"Phonics is ascendant.... [F]unctional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words. But that finding — by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists — is often disconnected from the work of training teachers and producing classroom materials.... Professor [Lucy] Calkins became a revolutionary leader in education... training educators in New York City schools, prompting them to give children 'writers’ notebooks' to chronicle their lives.... At workshops on Columbia’s idyllic campus, educators were encouraged to see themselves and their students as intellectuals.... A goal was to help children to build a joyful identity as a reader.... For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing... [directing] children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters... In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word 'car,' even though simple phonics make it decodable. Professor Calkins said word-guessing would not be included in her revised curriculum.... Professor Calkins does not believe she has anything to apologize for.... And, she asked, shouldn’t the phonics-first camp apologize? 'Are people asking whether they’re going to apologize for overlooking writing?' she said."
From "In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat/Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased" by Dana Goldstein (NYT).
The top-rated comment is from someone who has taught in a NYC public school for 21 years where they use Calkin's "Units of Study": "The degree to which we have had to supplement them with other approaches and sources is immense. Most kids would not learn literacy with these curricula alone. There really has been a sort of cult of personality around Lucy Calkins. The professional developers she hires parrot her ideas and demeanor. Regardless of her claim that she wants to support and respect teachers, the message was always 'Lucy knows best.'"
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57 comments:
also reading is racist..........watch, its coming
indeed she has lot to apologize for :
--- the many [thousands] children who were stunted in their development and still struggling?
My wife has been a K-4 reading intervention specialist and she *hates* Lucy Calkins. And her boss *loves" Lucy Calkins. My wife has been biting her tongue for years and years.
Well isn’t that special. You know what else rewires brains? Rote memorization of times tables. Mastering the 100 easy answers in the 1-10 grid pays enormous dividends in mathematics and will be useful your whole life. Declaring your preferred pronouns instead of learning phonics and times tables teaches you that schools are a waste of time and disengages the inner drive to learn.
The insistence on so-called whole language learning should certainly be remembered as the absolutely most stupid development in the history of education. Yes, we do eventually memorize words by sight, but we cannot skip the memorization process — which Ayn Rand called automatizing.
After several [sometimes many] attempts to sound out a word phonetically, we eventually automatize the process and remember it as one discrete unit instead of a string of letters. Children whose education skipped phonics are mentally crippled for life.
“Professor Calkins does not believe she has anything to apologize for.... And, she asked, shouldn’t the phonics-first camp apologize? “ This is why we have the truth that science advances one funeral at a time.
I've always been a bit puzzled : why isn't "phonics" spelled "fonix", you know, for consistency?
Hoo wood uv thot.
There is nothing surprising here, except that a generation of so-called “educators” fell for it. I can recall my 3rd grade teacher (this was in 1956) raving about phonics as a way to teach reading comprehension. Later, I read that primary education had moved to a “guess the word”/ whole language approach. Then I saw TV ads for “Hooked on Phonics” as desperate parents attempted to do what public schools had abandoned.
I have an acquaintance who founded and runs an independent school on the West Side of Chicago with outstanding results. I asked him how he screens candidates for teaching jobs. He said that if the candidate has taken any education classes, he does not even interview him or her. He looks looks for candidates with real world experience or a solid traditional education in the humanities or STEM.
Child abuse. Experiments on children. There really is not any other way to describe them. Think of the damage that has been done to children who didn’t learn phonics. Incalculable.
I'm feeling guilty now... I trusted my kids' early childhood teachers to know how best to teach reading, and none of them reads for pleasure, nor writes as fluently as I did in school. They do well by present standards, I gather from their grades and teachers'comments on their essays, but man. I read what they've written: workmanlike, obviously arrived at under duress, and dull.
I grew up with phonics; they grew up with contextual guessing, invented spelling, all that. And I didn't question it. I just figured they didn't take after me in this regard - even though they're very much like me in almost every other way. I'm so sorry, kids!
