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

[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.