If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
Is this some kind of
Americanjoke I’m tooEuropeanto understand?They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences
The fuck you mean guess? What if the text has no pictures? Wat!?
Nah, my bizarre rants are just a feature of my neurology.
Highly recommend the “Sold A Story” podcast
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read.
That sounds like a problem with reading comprehension rather than phonics. Critical thinking skills are in short supply nowadays.
The problem with three-cuing is that it teaches people to skip words they don’t know. Having people just not read half the words in comments they are replying to explains so much. No wonder people have bad reading comprehension.
I skip words because I have attention deficit problems.
You skip words because you can’t read.
We are not the same.
I learned phonics (which is essential) but also ended up self-teaching myself visual reading. Unless there’s an unfamiliar word or unusual sentence structure I usually don’t subvocalize or “hear” what I’m reading. When I was younger teachers would be upset because I typically finished reading the novel they assigned in the first or second in class “reading time”.
So there is absolutely significant value in visual reading, skimming, cueing, etc – but skipping phonics is insane. It’s like teaching someone how to run before they can walk. It also ignores not everyone is great at running and leaves those people especially screwed.
I usually intuitively understand slovene text when reading it. It just makes reading books more boring - so I read more English books (well I can also do it with English text, but not as good).
It also infuriates some people I read to - since I just skim trough the boring parts, which then sound like groups of random letters.
Always remember when discussing with US citizens:
Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy -> second to last paragraph of the first part.
1 in 4 people you see walking on the street in America are functionally illiterate. More than half can only read at somewhere around a 6th grade level or below. The US glorifies and revels in ignorance.
When I was in the 6th grade I got called into a room after the reading/writing test we all took. I thought I was in trouble. They just didn’t want the other students to hear that I was reading/writing at a college level while they were all at 2nd-8th grade levels.
I am actually autistic/adhd and had a lot of trouble in early development with language. I had a speech impediment, and couldn’t read or write properly. There was a single teacher at my public school who was in a wheelchair and would take me into her office and would sit there and practice my words with me and tell me how to position my tongue, and would teach me how to sound out words, and stuff like that when I was in elementary school.
I think that woman is fully responsible for me being literate. It’s crazy to think about how a few hours of one on one time as a kid had such a big impact on my early childhood development.
I moved around a lot, and when I got to third grade I didn’t know cursive so my teacher decided I should be in Special Ed and sent me out of class to get tested.
After the tests, they put me in this thing called the “extended learning program” which was a little like a play room full of educational games and a bunch of really nerdy kids. It turns out my math and reading skills were high school level and though I had not yet learned cursive I was typing 22 words per minute on “Mavis Beacon”. So the conclusion was to send me to ELP and have the kids there teach me cursive.
Then I moved a hundred miles away in the spring and had to start all over for fourth grade when my teacher decided my bad handwriting meant I was illiterate and she sent me to get tested…
My handwriting is still ass though cursive or otherwise.
I can’t write in cursive either unless adding some fancy squiggles counts. Can’t read it either. And my handwriting is super messy. I’ve had it called doctor handwriting lol.
I’m very torn with that revelation. My nephew is in the second grade and he reads pretty good. My girlfriends child is in the 3re grade and she reads a lot. Like more than i do on average, and while my reading comprehension and speed is obviously much higher, she’s not that far behind overall. Thinking back, i read the same boojs as my mom when i was in 6th grade, i might not have understood them fully, because they were mainly political thrillers, but i read them. Si i don’t really know, how well does a 6th grader when it comes to reading?
Read some articles in Simple English Wikipedia. It’s at roughly a 6th grade level.
Edit: bear in mind when you do that even Simple English Wikipedia will be easily understood by only around 29% of the total number of literacy-challenged people in America. You and yours are probably not anywhere near either group.
yep. tis why my wife laments ever setting feet in turtle island. she knew she was part the 3% able to recite, sign, and localize curricula with goals, criteria, and pedigree for a generation that will never surpass her. Traumas are mitigatable, but not the isolation that no peer like her will ever exist.
Holy fucking shit this explains so much!
It was called whole word learning in my location (PA) circa 90s. My kids had to do stupid shit like draw borders around a word over and over while repeating it. Their homework directions never made sense to me so we practiced sounding things out. They were not encouraged to learn sounds in school— just memorize the word. If you didn’t know the word you were to look at the first and last letters and guess what belongs in context. Of course if you can’t read any of the other words guessing context is impossible. When my son struggled to read, the reading specialist gave me a book of essential words for him to memorize at home. Multiple times a year the kids did collages to match pictures to letters or words. We were told to work on it at home so I had to sign up for and save magazines to use the pictures. It was a useless, time-wasting project. Then there were the stupid assemblies that occurred regularly—90 minutes of yo-yo entertainers who were invited back every year, fund raising assemblies to sell wrapping paper (mostly to myself and my parents), the obligatory follow-up assembly to distribute the shitty prizes.
