I have a suspicion that teacher's dislike of phonics is that they were part of the lucky majority who picked up phonics easily and have memories of being bored being drilled in skills and knowledge they already had. As a result the large minority who actually need slow careful instruction in the code were deprived of the basic bottom rungs of the reading ladder. And if you can't learn to read you're in serious life long trouble - even more so in todays world. It's an enormous risk factor for all sorts of nasty social/emotional/mental health problems too.
As a teacher who loved and enjoyed reading, running up against the roadblock of the hatred of reading was really difficult for me. And I really floundered in getting students who hated reading to actually read. I had a friend who had struggled in school as a student (somewhat--he never flunked anything) who was one of the best teachers I've ever seen. He anticipated so many issues from the "difficult" students and motivated them to do better. I left the profession, he has excelled in it and his patience and empathy with students is legendary.
We often pick people who excel as students to be teachers but the skills are so different. My friend wasn't great at one but incredible at the other but it is difficult to see until the person actually gets in the field.
Education degree majors have the lowest average SAT/ACT scores entering college across all degree majors. I'm not saying your idea isn't correct, but learning phonics quickly and low standardized test scores don't seem to inherently go together.
Only 50% of an age group enter college. They're not absolutely the top 50%, but they're pretty close to being. That is anyone who went to college is above median in elementary school.
Only because I was really interested in this .... BLS has 3.6M registered nurses (91% with bachelors degree) vs. ~2M elementary education teachers + 1M for high school so nursing seems like the most commonly held job that requires a college degree.
I think this is exactly correct; people who learn slowly early on don't often speed up (there are "late bloomers", but they are a minority), and teacher qualification requires above median academic achievement.
Isn't this going to be a problem for all teachers, in all subjects, at all levels?
One would hope that everywhere below the doctoral level, classes are taught by people who are smarter than the median student in the class. Being aware of that and allowing for it is one of the most basic skills that educators need to develop.
Even at the doctoral level, only a fraction of students complete the PhD and a fraction of those get academic jobs. There might be some subjects where there are enough higher prestige jobs that the academics aren’t the most successful PhD graduates, but in all the fields where they are, the professors were above median students.
I don't have a PhD but I'm sure that's true. Still, the experience of realizing "this guy/girl is much more intelligent than I am" must be more common among academics working with doctoral candidates than among high school teachers, even though they'll occasionally have it too.
I doubt that, actually - very few high school teachers were never top percentile themselves, but they have to teach top percentile students.
Academics teaching doctoral candidates are more likely to be top percentile themselves. I suspect there are a lot of doctoral candidates for whom the first person they ever met who was obviously much more intelligent than themselves was their PhD supervisor. Indeed, I knew a few for whom that was literally the case - several of my TAs were supervised by Abdus Salam (Nobel, 1979) and the one I got to know fairly well related exactly that experience with Prof. Salam.
The median student is a different story, obviously the median PhD is much brighter than the median high school graduate.
True Jeff, but I feel that being drilled in vital but low level skills is particularly tedious. I'm a retired school psychologist who mainly worked in elementary schools and occasionaly came across students who were fluent decoders before they entered grade one. They were still exposed to phonics instruction. That said my career was based around students at the other end of the scale and it frustrated me to see them given shallow and ineffectual instruction in phonics when they really needed intensive systematic instruction FOR AS LONG AS IT TAKES!. Reading is more than decoding but if you can't decode you will never have a chance to read adequately. In years 4+ they were being taught as though they could read. It was like putting cripples on the football team!
My _very_ limited experience (TA for 3 semesters of a discrete math class) is I recall one student (in another TA's section) who struggled on that particular class, but also made the time to come to my office hours (I think they were more convenient than his TA's) and ask for help. Most students didn't come to office hours at all, so a combo of
1) Students at that point(mostly juniors in college) are probably better equipped to see where they are struggling and have the tools to address that.
2) It's much easier to provide extra instruction to the struggling students when the professor has TA's to help with that.
(I loved TA-ing that class, a highlight of my college/master's experience to be sure)
Yes! And, more broadly, as I've posted before, my short take on education policy is this: Kids should be able to learn and achieve their full potential at their best pace, in the settings and with the methods that work best for them.
This is why pushes against assessments are so incredibly pernicious. Effective education is all about presenting each student with material appropriate to them. The only way to do that is to effectively assess what they already know.
I’m generally unclear why I need a huge one time test to do that since I’m assessing all the damned time. I’ve only very seldom been surprised by any of this data. I assess learning all the time.
Having a one time standardized test be the decider instead of 170 class days is making policy around the losers.
You clearly can't have a 6 year old who can't read sit down and fill out an SAT style standardized test. You need appropriate ways to assess their knowledge level. And especially with young kids you need capacity to support kids learning at differing paces, because kids who might have the ability but not the practice need an opportunity to catch up with kids who had an earlier start with their parents or whoever.
Testing high school kids sometimes has similar issues: when state testing rolls around in the spring, I always suspect that we are measuring students' "give a shit" rather than their academic skill per se. Fortunately, "give a shit" and academic skills seem to be correlated.
And math is the new reading. There was a great piece over the summer on Noah Smith’s Substack about how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math. I’ve made this point elsewhere but the US education system overall does a poor job of meeting gifted kids where they are at and an equally poor job of meeting non gifted kids where they are at.
Oh boy, when I told my mom about some of the equity in education arguments being made out there, she got so angry--and she's normally one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. She was always frustrated about me being held back by the pace of the class, and how so happy she was when I tested into GATE and could be challenged better.
My daughter recently graduated from high school in a big city west coast school district with a strong equity focus and a non traditional grading system (I am not the custodial parent, it was not my idea). My daughter is also academically gifted (she skipped 2nd grade) and like a lot of gifted kids, lacks both humility about her talents and self discipline to see her through when her talents are not enough.
In my opinion, the lack tracking in middle school and honors/AP courses in high school did her a great disservice not just just in terms of meritocratic competition (I have a dumb Email job and I’m satisfied with my life, if my kid also has a dumb Email job it’s no great loss) but in terms of building character. My daughter never had a class where she had to develop self discipline to succeed, and she never had a class where she wasn’t aware she was one of the smartest kids in the room. For all the “woke” posturing of her school, she came out thinking of herself as one of the natural aristocrats, which is one of my greatest disappointments.
An AP calculus class where she was routinely average would not just made her a better student, but a better person.
Total bummer. I can't think back to my behavior in high school with enough self awareness to compare but I vividly remember getting my ass totally kicked in freshman year engineering and having a real come-to-Jesus moment my second semester about my level of effort, commitment, skipping classes, etc. Really turned around after that. Just saying ... college might provide that for her.
From your mouth to Gods ear. I remember a lot of entry level jobs I did in my twenties that put me shoulder to shoulder with people with spent their whole lives showering after work and basically getting my ass kicked at those jobs and having to really adjust my thinking and really realizing just how important that experience was in making me the man I am.
I do think so much of this comes down to competition. The earlier you can get reps competing the better. For me, there was nothing more humbling than getting completely outclassed on a wrestling mat. No one to blame. All on you. Either get better or don't. 20 years later -- same thing, everyday at work.
When our kids were in high school they got a new principal who tried to eliminate honors classes, and undermined efforts to add new AP classes. My husband remarked that he probably wanted all of the graduates of that school to be as mediocre as he was.
It’s maddening to me in a country where we desperately need more people who are good at STEM subjects that we are actively holding kids back who are good at it because it promotes equity. This is not like Ancient Greek languages for Shakespeare or some other oddball class. This is basic core math.
A that’s partly do to stupidity of the powers that be, but mostly it’s class warfare (with racist tinges). Rich (mostly) white parents with mediocre kids don’t want talented hard working poor (mostly Asian) kids to compete with them so they force “equity” on public schools and dismantle gifted programs, all while sending their kids to the private sectors, and relying on legacy admissions if that’s insufficient (cf. the demolishing of the sat).
True and then it’s twisted into some argument about how it’s helping black and brown students when it’s really not. Math more than almost any other subject needs to be tracked because when it’s not it’s a huge disservice to all students; those who are gifted are bored, those who struggle fall so far behind they cannot catch up and those who are average get lost in the shuffle.
My guess is that's not really what's happening, but where do you get the impression that that is the typical situation in a district where gifted programs are being dismantled? These things primarily seem driven by DEI people / people with advanced degrees in education. Most districts outside of NY, NJ and California don't really have enough Asian kids for that to be a significant part of it and class is seldom a binary and more often a bell curve distribution where the rich end does't have that kind of power or that stupid of kids.
I don’t know about the typical program, but I have the strong impression that this is happening at public magnet schools. If you look at what happened at TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School, a magnet school in northern Virginia), the people who opposed changing the admissions standards were all Asian. Maybe the white parents didn’t introduce those changes, but they certainly weren’t acting like they thought the “equity” changes were bad for them. And at TJ/magnet schools generally, there are definitely enough Asians that they seem like a threat to the white parents.
Yeah, and I guess I'm coming to the conclusion that this is kind of a niche thing. How many cities even have a magnet school with 10%+ Asian students, and then furthermore see it supporters / detractors cleanly cleaving among ethnic lines? My guess is not too many - I live in decent sized city and the public school system has none of the above as far as I'm aware, and far more college-bound students go to suburban districts.
Surely some of what THPacis claims is happening, but he paints with very broad, very cynical brush strokes. Not all PMC white parents are as machiavellian as he describes, nor as aware of the system-gaming possibilities of "equity" (though surely some are). Moreover, a fair number of European-descent children in the United States are actually intelligent and hardworking, and are driven by tiger parents every bit as demanding as the popular stereotype of Asian mums and dads.
Believe it or not some parents (of all colours) exist who just want their kids to have the richest possible education experience, and this includes honours classes, programs for the gifted, and the like.
"how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math"
Algebra seems to be one of those things that really derails people. I'm surprised that there isn't more of a summer school industry to intensively teach kids who didn't take Algebra in 8th grade.
yup, and if you try to crack the "mixed level class" problem by letting some kids advance at a different rate, there are some people who will get very angry... :(
This seems like a problem that should be solvable with computer instruction. Computers can easily present an endless number of problems to work on very narrow math topics, and can pace students individually.
You're right, but there's also a colossal difference between reading and math (and everything else) that no coverage of this subject seems to mention - Reading is not just a skill but a habit. Learning the basic skills of reading is great, but it doesn't get you all that far without a habit of reading. True literacy & highly skilled comprehension are achieved not through classroom lessons but through consistent long-term independent reading of a wide range of materials.
To your point, the problem you illustrate is pretty much entirely solved by letting more advanced kids read more advanced material independently. They already know how to ride the bike, and teaching them more "bike skills" is of pretty minimal value in getting better at it compared to sheer time spent riding.
The ability of schools to inculcate a habit of reading is pretty limited compared to parental influence. Parents who read habitually will probably raise children who read habitually whether they intend to or not. Kids want to do what their parents are doing - kids with parents who read habitually will leaf through books even before they can read much of anything. At first it's just for the pictures and then they slowly become able to glean letters, words and meanings to add to the pictures.
