The idea of learning to read silently and not though sounding out the words seems asinine to me. I couldn't stomach the entire article but it is difficult to imagine a rational argument for this approach.
In ancient times, "reading silently" was considered a special skill that very few people had. Most literate people back then would read by sounding words aloud.
They weren't sounding letters, they were sounding words. I imagine the same would be true for numerals. They wouldn't go "X I I K I D S", they would go "twelve kids".
This is how I read and it's horrible. It really leaves you in the lerch if you cannot recognize the word because your are relying on just one sense to absorb the meaning.
I've definitely learned how to sound things how as I've gotten older because I know a lot more words than I can possibly spell. Mostly because speaking is easier than reading. You just get to use more senses when you speak and the idea of reducing the senses in reading is silly. Honestly people would be better at reading if you could introduce a textured alphabet you could feel. The more senses you can bring into learning something the easier it gates
The Simplified Spelling Board was America's chance to get out of this spelling mess. Of course it should have been made up of linguists, but those might have been hard to find at the time. It seems that the effort was thwarted by institutional conservatism. Why should my children use a sensible spelling system when I had to learn the insane one, am I right?
There are many tradeoffs in language orthography; 'phonics' (or phonology, rather) is not the only consideration. English orthography - especially the American one with Webster's correctives applied - is not obviously wrong or insane.
You'd first have to decide which dialect of English would form the basis of the new spelling, which would be politically infeasible even if limited to those of the USA. By allowing (for example) the word "oil" to be pronounced as both "oiul" and "al", we've avoided the question of who is speaking "correctly".
After that, you'd need either new letters or a lot of diacritics if you want to avoid multiple readings of the same word. The letter "a" can be pronounced something like three or four different ways, and clearing that up would cause written English to resemble Pinyin (or maybe Croatian). When choosing the new writing system, try to keep existing computer support in mind or nobody will be able to backport your new system to ASCII-only text.
So to avoid some difficulties, let's keep spelling "iland" with an s because someone thought it would be better for a germanic word to have a Latin-like spelling.
There are many many reforms that can be done to English spelling that would simplify it tremendously without making it fully phonetic. Apart from reversing some of the silly forced latinization, you could get rid of some of the more bizarre letter combinations, like "ough" (could be replaced with, say, ow/off based on word). And sure, even here, there may be some dialectical differences in some words, but they would be rare. No one pronounces "though" like "thoff", so why not write it "thow"?
The most likely-to-be-successful spelling reforms are those that native English speakers are already testing in the field. So why not though -> tho, and through -> thru?
> You'd first have to decide which dialect of English would form the basis of the new spelling
You would not. You could instead make the rather sensible choice of allowing the written forms of distinct, increasingly divergent, dialects to be different from one another. There are several clusters of similar but differing written standards existing side-by-side in Europe, and they don't pose any major challenges to communication. And in some language regions, it's quite common for people to write in their local dialects in informal contexts instead of the standard variety, which also doesn't pose any major challenges to communication. There is very little actual necessity for a single unified standard variety. By the time the dialects would have diverged far enough for there to be issues in communicating due to distinct written forms, perhaps a few centuries from now for English, the alternative of having a unified written form would necessarily mean that to be literate at all, you'd have to learn a foreign language (the unified standard), which would be the worse situation to find oneself in, and it would probably be easier to first acquire literacy in your native language, and then learn the standard as a second language.
It depends what you mean by "simplification". The fact that phonics is something that can be taught and can be helpful for learning to read indicates that English does have phonetic spelling rules, inconsistently applied as they may be. It would be possible for a spelling reform to preserve the existing spelling conventions of written English while simply making the rules more consistent. There aren't really that many outright ambiguities in written English. Sure, <a> can indicate a bunch of different sounds, but it's usually possible to tell what sound it is from the surrounding letters---e.g. it'll be "short" (as in <cat>) if it's in an orthographically closed syllable, and "long" (as in <name>) if it's in an orthographically open syllable. The trouble is that we have words like <give> and <many> which are straight-up exceptions to the usual rules about open vs. closed syllables (<many> also has an exceptional sound value for the <a>). Respelling these occasional exceptions (I'd go for <giv>, <menny>) might make English spelling considerably less confusing while still preserving its basic "look and feel".