The degree to which we have had to supplement them with other approaches and sources is immense. Most kids would not learn literacy with these curricula alone.
This is why education is evolving so slowly. When new methods are introduced, we do not rely on them solely to see the effects so we can keep what works and move past what doesn't.
Instead, teachers "teach around" the bad materials, muddying the results, and giving false success to ideas which do not merit it.
For those who say, "We can't just let kids fail to read," the answer is much more rigorous testing with much smaller groups.
If we don't have significant improvement in a sample classroom, why are we making these ideas mandatory across the educational establishment?
Also: I'm reminded of the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird, in which Scout had to hide the fact that she's literate because her first-grade teacher doesn't like the way she reads.
When I was four, my uncle spent a few hours teaching me the sounds of consonants and vowels, which was easy to memorize after all the time he'd spent reading to me, pointing at each word while he read.
Then one day, he taught me about syllables and joining them together to form words--all of them from the same Longfellow poem, "The Children's Hour." Within 40 minutes I was reading.
Phonics worked for generations. So of course it had to be tampered with.
The brain works through correlation. It is primed for pattern recognition and constructive association.
Egotism and Hero worship in science is unscientific.Proper education should incorporate neuroscience. But in the modern world "belief" has trumped truth.I learned phonics at age four.My mother read comic books to me. By eight I had read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.Love ya Mom RIP.
Learning to read requires that young students learn to sound out the letters. Guessing the word based on context may work in a few, obvious instances, but the notion of relying on that method to teach children how to teach is ridiculous, a sure way to discourage children from reading.
I think it also requires--or is at least reinforced by--parents who read bedtime stories to their young children. My father used to read to us from the Old Mother Westwind stories by Thornton Burgess, as well as other children's tales. This developed and fed an appetite for stories in my twin and I, and when I began to learn how to read words, and I discovered I could read stories to myself, anytime I wanted, (stories livened up by colorful drawings, no less), I was thrilled! I still remember the awe and intense pleasure I felt reading those early books by myself. Then, and now, just holding, caressing, and browsing through the books in my library give me great pleasure. Books, as objects hold great power for me. My twin also became an avid reader. (Not so much our younger brother, very intelligent, but more drawn to physical and athletic endeavors.) My father, himself a lifelong fan of newspaper comics, was more than happy to buy us comic books, which furthered our liking for reading. Reading must become a habit, which can only happen if the young reader has fun with his or her reading.Give children age- and interest-appropriate reading matter, help them until they can read well enough on their own, and let them fly!
(I've also always been a good speller. I think it's because I see words as "pictures" in my mind, and when I see or write a misspelled word, even if I'm not sure of the correct spelling in the moment without looking it up, I can tell it's wrong. The letters don't accord with my memory of how they should appear in that word. Perhaps this is how all readers or good spellers see words, I don't know.)
"For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing... [directing] children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters... In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word 'car,' even though simple phonics make it decodable."
Gee, either do the work and sound it out, or … guess. I can't imagine which method has a higher success rate…
"A goal was to help children to build a joyful identity as a reader...."
The joy is in getting it right and building your abilities. In your hard work coming to fruition. These people are idiots. Destructive ones, at that.
"The curriculum, which goes on sale this summer,"
Looks like a business decision to me.
She is incredibly wealthy and wants more.
Check her Amazon page. Excuse me, pages.
She's sells overseas also.
Lady found a gimmick and made bank.
Too bad about the kids.
"Experts". What would we do without them?
My 4 years old grandson knows how to read in both English and Spanish and can distinguish pronunciation be the 2
He's not Great at reading but that he can do it at all I find amazing.
I don't think he is getting formal reading instruction in pre-pre-kinder. It is more like anyth hours 6 ye old sister can do, he wants to do to.
6 year old sister, in kindergarten, is being taught to read in Spanish. Has no trouble reading english either.
School use a version of phonics. She can sound out English and Spanish words.
I consider both fully bilingual allowing for age.
My rather progressive school didn't start teaching reading until 2nd grade.
