Speaking of multiplication tables, I (Gen X’er) remember being quizzed on my multiplication tables 1-on-1 w/my 4th grade teacher. The teacher did this with every student, so it wasn’t targeting just me. I got them all right. What was her feedback? I was ‘too serious’ while she was drilling me on multiplication. She wanted me to laugh and joke around more.
Meanwhile, 4th grade me was thinking, “None of this is fun, lady. Why would I be joking around with this since I’m getting graded on it?”
Sounds like many of y’all had pretty bad schools. I think my kids were pretty fortunate to have involved parents and mostly good teachers (minus a few duds here and there) who taught effectively.
There seems to be a big swing toward The Science of Reading now so hopefully the bad schools out there will catch up. The push for phonics and “science of reading,” explained - Vox
But will the generation of kids catch up?
Now we have a whole generation of covid-zoom kids with masks…not looking good (or looking good from teachers I’ve heard from).
I suppose we were lucky. My kids went to a private school for K-7/8, but I would have put it on par with a mediocre middle/upper middle class public school. That being said, they seemed to stay with more historic techniques for learning, and I was fine and now happy with that, I suppose.
That being said, I have no recollection of how I learned to read, nor how my kids learned. I remember that I dreaded helping them to read, because I didn’t understand how anyone learned. I read to them a lot. They knew their ABCs super early. They knew how to read before kindergarten. I wouldn’t say either were awesome early readers, but competent. But first grade they were reading Harry Potter, but then again so were many of their classmates. Reading was pushed at their school, but I couldn’t tell you what method was taught. I volunteered my lunch hours to listen to their kindergarten reading groups each week.
Math facts WERE pushed at the school, and I was happy with that. Each week in 1st grade, they’d have timed math tests with a sticker chart to see how fast you got through them. Older S blew through the addition, subtraction, mixed, multiplication, division, mixed. Younger S did well, but not like his brother. I don’t think he missed a question the entire time, but then again he could multiply 2 and 3 digit numbers in his head at that age.
They also most definitely had spelling test. I hated theirs in middle school! They had to know the spelling, the word by the definition, how many syllables, what part of speech, and by synonyms/antonyms. Those were the only tests they asked me to help study for, and I have PTSD trying to get through them all Fridays mornings as we were trying to get ready for school.
They also learned cursive, which I am thankful for. Our public schools dropped that awhile ago.
Sold a Story is fascinating and very informative. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the latest science about how we learn to read. Many people on this thread, and their kids, clearly were learning to read before the start of lasting long-term memory (around age 3-5), so they don’t remember internalizing or practicing phonics. There is also a thing called childhood amnesia which could explain why many don’t remember learning to read.
I am the same—I went to Kindergarten at age 4 and was already reading. No one taught me, although we did have a book-rich environment at home. Our oldest daughter followed in my footsteps. She was sitting on my lap at my computer at age three and she started reading the keys: “enter, tab, shift.”
Then came her two siblings. We read to them everyday—not just me and DH, but also my parents, their aunts, their babysitters. They absolutely loved books. We went to the library weekly, and the youngest would vacate his stroller and walk home so we could fill it with books. I was a SAHM and a huge reader. We watched very little tv, and these kids could not get enough stories. Yet, the second two did not start reading themselves, even in kindergarten.
When our middle child’s kindergarten teacher told me that she had “low phonemic awareness,” that was our first clue that both she and her brother are dyslexic. It didn’t matter that they were surrounded by every type of book, plus audiobooks, or that we loved reading to them. They simply were not connecting symbols to sounds. Both needed 50-80 hours of systematic phonics training with proven programs (Lindamood-Bell and Orton Gillingham) in order to learn to read. They didn’t read simple chapter books until age 9 for one and 11 for the other. Their sister was reading them easily at 5.
What I learned from Sold a Story is that everyone learns to read through phonics. Some people are such naturals at it that it happens very young. It seems automatic to those around them. But it isn’t. When they film the eye movements of young, fluent readers, their eyes are taking in each letter in order, sounding out words. It just happens imperceptibly fast.
No home environment can erase dyslexia. Kids with dyslexia need research-driven phonics education. If they come from a privileged environment, their parents may be able to supplement their school with tutors, like we did. But I am heartbroken for all the Americans out there who can’t read because we got our methods wrong in our schools for so long.