I mostly agree with your rules of thumb, but an incremental spelling reform should also (1) not leave native speakers guessing as to what you're trying to say, and (2) preserve morphological relationships as far as practical. So wrt. your examples of reformed spellings, I think I'd prefer *givve (compare gave, given etc.) and *menye - which is even an attested spelling, if only in Middle English. (The -ye ending is a bit weird, but is arguably the best fit for the final /i/ in /'mɛni/. -y and -ie just seem too confusing.)
> In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters
> differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but
> as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids
> who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for
> example, or “p” and “q.”
This doesn't match what I've heard from ESL adults from a non-Latin background, who have frequently complained that Latin letters are too similar (so it's not an issue limited to children).
Also not my own experience as an adult learner of Japanese (which has similar symbol-pair challenges for ソ ン , シ ツ , さ ち). And it's definitely not my own memory of learning to read as a child -- to this day I remember the frustration of deciding whether "read" should rhyme with "reed" or "red", but no particular challenges with [d b] since they're easy to recall from [D B]. The worst part of learning to read/write in American elementary schools was cursive, which to do this day I can't sight-read if there's too many i/u/v/w in a row.
In fact, the only time I remember hearing letters described as "three-dimensional" or "rotating in space" is from someone with dyslexia. Maybe the author should get themselves checked?
I think the real issue here is, we've reached the point where we need to realise (and can, for the first time ever) that there is no one, single teaching method.
Humans aren't off an assembly line. We have a collection of genes which enable capabilities, and further, those genes may be expressed or not.
Little Bobby may read via 12 genes, and Pete via 14 genes, with only 10 genes identical between them.
An example ; some humans cannot tell the difference between faces. Literally, some humans do not have the genetic framework to understand concepts conveyed in certain ways.
Why would teaching, learning, be different? And when we talk to people, listen to people regarding their learning experience (such as yours), it all seems subtly different. Unique.
That's because it is.
So teaching needs to be wrapped more, IMO, in the desire to convey info, but also, in the ability to realise that lessons are going to require individual nudging no matter what.
Thus, teaching methods should be less specific about "how to teach" and more about a framework to teach.
There's a common belief among inhabitants of American bureaucracies that expertise does not exist, only knowledge, so if that knowledge can be written down then there's no need for training or experts. Many people in HN have likely encountered middle-managers who ask their senior engineers to write policies, and then hire teams of juniors to implement those policies rigidly -- same principle.
When applied to education, this manifests as a belief that the teacher is less important to education than the textbook. The people writing the educational policy framework might understand that it's not a one-size-fits-all, but they're not allowed to write one policy per child. The teachers in a classroom environment aren't given the autonomy to teach according to their own judgement, because (in the eyes of the administration) if their judgement could be trusted then they would be writing policy instead of teaching.
> There's a common belief among inhabitants of American bureaucracies that expertise does not exist, only knowledge, so if that knowledge can be written down then there's no need for training or experts.
Ah but if everything can be written down, why can't the whole bureaucracy be replaced by a very small shell script?
I don't know about the very small part, but it does seem to me that the bureaucracy is pushing for its automation. Complete with Byzantine processes that leave you out in the cold if you're a corner case.
Is this "belief that the teacher is more important than the textbook" actually incorrect? It may be exaggerated, but the teacher is extremely important. How many children have given up learning something they were good at because of a bad tutor? I'll speak for myself and say that I never learned or did well in math in school because I had awful teachers, but then found that I was quite good at it when I found a tutor that explained concepts in a way that makes sense.
You also seem to think that "these people make the policies because they are the best at making policies for X", but again, is that right? Have you never heard of an incompetent politician?