My inclination is that decreasing reading scores probably correlate entirely with decreasing habitual reading among parents in favor of phone-scrolling. Bad news for society, but great news for parents concerned about their child's positional relationship to other children in reading skill - just demonstrate a habit of reading to your kids and they'll almost certainly be excellent readers, and they'll leave most other kids in the dust whether they have phonics tutors or not.
What you are really describing is a labor problem, more than a mixing problem. In order to allow students to proceed at a personalized level, or even just at a bunch of levels, you would need considerably more teachers than we are willing to pay for at present.
Unless of course, if their are at least three or four different classes (like 95% of schools in America) that have mixed level abilities in the class. In which case... and I am no genius... it seems like you could use those three or four teachers... resort the classes, and have same ability classes.... with zero change in labor!
There is an enormous difference between kids at the 66th percentile and kids at the 98th percentile, and in a school with three teachers, that is literally what you are talking about combining. At that point, you are right back where you started: teachers providing differentiated instruction. I think your assessment is based on a lot of assumptions that don't actually hold very well in the complexity of the real world of instruction.
That's kind of the whole argument of Matt's column: this one weird trick is not going to solve education.
I mean, my assumptions are based on a twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer.
I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids.
Hard problems are hard. You are a smart person. If I offered the level of experience you are describing as evidence of my suitability to provide root-cause analysis of another, similarly complex phenomenon, you wouldn't take me seriously.
Even a teacher for every decile wouldn't be enough -- there are differences between the 91% kid and the 99% kid. Obviously we need a 1:1 teacher:student ratio or this isn't even worth trying. :)
Haha--fair. I should probably put it more like: I think sorting is less of a problem than your labor pool problems. I think teaching doesn't pay enough or carry enough cultural cache to create sufficiently deep labor pools to overcome other kinds of challenges that sorting might actually exacerbate. So I think that you're only going to be able to reap the advantages of a sorting approach if you put in enough money to overcome the downside risks; otherwise you are just robbing Peter to pay Paul, as it were.
That's fair, but you also often have high-performing kids who can make a lot of progress with less teacher time. For example I had a wonderful third grade teacher who let me do the math program at my own pace & just proctored tests for me. At our local school there is a similar option for kids to just do 8th grade math at their own pace online while also doing 7th grade math, to get into Algebra in 8th grade.
yeah I mean you just read the textbook & all the info is there... ask a question in the rare case where you get confused. easy-peasy. I also probably asked my parents questions at times - I know they were tracking my work fairly closely.
You don't get same-ability classes, but you get closer-to-same ability classes. I was in a "setted" school with four sets (two classes per set) and there was still an obvious and notable range of abilities in each set. Also remember that the sorting process is imperfect, and that students' abilities change over time (but moving them around too much harms their education too as it breaks their ties with their friends), and also vary by subject (some practical subjects, like PE, you're still teaching a mixed-ability class)
Actually, in the UK, we'd call that "streamed", we make a distinction between streaming (dividing on general academic ability) and setting (dividing on subject-specific academic ability). In that school we did both.
So, to pick an example: we had eight classes of 30 in the whole school; students were divided up into four streams based on their academic ability reported from primary school at the beginning of what you'd call sixth grade and we'd call first form (now "year seven").
We were restreamed for seventh grade ("second form" / "year eight") and ninth grade ("fourth form" / "year ten"), ie students would be moved up and down based on academic performance. Not many were actually moved - you had to be a long way above or below the line for it to make sense to move you. Generally, students would only be moved if it was a two-stream move, not a single stream.
In sixth grade, you were taught as a class of 30, but as you moved up and the school got a better sense of your academic abilities, the subjects would start "setting". As an example, ninth grade math was taught in three sets per stream, so the top 20 of the 60 in each stream were in one classroom, then the middle 20, then the bottom 20. This was based largely on your performance in eighth grade math. The top set in the three lower streams would usually end up somewhere between the middle and bottom set of the stream above. This is why moving a student up one stream was pointless; the top set of their current stream wasn't much different from the middle set of the one above (if they were good enough for the top set of the stream above, they were probably good enough for the middle set two streams up, and that was when they did get moved). Students would be separately setted for English, so you could be top set for maths and middle set for English (or vice versa). Subjects where the streams didn't work (practical subjects like art or music or physical education or shop class) tended to be taught as streams in what were effectively mixed-ability classes. Physical education was sex-segregated, so they segregated the streams, giving groups of 30.
The classes continued to exist as administrative divisions, even as teaching was increasingly done by stream (ie a group of 60) or set, rather than by class.
Aside: my primary school had no setting/streaming because it was one class per year. Very few UK primary schools, even in urban areas, are more than two-class entry (ie more than 60 per year). This is generally to ensure that the schools are within walking distance of the students' homes. Even in (what you'd call) kindergarten, my mother walked me to school, no school buses involved. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I was walking there and back myself. These days, there are "walking buses" where a volunteer adult (usually a parent) will lead a group of children to school, picking each one up as they pass their house on the way. The walking bus will include children of all ages (ie from 5-11) so the older ones can help keep an eye on the youngest. Obviously, some parents still drive their kids, but there are deliberate efforts to discourage them, including banning parking near to school entrances.
I would dispute that. Even without electronics, teachers have always been able to divide classes and focus on smaller groups. The key is allowing and expecting kids to self direct while they aren't in the group working with the teacher.
Yeah; I agree. I think that good teachers are often "good" because they are good at that kind of juggling. I was partly a lousy middle school teacher because I was so bad at that particular skill.
What I probably should have written is that I think you could actually get a lot of what Rory wants with either more teachers or with much more skilled teachers. But that comes back to what I said about it being a labor problem. I kind of think that it amounts to the same thing in terms of cost: you will either need to spend more money hiring more teachers or you will spend more money to pay the kind of wages that attract those superstar people with the individualized instruction skills to teaching and retain them long-term because the money is so good.
I'm skeptical that the existing labor situation is so awesome that high-quality individualized instruction is not lacking in a lot of classrooms. I feel like a lot of schools are doing what the school I worked for did: hiring people (like me at 22) with little or no experience because the labor pool just isn't deep enough to be highly competitive, given the wages on offer. And I think that if you had pooled the students in my school and then given me a less widely mixed group of students that I probably still would not have been equipped to deliver good instruction. I guess maybe you could have covered my flaws by giving me a bunch of high-performers who could progress without me, but that would have done those kids a disservice. Maybe I would have grown into a good instructor, given time, but the wages I made were not enticing enough for me to stick it out when I could take relatively little acquired teaching experience and jump to a corporate job that paid more with easier working conditions.
"I'd be skeptical of pointing to one thing as "the" problem."
I disagree. There is always one thing that is *the* problem, and it's always the same: it's monocausal explanation. Monocausal explanation is *the* problem.
I would normally agree with your snark... but having raised 9-kids... almost all problems in schools stem from teachers having to do to much. Even a subpar curriculum works better when teachers aren't having to provide multiple levels of instruction and discipline to 30-odd kids with different levels of ability.
Therefore, I will stick with my "The problem is..."
Because even if their isn't a monocausal explanation... sometimes there is a root problem.
It seems to me that this all or nothing approach to reading is missing the point. Kids need three things to read fluently: phonic awareness, vocabulary, and context. In order to enjoy reading at all, they have to be fluent in reading. Phonics is the foundation--learning the letters and how they sound, learning the combinations ("ST", "SH", etc....), learning how vowel sounds "glue" the consonant sounds together. A kid with a limited vocabulary can decode words but struggle to understand the meaning of what they are reading, so cuing using pictures or the other words in a sentence can really help. Cuing is a really useful skill--it only got a bad rap because the whole language school tended to jump over the "sound it out" step before going to the cuing steps.
The final skill is context-does the kid have a frame of reference for the content she is reading? Kids whose parents read to them a lot have seen stories about farms, about oceans, about caterpillars who are Very Hungry, etc. They may have visited places that have people who live differently or look differently than they do. Kids who have never read about or even seen a farm may struggle to form a mental model of what they are reading about, so their comprehension of the text is going to be limited by that. Again, this is an area where something that is seen as a Bad Thing can be really helpful-some amount of quality screen time. A kid who watches Finding Nemo will understand some basics about sea life and be able to enjoy a picture book about an adventurous fish.
It's really sad to me that "experts" dig in and either defend or demonize an instructional method. When my kids were in school, it was math wars---traditional instruction vs. "applied math" where kids were given practical problems to solve and less emphasis on memorizing formulas. As a highly verbal kid who had trouble with rote memorization, I would have thrived with the applied math program, vs. struggling and giving up because memorizing algebraic and geometric formulas was overwhelming, and nobody at the time recognized that I had problems with complex memorization---I suspect this would have been picked up on had I attended school a generation later.
Rather than taking the position that teaching phonics has to replace whole language, or applied math has to replace traditional math, schools should recognize that these instructional methods complement each other and both are necessary for a kid to master a subject.
Kids master everything at different speeds. Whatever your method of reading instruction, there are going to be kids at different levels. I think early elementary school reading is an area where we actually have the best solutions to having kids at different levels in the same class -- some class-wide instruction, leveled reading groups, and, when all else fails, you just let the advanced kids read their own books. Whereas as they get older, that doesn't work anymore.
You mean those schools that provide early education for a fee thus ensuring you only get well off kids and engaged parents has studies showing they do better?
Not impressed by them. They are a prime example of why schools go to inquiry learning and whole language because .... if it works for upper middle class.... it will work for everyone.
Here's a lesson in humility for me as someone who has never taught in elementary schools:
The UK "... incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons...."
Three years of phonics lessons daily, hour-long. Wow.
I was no prodigy as a kid -- I learned to read around kindergarten some time. My guess is that most of the readers of this blog learned to read by first grade, and some of you smarties learned much sooner.
But the idea that there could be kids who have daily, hour-long lessons in cat pat sat mat and after two years of that still don't get it -- that's kind of mind-blowing to me. And a good reminder that elementary school teachers have to work with kids at every level, all at once. I don't think I have a good grasp of how challenging that would be, and I suspect it's easy for other substack readers not to get it, either.
The kind of people who write these pieces and most of those commenting don’t have a real grasp of what it’s like to move through the world with an IQ at average or below. It’s almost a foreign mode of existence and I think extrapolation from personal experience is difficult, tricky.
You’re not wrong, but please remember that different kids develop at different paces +some learning challenges can arise due to certian conditions (eg dyslexia) so that being slower to learn to read in elementary schools doesn’t necessarily mean being an adult with below average iq or vice versa
Over the course of my wanderlust-fueled career, I have been a classroom instructor for middle school, high school, college undergrads, grad students, and adults (as a corporate trainer).
Being a classroom teacher in middle school was the hardest teaching job by leaps and bounds. It's not even close. I can't even imagine keeping up with a class of second graders.
I don't mean to be curt, but weren't you telling someone earlier this week that you're one of the 100 or so people on planet Earth who's an expert on 19th century Chinese history or something? So you've had all these jobs and then became a world authority on a niche topic later on? Just curious. I meet so many world-leading authorities here on the Internet :)
Edit: further down the thread you wrote this. But claiming to be a world authority on Chinese history is still up from Monday. So you did all these things in your career? Huh!
"twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer. I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."
The answer is right there in the claim. My Ph.D. was in history; my subfield specialties included global health. And that helps you understand my expertise in teaching--I'm not sure what you think a "PhD historian" does, but the answer is that most of us teach, at least for a portion of our careers. If you buy what I said earlier this week about being an academic (feel free to check my credentials; they're legit), then it shouldn't surprise you that I claim to be a teacher. I can see why you raise your eyebrows at the middle school part, but like I said: wanderlust. I have done a lot--I mean A LOT--of different jobs. Hilariously, my wife agrees with you that this is all very sketchy, and she is hoping that my latest job (finishing nursing school this week!) is going to stick. And before you ask, I usually get good performance reviews and only got fired once, but I was a lousy middle school teacher. I was 22 and fresh out of college and oof. I think I would do it better today, but oof.
So re: our discussion earlier this week, how many people in the world do you actually think did a Ph.D. with a subfield in global health history? It can't be that many. I was the only one in my particular program; I had to literally do a DIY thing where I assembled different people to handle different specialty topics and reading lists, which sounds very fancy but is actually not that unusual in graduate training. How many of those folks did nineteenth and early twentieth century stuff? It has to be an even smaller number. So maybe "100" is correct, and maybe it isn't, but I doubt that it is, I don't know, 500 people well positioned to talk the Venn diagram of Opium Wars and modern drug policy. I must know or have met at least ten percent of them; it's not like the annual meetings for those professional societies are that ginormously large.
That said, you are actually correctly onto my game: if you have read a lot of my comments on this site, you know that I consistently down-weight expertise in favor of a claim that the world is extremely complicated in ways that tend to confound "expert" analysis. I also say that about "meritocracy." It's the subject of a whole ongoing thread on Ivy League and selective universities I have with THPacis, who is a lovely person who finds me a bit tiresome on this subject.
So yeah, I actually think you are correct about the problem of world-leading authorities, but not in the way you think, i.e. people becoming "experts" on the internet. I'm genuinely very skeptical of "world-leading" authority, because I think it has such sharp limits and can be defined so easily in a world where academics--like me--have these very, very niche areas of study. It's not actually that hard to be the guy who happens to have read more on a topic than 99% of the population. There are a lot of topics, and then you combine, periodize, or slice them, and suddenly, boom, you are an "expert."
For precisely this reason, you will see me pretty consistently argue the limits of claims, rather than making my own expansive ones. I'm sure you can find some counter-examples; I'm a pretty bombastic guy who thinks he knows lots of stuff about lots of stuff and is surely wrong about lots of it. But I mostly know that and try to let that knowledge inflect my analysis, and I think you will see that if you consistently read my comments on this site. (Although I might be wrong! You could probably conduct an experiment over the next month to check the claim.)
This is also why you will see me lay out my expertise in certain ways; you can actually find most or all of the evidence if you look down through my CV and across the other stuff on my website, which covers my academic history (link on my bio page on this site, I think).
There is an interesting side question, which is how much time do you need in a thing to be an "expert"? Like, I worked for the Texas Historical Commission and wrote a travel brochure for them on African American history in Texas (long, very stupid story with a hilarious ending). I do not feel like an expert on Texas Black history. But on the other hand, I literally wrote the f-ing brochure. I clearly had to do a lot of research and develop a pretty deep understanding of some stuff. But it's way outside what I would describe as my normal bailiwick. So am I an expert? Maybe? This is back to my feeling that expertise is actually a very slippery concept.
And that is where you circle back to my claims about my own expertise. And this is where I will write a thing that maybe I shouldn't write: precisely BECAUSE I try to hold myself to claims that are strictly true, I consider describing my claims of expertise to be maybe one step removed from a form of trolling. Like, I think they matter a lot more to the counter-party in most of these discussions than they matter to me. The thread you are citing is a good example. As you probably noticed, my whole thing in that discussion had nothing to do with arguing interpretation of the actual "expert thing" at issue. I literally argued that expertise in the Opium Wars and early twentieth century Chinese history was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
I showed up, flagged my expertise as similar to the poster's, and argued that our shared expertise was not all that relevant.
If you go read through my exchange elsewhere in the comments on this article, you should be able to identify a similar kind of dynamic. You will also find that I think, as a person who has a very weird and shaggy set of work / life experiences, that I also think experience is often a lousy basis for analysis.
In a sense, this is probably an ugly and unfair argumentative tactic. I basically show up and say, "I have this relevant training or set of experiences, and as someone with those things, I think your expansive analytical claims are pretty weak." And for someone claiming expertise or experience, they are stuck with either agreeing with me that expertise and experience is not that useful in this particular way, or they need to argue that my expertise or experience is very meaningful, in which case the fact that I disagree on the analysis is a genuine strike on the analysis. That might come over nihilistically, but believe me when I say that I don't actually mean it that way. I just genuinely believe that hard problems are hard, and that "experts" and people with "experience" often struggle the MOST with the complexity of the world, precisely because it feels like admitting that undercuts us.
I actually think that feeling is wrong; I think expertise and experience salted with a generous helping of humility is your best bet for tackling hard problems. But it doesn't feel as good as being the "expert: BOOM, I know stuff!"
Full disclosure- I certainly didn't read all this. But your CV says your dissertation was 'The Development of Radiation Therapy, 1895-1925'. Bit of a stretch to the Opium Wars, nah? Or, arguably, there's really no connection at all and you were caught lying?
I wouldn't personally care about gross exaggerations of expertise if you were just kinda less of a jerk about it, to David and to Rory in the comments section here.
"I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one" The whole comments section from Monday..... Then, "I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."
Maybe just dial it down a bit? A lot? You sound really arrogant, and then it turns out your supposed expertise is mostly fake.... A little humility could go a long way, is all I'm saying
Is the idea that you need to write a book about something to be an expert in it?
I mean, either I did study global health, or I didn't. I taught those classes: do you think I just lied about my expertise and they didn't check my transcripts?
Okay, full disclosure: not every school where I ever taught has asked to see my transcripts, but Penn did. They decided that I had the expertise I claimed to have, based on the coursework I completed (and on in-person interviews where they asked me some questions and concluded that I knew what I was talking about).
You can see a bunch of course reading lists on my website; either you think they suck and indicate a poor understanding or you don't. But presumably I think they are pretty good, or I wouldn't, you know, put them on my website.
Like I said: I actually do think that expertise is sharply circumscribed. There's a lot of things to know in the world and a lot of books to read. Honestly, one thing writing a book about radiation therapy has convinced me of is that expertise is highly overrated--like, am I an expert in the history of radiation therapy? There is so much stuff I don't know, and especially some questions that I still think are very poorly answered in the book, but I'm not convinced that anyone else knows the answers to those questions, either. And I'm also not at all convinced that the last 10% of my specialist knowledge on that subject is worth as much, in terms of my "expert-ness," as the first 90%; I think I quite possibly learned more of use for policy questions in the first year of my research than in the last two.
So I think your core problem is that you and I actually deeply disagree about what constitutes expertise and about the limits or value of that kind of knowledge. You think I'm a charlatan, but it is because you want to ascribe a value to a theoretical non-charlatan something that I'm not actually convinced is warranted even in the areas where you would concede that I belong.
I'm literally the guy who sounds really arrogant to you saying, "I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis." And I feel like if I said that to you in a bar, you would nod sagely and agree before taking another sip of your beer. So why does it bother you when I say, "I am an expert, and I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis"? And why does it bother you so much that you need to go over my CV looking for evidence that I don't have the expertise I claim to have?
The acid test of expertise is whether someone writes something dumb about a subject on which they should be smart. So it's easy to prove my non-expertise: go forth, my friend, and point out the subject on which I have something really dumb where I should be smart, based on my supposed expertise. I post way too much on this site. I must have left my butt hanging out stupidly somewhere.
Also you, on Monday: "I'm an actual, honest-to-god historian with a Ph.D. and specific training in this area, which falls within my various areas of specialty training. I'm one of the hundred or so people on the planet with the specific expertise to discuss this issue at length and in detail. As you probably guessed from me doing that much wind-up, I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one."
To be fair, I had to look several of those up, although "BOUGH" is my go-to fourth pick for Wordle if I can't solve it in three or fewer guesses (starting with MERCH, PLAID, STONY).
But the point is not that they are doing three years of hour-long phonics lessons and still not learning to read. The point is that they are doing all those phonics lessons unnecessarily. The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, and they should be spending the time on other things.
"The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, ..."
Maybe? I don't think that is clear from the snippet that Matt gave us, and I have not read the full report.
If each one of these kids is a fully competent reader and is still being forced to do elementary phonics, then that's a different problem. I thought the problem was that some have mastered it and some have not.
"...in the U.K. they are currently in a backlash phase, based on the finding that British schools spent too much time on phonics instruction and not enough time on developing more advanced reading comprehension..."
[...]
“'There’s no question that phonics instruction is important,' Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University of College London, told Vox. 'But let’s be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You’re wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension.'”
Yeah, I'm honestly blown away by this being an issue for young would-be readers. It's no wonder why a lot of kids, especially boys, who tend to do worse academically, start to hate school, when they get THREE YEARS of lessons, and the feedback they're receiving over the entire time is that they're failing, you're not getting the material as quickly as your classmates, just try harder, etc. What is a 6 year old child supposed to think other than "I must be dumb" when they keep failing? Those things stay with someone for their whole life and self-concept. I'm all for giving people the opportunity to realize their potential, but my God we need to do a better job at giving people opportunities without a thinly veiled credentialism that relies upon largely hereditary traits like IQ and silos people from an early age.
I agree with this. I teach statistics at what is called the practitioner level. These are grad students who will use statistics in their research, but who are not primarily statisticians and never intend to be. People's background varies _widely_ from having a strong math background and having taken stats before to being math phobic and totally unfamilliar. That is by far the biggest challenge.
ok if we've got this phonics issue solved, can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables again?
It seems like this was foolishly dropped because no one likes "drill and kill" anymore, but now I watch kids hit trouble when they have to find common denominators for fraction or factor equations in algebra :(
We do arithmetic drills in our family, particularly focusing on multiplication. We do pencil and paper workbooks rather than an app, which is a sore point for my kids, but I think it is really good for them and I tell them they will thank me someday.
I just don't see how a kid can do math effectively until all the basic operations and tables are memorized and automatic.
They go to Catholic school, so the methods and content are a little more traditional than public school, but we do the drilling independently.
Yeah, Edutainment software is just phenomenal when it comes to math, since it can force you into memorization patterns that would be "too boring" otherwise. I'm trying to remember if my kids had access to anything like that...they are pretty bad with multiplicate tables sadly, though they understand the higher level concepts.
I think part of my luck was this being the early nineties, when other computer games were pretty terrible. It would be hard for math games to compete with Fortnite.
