videos

Reminds me of this:

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Apparently, in the US, some teachers are not teaching the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, so some students come with these strategies (or rather, as flan pointed out, they actually teach the kids to do this).

i'm not well-educated enough on child pedagogy to know for sure, but i've seen a lot of suggestion that one of the driver's of the current us dip in literacy is moving away from empirically tested methods of teaching reading. something about "sight words" vs phonics.

I have had some thoughts on school book production, which I may as well post here:

So, here in Germany, there are large, private publishers of school books. These are basically monopolies. They create school books based on the curriculum standards set by the government. There is a "market" in the sense that the teachers at the various schools can choose among several books that are available and approved by the ministry (assuming they get budget approval). Those publishers (e.g. Bertelsmann) are, btw, also behind lobbying efforts to open up more parts of the education system to private interests.

These books get minor updates almost every year, which are insignificant for the most part (lots of changing things around so the page numbers are off). Old editions cannot be bought. This causes confusion among teachers and students. This is, I'm pretty sure, so that the schools will buy a new full set of books every couple of years. The publishers also completely discontinue the books every now and then, and instead publish a totally new books.

The way new books are made is that they hire a bunch of teachers, and tell them to write some chapter of the book, based on the government standards. They try to do this mostly on the cheap, so there's a lot of looking at existing books while barely avoiding plagiarism. The quality doesn't actually improve over time, and there is not really much feedback from the actual teachers using the books.

If, instead, the books were made in some sort of collaborative process, by interested teachers, researchers at universities, and so on, that would improve things a lot I reckon. A bit maybe like Wikipedia or Linux, and ideally with a blanket suspension copyright for educational purposes, so that they can include whatever material they like. Of course the teachers should be paid for this work as well.