No. Bobby and Annie read thanks to tens of thousands of genes and astronomical numbers of interactions between them. One may have a few more copies of this or that gene. But there are super duper few actual "you have a gene with X function but they simply don't" cases. Loss of function cases for some non critical genes are the only case you're likely to encounter in typical people. And it's not even clear how much this matters in all but extreme cases (e.g. dominant genetically determined face blindness certainly can happen https://doi.org/10.1080/02643290701380491) but I'm not sure that it makes sense to take these extremes as a model to understand normal human capacities. We are in general extremely similar in innate abilities, with incredibly low genetic diversity relative to other species. In fact, our similarity may be the driving factor in the incredible levels of social organization that we can achieve relative to other organisms.
The smallest human is under 3ft tall. The largest, over 8ft tall. Perfectly fit humans also have a widely varying maximum speed, and endurance.
The same is true of every other aspect of human capacity, intellectual abilities included.
We are not all equally capable.
Fairness comes from knowing this, knowing that each person is somewhat different, and working to enable the best outcomes for all.
To speak to this, imagine if a teacher explained an aspect of math to a student; multiplication perhaps. In this case, the student does not understand.
Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
>To speak to this, imagine if a teacher explained an aspect of math to a student; multiplication perhaps. In this case, the student does not understand.
>Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
>Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
It depends. If there are 29 other students in the class that got it just fine and the one is struggling, then I would think that the teacher would have to make a judgment about how much time to spend on that one student. Or maybe that one student needs to be in a different class with more one-on-one for a particular subject.
I am all about new pedagogy research, but over the last few thousand years, we know a few things that do tend to work for most people.
It depends. If there are 29 other students in the class that got it just fine and the one is struggling, then I would think that the teacher would have to make a judgment about how much time to spend on that one student. Or maybe that one student needs to be in a different class with more one-on-one for a particular subject.
What a valid statement, you're missing my point. In the scenario I listed above, the teacher is already re-explaining the lesson again, to that specific student.
So if you read my statements in that context, the difference is -- when already repeating the lesson individually, does the teacher say precisely the same thing, word for word, or does the teacher try to explain it in a new way?
> [A school teacher] told me, "I find this idea offensive—that kids who come from poverty areas need a more structured and disciplined approach to learning than middle-class kids do. They may need more time on the decoding skills. But why shouldn’t they be exposed to the same kind of enjoyment about reading as other kids?"
You find this kind of attitude across many subjects, not just basic literacy and it's always been quite puzzling. My own guess is that the idea of "structured and disciplined" teaching is a lot more offensive to teachers than students at the proper level. In fact, it can introduce a sort of enjoyable 'gamification' to the task of building up competence in any skill.
That quote doesn’t oppose structure and discipline. It opposes focusing on it rather than focusing on particular needs, when it comes to teaching students with a lower existing degree of skill.
> That quote doesn’t oppose structure and discipline.
Of course it does, that's what the teacher is claiming. Expressly endorsing a less-structured approach, hoping that it will boost enjoyment among students who have yet to develop the basic skills of literacy. Even though the exact opposite is in fact more likely, with students being frustrated by an overly obscure, everything-goes approach.
You do understand that for most IDs you have to pay some money? So how is what you are proposing not a poll tax?
The way this could ever be equitably implemented is with probably a decade long push for a sensible national id project that is free for everyone, but generally I've not seen proponents of this idea be willing to do the legwork that's necessary to get this to work.
The kind of voter fraud that would be stopped by ID checks is a fantasy. Now you're proposing the rollout of an expensive nationwide government program to stop something that basically doesn't exist?
I'll link this random source here, but there are dozens of them out there. There is no evidence to support any claim of widespread voter fraud that would merit the introduction of a poll tax or a nationwide free ID program + combined ID requirement.
Your proposal also ignores the fact that in some cases getting an ID is very complex and expensive - some people don't have birth certificates, for example, and getting one printed requires going to a specific location and paying a fee. Sometimes it's still not possible, because the records facility keeping your birth certificate burned down (there's at least one case of this I read about.)
