Interesting Links for 05-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy

(tags:reading education epicfail USA )

2. Being vegetarian may partly be in one's genes

(tags:genetics vegetarian )

3. When game design isn't obvious

(tags:games design )

4. The 'fit but fat' research finally validates what women like me knew: being obese does not mean unhealthy

(tags:weight health women )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

1. Fascinating. Depressing that the conceptually easy helps of "eliminate poverty and racism" and "fund schools properly" will never happen. (I'm one of the "don't know how I learned to read" crew. Could read at 2.5 and write at 3. I do know my mother read out all the shop and street signs for me as an infant).

4. Caveats: https://scitechdaily.com/fat-but-fit-expert-weighs-in-on-metabolically-healthy-obesity/. (Still higher risk than non-obese, or seems)

[andrewducker]

Thank you for that.

[altamira16]

So many kids in the US cannot read because of what happened in 1, AND the whole thing became politicized with conservatives choosing the proper side of this issue. Here is an article from a few years ago on the reading wars.

I follow local school board races very closely, and the conservative anti-vaccine lady pointed out that in the first fall of the pandemic, literacy scores went up. She credited parents, who had learned literacy through phonics, teaching their kids to read at home.

[channelpenguin]

Parent teaching is also a pretty ultimate small class size!

[altamira16]

"Fountas & Pinnell," one of the lowest scoring curriculums on actually teaching kids to read in this article, was adopted by our school district a few years ago. I just searched through my emails for discussions of Fountas & Pinnell, and I was glad to see an email, summarizing school board meetings, that said that the superintendent had decided to move away from it earlier this year.

[andrewducker]

I'm really glad.

[andrewducker]

I really do wish that there was a more reality-adjacent right-wing party in the USA. Because a plurality of views is really useful, and there can be useful views on all sides, so long as they are attached to reality.

[conuly]

the conservative anti-vaccine lady pointed out that in the first fall of the pandemic, literacy scores went up. She credited parents, who had learned literacy through phonics, teaching their kids to read at home.

They very likely didn't learn to read through phonics. She just doesn't remember exactly how she was taught, and assumes it was phonics.

[altamira16]

I thought the switch happened sometime after the middle of the 1980s?

[conuly]

Exactly when do you think most parents of elementary schoolers today learned to read?

[altamira16]

Oh! The anti-vaccine school board lady was the parent of a high schooler, so she would have learned using phonics, but the parents of elementary school aged children are generally a decade younger than her, so they would have probably learned during the whole language era.

[conuly]

I was born in 1983. I entered first grade in 1989. My niblings were born when I was in my low 20s, and are now in college.

The parents of high schoolers over the past 3 years also were frequently educated in the 1980s.

[altamira16]

I am a few years older than you. I was educated in the 1980s, but I grew up in a school district that was not changing curriculum all the time because it did not have money to do so. We had lessons where the last two letters of a three-letter word would stay the same, and the first letter would switch as we learned to sound things out. We read some of the Dick and Jane books. I am the parent of a middle schooler.

[conuly]

If your memories are typical of what your school experience was like, which is not a guarantee, it sounds like what you had was the start of whole word education - look-say with a few phonics elements, such as onset-rhyme worksheets, added on. But in my experience people have incomplete memories of their early elementary education - they'll say wild things like "We all were taught only the standared method for long division and it took us all less than a week to learn it" which, um, if that's true what the heck did the teacher do for the other 39 weeks of the school year? (There is no halcyon time in American history where most American students had a good conceptual understanding of mathematics, and anybody who says otherwise is definitely trying to sell something.) So of course it's possible that you only remember these two things clearly, but some or most of your instruction was doing something else.

