences. I'd be thrilled if five years has made a huge difference, but I'm not optimistic.

I should note that we're in a not-terrific school district, and that there's a whole chain of people from the teacher up to state legislators on up to, I suppose, Betsy DeVos who can effect how the standards are addressed.

[r00fus]

More anecdata: my younger two are bilingual and didn't know how to read more than really basic sight words before starting K (common core class). They are now highly proficient at reading (english), which (they are decent learners and have no challenges) I reason are due to two things: 1) An interest in reading which is fostered by the class atmosphere - they have "choice" time and some of that can be reading. 2) They have an expectation in class to spend a lot of time reading or being read-to.

I will admit we did read to them every night since they were babies, so that's probably also helpful. But kids usually love the bedtime story.

[dragonwriter]

> The standards are difficult to turn into lesson plans

That people can say that with a straight face indicated to me that we have a real problem in teacher education [0]. The standards you link may be different than what is addressed in lesson plans that have been handed down with only incremental modification for decades, but nothing about them seems to difficult to develop a year-long lesson plan that incorporates then.

> They will never have extended reading time in class.

Which is hard to blame on the standard you post, since you almost certainly cannot properly assess CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.A without it.

[0] and, to be fair, also in allocating work time and pay for the one-time effort of initial curriculum development to support the new standards; the effort is clearly different than adapting existing lesson plans to incremental changes to legacy standards.

[ktsmith]

It's not that hard to develop lessons that meet the standards. It is time consuming and typically not paid for, teachers are expected to do it on their own time.

My state adopted new social studies standards last year and will require that they be taught in all grade levels as of next year. They allowed time for phasing them in due in part to the knowledge that there is no money behind redoing the lessons that teachers will need to develop and also no money for curriculum purchases to support it. Last weekend my wife went to a training on the new standard which we paid for out of our own pocket as one example.

[dubya]

> That people can say that with a straight face indicated to me that we have a real problem in teacher education [0]. The standards you link may be different than what is addressed in lesson plans that have been handed down with only incremental modification for decades, but nothing about them seems to difficult to develop a year-long lesson plan that incorporates then.

The problem isn't translating a single standard into a single lesson or set of lessons, it's putting three sets of reading standards, a writing standard, a speaking & listening standard, and a language standard into a coherent, interesting curriculum. It's not impossible, but it's a lot to expect from, say, a small group of first grade teachers.

[Kluny]

Oh wow, that sounds suicidally boring. Way to kill the joy, eh.

[tropo]

It's mandatory to be boring. Anything else is offensive.

Little kids want to read about flinging poo, farting, projectile vomit, violence, and every possible misbehavior.

Supposed "children's books" are actually marketed toward grandmothers and public school librarians.

[Kluny]

What about that Captain Underpants crap? I hated it when I was a kid but it seemed pretty good to the other kids and kind of acceptable to the adults.

[ktsmith]

Not sure where the other poster lives but the entire Captain Underpants series is in our son's school library. That's where he read the first one and we purchased the rest for him as he's a voracious reader. They aren't the best books but there's a big benefit in the kids having something that they are interested in reading and will read without being pushed.

[tropo]

That often gets banned for crudeness, but otherwise yes. It has the right idea.

I object to it for a completely different reason: bad spelling and grammar. I think a kid's book should set a perfect example.

[mkempe]

Some teachers don't have to do that.

One reason we sent our daughters to (private) Montessori school was to have teachers and lessons completely free from Common Core.

Note that Bill Gates also sent his children to a private school that never adopted Common Core, although he was instrumental in pushing and forcing Common Core requirements across the public schools of the country.

[GrinningFool]

Common core standards for English and math were released 2012 with adoption spread out across years for many states. Development of the standards started in 2009. Gate's youngest child would have been starting school ~2008.

[mkempe]

Actually the release date was 2010 not 2012: "Standards were released for mathematics and English language arts on June 2, 2010, with a majority of states adopting the standards in the subsequent months." [1] It was adopted by Washington State in 2011. [2]

Are you implying that his children were subjected to Common Core, or that they couldn't have? by 2011, they were age 9, 12, and 15.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...