Making IDs free would be a cool measure for equality! Not sure where the funding would come from though. In some places like Washington State people keep trying to defund the DMV entirely by getting rid of car taxes, so I doubt you'd get away with funding it that way.
The 19th amendment - The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
I'm trying to say reasonable measures should be taken to both ensure access to the polls and confidence in the election results. And both parties are guilty of undermining these goals.
And now I replied, too, so, by way of attempt to salvage things, a suggestion: the downvote button is a far more effective way of heading off attempts to steer the discussion down unproductive paths.
The kids all have the same potential in kindergarten and 1st grade. Sure, a few precocious kids are reading and doing basic arithmetic already, but most kids, even from affluent intact households, are just ready to get beyond recognizing sight words.
Cause "disciplined approach" is euphemism for "deadly boring stripped of anything fun or even punitive". Kids are not offended by these approaches. But they tend to check out and get bored.
I am arguably middle class. I did put a lot of effort and money into making reading fun and interesting for my kids. They do read a lot now. The parents that made it about discipline (I know some) have kids that don't read voluntary. Go figure.
It seems like every headline from American newspapers is now about the rise, the fall or the death of a social phenomenon for which the author coined a new term.
More often than not, it was never alive, or it's changing rather than dying, or the whole rise and fall occurs in a small circle of people.
I have come to treat those headlines as clickbait for pearl-clutching twaddle. Same as "We need to..." and "It's time we..." headlines.
Yes, it is. It reports a specific change that is taking place this year as a marked depature from the approach to literacy teaching that has been dominant for the past twenty years. Criticism of that approach isn’t totally new (see, e.g., [0]) but there really is a rise-and-fall pattern here, and “vibes” isn’t far off as a descriptor.
I know phonics just confused me when I was a kid. A makes <this one sound>, r makes <this one sound>. I was like no they all make all these different sounds too.
"In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but as three-dimensional objects rotating in space."
What does this mean? I've never (consciously) perceived letters as anything but flat.
At a guess, children famously sometimes write letters rotated or mirrored. But that could simply be poor feature extraction when learning or poor/untrained auto-encoding.
My child wrote letters mirrored, when I demonstrated writing by doing it backwards (but right-side up for her).
I then realised that she was doing the more complex stuff, and I should just do things as simply as possible.
The mirroring that happens also tends to happen on letters that have mirrored counterparts. So I see backwards Zs and Ses, and Ds & Bs swapped, but I've never seen a backwards F.
Aside from reading, most of what children are observing are 3D objects in 3D space. Reading comes right after the developmental stage when children have mostly full object permanence and consistency. They finally understand that the same object can be viewed from many different sides, flipped around, turned upside down, and still they are the same thing. Except in reading!
If only the US were truly bilingual. Then you could simply teach children Spanish first, which has a very reasonable orthography, and move onto English once they had mastered that.
I disagree Spanish might be a "easier" language but it's arguably much better to learn the harder more used language than trying to take the easier route. Not to mention the ideas that are expressed in English and Spanish differ greatly. Things like gender don't make any sense to me as a native English speaker but that makes agender way easier for me. That's a shallow difference but there are a lot more especially when you approach technical areas. Few language contain deep technical words. I think English, Chinese, German, french as go examples. And that's not to say other languages cannot develop those vocabs but they don't exist now, and inventing from scratch is really hard
Anecdotal, but I know way more people truly bilingual people in the US who learned Spanish at home and then English later than people who learned English at home and then Spanish later. The latter is extremely rare and takes years of study. The former frequently happens almost by accident (not to discount the difficulty of it).
<<“If you can do one thing to improve education,” Diane Ravitch told me, “you eliminate poverty. But people say, ‘That’s impossible. What else can we do?’ ” The question is overwhelming; the answers seem impossible to grasp. But one person is something you can see clearly. One curriculum is something you can hold in your hand.
I was mostly in agreement with the article until the poverty claim. You could be "not poor" and the results would still be the same if your parents won't either spend time reading to you or not leave you surrounded by books ( and you are the curious type ). I do not understand this fascination in US with money. Not everything is about money. It can certainly help, but it does not automatically make everything better. Some minimal level of effort is needed.