I don't know anything about education, so I do wonder: might it be extremely effective to have math classes basically all just be done on computers? It seems that just working problems is the most effective way to learn math. Computers can present endless problems on very narrow topics and can pace students so that core concepts are very solid before other topics are introduced.
"ok if we've got this phonics issue solved, can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables again?"
The main obstacle to acquiring elementary arithmetic facts is phonics.
I mean, "one"? "two"? What's up with those words? I don't see any "W" in "one"; how come I hear it? And why is the "W" silent in "tWo"? How come I say it where it isn't and don't say it where it is? Is this one of those "borrowing" operations? Am I supposed to "carry over" the W from two to one? Don't even get me started on "eight".
The fact is, phonics won't help here. Kids are never going to be able to learn their math facts until we have wholesale spelling reform.
Spanish also has the rare ü to indicate when it should be pronounced in a gu[e/i] setting, because regrettably like many dominant European languages, they also have contain the utter scourge of the soft G that should have been cast into the hottest dumpster fire ever.
I don't know about wholesale spelling reform as a necessary precondition. What I do know is that improving kids reading improves their math performance too. They can read word problems more accurately and parse the language into mathematical operations. They can read the instructions on written tests and use the given formulas - lots of kids ignore the little box at the beginning of various standardized exams that explains what to do and which equations are given/helpful in this section of the test because they can't read it.
There has seldom been a more foolish, superficial, shallow, lazy and thoughtless fad than this inane mantra “rote learning bad critical thinking good”. Rote learning is the basis and foundation of all learning. That goes to both quantitative and verbal thinking. Show me a school that forces kids to memorize multiplication tables and poems and I know there is potential for real education there.
Rote memorization of multiplication tables is important.
I cannot for the life of me think how memorizing poetry helps anyone; are you using poem memorization as a signal that the school probably has other good practices?
Well, a lot of poetry (song lyrics, epics, Shakespearean lines) was written with the expectation that readers would memorize and then recite it. We don't have to be whipping out the quills and parchment, but I do think there is something to be said for experiencing works of literature in their intended medium.
Absolutely. If you have to stop and think about every single digit multiplication operation in an algebra problem, solving a problem is going to take a LOT of time and extra cognitive load.
"can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables…this was foolishly dropped"
Is this really true? I remember multiplication table drills in second (2005) and third (2006) grade; I may well have had them in first and fourth and just don't remember. (And yes, this was a public school.)
I don't hate the common core math approach as much as many people seem to–it's how I intuitively do math and I was great at K-12 math. I am, however, disappointed with just how much it sounds like learning multiplication tables has been de-emphasized in a lot of cases. I really do consider it a foundational element up to a point.
Also, we drilled in multiple ways. I was good at those 60 second tests with a sheet of problems. There was a class clown that didn't seem like a great student otherwise but he *destroyed* at this around the world game with flashcards.
And it doesn't even have to be "drill and kill" anymore--I'm sure there are gamified arithmetic drill computer games out there. Adults ignore the fact that things that are boring for them can be a lot of fun for kids--playing Candyland made my eyes glaze over, but little kids love it.
There are computer flashcards, so you don't even need a para to do that. It's been two decades or more since I've seen the inside of an elementary classroom, so I don't know what I am talking about, but are kids still expected to be able to work independently and self-direct some of the memorization work that is needed in the early grades?
1. It's important for kids to learn phonics if they're going to become good readers.
2. It won't happen unless teachers agree.
3. The internal politics of public school education is complex.
4. New teachers in the US don't get enough support/advice from their more experienced colleagues.
5. The US system of teacher training is seriously flawed.
6. I'm delighted that Matt cares about these issues, but it makes me wonder why they aren't more widely discussed within the "punditocracy." I speculate that only a small minority of pundits have school-age children.
I'm guessing that the punditocracy has kids who likely learned reading at home and/or has the resources to supplement if their kids are struggling to read at school
yeah at first I did not know our schools were skipping phonics and multiplication tables because I was just teaching these things to my kids casually at home.... Sometimes I wouldn't start the car until someone could tell me what 8x7 was. And we had fun game where they would type random letters on the keyboard and then try to pronounce these silly words - pretty pure phonics fun.
I remember this series of songs we learned in third or fourth grade to memorize multiplication tables and there was a whole song for 8x7 specifically, because I guess that's one of the harder ones to remember. Still pops into my head from time to time. (your comment made it start playing in my head--eight times seven is fif-ty-six--it's not hard, for you!)
I liked your list, but I want to offer an alternate theory for 6. I feel like these issues actually are widely debated in the pundit class--education reform is perennially on the menu in political debates. I mean, it became a major feature of our national fights over Covid policy, just to take one example.
So my theory is that I think that there are so many different things in ed to fight about, because it is such a fearsomely complex problem, that we don't notice how many different fights are about the same thing. There's a guns-in-school debate that we lump as guns, more than school, and a Covid-school-policy debate that gets classed as Covid, rather than school, and a gentrification-and-schools debate that gets classed as a fight over property values, rather than schools, and a race / desegregation-in-schools debate that gets classed as race, rather than schools, and so on.
Like, it seems to me that you can find a school angle on 90% of the fights in our society, which is why it is such a f-ing hard problem.
Most adults (and that's most by a big margin) have at least one child in their lifetime. 40% of households have a child under 18 in them, which is a majority of all people (because households without a child are smaller on average), and if you add on everyone whose children are now adults and everyone who is intending to have a child in future, the majority of adults who care about schooling is huge.
Single adults without children or couples with no intention of having children are a pretty small minority of people (we're a fairly small minority of households, but being households of 1-2 persons, we're a much smaller minority of people). That means that almost everyone has a personal stake in education, and so anything that involves a lot of people is going to get tied back to education.
It's like how healthcare gets tied to everything: a small group of (mostly) young (mostly) men have relatively little personal need for healthcare, but everyone else needs regular contact with a doctor, so any big issue has a healthcare element to it.
True, but a) a lot of young people who may ultimately have children don't now, and b) I suspect that childless adults are more likely to spend their time writing essays.
I agree with you, and I agree with what I take to be Matt's main point, that solving the technical issues that make it hard to teach a specific skill is only a small part of a large problem that involves politics, society, and values.
I genuinely wonder how much normie, non-activist parents think about the method of teaching their kids to read. Our oldest learned how to read at 4 years old by sitting in our laps every night before bed and working through the words in a book, after we spent the previous 4 years reading to her every night. I have no idea whether this is the phonics method, or the 3 cue, or something else.
Was this phonics? Was it optimal? No idea! It just felt like the intuitive way to teach her to read. I have no idea what reading system they use at her school to supplement this either. She just started 4th grade and reads roughly two grade levels ahead and scores well on standardized testing, so I assume her comprehension levels are high enough, but I've never gotten feedback from the school one way or the other about it.
This is a meandering way to say that I'm not sure a lot of this debate about pedagogy filters down to parents. We're involved, educated parents who take an active role in making sure our kid learns, but we're totally oblivious to this debate roiling educational circles, and considering I've never once heard another parent bring it up at any play date, social function, PTA meeting, etc, I have my doubts we're the outliers here.
That said, our kid attends one of DC's premier, extremely in-demand charter schools which has excellent testing results, and I've become fully convinced this has more to do with self-selection of parents who want their kids to attend it rather than the actual education the kids receive, but that's a story for another day.
similarly, i first learned to read (at age 3) by my parents reading me books enough times that I memorised the words and eventually read them back to them. but i doubt my experience generalises very much, and my phonetic skills have never been great; i frequently mispronounced words growing up especially if I only ever saw them in text.
Isn't the mispronunciation of words you've only read a function of the non-phonetic quirks of English? Like how would anyone learn to pronounce lasagna or Worcestershire correctly unless it's heard.
For whatever its worth, I'm in my late 30s and still get caught (and mocked by my spouse) for mispronouncing words that I only ever see in text. I still don't know if biopic is supposed to be pronounced bio-pic or bi-aw-pic, and at this point I'm too scared to ask.
You're in good company; I don't think I stopped pronouncing "decipher" to rhyme with "Lucifer" until college. (I say "bi-aw-pic", which conforms to the natural tendency of English words to stress the second syllable, but Wiktionary lists that pronunciation as non-standard.)
My eternal curse on this is the evil soft G. My mind still thinks that the first syllable of Kirsten Gillibrand's last name should be the same as the breathing organ of fishes.
I imagine the vast majority of parents (understandably) won't care about all of this unless it's pointed out to them that their child is behind other students–regardless of the method the school is using–or is unable to do things out in the world that their parents expect them to be able to do at their age.
I have a lot more to add since this is an area I know a lot about but I think “we” have a pretty good sense of how much phonics instruction kids need and it’s about 30 minutes a day. Most elementary schools have between two and three hours of literacy/ela every day - more than any other subject. The consensus among people who do phonics instruction in classrooms (as opposed to what’s needed for intervention in specific cases of students who need more help) is that you can take half an hour to do structured explicit phonics instruction and use the rest of your readings and writing time for building knowledge and working toward fluency and comprehension.
The extreme anti-phonics position can be summarised in the form of a joke told by linguists: "English uses an ideographic writing system that composes words from 26 radicals".
This is clearly not literally true: most letters have no more than three phonemes associated with them, outside of specific contexts: so "c" can be /k/ or /s/ or silent; in the context of "ch" it can have that distinctive /tʃ/ sound, and there are some other special cases (e.g. /ʃ/ "sh" in machine, /x/ in loch). There are a few cases that are very irregular, most notably "-ough".
Still, this is why it's possible to go "too far" with phonics; English spelling is a useful but unreliable indicator of pronunciation; any adult who reads a lot will tell stories of words they have only encountered in writing, which they use regularly in writing, and which they have no idea of the correct pronunciation.
Phonics will get a reader started, but real comprehension comes when the reader moves beyond phonics. Knowing when to move from phonics because the learner has learned to read is a skill that is one of the things that you're paying for when you hire professional teachers
You don't have to "go beyond phonics", because while everything you said is true, there's a very basic glue that ties everything together: English spelling has a few different orthographic systems combined into one, and you just have to learn those (and which words come sit in what system) and you can pronounce any word. That's certainly more complicated than languages like Spanish and Japanese that adapt loanwords into their native orthography, but it's systematic.
edit: haha you literally made this point down below
Years ago, my parents and I were new immigrants in Vancouver. We spoke English, but we didn't speak it very well, and there were lots of words we had seen written but never heard spoken.
One day we had to find Hastings Street, and in an age before smart phones and GPS, we would stop random pedestrians and ask them for directions to "Huss-tings Street." Nobody had ever heard of such a place! We were puzzled. Hastings was supposed to be a major street in Vancouver!
Finally an intelligent woman looked at us for a moment and said, "Huss-tings... Ohhh, you mean HAY-STINGS!"
Yes, yes, we mean Hay-stings. Thank you, English pronunciation.
Exactly. English orthography is a mess. There are good reasons why it's a mess, but that doesn't make it not a mess.