[2] https://www.seattleschools.org/academics/curriculum/common_c...

[jjuel]

It was very much a nothingburger. I am disappointed I read the whole article.

[zellyn]

The interview is clearly about a book; I assume they focused on the story around the writing of the book, rather than recapitulating the contents of the book. If you want to know what is done badly, and how to improve, I imagine the best thing would be to read the book.

[ahdroit]

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/books/language-at-the-spe... quote: "Most of all, as he, teachers and other reading-instruction stakeholders have already joined forces to do in the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, he pleads with those who teach written communication and those who research it to start, at last, communicating with one another."

[woodandsteel]

I have read many hundreds of interviews with non-fiction book authors, and they almost always include some of the specific ideas of the book. Indeed, usually that is most of what the interview is about.

[skywhopper]

Yeah, agreed, there's really no substance to the interview that I can grab a hold of. The main thing that I would be wary of is the idea that there is a single approach or method that will work for every child.

"Phonics" is mentioned a few times in the interview, ie, the connection between (English) spelling of written words and the spoken language they represent. I immediately found myself wondering how this relates to how children learn to read in other languages whose written forms are either far more phoenetically entwined with their spoken forms (eg, Portugese and Finnish, as I understand it), or far less (eg, Mandarin or Arabic). (I'm sure I'm oversimplifying complex relationships and reality in the overbroad sentence I just wrote, but I'm happy to hear how my received CW is wrong about these languages.)

Anecdatally: when my own daughter was about four, we had some friends whose son had learned to read from a Phonics book at four, and when we knew him at five, he could read pretty much anything you put in front of him (how much he understood, who knows, but he could translate the text into spoken language that we could understand). Both her mother and I were also reading at four, and so we expected our daughter would be able to do the same. We were inspired by this kid's example to get our daughter started early, and tried the same Phonics book with her.

Unfortunately, she didn't take to it so well. She seemed to understand what was happening well enough, but it never clicked or became natural, and it was ultimately a frustrating experience for us and our daughter. So we eventually stopped the lessons, and let her learn at her own pace. She happily made it through kindergarten and first grade without really showing any interest in or being able to read with any proficiency. She was clearly smart, and her teachers told us not to worry about it. Then in second grade mid-year, something just clicked, and she started voraciously consuming books, with her reading ability testing well above grade level.

Now at 16, she's still a voracious reader, and a writer who has completed NaNoWriMo three times, reads and writes every second of the day, and has an incredibly sophisticated grasp on storytelling, analyzing the writing behind books and movies and TV shows with a clarity that I personally have never had.

So, how did she learn to read? I have no idea. It wasn't phonics. But I suspect she would have managed it no matter what instruction she received. I also doubt that she is really a meaningful example, other than to say that it's complicated, and humans vary in their learning styles, and we should focus on the goal of reading and comprehending, trying to discover all the ways that individuals can and do learn to read, and having our teachers focus on identifying and encouraging the best methods for each student and not so much on imposing specific mechanics of how the statistically typical student achieves reading proficiency.

[Confiks]

If some rich and complex learning material doesn't immediately 'click', that doesn't mean it is ineffective. You might just be laying the groundwork to understanding those complex ideas later, for example when they are connected to other ideas or when the motivation to learn surfaces. Learning is sometimes too focused on 'understanding' and immediate results, while often very puzzled faces and proclamations of non-understanding are the best indication that real learning is going on.