I didn't start really reading until 5th grade when an Australian houseguest taught me in 15 minutes. I've probably averaged 2 books a week ever since.
All I remember of what he taught me was to focus on the page, not the words or even lines. I don't think that can be right, there has to be more to it than that. But that is all I remember.
John LGKTQ Henry
Another expert turns out to not be. This is my shocked face.
In the meantime, I'm spending the week with our grandkids watching our four year old sound out words and read everything around him. One letter and word at a time. You can see him building up his ability and knowledge. You can literally see the achievement lit up in his face with each word.
And it didn't take an 'expert'. Just good parents spending a bit of time.
Now do the 6,000 Chinese characters : )
who is Maria Montessori
understanding-the-principles-of-montessori-method
Montessori is not beloved by Feminists or Education School Faculties
Calkins, and others of her ilk, have a lot to apologize for.
my grandfather undertook to tutor me when I was 4 early 1950's [he died a few months later]
I put together the string PALAM and pronounced it phonetically as P/all/um:
he said there is no such word ==
next day in the newspaer was story from PALAM airport ; New Delhi
Jamie said...
I'm feeling guilty now...
===
please read Ayn Rand article
sit with your kids before/during/after - could be very healing
There are few people more driven by superstition than the faculty at schools of education.
It was painful to watch my children be driven to despair by demand that they write, when they lacked the skill to express their ideas.
Our boys were taught reading by "sight" in elementary school. During the summers I taught them how to read by phonics. Every year teachers were amazed at how well the boys read at the beginning of the school year. Sight reading is BS and didn't teach kids how to read new words like phonics.
I remember the new Ed school fashions from years ago. "See and say" was one that left a generation of kids unable to spell. The bottom quintile of professors in any college teach the bottom quintile of students in Ed school. Fads are a consequence of boredom.
There’s no real mystery here. Teaching phonics is hard and boring work for teachers. They don’t want to do it, because they are lazy. They think their job should fulfill them directly, instead of finding fulfillment by actually educating small children.
Most kids who learn to read very young don't learn to read phonetically. Phonics works very well for kids who don't pick up reading naturally and need all of the steps spelled out for them. Coincidentally, the same thing is true in mathematics. Some kids have an innate number sense and some don't. If you take a child who can already read when she enters school, and you subject her to months and months of "sounding out the words", you risk pounding all of the joy of reading out of her, but absolutely you are wasting her time. It doesn't need to be "either/or". We used to customize reading instruction with the "bluebirds" and the "cardinals". The thing that doesn't surprise me in today's climate is if we're going to penalize one group of kids, it will be the early readers. We can't have anyone reading chapter books while other kids are doing "bah, bah, bah".
Why not offer both and see which, or which mix, works best for a given kid?
There really has been a sort of cult of personality around Lucy Calkins
She's Trump!
My daughter surprised us one morning by reading a simple book to us that she had never seen before. She was four. We asked where she learned to read like that. She answered that she learned it watching Sesame Street.
Back then, 40 years ago, Lucy Caulkins hadn't been invented yet and Sesame Street was teaching four year olds how to read using phonics.
In 1985 I quit my job to go back to school and get my teaching license. I was shocked that in he class I had to take about teaching reading, they spent all the time on BS methods and then threw in as an aside that phonics existed. I knew that phonics was the best method but I was aiming at being a high school teacher so I didn't expect t to be teaching anyone to read anyway, so I blew off the class and just parroted back what I needed to say to pass. It did reinforce my impression coming out of UW-Madison that Ed school was a joke. From what I can tell, it's only gotten worse.
The difference between Education and other fields is that in Education even the most absurd and/or destructive fads don't fade away within a season or two but persist for decades.
Teaching phonics is hard and boring work for teachers.
I dunno, Reddit Teachers don't seem too enthralled with Calkins either.
Subjects today:
"Does Lucy Calkins just want future generations to be unable to write coherently and legibly?"
