We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
>> We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.
That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions.
Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.
Yeah, I think every person is different. My first kid learned to read himself from watching educational material and using a computer. He knew the alphabet before anyone could really understand his words. His siblings needed someone to walk them through the concepts.
Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.
Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling, so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read. There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two). In reverse there are often several different phonetic ways to pronounce a written word.
As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)
Um. You have not read any pre-19th century English-language literature, have you? If you think there are no good rules, expose yourself to how the language was written before there were _any_ such rules. Finnigin's Wake, anything by Cotton Mathers and the like.
The added rules were just memorize the one correct way to spell. Previously it's was phonetic, and everyone used different spellings. Of course it looks less phonetic if you are unaware of how phonics change. (U and V switched roles as one example)
Previously it was dialectic. To say that different spellings were used by different people dramatically understates the situation. You can find an author using different spelling to express the same word in different contexts in the same volume, because, well, that's the way it was spoken.
I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece was written but the idea of returning to a system (non-system?) of spelling makes my head hurt. At this point, I can read an book or document written (in English) by an Australian, US Southerner, US Baltimore or Indian writer without needing to decode the writer's dialect. Sure, some of that comes out despite using a fixed spelling system, but that gives the text.. I guess I might describe it as _texture_ or _personality_ without detracting from the ideas, stories or info conveyed.
I think 'ou' is still in play in British English (colour, odour, etc) but was removed from the US standard (i think) sometime in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't minor in my 2nd grade teacher's pov when I spelled it `colour` (1978..I had some old comic books at home--I blame them) but from what I understand, such changes were made after a great deal of debate which included discussions on whether the obfuscation of _existing_ text is offset by decreased obfuscation in future writing. I think, rightfully (if you're into that sort of thing), they got it right. I do not miss `colour` but whether or not it is there does not impact my understanding of the sentence.
If there was a credible effort to revert or deprecate spelling, I would be concerned about knowledge and information dissemination reverting to the old pre-reformation model of jealously guarded silos of information/education.
You need to learn something other than English! Spanish has easy spelling rules because it is one sound = one letter. (except for ll - and they consider that a separate letter). It is easy to spell in Spanish because each letter maps to exactly one sound, and each sound maps to exactly one letter.
We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand languages like French and Polish solve this by having rules of how every letter combination sounds, but I don't know enough of them to explain how it works - but they might be useful inspiration if you don't want to add letters). There should be exactly one way to spell a word, and it should be obvious what that way is by how the word is pronounced.
Of course we also need to reform English so that we all pronounce words the same (goodbye and good riddance to all the funky accents - they sound cool but they hinder communication), and a lot of other related reforms that will never happen.
It's an adaptation to the limitations of phonetical spelling in english.
IIRC, my kid was taught about 100 "sight words" that are usually common words that link stuff together or appear often. Stuff like "who", "the", "which", etc. The kids memorize those and sound out the other stuff. I think the idea is to avoid discouraging kids from getting hung up on common things or memorizing things wrong.
Not trusting authority figures tends to be extremely laborious, give little benefit, and gets you socially marked as an oddball.
Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways into the future, and you'll have plenty of social acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable" misfortune.
Not trusting authority figures is the #1 advice for success in life, and has been since the invention of "authorities".
The goal of "authorities" are always to harm you as an individual and the more you follow them, the more harmed you will be. There is really no limit to how bad they are willing to make your short existence on earth, including - but not limited to - putting you in a muddy trench to be slaughtered by the enemy's artillery.
That's interesting because in the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird (widely taught in the US and well-known in other countries), there's a scene where the character Scout is criticized in school by her teacher, when it's discovered that Scout learned to read ahead of the curriculum, from her father at home. The teacher expressed the concern that Scout might end up learning how to read incorrectly. If I remember correctly, the end result was that Atticus (Scout's father) told his daughter that she could secretly continue to read at home, just without telling her teacher, to avoid conflicts in class.
~~
Except from the novel (where "I" is the character Scout):
“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’t taught me anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain’t got time to teach me anything,” I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. “Why, he’s so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and reads.”
“If he didn’t teach you, who did?” Miss Caroline asked good-naturedly. “Somebody did. You weren’t born reading The Mobile Register.”
“Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch. Jem says my name’s really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was born and I’m really a-”
Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. “Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us, dear,” she said. “Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage-”
“Ma’am?”
“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. [...] I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the window until recess when Jem [Scout's older brother] cut me from the covey of first-graders in the schoolyard. He asked how I was getting along. I told him.
“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it-”
“Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way—it’s like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”
~~
Contrary to this approach in teaching, in my university courses, my professors in math and the Spanish language always encouraged additional reading and study outside of class (oftentimes, this was written directly in the syllabus or part of class discussions). So, I haven't heard much about professors being concerned about students learning the "wrong way"—I suspect that many educators are happy in general when students seek to learn from additional materials outside of what's presented in class.
Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis on us as parents taking an active role in reading with them and encouraging them at home.
I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
When my oldest brother was a preschooler, my mom attended a meeting at school for parents of preschoolers. They specifically told her: "Do not attempt to teach your child to read, you will do it wrong." Also, she tried to find out the right way, and was rebuffed. She sensed bullshit, and taught us to read at home.
> I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school".
Yeah, I think this is actually the right approach. A lot of children will learn reading without specific training if you read picture books with them in your lap and they're looking at the pictures and the letters. If they do, that's great; if they don't, that's fine too. Structured reading practice and development can happen later.
I learned French by immersion (my parents sent me to a French school aged six, and for six months I was miserable). When I went to an English school, and took French lessons, I was marked down for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.
20 words in their first year? That’s insane. Granted I haven’t been in the US system for 20 odd years, but I believe we easily learned 100-150 in our first year here.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.