Incidentally, the word "phonics" covers a variety of types of methodologies. If you mostly were doing onset-rhyme instruction and also drilling with sight words from the Dick and Jane books, that's more effective than the other way around - but both of those are less effective overall than synthetic phonics instruction where common phonograms are taught in isolation and children learn how to put them together. (A phonogram is a letter or a combination of letters that represents a single phoneme, that is, sound. The written word cat has three phonograms - c, a, t. The written word chat also has three phonograms - ch, a, t. The written word high has two phonograms - h, igh. However, the written words prat and cant each have four phonograms - p, r, a, t for one and c, a, n, t for the other. In a synthetic phonics instruction program, children are encouraged to analyze these words letter by letter and phonogram rather than chunking them up at the vowel.) Synthetic phonics instruction programs are considered the gold standard for dyslexic students, and generally are shown to be effective with all students.

[nancylebov]

#1. This isn't news, but it's worth repeating, and the angle in your article (that whole language/balanced reading works relatively well in reading-friendly homes) is one I haven't seen before.

Whole language reading is a completely unforced leftwing error. I trusted them more than that, and I shouldn't have. I believe reparation is both possible and called for-- a well-publicized apology and phonics education for those who want it.

Part of the hook for teachers was that there was a lot of involved helping for the students, but the desire to help is just another human passion, and it needs to be regulated.

[flemmings]

Two decades only? I went back to college for a certificate in 1980 with people ten years younger than me. They'd been taught by see and say, and like the little girl at the start of the essay, had no idea what came after the first letter of an unfamiliar word. Reading aloud was painful for all of us.

[andrewducker]

So terrible.

[haggis]

Have you heard of the ITA reading system? It was a much more logical writing system than English and the idea was that children learned ITA and then transitioned to English later. It was trialled in the 60s but didn't work.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1523708.stm

[andrewducker]

What a fascinating idea. I'm not surprised it didn't work, but it was probably worth trying.

[snippy]

I enjoyed the thread about game design very much. I game a lot but no FPS, nothing where my viewpoint moves a lot because I have vertigo.

[channelpenguin]

I don't game at all, but have watched, and I can totally see why FPS would set off vertigo!

I find it surprising, unpleasant and disturbing (in a sensory sense).that most FPS (etc) have/allow 'head movement' (point of view change?) that is so much faster than real body movement plus has a really unnatural acceleration/deceleration curve. Maybe you have to be trained to it from a young age, but to me it is jarring and not quite nauseating - but on the way. Maybe it's ok if you have totally normal eyesight and eye coordination (or wear glasses or lenses that do perfect correction).

[simont]

Oddly enough, I was watching a Twitch stream last night in which someone was playing a VR game, and streaming the visuals from her headset to the Twitch video feed. That gave me vertigo in a way that ordinary FPS games don't do nearly so much – and yet those changes of viewpoint absolutely were derived from realistic head movement, because I could see a real person in the corner of the screen moving her head to cause them!

I think for me it's much more about the fact that my head movements aren't correlated with the viewpoint changes. If I have my own head stuck in the VR headset – or even if I'm the person in charge of the controller in an FPS game on a conventional screen – then the changes don't jar me because I'm expecting them.

[channelpenguin]

Hmm. But in game change of viewpoint, although *triggered* by that player's real head movements was possibly (even likely) not exactly tracking them in the game environment - by which I mean at same speed and arc as in reality. Or possibly even a plausible speed, acceleration/deceleration and arc. Or realistically mapped the combination of eye head and body movements at each stage of the turns. Inertia, I think I miss that...

Ok, so maybe it's just me, and I'm weird to expect that, and to find the difference jarring. I did a lot of martial arts in my younger days (until I was about 40) and I'm very used to my own max speed of turn and gaze and its probable oddities (I'm fast but stiff and my eyes probably don't track finely enough at speed).

[andrewducker]

Take a look at a VR let's play and see how it affects you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXTtmSejMEk

[channelpenguin]

I've watched a LOT of Skyrim (one of BFs faves). The VR play video was interesting with how "twitchy" the view was. Presumably our own visual systems just edit that out! Movement still looks odd to me.