"I am again super frustrated with Lucy Calkins curriculum 🙄. Looking for ideas to fill in the gaps it doesn't cover. TIA."
"I have a Lucy Calkins PD on Tuesday. Please send thoughts and prayers."
"Lucy Calkins can go to hell!"
LOL
Debates over how children learn are like debates over whether women have G-spots. Human beings are individuals, not clones. Minds differ profoundly just as bodies differ profoundly. If you’re in too much of a hurry to apply a personalized approach you belong in another line of work.
"Most kids who learn to read very young don't learn to read phonetically. Phonics works very well for kids who don't pick up reading naturally and need all of the steps spelled out for them."
I'm curious what "pick(ing) up reading naturally" entails. Can you explain?
I'm curious what "pick(ing) up reading naturally" entails. Can you explain?
What she means is that she doesn't know how they learn to read.
I learned to read from my mother who used phonics. I still remember how excited I was when I realized I could sound out words. I taught my kids that and they were fantastic readers.
When all is said and done, the problems are these:
1: To get a Ph.D., you have to come up with "something new". SO the academic community is inherently biased against "this thing works. Just do it." Because if they're not coming up with something new, and exploring "the great new thing", then it's harder to get a Ph.D., it's harder to get published, and it harder to justify why you need to travel to this conference in Hawaii.
Phonics works. Phonics has been known to work for decades. But throwing out all the academic wanking and just going with phonics isn't cool
2: For reading education, the biggest problem is that none of the educators remember what it was like learning to read. Or learning to do math. So they look at what competent people are doing now that they are competent at the field, and assume that that's the best way to learn it, not just to do it.
And in that they are entirely wrong.
The actual researchers, the actual scientists, the people whose degrees have actual value, are showing that you have to rewire the brain, and that doing the thing that works once the brain is rewired is NOT what's necessary to rewire it in the first place.
3: The final problem is the "expert" problem. teachers want to be "respected professionals". But you can't have that luster when any parent can understand what you're doing, and do it as well or better than you can. So to "prove" their "professional" status, they come up with all sorts of academic bullshit that's "the right way to teach." Not because it's any better than, or even as good as, the simple ways to teach. But just to try to buff their status.
As we've seen over the last two years, professional educators do not give a shit about the quality of their students' education, they only care about themselves and their status. Which is why any place where the "teachers" had political power, the kids were screwed with "distance learning".
Thus the disdain for phonics, which any person of even average intelligence can teach quite well, and have
Eleanor said...
Most kids who learn to read very young don't learn to read phonetically. Phonics works very well for kids who don't pick up reading naturally and need all of the steps spelled out for them. Coincidentally, the same thing is true in mathematics. Some kids have an innate number sense and some don't.
Wrong.
Everyone has to rewire their brains. The fact that you only encounter then after the rewiring is done does NOT mean they didn't go through the process.
I graduated from college with a woman named Kathy Short who went on to acclaim in the Whole Language world. She taught, briefly, in the same public school system I did where she converted every female elementary teacher on the staff into Charles Manonesque disciples. Oh, the wars that were to be fought in our semi-rural school system which was populated with plenty of young Amish kids. Short eventually ended up a U. of Arizona and has/had a prestigious career. But the whole language culture she left behind in our school system faded in time. Unfortunately, not until my three kids went through her world.
The good news is they were all reading long before the school could mess with them.
So my point is, actually I don’t have a point. I just was amazed that this whole anti-phonics reading method has waved the white flag.
In the late '80s my daughter was in grade school. The school started teaching an exciting new program from Utah called "whole language." The summer before she entered fifth grade we moved to my hometown. She started school and it was found out she was behind in reading and spelling compared to the rest of the kids who were still being taught "the old fashioned way." Thankfully it didn't take her long to catch up.