Most of the languages with non-phonetic orthography are where the orthography predates historic sound changes - that is, it represents how the word used to be pronounced, rather than how it is now pronounced. This has the advantage that you can read older texts, even if the words have changed pronunciation a lot. There is an example elsewhere in the thread of Greek, which is deliberately spelled so that Greeks can read older Greek writing - for them, the New Testament is about as difficult as Shakespeare is for us (though Homer would be like us trying to read Beowulf in the original). There have been lots of sound changes since the New Testament, though, so they wouldn't be able to have a conversation with the gospel writers. Thai is another language where they can read things written over a thousand years ago at the expense of a messy orthography. Other languages have done a major orthographic reform (e.g. Turkish and Vietnamese), giving them regular orthographies, but also cutting them off from being able to read texts from before the reform - in both those cases, they switched to a new alphabet (to the Latin, from Arabic for Turkish and Chinese for Vietnamese), meaning that historians have a major barrier to reading older texts.
English is partly this - we still spell as if the Great Vowel Shift had never happened, for instance - but the other problem is a very strong tendency to not change the spelling for borrowed words - at least if they were borrowed after the invention of printing. Almost every other language will change a word to follow their own orthography, so they'll either change the spelling or the pronunciation (or, often, both). English tends to keep the original spelling (discarding all accents) and then to mildly anglicise the pronunciation (changing the French R sound to the English R sound, etc). The result is that the spelling rules depend on what language it came from and when it was brought into English. This really is gratutious complexity. There is no good reason not to respell it as mustashe, and expecting people to know the orthographies of about half a dozen European languages and the etymology of any word that has recently entered the English language in order to be able to pronounce/spell it correctly is absolutely unreasonable.
Re: keeping original spelling and/or pronunciation, when Polish (which has a very logical orthography) borrows words, it changes the pronunciation and/or spelling as much as it needs to to make the word both sayable and spellable. Simple example: the Polish word for computer is spelled "komputer" and pronounced "kom-POO-ter." If it were spelled "computer," it would be pronounced "tsom-POO-ter."
And two-vowel combos don't work well in Polish unless one of the vowels is "i,", so they've got to go.
I would love a short post on your daydreams regarding English spelling reform. Bonus points if posted in standard English and your ideal reformed spelling.
You can basically get a flavor of this by reading historical documents, particularly ones written in the United States pre-twentieth century. (I'm a historian.)
I think spelling reform is hard partly for two reasons. 1) It always kind of scans as hilarious, at least to me, when I read old documents where people are doing this, because as an adult you are already so deep in the tank for our stupid spelling. 2) My sense is that we don't actually have enough letters for all of the sounds we want, so we have all these digraphs and letter combinations that try to muddle through, with the result that even people trying to do the reformed spelling STILL spell the words differently from one another.
I agree, though, that I would love to see Matt write that column and think it would provoke a hilarious comments section.
What makes English spelling hard is not the use of digraphs. It's not that you have to represent "ch" and "th" and "sh" with two letters (note we used to have two characters for the two different "th" sounds in English...) It's that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound. One character can represent many sounds, and one sound can be represented by many characters. And it's hard to break down these patterns into rules that are consistently followed.
There are other challenges to spelling reform include: 1. that you lose the etymological relationships between words (if knowledge and know were spelled "nalej" and "no", for instance, you wouldn't know that they are related concepts), 2. spelling reform will by definition favor certain prestige/standard dialects over others. People speaking dialects with non-standard pronunciations will either have to change their pronunciations, or they will continue to have incongruity between speech and writing, 3. English has a complex system of vowel reduction that may be hard to incorporate into spelling. Most unstressed vowels of any in a word are reduced to a schwa when speaking normally. Now I don't think any of these things are insurmountable. But people may be not willing to make these tradeoffs (favoring certain dialects over others, losing etymological relationships) for the added ease of sounding out words.
Agreed. The reason Spanish (and I guess Finnish) can be spelled transparently is that the spoken languages don't have phonological rules which would complicate that.
English does, but maybe a clearer example is French. Would it actually be easier to spell French words with or without a final consonant, depending on the next word in the sentence, or to keep the current system of always spelling them the same way but having a rule about when it is or isn't pronounced?
I think the second option is obviously easier, just because the rule is one you need to learn for spoken French in any case. (Same with the contextual schwa-ification of English vowels.)
Welsh has rules where the sounds at the beginning of words change depending on the previous word, so Wales is "Cymru", but Welcome to Wales is "Croeso i Gymru".
They do change the spelling when these mutations happen. It means that the orthography is very regular (it's confusing to English-speakers because the letters represent different sounds from what they do in English, but they are consistent)
It makes the orthography easier to pronounce, but means you have to remember the mutation rules when writing as well as when speaking. Is it better or worse than the French way? Not sure.
Is that because Brazilian Portuguese words have context-dependent pronunciation, or only because Brazilian pronunciation has changed since Portuguese spelling was standardized?
Modern Greek, which I've studied a bit, falls in the second category. The pronunciation is usually not context-dependent but the spelling is unnecessarily complex, because it was fixed much earlier than for other European languages and a lot of vowel sounds have changed or merged over time. So "ι", "η", "ει", "οι" and in some cases "υ" are all pronounced the same way: like the English vowel in "meet".
That would make Greek a good candidate for spelling reform except for the other problem Brian Ross mentioned: if you smashed all these down to a single letter you'd obscure some of the language's etymology and disconnect modern speakers from the heritage of Ancient Greek. I don't think they want to do that.
Brazilian Portuguese is a diglossia (actually quite similar to German and Italian). Educated people in the cities speak the standard dialect (which correlates ok with the spelling), while rural people speak a very different dialect that does not. I've heard from folks that it's mostly not even mutually intelligible.
Thanks for this explanation of the digraph thing. That makes good sense.
In reading old medical records, I would often need to read out loud in an effort to "hear" the word and decipher what it was (especially for medical terms), and my feeling was always that it never did not make me sound like an idiot sitting at the research table in the archive.
"My sense is that we don't actually have enough letters for all of the sounds we want...."
Yes. That's why Ben Franklin, staunch advocate of spelling reform, simply created a handful of new characters to supplement the Roman alphabet. It's easier when you are used to casting your own type.
And as others noted, how many different vowel sounds you have depends on which version of English you speak. Do you use one or two or three different letters for the first vowel in Mary, marry, and merry?
Well, that's another of those weird gaps between spelling and pronunciation. We write the letters "pretentious suck-ups," but we pronounce it "British".
I'm Northern! At least I don't have the BATH-TRAP split.
I mean, I speak a generic middle-class Northern, not a proper local working-class accent where you can literally tell someone's home to within 10 miles. And when I say "you", I mean "I" - I grew up here and I have a pretty good ear for accents; it's just that I moved around a lot before I was 12 and my accent got all mixed up, so taking on a generic Northern accent was better than having random features from a bunch of different places, like I did in my teens (it was terrible: I sounded like a posh person trying to pretend to be working class and with no real idea where specifically they were trying to be from).
As a proud and very obvious Northwesterner, I merged as many vowels as I could with the alphabet I made up that I talked about in my top level comment. I think I got it down to about 9 different letters if I remember correctly.
And 3) it's highly daunting to reach a consensus on teaching a new system to a population that already knows the old system. Just look at all the failed efforts to convert to metric over here.
I have to go to work and I don't have time to think of this now, but here's where I would start.
First of all, get rid of the ridiculous "ough" letter combination that doesn't sound anything like how it's spelled. Change to:
enough -> enuf
through -> throo
although -> althou
See? Better already.
Next, let's have two different spellings for the different pronunciations of "th." Let's make "th" mean the sound in "this," and repurpose "x" for the "th" sound in "thin." X isn't a useful letter anyway, it can be easily replaced by ks. Go ahead and replace "ph" with "f" while you're at it. "G" is annoying, because it can be pronounced like in "gravity" or "giant." Let's use "g" only for words like "gravity," and for words like "giant," let's replace "g" with "j." Likewise, replace "c" with "k" or "s" as needed. We can keep "c" around for use in two-letter combos, like "ch" in "chocolate". "Chemistry" is now spelled "kemistri," sorry not sorry.
Now, the biggest problem with English, IMHO, is the vowels. I don't have a great solution here, because the number of vowel fonemes > the number of vowel letters. But let's give it a try.
I would get rid of the "e at the end of words is silent, but makes the preceding vowel long" (see: mat vs. mate, rat vs. rate). And get rid of two-consonant combos; usually two written consonants = one consonant phoneme, like in "comment." Just write "coment"! And let's have each vowel letter represent the "short vowel" foneme, and the "long vowel" foneme will be represented by two letters. Like so:
Lake -> layk
lack -> lak
rat -> rat
rate -> rayt
huge -> hyooj
hug -> hug
like -> liyk
lick -> lik
Aniway, this isn't veri wel xot owt, and aim awer that ai haven't akownted for meni vowel sownds in English. I do hev to go to work now thou. Wood lav to see sam coments!
"Let's make 'th' mean the sound in 'this,' and repurpose 'x' for the 'th' sound in 'thin.'"
Imagine the "They're the same picture" animated GIF here. (Seriously, if my life depended on it, I would say the "th" sounds in "this" and "thin" were identical.)
This is interesting. I spent 15 minutes trying to think of a pair of words for which I could say: “so do you pronounce X and Y exactly the same?” And the only pair of words I could think of was “loath” and “loathe”. And a lot of people don’t even use the word “loath” — or actually do pronouce it like “loathe” — so that’s not a very good example.
But it doesn’t matter. I was always bemused by the “Mary — marry — merry” trichotomy. Of course they’re pronounced the same!
In my made up alphabet I remember using the Greek theta, /Θ/, for thin, which I think the IPA uses as well, and then drew an additional vertical line for the sound in this.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills -- my tongue is positioned relative to my teeth in exactly the same way for "thin" and "this" and my breathing is the same for both. How is anyone getting a different sound for the start of those two words? I mean there's obviously a different sound to the overall words, but it's entirely in the back half: "th-in" (rhymes with "win") and "th-ehss" (rhymes with "kiss").
It's called voicing, the same difference between "d"/"t" and "b"/"p". Touch your throat; does it vibrate? (It should for "this", but not "thin".) That's your vocal cords at work.
(Edit: Ethics Gradient, responding to drosophilist in a sibling comment, scooped me.)
Like Ace-K above I'm having real trouble finding other examples, kudos to them for loath/loathe.
(Or hold the sounds for both. thhhhhhhis thhhhhhistle - the second one sounds like a leaky balloon to me, the first is more like humming - I can feel the vibration)
Actually, yes, thanks, holding the sound like that I can hear a difference in the "th" sound itself, not just a change in the subsequent sound. That said (pun intended), I at the same time can only hear it because of the exaggerated pronunciation. Speaking normally, I'd say those were the same sounds.
Huh, I don't think I have a particularly distinctive accent beyond "generic American." To me there are only two possible "th" sounds starting a word: one that sounds like "th" (this, thin, thing, thick, three, theater, etc.) and one that sounds like "t", which mostly if not exclusively turns up in proper names (Thomas, Thailand, Thames).