> he posited whole language as a rejection of “negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity” and compared advocates of phonics to flat-Earthers.
Great, another failed policy constructed for the totally wrong reasons which ends up harming those it was claimed to benefit most.
I remember a couple years ago I went over to my sister's house with my father because we were babysitting her kid. He got out his homework and at one point he asked us for help with his English and reading. I think he was around 10 years old at the time. But yeah, the way he was reading was so foreign and alien to me and my father. He was doing exactly what is talked about in this article. He was looking at words and then just saying what he thought they were and most of the time he was wrong. We tried to figure out why he was saying the words he was saying when he was looking at the words he was looking at and we tried to do the whole sounding out the word thing and he had no idea what we were talking about. His mom is a teacher and they aren't in poverty... This is just how they were teaching things for a while I guess?
I don't know why we strayed away from doing the whole sounding out the word and learning the structure of English words stuff...
I don't know if I learned this from school or my dad at home but learning about Latin roots of English words or just roots in general for the different parts of words along with just general phonetic sounding out just seemed like the right way to literacy.
I mean I can't spell worth a damn but who cares about spelling when like everything that we type on fixes my mistakes or at least underlines my mistakes for me and then I could pick the correct spelling. But also my inability to know how to spell has nothing to do with the way it was taught how to read because all of my peers did way better than me in spelling, I just can't spell, but I was able to read better than most of them and also comprehend words at a higher grade level than most of them, I guess it's a trade off between some sort of different type of memorization ability, the ability to Intuit as opposed to the ability to remember... I dunno.
But yeah... I guess this is like common core reading that I dodged by graduating high school when I did. Seems like as soon as I got out of school all of this weird stuff started just getting pushed into the normal curriculum.
I was taught that if I didn't know a word, to look it up in the glossary, which all elementary readers had, or if none, in a dictionary. Neither word "glossary" nor "dictionary" appear in this article.
Seemed to work well -- I'm told I had taught myself to read, bootstrapped you might say, by the age of two or three.
76 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadI've definitely learned how to sound things how as I've gotten older because I know a lot more words than I can possibly spell. Mostly because speaking is easier than reading. You just get to use more senses when you speak and the idea of reducing the senses in reading is silly. Honestly people would be better at reading if you could introduce a textured alphabet you could feel. The more senses you can bring into learning something the easier it gates
After that, you'd need either new letters or a lot of diacritics if you want to avoid multiple readings of the same word. The letter "a" can be pronounced something like three or four different ways, and clearing that up would cause written English to resemble Pinyin (or maybe Croatian). When choosing the new writing system, try to keep existing computer support in mind or nobody will be able to backport your new system to ASCII-only text.
There are many many reforms that can be done to English spelling that would simplify it tremendously without making it fully phonetic. Apart from reversing some of the silly forced latinization, you could get rid of some of the more bizarre letter combinations, like "ough" (could be replaced with, say, ow/off based on word). And sure, even here, there may be some dialectical differences in some words, but they would be rare. No one pronounces "though" like "thoff", so why not write it "thow"?
this may have been a case for their introduction in the first place
You would not. You could instead make the rather sensible choice of allowing the written forms of distinct, increasingly divergent, dialects to be different from one another. There are several clusters of similar but differing written standards existing side-by-side in Europe, and they don't pose any major challenges to communication. And in some language regions, it's quite common for people to write in their local dialects in informal contexts instead of the standard variety, which also doesn't pose any major challenges to communication. There is very little actual necessity for a single unified standard variety. By the time the dialects would have diverged far enough for there to be issues in communicating due to distinct written forms, perhaps a few centuries from now for English, the alternative of having a unified written form would necessarily mean that to be literate at all, you'd have to learn a foreign language (the unified standard), which would be the worse situation to find oneself in, and it would probably be easier to first acquire literacy in your native language, and then learn the standard as a second language.