People who learn to read phonetically believe that everyone can learn to read that way, and no doubt everyone can, but the kids who arrive at school who have already learned to read using a "whole language approach" are past the point where phonetics has any added value. Wasting their time teaching them phonics borders on criminal given how much time is spent on it. Just like making someone whose native language is Spanish waste his time in Spanish 101. There's a lot of "if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for everyone else" in education. But the reality is there are 6 year olds who will be better readers than a lot of adults will ever be, and they got there without ever being subjected to learning phonics. By all means teach phonics in school. Just exempt the kids that are past that point. Some kids look at the multiplication tables and immediately see the relationships and do not need drills to learn them. Let them demonstrate they can already recite them and give them something more challenging to do. Why are you so unwilling to admit some kids are smarter than you were?
I’ve been teaching COVID kids who missed first and second grade to read. They quickly learn a page and a half of English phonograms,, syllables, and seeing prepositional phrases as a unit. They quickly read at a sixth grade level if they have good visual convergence. This has been known for at least a hundred years.
Pol Pot was no doubt a despot mass murder. So this is a joke:
Even a stopped despot clocks right twice a day.
First, purge all the intellectuals.
"The thing that doesn't surprise me in today's climate is if we're going to penalize one group of kids, it will be the early readers. We can't have anyone reading chapter books while other kids are doing "bah, bah, bah".
Yes, a half century ago in my TX kindergarten, they had the first, second, and third reading groups. We in the first just took turns reading the next sentence about jane and dick and the trick was that the story was repetitive enough that when it came to your turn you already knew how to pronounce the word.
I believe that teachers today would hobble the smart kids to keep them from getting ahead of the pack. Parents have to fill the gaps.
Caligula said...
The difference between Education and other fields is that in Education even the most absurd and/or destructive fads don't fade away within a season or two but persist for decades.
==========
now talk about Chinese foot binding to stunt growth of womens feet
Eleanor said...
People who learn to read phonetically believe that everyone can learn to read that way, and no doubt everyone can, but the kids who arrive at school who have already learned to read using a "whole language approach" are past the point where phonetics has any added value.
===============
I dont believe you that anyone ever learns to read using WLA
I can remember when I thought it mattered how the public schools teach reading. At this point, if my advice were requested, I would say that they can do it any way they like, as long as they do it at the bottom of the ocean.
Robert Cook said...
I'm curious what "pick(ing) up reading naturally" entails. Can you explain?
+1 for Robert Cook
Eleanor said...
the kids who arrive at school who have already learned to read
don't need instruction, and are are past the point where ANY of the BS the "teachers" push has any added value.
FIFY
The issue isn't the kids who already know how to read. The issue is kids who don't know how to read, and need to learn.
What part of that is unclear to you?
"The thing that doesn't surprise me in today's climate is if we're going to penalize one group of kids, it will be the early readers. We can't have anyone reading chapter books while other kids are doing "bah, bah, bah".
Once you know how to read, "reading instruction" is worthless. What you need is practice and more vocabulary.
"whole language reading instruction" isn't going to help the "already reading" either.
Nothing will, other than a willingness to let give them better books to read while you help the kids who don't know how to do it
Eleanor:
People who learn to read phonetically believe that everyone can learn to read that way, and no doubt everyone can, but the kids who arrive at school who have already learned to read using a "whole language approach" are past the point where phonetics has any added value. Wasting their time teaching them phonics borders on criminal given how much time is spent on it.
I could read long before I started school, and I'd spend reading class reading the teacher's guides at the end of the readers (same with the arithmetic books). I have no idea how I learned, except that it might have had something do do with my father teaching us kids how to sing-song the alphabet. I can still do that, in fact. So I don't think I learned to read via "whole language." Which sounds ridiculous anyway. Why should you have to look at a picture of a car to figure out what the letters "c-a-r" say? What if you had to look at a picture of an antithesis to figure out what the letters "a-n-t-i-t-h-e-s-i-s" say?
Contra Eleanor,I loved phonics (went to old-time parochial school with nuns)! It was like a word-party: all the different words that rhymed with each other! Great training for discovering new words and also for playing Wordle.
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