| The wikipedia article you cite is marked as needing citations. The research shows whole word learning does not work well in a classroom setting. it works well one to one. If parents do it as a game with kids it works. Its worked for at least two generations in my family and we all learned to read at least a bit before we went to school, or outside school, or in a different language and alphabet (English at home) we learned in school. Well ahead of school in the latter cases, despite a phonetic alphabet in school! > t is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless They disengage because they are forced to do things that are disengaging. As other have commented kids enter schooling enjoy learning, and a few years later have lost it. > A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division, Why do long division? There is lots of maths that is interesting. We are talking past each other here. I am saying the curriculum learning demotivating, and your answer is that kids need to be forced to do curriculum learning. I have specifically discussed maths in other comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409430 and there are links to more detail about some of my experiences with maths from the blog post I linked to already. > Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?" If they needed to ask, they are already doing it wrong. I certainly never did anything like that. I cannot even imagine why you would ask a child that. |