Maybe we should separate out the kids who have already learned to read on their own, and send them off to enjoy reading and improve. But the rest of the class should have the kind of instruction that works. No amount of cozy reading nooks, beautiful illustrations, acting out the stories, pairing the reader with the right book, whole language, etc. was ever going to work for my dyslexic kids. I thank my lucky stars often that we had the time and resources to help.
Our more mildly dyslexic daughter will be a senior history major this year at William & Mary. She is a voracious reader. Her minor is creative writing, and she loves to write also. For our more severely dyslexic son, reading is still a chore. He prefers audiobooks, live theater, discussion, and debate. I wish we had given him more intense intervention at an earlier age…He’s headed to college this fall and also wants to major in history, so we’ll see how he does with the amount of reading!
Thanks to @gouf78 for highlighting the Sold a Story podcast series!!
A few years ago, some store (Target?) had a product on sale for 25% off. The regular price was $40. At the register it scanned for $35, showing a $5 discount. I told the clerk that was incorrect. She replied that it was correct because that is what the computer said it was! I asked for a manager. i explained that 25% off of $40 is a $10 discount. He took a calculator out of his pocked and punched in the numbers. He said that I was correct. I was so glad that I was taught by the sisters in Catholic schools.
And as for spelling I remember being drill in spelling even through four years of high school.
I remember in college, we were taking statistics for sociology and one of my classmates had no idea how fractions and decimals were connected. I helped tutor her and had study groups with her. We both aced the class and by the end of it had an adequate handle on subject matter.
Many people can’t easily figure out what 25%, 1%, 15% or other amounts are. It’s not rocket science but they never learned how to figure it out and overly rely on calculators.
Completely agree. And vice versa. Some humans are born with the ability to instantly connect symbols to sounds to words. No one has to teach them. If they have the opportunity to see written language while hearing it spoken or understanding its meaning through close captions or even seeing food packaging, no lack of being read to on a regular basis will prevent them from learning how to read. My mom was a teacher in an area where parents were struggling and most kids couldn’t read in first grade and she asked the mom of one little boy who was a great reader from day one what she had done to help him read and she said she had no idea. But she always took him to the grocery and one day he started reading the signs.
Those already reading and able to decode anything g will be bored by phonics instruction.
Not sure if this was normal in 1960s because per prior post my 1st/2nd grade was in ITA program. We had three reading groups, depending on ability. I don’t think the groups were not labelled as such, but we knew. Possibly the lowest level group felt singled out, but they did get appropriate books and a lot of extra attention. Students not at reading group worked at their desks.
This is the problem. The premise of these failed teaching programs think kids have the “innate” ability to read and somehow by osmosis will miraculously start reading. That simply doesn’t happen.
Some kids do “by miracle” or hook and crook learn to read. The more logical explanation is their parents talk to them a lot. They read the comics to them. They absent mindedly point out every sign in the neighborhood so the kid knows what they say. And their kid is good at pattern recognition (which probably is innate). The “word games” as a foundation to reading is done very naturally. Or the kid watches Sesame Street, has another adult reading to them or a plethora of all.
But nope. I don’t think it’s natural at all. It’s taught. I doubt any of us would get the rosetta stone and instantly decipher it without clues as where to begin.
Some of the teachers divided their classes up because they were given a heterogeneous group and it bored the quick ones to tears and was too hard for the slower ones. Mostly the quick kids ended up being largely self-directed and self-taught. It was OK as long as they were motivated and had good peers.
Back when we were in school, they were allowed to separate kids by ability and track them. This unfortunately didn’t allow for much (if any) movement once you were put in a track, even after you mastered the material, which caused its own issues. It was especially bad for late bloomers, once they bloomed and started getting bored.
Agree. The Everyday Math spiral approach failed both my kids miserably. Introduce topic d with no expectation that the kids will learn it. Spend some time on topic c expecting that the kids will learn a bit of it. Go back to topic b. Introduce topic e. Spend some time on topic d. Go back to topic c. Introduce topic f…
For the kid who understood each topic thoroughly the first time it was introduced math class was a boooring review most of the time.
The kid who didn’t pick up the concepts quickly always felt like a failure, lost because they weren’t expected to understand the math until the third or fourth time through, often months later.