My favorite was the year they gave my son an award for a poem he wrote (Yay! We were so proud) and then the school tried to sell us a book of poetry written by all the 5th grade prize winners in PA. Who tf wants a book of 5th grade poetry? We framed and hung his poem on the wall.
All this to say schools appeared to be focused on everything except reading comprehension. Complaining parents were assured THEY were the problem. My kids ended up in private school because I didn’t want them to be functionally illiterate as so many others have. I am not surprised by reading levels in the US.
Defunding US public education is possibly the most successful move republicans made early on. It has worked brilliantly for them.
I’m thankful every day for my kid’s Montessori school. 5 years old and I’m already to the point where we read together every night for fun, but I’m not really needed. Sometimes I see the reading light on after bedtime, but I let it slip. 🥹
You’re so lucky you can afford not only kids, but private school as well. I really hope you appreciate your privilege.
good parent ☺️
montessori is crazy, we’ve been doing lovery and their toys are so well designed
i lived in california from ages 4-8 and we did phonics basically every grade level.
i moved to florida about 3/4 through 3rd grade and that was when i learned about educational standards at the ripe old age of 8 when everyone in my new third grade class read at a first grade level and even my teacher didn’t seem to know what she was doing.
i have a formative memory from my first day. i asked the kid next to me when recess is, and his response was, “what’s recess?”
Meanwhile during my childhood I moved many many times and I remember arriving at a school in upstate New York for 7th grade, getting out of our life skills class which is like Home Ec for head injuries, going to lunch and then after lunch going out for recess.
The life skills class focused on important things like don’t talk to strangers which I thought was childish enough and then we went out for recess. We were in Middle School, and we had recess.
The kids I met there were the most behind of any kids at any school I ever went to. I was constantly accused of having my parents help me with my homework and projects. It seemed impossible to explain to them how little time my mother had to pay attention to me at all since she worked 2 jobs.
Shully gully and mercy.
I learn new words by searching for the definition. Is that not a thing anymore? You don’t have to go find a dictionary anymore. You can literally pull out your phone and type: “define xxx”. I really hate our education system.
Oh, this is worse than that: it’s not just about their vocabulary being stunted, it’s that they can’t even recognize words they know because they don’t know how to sound out a word. Grim stuff.
Oh fuck me, that is grim. No way to know what that which you’re looking at means. That’s fucking terrifying! “Huh. The bottle’s got some tall, red letter words and exclamation points. I bet it means that this shit’s gonna taste awesome!”
there is a limit to the utility of phonics and the idiot teachers should be forced to acknowledge it, however everyone should be taught some phonics.
(I did make another comment but I was being a little silly)
It’s pretty insane to me that they don’t teach phonics, since that’s very important to actually reading a word, especially aloud. In my original comment I was ignoring that reading included determining the meaning of a word, but I was conflating reading with only reading aloud or simply identifying a word.
Three cueing can be important to reading and would probably help out on the spot, but is something I (and I assume many others) picked up naturally anyway from just reading a lot. I don’t expect it to be taught in school instead of phonics, and it should not replace just looking up a word in the dictionary. This just seems absolutely absurd to me.
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
My mother was a learning disabilities teacher consultant and hated 3 cuing. Most students sent to her once it started were fine when taught not that way.
That’s simply not true, fortunately. All public schools are to follow common core standards and that includes phonics (sounding out words) over sight words and certainly over context guessing. Going contrary to the core is possible, I guess, but certainly not the norm.
If you’re curious, the debate was mostly settled in the 90s, during what my PhD advisor called the “reading wars.” Well, mostly settled… sight words still have a place in reading, especially when a word is contrary to its phonics. But basically, policy has prioritized phonics since Clinton, with to only some revision under Obama.
That’s not to say Americans aren’t dumb; doesn’t mean much if standards aren’t met. But it’s not as simple as saying we’re taught incorrectly. I could give a variety of reasons, although Lemmy users can probably guess poverty, politics and capitalism are pretty central to a lot of it.
Agreed I sub in multiple schools in rural PA. They’re all doing heavy phonics. More phonics then I was a kid for sure.
And the fact that you have a culture that rewards ignorance!
Researchers have tried to test that, too, although it wasn’t that strong an impact compared to funding discrepancy and parental neglect due to overworking and such. However, traditionally that type of research had racist undertones that assumed black inner city kids were the ones rewarding ignorance and somehow completely ignored the white Christian nationalist crowd.
I’d be curious to see more contemporary research on that, though I think researchers are scared to challenge religious or MAGA norms. That seems to be where ignorance is rewarded, compared to the college-first mentality you see in urban schools. But that’s my two cents, not backed by research (yet), unlike the data on poverty and curriculum standards.