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/meihem.htm
Also not my own experience as an adult learner of Japanese (which has similar symbol-pair challenges for ソ ン , シ ツ , さ ち). And it's definitely not my own memory of learning to read as a child -- to this day I remember the frustration of deciding whether "read" should rhyme with "reed" or "red", but no particular challenges with [d b] since they're easy to recall from [D B]. The worst part of learning to read/write in American elementary schools was cursive, which to do this day I can't sight-read if there's too many i/u/v/w in a row.
In fact, the only time I remember hearing letters described as "three-dimensional" or "rotating in space" is from someone with dyslexia. Maybe the author should get themselves checked?
Humans aren't off an assembly line. We have a collection of genes which enable capabilities, and further, those genes may be expressed or not.
Little Bobby may read via 12 genes, and Pete via 14 genes, with only 10 genes identical between them.
An example ; some humans cannot tell the difference between faces. Literally, some humans do not have the genetic framework to understand concepts conveyed in certain ways.
Why would teaching, learning, be different? And when we talk to people, listen to people regarding their learning experience (such as yours), it all seems subtly different. Unique.
That's because it is.
So teaching needs to be wrapped more, IMO, in the desire to convey info, but also, in the ability to realise that lessons are going to require individual nudging no matter what.
Thus, teaching methods should be less specific about "how to teach" and more about a framework to teach.
When applied to education, this manifests as a belief that the teacher is less important to education than the textbook. The people writing the educational policy framework might understand that it's not a one-size-fits-all, but they're not allowed to write one policy per child. The teachers in a classroom environment aren't given the autonomy to teach according to their own judgement, because (in the eyes of the administration) if their judgement could be trusted then they would be writing policy instead of teaching.
Ah but if everything can be written down, why can't the whole bureaucracy be replaced by a very small shell script?
You also seem to think that "these people make the policies because they are the best at making policies for X", but again, is that right? Have you never heard of an incompetent politician?
If not, I urge you to read my comment again.
The same is true of every other aspect of human capacity, intellectual abilities included.
We are not all equally capable.
Fairness comes from knowing this, knowing that each person is somewhat different, and working to enable the best outcomes for all.
To speak to this, imagine if a teacher explained an aspect of math to a student; multiplication perhaps. In this case, the student does not understand.
Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
>Would you feel it sensible for the teacher to explain again, without deviation, without changing the lesson, precisely as before, because it worked for others? And because we are all essentially the same?
>Or would you consider that an inept, cruel teacher?
It depends. If there are 29 other students in the class that got it just fine and the one is struggling, then I would think that the teacher would have to make a judgment about how much time to spend on that one student. Or maybe that one student needs to be in a different class with more one-on-one for a particular subject.
I am all about new pedagogy research, but over the last few thousand years, we know a few things that do tend to work for most people.
What a valid statement, you're missing my point. In the scenario I listed above, the teacher is already re-explaining the lesson again, to that specific student.
So if you read my statements in that context, the difference is -- when already repeating the lesson individually, does the teacher say precisely the same thing, word for word, or does the teacher try to explain it in a new way?
You find this kind of attitude across many subjects, not just basic literacy and it's always been quite puzzling. My own guess is that the idea of "structured and disciplined" teaching is a lot more offensive to teachers than students at the proper level. In fact, it can introduce a sort of enjoyable 'gamification' to the task of building up competence in any skill.
Of course it does, that's what the teacher is claiming. Expressly endorsing a less-structured approach, hoping that it will boost enjoyment among students who have yet to develop the basic skills of literacy. Even though the exact opposite is in fact more likely, with students being frustrated by an overly obscure, everything-goes approach.
Saying “I oppose X as a solution to a particular problem” isn’t the same as opposing X.
The way this could ever be equitably implemented is with probably a decade long push for a sensible national id project that is free for everyone, but generally I've not seen proponents of this idea be willing to do the legwork that's necessary to get this to work.
It's not a poll tax because in the post 9/11 age / post pandemic age, you need an ID to do most anything.
In NYS, the driver's license fee can be as low as $6.50.