Both kids were caught up in the “let’s make sure everyone learns together at the same lockstep pace” crap in both reading and math. No concept of the fact that people learn at different rates. Again, waaaay too much review for one, not enough actual instruction for the other.
And don’t get me started about how Everyday Math turned math into magic without explaining how the procedures work.
Does anyone know of a similar review of math programs over the years?
Back to reading…
Similar to math, in reading one caught on with very little instruction while the other needed to be explicitly taught. Since this is CC, guess which one went to the more prestigious university? Yeah, the one who had to work hard.
Sadly S had a botched Chemistry class that turned him off from chemistry too. The teacher skipped all over and jumped around trying to drill the kids on concepts she had never taught. It turned him off from chemistry thoroughly, though since he was a math science kid he would likely have really enjoyed it if it had been taught more sequentially.
My premise is not that kids in general have an innate ability. It’s that a few humans eons ago had to have this ability more or less as a special natural talent. Otherwise it’s unlikely written alphabets would have been created. A few of us now have extraordinary natural abilities in areas of language or math. It takes little instruction for them to be very good at it. Even if parents do little just seeing the words on signs not being pointed out exactky but just saying lets go to Kroger or Payless Shoes ( or whatever) and seeing the sign when they enter and seeing words on products like a box of cereal, shampoo, peanut butter etc… is all that it takes. The vast majority will need instruction and practice and many significant instruction and practice. Schools should be creating curriculums that work best for most. But some people ( maybe 1 percent) it really just comes incredibly naturally to without any instruction, being read to etc…. And for many more it coming easily with almost any sort of instruction. But the majority need phonics.
I think most would agree that there are a few kids (unicorns) that are largely self-taught. They absorb reading and math with very little formal instruction. They tend to have good to great attention spans and make connections easily between things.
The vast majority of people need some to a lot of instruction and phonics is a very strong tool for the toolbox. I honestly can’t figure out how they expect kids to “read” just from context guessing words. The idea just seems totally crazy to me. In life, so many times there is little to no context and very very few cues or clues or helpful pictures
Similarly with math—fundamentals are so important and without them there’s just so much floundering.
That’s pretty close to my great nephew except he was read to. He learned to read at age two and was reading big complex words at that time like “magenta” and the names of all the planets. His parents definitely weren’t trying to teach him to read but he just picked it up anyway — they were super surprised when he started reading. He is an incredible kid and knows every country in the world by the outline without context (and did at about age 4). Someone like him could’ve invented an alphabet and the written word back in ancient times.
I learned through phonics and I’m sure I shared that with my kids when I read to them. We did not do a curriculum or anything though just lots of book reading which they loved and then good early teachers in school.
I remember one kid, with Everyday Math, came home in first grade with what was essentially algebra, solving for the unknown. I asked kid how the teacher expected kid to do it. Kid said that they were told to use “guess and check”. I said, “Nah, we’re gonna learn algebra now.” I then taught kid simple algebra, setting up an equation and solving for the unknown by applying same exact operations to each side of the equation. Kids are very concerned about rules and everything being fair, were very receptive to the concept of being “fair” by doing the exact same thing to each side of the equation. I would not have taught this to that kid in first grade, but hey, the opportunity came up and we ran with it.
During the era of Everyday Math, the only kids in my school who actually learned math were the kids who had a parent who was in science or math or engineering who took the time to teach the kids at home. The others were out of luck, never really learned math, were handicapped by the time that they reached middle school, where they seemed to actually teach math. Many of those kids never caught up in math, were steered away from STEM fields because they couldn’t do the math.
Both my children had the same 3rd grade teacher whom I loved. You would walk into her classroom, and there would be multiple groups all learning at different levels. I expressed my admiration to a fellow parent years later, and her comment was that she never liked that classroom. To her, it appeared the teacher had no control. WHAT? Her expectations were likely that the students all sit in their seats and pay attention at the same time for the same lessons, with no interruptions.
This article is from 2013 but Every Day math is still being used today.
As a parent, I absolutely HATED Everyday Math. We supplemented by teaching her the old way at home. She used it to check her work on tests but it was irritating because sometimes she would show her work differently and get docked even though she had the correct answer.