[kokey]

My son is hyperlexic (and on the autistic spectrum) and he basically taught himself to read phonetically when he was 3 by watching youtube videos of phonics. I was not taught reading at a young age, it was considered bad to teach kids early where I grew up, but when I started school at 6 and we did the phonics I was almost immediately able to read well beyond my age. Hyperlexia is a bit like the opposite of dyslexia and I think it's is a bit of a spectrum where most people find themselves closer to the center. My son really struggled with receptive language, or language in general. Hyperlexic kids often only start to get the hang of receptive language (as in understand spoken language) and use language for communication (aka 'start talking') between the age of 4.5 to 5.5, so I suspect kids who are less on the hyperlexic side (aka most kids, and also 'early talkers') probably only start to get into the groove of reading after that age. Hyperlexia and dyslexia is just symptoms of a component of our brains that processes our environment and I think there's huge variation in humans when it comes to this and it's kind of independent from our intelligence (though it could affect our test scores, for sure)

[teslabox]

> So, how did she learn to read? I have no idea. It wasn't phonics. But I suspect she would have managed it no matter what instruction she received.

I think John Taylor Gatto pointed out that some children learn to read when they're 2, some when they're 8, and by the time they're 12 you can't tell the difference.

I met a man who was traumatized when his first grade teacher tried to force him to read, before he was ready. The lesson was put in front of him, and 1st-grade-him thought he was stupid for not being able to perform.

[sp332]

The amount of text that a person has read improves their reading speed. So someone who has a big head start like that is going to have an advantage for more than a few years. It's true that eventually other factors might average them out, but why would you want to be illiterate for years and then make everything else you're trying to learn more difficult for years more? It's much less stressful to learn to read early.

[jackhack]

You're missing the point.

"illiterate for years" is of no consequence when we are talking about 5-8 year old children. The point was there was no discernible difference in children who learned to read a a variety of ages.

In factory schools, if one is "delayed", that classification/label is attached to the child and becomes a part of their identity. Few escape it. Similarly, one who reads well at age three is held up as "gifted", and placed on a social/academic pedestal.

People have a wide variance of ability and timing during normal development. saying "it's much less stressful to learn to read early" is arrogant and naive. It's extraordinarily stressful to a child to be told they are stupid/slow when they are simply not ready, and stereotyped and classified as a result.

[sp332]

Yeah, I did miss the point. No one should be called stupid while they're trying to learn. But we should provide a lot of encouragement and hand-holding to kids to get them reading as soon as they can.

Gatto's quip aside, there are actual studies that look at correlations. "Using third-grade national percentile rankings... into below (0-24th national percentile), at (25th-74th national percentile) and above grade level (75th-100th national percentile) groupings, we find correlational evidence that students who were at and above grade level in third grade graduate and attend college at higher rates than their peers who were below grade level in third grade." https://www.chapinhall.org/sites/default/files/Reading_on_Gr...

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reading-and-maths... found a 10% difference in earnings at age 30 for differences in reading skill at age 10.

[sarahconstantin]

I'm also confused here. Most definitions of "phonics" I've seen are just "teach kids how to connect written letters with speech sounds." What on earth would non-phonics reading instruction look like?

[rogerthis]

The one method that become very popular in Brazil since the 80s is the "whole word" method. The child is supposed to memorize the form of the word instead of decoding it. No need to say that's not efficient (as the latin letters allow the sound/sign conversions), it overloads memory, and in the end, the child takes longer to learn. The standardized tests in Brazil show that.

Now, for why phonics and syllabic method had been replaced with the whole word method here in Brazil... that's another and long story.

EDIT 1: typo.

[mkempe]

The "Look Say" method you describe (vs the classic "Phonics" method) was also widely deployed in the USA, to the detriment of many children's reading and writing skills.

[tropo]

I object to both.

The whole-word method is required for Chinese languages. Phonics is obviously proper for Spanish and Russian.

English is not so extreme. Phonics is useful, but it falls short. I've seen the disaster that is pure phonics with English, leading to a kid who mostly couldn't read at age 14. On the other hand, it will be hard to develop a decent vocabulary with the whole-word method. A hybrid approach works nicely.

See phonics fail on The Chaos: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....

[camelite]

One part of the solution is to introduce exceptions early. The whole thing is a more complicated business than a one-to-one sound-letter correspondence. But it is a problem that has been solved for a long time now[1]. Cognitive science is not required. The only mystery is how this is not more widely known.

[1] teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons, and associated school curricula from the same author