I don't know if this is the correct term for it in English, but the difference between "this" and "thick" is that the former is aspirated and the latter is not (aspirated = that extra little burst of air as you pronounce the sound; I don't know how else to describe it). Think the difference between v and f, or b and p. Linguists, feel free to correct me!
In mai niu and improovd Eenglish pronunsiashyn, "Thomas" and "Thailand" ar simpli speld "Tomas" and "Tailand."
Surely it's voicing rather than aspiration that's the salient feature here?
The lack of an Icelandic-style eth / thorn[1] contrast in the "th" digraph does stick out a bit like a store thumb precisely because voicing is the (nominal, not always observed in pronunciation) orthographic difference between many consonants in English:
b/p (although p being aspirated in various contexts is also salient),
d/t,
f/v
[c,k]/g [2]
s/z [3]
[1] Symbols for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sound respectively, still in use in Iceland, formerly used (I believe with less formal distinction between them than in Icelandic) in English.
[2] Precisely because voicing is way more salient than aspiration in English, I've heard (though don't know enough to confirm) that American English speakers actually better approximate one of the most common Korean family names if they say "Gim" rather than "Kim," because we tend to aspirate our "Ks" but not our "Gs," and aspiration is far more salient in Korean than it is in English.
[3] Note that despite orthography, terminal-S following a voiced sounds is generally voiced a la Z.
I knew you'd like this subject, good to see you here.
For whatever reason, in transportation they overwhelmingly spell it thru, so at least that would kill one of those -ough words. And I can't think of any such word that actually has a /g/ sound in it like it should when you look at the actual letters.
We have our solution! Genetically engineer humans with CRISPR to have six digits per hand (and per foot, just to match), and switch to base 12 at the same time!
Without this technology, the way I heard we could do it is some society that used the thumb to count the three bones on each of the four other fingers.
Exactly. While I would never endorse the Imperial system on its merits, the metric system's slavish devotion to base 10 is not maximally useful for everyday measurements, where dividing by 3 and 4 are very common things to do.
Yes, so base 12 improves fractions as long as the denominators aren't too large...but anybody who works with fractions for an extended period of time can tell you that denominators will grow very quickly. Conversely, base 16 is a power of 2, which makes working with computers and most combinatorial enumeration tasks easier.
We taught out kids to read with the book “teach your kid to read in 100 lessons.” It is amazing and I highly recommend it. It is phonics based, but initially scaffolds learning using diacritics (special markings above or on letters) so that each letter produces exactly one sound. It then drops the diacritics slowly. The diacritics make it easy for kids to sound out words initially without worrying about the complex set of sounds each letter can make.
The problem is always going to be mixed level classes.
Phonics is absolutely critical to becoming a good reader, but once a certain level is achieved, it then becomes about structure and base knowledge.
The problem is different kids master phonics at different speeds. Some very fast. Some very slow.
A kid who has mastered it is then being held back if sitting in a class with nothing but phonics.
A kid who hasn’t mastered phonics is lost without it.
Of course separating classes is problematic so teachers are meant to provide differentiated instruction. Which basically means half assing everything.
Everything above goes for math.
I have a suspicion that teacher's dislike of phonics is that they were part of the lucky majority who picked up phonics easily and have memories of being bored being drilled in skills and knowledge they already had. As a result the large minority who actually need slow careful instruction in the code were deprived of the basic bottom rungs of the reading ladder. And if you can't learn to read you're in serious life long trouble - even more so in todays world. It's an enormous risk factor for all sorts of nasty social/emotional/mental health problems too.
Exactly... I was going to write about his, but you beat me to it.
People who pick stuff up easily can't comprehend how people cant pick things up easily.
As a teacher who loved and enjoyed reading, running up against the roadblock of the hatred of reading was really difficult for me. And I really floundered in getting students who hated reading to actually read. I had a friend who had struggled in school as a student (somewhat--he never flunked anything) who was one of the best teachers I've ever seen. He anticipated so many issues from the "difficult" students and motivated them to do better. I left the profession, he has excelled in it and his patience and empathy with students is legendary.
We often pick people who excel as students to be teachers but the skills are so different. My friend wasn't great at one but incredible at the other but it is difficult to see until the person actually gets in the field.
My best math teacher had struggled with math. He had 3-4 ways to explain every concept.
Education degree majors have the lowest average SAT/ACT scores entering college across all degree majors. I'm not saying your idea isn't correct, but learning phonics quickly and low standardized test scores don't seem to inherently go together.
Only 50% of an age group enter college. They're not absolutely the top 50%, but they're pretty close to being. That is anyone who went to college is above median in elementary school.
Most people don't go to college at all, and education majors have substatially higher SAT scores than the cohort of people who don't go to college
Only because I was really interested in this .... BLS has 3.6M registered nurses (91% with bachelors degree) vs. ~2M elementary education teachers + 1M for high school so nursing seems like the most commonly held job that requires a college degree.
I think this is exactly correct; people who learn slowly early on don't often speed up (there are "late bloomers", but they are a minority), and teacher qualification requires above median academic achievement.
Isn't this going to be a problem for all teachers, in all subjects, at all levels?
One would hope that everywhere below the doctoral level, classes are taught by people who are smarter than the median student in the class. Being aware of that and allowing for it is one of the most basic skills that educators need to develop.
Even at the doctoral level, only a fraction of students complete the PhD and a fraction of those get academic jobs. There might be some subjects where there are enough higher prestige jobs that the academics aren’t the most successful PhD graduates, but in all the fields where they are, the professors were above median students.
I don't have a PhD but I'm sure that's true. Still, the experience of realizing "this guy/girl is much more intelligent than I am" must be more common among academics working with doctoral candidates than among high school teachers, even though they'll occasionally have it too.
I doubt that, actually - very few high school teachers were never top percentile themselves, but they have to teach top percentile students.
Academics teaching doctoral candidates are more likely to be top percentile themselves. I suspect there are a lot of doctoral candidates for whom the first person they ever met who was obviously much more intelligent than themselves was their PhD supervisor. Indeed, I knew a few for whom that was literally the case - several of my TAs were supervised by Abdus Salam (Nobel, 1979) and the one I got to know fairly well related exactly that experience with Prof. Salam.
The median student is a different story, obviously the median PhD is much brighter than the median high school graduate.
I think this is right.
True Jeff, but I feel that being drilled in vital but low level skills is particularly tedious. I'm a retired school psychologist who mainly worked in elementary schools and occasionaly came across students who were fluent decoders before they entered grade one. They were still exposed to phonics instruction. That said my career was based around students at the other end of the scale and it frustrated me to see them given shallow and ineffectual instruction in phonics when they really needed intensive systematic instruction FOR AS LONG AS IT TAKES!. Reading is more than decoding but if you can't decode you will never have a chance to read adequately. In years 4+ they were being taught as though they could read. It was like putting cripples on the football team!
My _very_ limited experience (TA for 3 semesters of a discrete math class) is I recall one student (in another TA's section) who struggled on that particular class, but also made the time to come to my office hours (I think they were more convenient than his TA's) and ask for help. Most students didn't come to office hours at all, so a combo of
1) Students at that point(mostly juniors in college) are probably better equipped to see where they are struggling and have the tools to address that.
2) It's much easier to provide extra instruction to the struggling students when the professor has TA's to help with that.
(I loved TA-ing that class, a highlight of my college/master's experience to be sure)
The gap is going to shrink as people advance through school
Yes! And, more broadly, as I've posted before, my short take on education policy is this: Kids should be able to learn and achieve their full potential at their best pace, in the settings and with the methods that work best for them.
This is why pushes against assessments are so incredibly pernicious. Effective education is all about presenting each student with material appropriate to them. The only way to do that is to effectively assess what they already know.
I’m generally unclear why I need a huge one time test to do that since I’m assessing all the damned time. I’ve only very seldom been surprised by any of this data. I assess learning all the time.
Having a one time standardized test be the decider instead of 170 class days is making policy around the losers.
You clearly can't have a 6 year old who can't read sit down and fill out an SAT style standardized test. You need appropriate ways to assess their knowledge level. And especially with young kids you need capacity to support kids learning at differing paces, because kids who might have the ability but not the practice need an opportunity to catch up with kids who had an earlier start with their parents or whoever.
Testing high school kids sometimes has similar issues: when state testing rolls around in the spring, I always suspect that we are measuring students' "give a shit" rather than their academic skill per se. Fortunately, "give a shit" and academic skills seem to be correlated.
And math is the new reading. There was a great piece over the summer on Noah Smith’s Substack about how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math. I’ve made this point elsewhere but the US education system overall does a poor job of meeting gifted kids where they are at and an equally poor job of meeting non gifted kids where they are at.
Great piece Matt!
Oh boy, when I told my mom about some of the equity in education arguments being made out there, she got so angry--and she's normally one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. She was always frustrated about me being held back by the pace of the class, and how so happy she was when I tested into GATE and could be challenged better.
My daughter recently graduated from high school in a big city west coast school district with a strong equity focus and a non traditional grading system (I am not the custodial parent, it was not my idea). My daughter is also academically gifted (she skipped 2nd grade) and like a lot of gifted kids, lacks both humility about her talents and self discipline to see her through when her talents are not enough.
In my opinion, the lack tracking in middle school and honors/AP courses in high school did her a great disservice not just just in terms of meritocratic competition (I have a dumb Email job and I’m satisfied with my life, if my kid also has a dumb Email job it’s no great loss) but in terms of building character. My daughter never had a class where she had to develop self discipline to succeed, and she never had a class where she wasn’t aware she was one of the smartest kids in the room. For all the “woke” posturing of her school, she came out thinking of herself as one of the natural aristocrats, which is one of my greatest disappointments.
An AP calculus class where she was routinely average would not just made her a better student, but a better person.
Total bummer. I can't think back to my behavior in high school with enough self awareness to compare but I vividly remember getting my ass totally kicked in freshman year engineering and having a real come-to-Jesus moment my second semester about my level of effort, commitment, skipping classes, etc. Really turned around after that. Just saying ... college might provide that for her.
From your mouth to Gods ear. I remember a lot of entry level jobs I did in my twenties that put me shoulder to shoulder with people with spent their whole lives showering after work and basically getting my ass kicked at those jobs and having to really adjust my thinking and really realizing just how important that experience was in making me the man I am.
I do think so much of this comes down to competition. The earlier you can get reps competing the better. For me, there was nothing more humbling than getting completely outclassed on a wrestling mat. No one to blame. All on you. Either get better or don't. 20 years later -- same thing, everyday at work.
The way things are going it’s becoming less likely unfortunately
When our kids were in high school they got a new principal who tried to eliminate honors classes, and undermined efforts to add new AP classes. My husband remarked that he probably wanted all of the graduates of that school to be as mediocre as he was.
It’s maddening to me in a country where we desperately need more people who are good at STEM subjects that we are actively holding kids back who are good at it because it promotes equity. This is not like Ancient Greek languages for Shakespeare or some other oddball class. This is basic core math.
"La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu."
A that’s partly do to stupidity of the powers that be, but mostly it’s class warfare (with racist tinges). Rich (mostly) white parents with mediocre kids don’t want talented hard working poor (mostly Asian) kids to compete with them so they force “equity” on public schools and dismantle gifted programs, all while sending their kids to the private sectors, and relying on legacy admissions if that’s insufficient (cf. the demolishing of the sat).