Where does it define a minimum value to be considered a tax?
Where does it say "some things requiring ID is an exception to poll taxes?"
The government requiring money to be paid in order to vote is in fact a poll tax.
still should have to show id to vote.
I'll link this random source here, but there are dozens of them out there. There is no evidence to support any claim of widespread voter fraud that would merit the introduction of a poll tax or a nationwide free ID program + combined ID requirement.
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...
Your proposal also ignores the fact that in some cases getting an ID is very complex and expensive - some people don't have birth certificates, for example, and getting one printed requires going to a specific location and paying a fee. Sometimes it's still not possible, because the records facility keeping your birth certificate burned down (there's at least one case of this I read about.)
Making IDs free would be a cool measure for equality! Not sure where the funding would come from though. In some places like Washington State people keep trying to defund the DMV entirely by getting rid of car taxes, so I doubt you'd get away with funding it that way.
Now answer my question.
The fact of the matter is the histrionically the left has cheated by ballot stuffing and the right has cheating by making it harder to vote.
What are you trying to say?
What evidence exists to suggest the current elections aren't trustworthy?
And now I replied, too, so, by way of attempt to salvage things, a suggestion: the downvote button is a far more effective way of heading off attempts to steer the discussion down unproductive paths.
This statement is false.
By this point, children have already been exposed to a large portion of their parents' vocabulary even tangentially rather than directly.
The amount of attention that kids receive can vary depending on their parents' schedules.
The amount and quality of nutrition has a large impact on brain and cognitive development.
That's not even accounting for base genetic differences, but these differences do impact the epigenetic control of expression of proteins.
I am arguably middle class. I did put a lot of effort and money into making reading fun and interesting for my kids. They do read a lot now. The parents that made it about discipline (I know some) have kids that don't read voluntary. Go figure.
More often than not, it was never alive, or it's changing rather than dying, or the whole rise and fall occurs in a small circle of people.
I have come to treat those headlines as clickbait for pearl-clutching twaddle. Same as "We need to..." and "It's time we..." headlines.
Is this one any different?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447
What does this mean? I've never (consciously) perceived letters as anything but flat.
I then realised that she was doing the more complex stuff, and I should just do things as simply as possible.
The mirroring that happens also tends to happen on letters that have mirrored counterparts. So I see backwards Zs and Ses, and Ds & Bs swapped, but I've never seen a backwards F.
To be clear, I didn't mean teaching Spanish as a second language: I was imagining a world where everyone was already a native speaker.
I was mostly in agreement with the article until the poverty claim. You could be "not poor" and the results would still be the same if your parents won't either spend time reading to you or not leave you surrounded by books ( and you are the curious type ). I do not understand this fascination in US with money. Not everything is about money. It can certainly help, but it does not automatically make everything better. Some minimal level of effort is needed.
> he posited whole language as a rejection of “negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity” and compared advocates of phonics to flat-Earthers.
Great, another failed policy constructed for the totally wrong reasons which ends up harming those it was claimed to benefit most.
I don't know why we strayed away from doing the whole sounding out the word and learning the structure of English words stuff...
I don't know if I learned this from school or my dad at home but learning about Latin roots of English words or just roots in general for the different parts of words along with just general phonetic sounding out just seemed like the right way to literacy.
I mean I can't spell worth a damn but who cares about spelling when like everything that we type on fixes my mistakes or at least underlines my mistakes for me and then I could pick the correct spelling. But also my inability to know how to spell has nothing to do with the way it was taught how to read because all of my peers did way better than me in spelling, I just can't spell, but I was able to read better than most of them and also comprehend words at a higher grade level than most of them, I guess it's a trade off between some sort of different type of memorization ability, the ability to Intuit as opposed to the ability to remember... I dunno.
But yeah... I guess this is like common core reading that I dodged by graduating high school when I did. Seems like as soon as I got out of school all of this weird stuff started just getting pushed into the normal curriculum.
Seemed to work well -- I'm told I had taught myself to read, bootstrapped you might say, by the age of two or three.