True and then it’s twisted into some argument about how it’s helping black and brown students when it’s really not. Math more than almost any other subject needs to be tracked because when it’s not it’s a huge disservice to all students; those who are gifted are bored, those who struggle fall so far behind they cannot catch up and those who are average get lost in the shuffle.
My guess is that's not really what's happening, but where do you get the impression that that is the typical situation in a district where gifted programs are being dismantled? These things primarily seem driven by DEI people / people with advanced degrees in education. Most districts outside of NY, NJ and California don't really have enough Asian kids for that to be a significant part of it and class is seldom a binary and more often a bell curve distribution where the rich end does't have that kind of power or that stupid of kids.
I don’t know about the typical program, but I have the strong impression that this is happening at public magnet schools. If you look at what happened at TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School, a magnet school in northern Virginia), the people who opposed changing the admissions standards were all Asian. Maybe the white parents didn’t introduce those changes, but they certainly weren’t acting like they thought the “equity” changes were bad for them. And at TJ/magnet schools generally, there are definitely enough Asians that they seem like a threat to the white parents.
Yeah, and I guess I'm coming to the conclusion that this is kind of a niche thing. How many cities even have a magnet school with 10%+ Asian students, and then furthermore see it supporters / detractors cleanly cleaving among ethnic lines? My guess is not too many - I live in decent sized city and the public school system has none of the above as far as I'm aware, and far more college-bound students go to suburban districts.
Surely some of what THPacis claims is happening, but he paints with very broad, very cynical brush strokes. Not all PMC white parents are as machiavellian as he describes, nor as aware of the system-gaming possibilities of "equity" (though surely some are). Moreover, a fair number of European-descent children in the United States are actually intelligent and hardworking, and are driven by tiger parents every bit as demanding as the popular stereotype of Asian mums and dads.
Believe it or not some parents (of all colours) exist who just want their kids to have the richest possible education experience, and this includes honours classes, programs for the gifted, and the like.
"how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math"
Algebra seems to be one of those things that really derails people. I'm surprised that there isn't more of a summer school industry to intensively teach kids who didn't take Algebra in 8th grade.
yup, and if you try to crack the "mixed level class" problem by letting some kids advance at a different rate, there are some people who will get very angry... :(
This seems like a problem that should be solvable with computer instruction. Computers can easily present an endless number of problems to work on very narrow math topics, and can pace students individually.
You're right, but there's also a colossal difference between reading and math (and everything else) that no coverage of this subject seems to mention - Reading is not just a skill but a habit. Learning the basic skills of reading is great, but it doesn't get you all that far without a habit of reading. True literacy & highly skilled comprehension are achieved not through classroom lessons but through consistent long-term independent reading of a wide range of materials.
To your point, the problem you illustrate is pretty much entirely solved by letting more advanced kids read more advanced material independently. They already know how to ride the bike, and teaching them more "bike skills" is of pretty minimal value in getting better at it compared to sheer time spent riding.
The ability of schools to inculcate a habit of reading is pretty limited compared to parental influence. Parents who read habitually will probably raise children who read habitually whether they intend to or not. Kids want to do what their parents are doing - kids with parents who read habitually will leaf through books even before they can read much of anything. At first it's just for the pictures and then they slowly become able to glean letters, words and meanings to add to the pictures.
My inclination is that decreasing reading scores probably correlate entirely with decreasing habitual reading among parents in favor of phone-scrolling. Bad news for society, but great news for parents concerned about their child's positional relationship to other children in reading skill - just demonstrate a habit of reading to your kids and they'll almost certainly be excellent readers, and they'll leave most other kids in the dust whether they have phonics tutors or not.
What you are really describing is a labor problem, more than a mixing problem. In order to allow students to proceed at a personalized level, or even just at a bunch of levels, you would need considerably more teachers than we are willing to pay for at present.
Unless of course, if their are at least three or four different classes (like 95% of schools in America) that have mixed level abilities in the class. In which case... and I am no genius... it seems like you could use those three or four teachers... resort the classes, and have same ability classes.... with zero change in labor!
There is an enormous difference between kids at the 66th percentile and kids at the 98th percentile, and in a school with three teachers, that is literally what you are talking about combining. At that point, you are right back where you started: teachers providing differentiated instruction. I think your assessment is based on a lot of assumptions that don't actually hold very well in the complexity of the real world of instruction.
That's kind of the whole argument of Matt's column: this one weird trick is not going to solve education.
There is less difference between kids at the 66th percentile and 98th percentile and the 15th percentile and the 98th percentile.
My assumption is based on raising 9-kids with different abilities in multiple states across multiple school districts.
I've seen it all. I know what works and what sucks.
I mean, my assumptions are based on a twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer.
I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids.
Hard problems are hard. You are a smart person. If I offered the level of experience you are describing as evidence of my suitability to provide root-cause analysis of another, similarly complex phenomenon, you wouldn't take me seriously.
I’ve met plenty of terrible 20-year teachers. You might be good. You might be bad.
Whole subject is predicated on some schools and teachers are sub-optimal.
As a yea her would you prefer to have a class with kids with similar abilities or a wide range.
Not what you can “handle”... what is optimal?
Even a teacher for every decile wouldn't be enough -- there are differences between the 91% kid and the 99% kid. Obviously we need a 1:1 teacher:student ratio or this isn't even worth trying. :)
Haha--fair. I should probably put it more like: I think sorting is less of a problem than your labor pool problems. I think teaching doesn't pay enough or carry enough cultural cache to create sufficiently deep labor pools to overcome other kinds of challenges that sorting might actually exacerbate. So I think that you're only going to be able to reap the advantages of a sorting approach if you put in enough money to overcome the downside risks; otherwise you are just robbing Peter to pay Paul, as it were.
That's fair, but you also often have high-performing kids who can make a lot of progress with less teacher time. For example I had a wonderful third grade teacher who let me do the math program at my own pace & just proctored tests for me. At our local school there is a similar option for kids to just do 8th grade math at their own pace online while also doing 7th grade math, to get into Algebra in 8th grade.
So you taught yourself?
yeah I mean you just read the textbook & all the info is there... ask a question in the rare case where you get confused. easy-peasy. I also probably asked my parents questions at times - I know they were tracking my work fairly closely.
You don't get same-ability classes, but you get closer-to-same ability classes. I was in a "setted" school with four sets (two classes per set) and there was still an obvious and notable range of abilities in each set. Also remember that the sorting process is imperfect, and that students' abilities change over time (but moving them around too much harms their education too as it breaks their ties with their friends), and also vary by subject (some practical subjects, like PE, you're still teaching a mixed-ability class)
Actually, in the UK, we'd call that "streamed", we make a distinction between streaming (dividing on general academic ability) and setting (dividing on subject-specific academic ability). In that school we did both.
So, to pick an example: we had eight classes of 30 in the whole school; students were divided up into four streams based on their academic ability reported from primary school at the beginning of what you'd call sixth grade and we'd call first form (now "year seven").
We were restreamed for seventh grade ("second form" / "year eight") and ninth grade ("fourth form" / "year ten"), ie students would be moved up and down based on academic performance. Not many were actually moved - you had to be a long way above or below the line for it to make sense to move you. Generally, students would only be moved if it was a two-stream move, not a single stream.
In sixth grade, you were taught as a class of 30, but as you moved up and the school got a better sense of your academic abilities, the subjects would start "setting". As an example, ninth grade math was taught in three sets per stream, so the top 20 of the 60 in each stream were in one classroom, then the middle 20, then the bottom 20. This was based largely on your performance in eighth grade math. The top set in the three lower streams would usually end up somewhere between the middle and bottom set of the stream above. This is why moving a student up one stream was pointless; the top set of their current stream wasn't much different from the middle set of the one above (if they were good enough for the top set of the stream above, they were probably good enough for the middle set two streams up, and that was when they did get moved). Students would be separately setted for English, so you could be top set for maths and middle set for English (or vice versa). Subjects where the streams didn't work (practical subjects like art or music or physical education or shop class) tended to be taught as streams in what were effectively mixed-ability classes. Physical education was sex-segregated, so they segregated the streams, giving groups of 30.
The classes continued to exist as administrative divisions, even as teaching was increasingly done by stream (ie a group of 60) or set, rather than by class.
Aside: my primary school had no setting/streaming because it was one class per year. Very few UK primary schools, even in urban areas, are more than two-class entry (ie more than 60 per year). This is generally to ensure that the schools are within walking distance of the students' homes. Even in (what you'd call) kindergarten, my mother walked me to school, no school buses involved. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I was walking there and back myself. These days, there are "walking buses" where a volunteer adult (usually a parent) will lead a group of children to school, picking each one up as they pass their house on the way. The walking bus will include children of all ages (ie from 5-11) so the older ones can help keep an eye on the youngest. Obviously, some parents still drive their kids, but there are deliberate efforts to discourage them, including banning parking near to school entrances.
I would dispute that. Even without electronics, teachers have always been able to divide classes and focus on smaller groups. The key is allowing and expecting kids to self direct while they aren't in the group working with the teacher.
Yeah; I agree. I think that good teachers are often "good" because they are good at that kind of juggling. I was partly a lousy middle school teacher because I was so bad at that particular skill.
What I probably should have written is that I think you could actually get a lot of what Rory wants with either more teachers or with much more skilled teachers. But that comes back to what I said about it being a labor problem. I kind of think that it amounts to the same thing in terms of cost: you will either need to spend more money hiring more teachers or you will spend more money to pay the kind of wages that attract those superstar people with the individualized instruction skills to teaching and retain them long-term because the money is so good.
I'm skeptical that the existing labor situation is so awesome that high-quality individualized instruction is not lacking in a lot of classrooms. I feel like a lot of schools are doing what the school I worked for did: hiring people (like me at 22) with little or no experience because the labor pool just isn't deep enough to be highly competitive, given the wages on offer. And I think that if you had pooled the students in my school and then given me a less widely mixed group of students that I probably still would not have been equipped to deliver good instruction. I guess maybe you could have covered my flaws by giving me a bunch of high-performers who could progress without me, but that would have done those kids a disservice. Maybe I would have grown into a good instructor, given time, but the wages I made were not enticing enough for me to stick it out when I could take relatively little acquired teaching experience and jump to a corporate job that paid more with easier working conditions.
Why is separating classes “problematic”? As you noted in a mixed setting just about everyone loses out.
I was being facetious.
It's not just phonics, they also need to teach content
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/to-make-progress-in-reading-we-need
Thats what I was talking about in my original post.
First comes phonics, then comes the other stuff like content.
Agreed
I agree that this can be a problem, but I'd be skeptical of pointing to one thing as "the" problem.
"I'd be skeptical of pointing to one thing as "the" problem."
I disagree. There is always one thing that is *the* problem, and it's always the same: it's monocausal explanation. Monocausal explanation is *the* problem.
I would normally agree with your snark... but having raised 9-kids... almost all problems in schools stem from teachers having to do to much. Even a subpar curriculum works better when teachers aren't having to provide multiple levels of instruction and discipline to 30-odd kids with different levels of ability.
Therefore, I will stick with my "The problem is..."
Because even if their isn't a monocausal explanation... sometimes there is a root problem.
It seems to me that this all or nothing approach to reading is missing the point. Kids need three things to read fluently: phonic awareness, vocabulary, and context. In order to enjoy reading at all, they have to be fluent in reading. Phonics is the foundation--learning the letters and how they sound, learning the combinations ("ST", "SH", etc....), learning how vowel sounds "glue" the consonant sounds together. A kid with a limited vocabulary can decode words but struggle to understand the meaning of what they are reading, so cuing using pictures or the other words in a sentence can really help. Cuing is a really useful skill--it only got a bad rap because the whole language school tended to jump over the "sound it out" step before going to the cuing steps.
The final skill is context-does the kid have a frame of reference for the content she is reading? Kids whose parents read to them a lot have seen stories about farms, about oceans, about caterpillars who are Very Hungry, etc. They may have visited places that have people who live differently or look differently than they do. Kids who have never read about or even seen a farm may struggle to form a mental model of what they are reading about, so their comprehension of the text is going to be limited by that. Again, this is an area where something that is seen as a Bad Thing can be really helpful-some amount of quality screen time. A kid who watches Finding Nemo will understand some basics about sea life and be able to enjoy a picture book about an adventurous fish.
It's really sad to me that "experts" dig in and either defend or demonize an instructional method. When my kids were in school, it was math wars---traditional instruction vs. "applied math" where kids were given practical problems to solve and less emphasis on memorizing formulas. As a highly verbal kid who had trouble with rote memorization, I would have thrived with the applied math program, vs. struggling and giving up because memorizing algebraic and geometric formulas was overwhelming, and nobody at the time recognized that I had problems with complex memorization---I suspect this would have been picked up on had I attended school a generation later.
Rather than taking the position that teaching phonics has to replace whole language, or applied math has to replace traditional math, schools should recognize that these instructional methods complement each other and both are necessary for a kid to master a subject.
Kids master everything at different speeds. Whatever your method of reading instruction, there are going to be kids at different levels. I think early elementary school reading is an area where we actually have the best solutions to having kids at different levels in the same class -- some class-wide instruction, leveled reading groups, and, when all else fails, you just let the advanced kids read their own books. Whereas as they get older, that doesn't work anymore.
You mean those schools that provide early education for a fee thus ensuring you only get well off kids and engaged parents has studies showing they do better?
Not impressed by them. They are a prime example of why schools go to inquiry learning and whole language because .... if it works for upper middle class.... it will work for everyone.
I've heard Montessori kids tend to be underprepared in certain areas. Math is most notable
Here's a lesson in humility for me as someone who has never taught in elementary schools:
The UK "... incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons...."
Three years of phonics lessons daily, hour-long. Wow.
I was no prodigy as a kid -- I learned to read around kindergarten some time. My guess is that most of the readers of this blog learned to read by first grade, and some of you smarties learned much sooner.
But the idea that there could be kids who have daily, hour-long lessons in cat pat sat mat and after two years of that still don't get it -- that's kind of mind-blowing to me. And a good reminder that elementary school teachers have to work with kids at every level, all at once. I don't think I have a good grasp of how challenging that would be, and I suspect it's easy for other substack readers not to get it, either.
The kind of people who write these pieces and most of those commenting don’t have a real grasp of what it’s like to move through the world with an IQ at average or below. It’s almost a foreign mode of existence and I think extrapolation from personal experience is difficult, tricky.
You’re not wrong, but please remember that different kids develop at different paces +some learning challenges can arise due to certian conditions (eg dyslexia) so that being slower to learn to read in elementary schools doesn’t necessarily mean being an adult with below average iq or vice versa
+1
Over the course of my wanderlust-fueled career, I have been a classroom instructor for middle school, high school, college undergrads, grad students, and adults (as a corporate trainer).
Being a classroom teacher in middle school was the hardest teaching job by leaps and bounds. It's not even close. I can't even imagine keeping up with a class of second graders.
I don't mean to be curt, but weren't you telling someone earlier this week that you're one of the 100 or so people on planet Earth who's an expert on 19th century Chinese history or something? So you've had all these jobs and then became a world authority on a niche topic later on? Just curious. I meet so many world-leading authorities here on the Internet :)
Edit: further down the thread you wrote this. But claiming to be a world authority on Chinese history is still up from Monday. So you did all these things in your career? Huh!
"twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer. I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."
The answer is right there in the claim. My Ph.D. was in history; my subfield specialties included global health. And that helps you understand my expertise in teaching--I'm not sure what you think a "PhD historian" does, but the answer is that most of us teach, at least for a portion of our careers. If you buy what I said earlier this week about being an academic (feel free to check my credentials; they're legit), then it shouldn't surprise you that I claim to be a teacher. I can see why you raise your eyebrows at the middle school part, but like I said: wanderlust. I have done a lot--I mean A LOT--of different jobs. Hilariously, my wife agrees with you that this is all very sketchy, and she is hoping that my latest job (finishing nursing school this week!) is going to stick. And before you ask, I usually get good performance reviews and only got fired once, but I was a lousy middle school teacher. I was 22 and fresh out of college and oof. I think I would do it better today, but oof.
So re: our discussion earlier this week, how many people in the world do you actually think did a Ph.D. with a subfield in global health history? It can't be that many. I was the only one in my particular program; I had to literally do a DIY thing where I assembled different people to handle different specialty topics and reading lists, which sounds very fancy but is actually not that unusual in graduate training. How many of those folks did nineteenth and early twentieth century stuff? It has to be an even smaller number. So maybe "100" is correct, and maybe it isn't, but I doubt that it is, I don't know, 500 people well positioned to talk the Venn diagram of Opium Wars and modern drug policy. I must know or have met at least ten percent of them; it's not like the annual meetings for those professional societies are that ginormously large.
That said, you are actually correctly onto my game: if you have read a lot of my comments on this site, you know that I consistently down-weight expertise in favor of a claim that the world is extremely complicated in ways that tend to confound "expert" analysis. I also say that about "meritocracy." It's the subject of a whole ongoing thread on Ivy League and selective universities I have with THPacis, who is a lovely person who finds me a bit tiresome on this subject.
So yeah, I actually think you are correct about the problem of world-leading authorities, but not in the way you think, i.e. people becoming "experts" on the internet. I'm genuinely very skeptical of "world-leading" authority, because I think it has such sharp limits and can be defined so easily in a world where academics--like me--have these very, very niche areas of study. It's not actually that hard to be the guy who happens to have read more on a topic than 99% of the population. There are a lot of topics, and then you combine, periodize, or slice them, and suddenly, boom, you are an "expert."
For precisely this reason, you will see me pretty consistently argue the limits of claims, rather than making my own expansive ones. I'm sure you can find some counter-examples; I'm a pretty bombastic guy who thinks he knows lots of stuff about lots of stuff and is surely wrong about lots of it. But I mostly know that and try to let that knowledge inflect my analysis, and I think you will see that if you consistently read my comments on this site. (Although I might be wrong! You could probably conduct an experiment over the next month to check the claim.)
This is also why you will see me lay out my expertise in certain ways; you can actually find most or all of the evidence if you look down through my CV and across the other stuff on my website, which covers my academic history (link on my bio page on this site, I think).
There is an interesting side question, which is how much time do you need in a thing to be an "expert"? Like, I worked for the Texas Historical Commission and wrote a travel brochure for them on African American history in Texas (long, very stupid story with a hilarious ending). I do not feel like an expert on Texas Black history. But on the other hand, I literally wrote the f-ing brochure. I clearly had to do a lot of research and develop a pretty deep understanding of some stuff. But it's way outside what I would describe as my normal bailiwick. So am I an expert? Maybe? This is back to my feeling that expertise is actually a very slippery concept.
And that is where you circle back to my claims about my own expertise. And this is where I will write a thing that maybe I shouldn't write: precisely BECAUSE I try to hold myself to claims that are strictly true, I consider describing my claims of expertise to be maybe one step removed from a form of trolling. Like, I think they matter a lot more to the counter-party in most of these discussions than they matter to me. The thread you are citing is a good example. As you probably noticed, my whole thing in that discussion had nothing to do with arguing interpretation of the actual "expert thing" at issue. I literally argued that expertise in the Opium Wars and early twentieth century Chinese history was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
I showed up, flagged my expertise as similar to the poster's, and argued that our shared expertise was not all that relevant.
If you go read through my exchange elsewhere in the comments on this article, you should be able to identify a similar kind of dynamic. You will also find that I think, as a person who has a very weird and shaggy set of work / life experiences, that I also think experience is often a lousy basis for analysis.
In a sense, this is probably an ugly and unfair argumentative tactic. I basically show up and say, "I have this relevant training or set of experiences, and as someone with those things, I think your expansive analytical claims are pretty weak." And for someone claiming expertise or experience, they are stuck with either agreeing with me that expertise and experience is not that useful in this particular way, or they need to argue that my expertise or experience is very meaningful, in which case the fact that I disagree on the analysis is a genuine strike on the analysis. That might come over nihilistically, but believe me when I say that I don't actually mean it that way. I just genuinely believe that hard problems are hard, and that "experts" and people with "experience" often struggle the MOST with the complexity of the world, precisely because it feels like admitting that undercuts us.
I actually think that feeling is wrong; I think expertise and experience salted with a generous helping of humility is your best bet for tackling hard problems. But it doesn't feel as good as being the "expert: BOOM, I know stuff!"
Full disclosure- I certainly didn't read all this. But your CV says your dissertation was 'The Development of Radiation Therapy, 1895-1925'. Bit of a stretch to the Opium Wars, nah? Or, arguably, there's really no connection at all and you were caught lying?
I wouldn't personally care about gross exaggerations of expertise if you were just kinda less of a jerk about it, to David and to Rory in the comments section here.
"I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one" The whole comments section from Monday..... Then, "I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."
Maybe just dial it down a bit? A lot? You sound really arrogant, and then it turns out your supposed expertise is mostly fake.... A little humility could go a long way, is all I'm saying
> just kinda less of a jerk about it, to David and to Rory in the comments section here.
Kind of a jerk is his thing. I already ignore his comments.
I tried to express empathy for his situation once and he trashed me for it instead: https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-5df/comment/18027237
Totally bizarre. What a jerk
Probably the right move, TBH. "Don't read the comments" is an internet meme for a reason.
Being a pompous jerk is his thing, though. "By the way, have I told you I'm a PhD historian lately?"
Is the idea that you need to write a book about something to be an expert in it?
I mean, either I did study global health, or I didn't. I taught those classes: do you think I just lied about my expertise and they didn't check my transcripts?
Okay, full disclosure: not every school where I ever taught has asked to see my transcripts, but Penn did. They decided that I had the expertise I claimed to have, based on the coursework I completed (and on in-person interviews where they asked me some questions and concluded that I knew what I was talking about).
You can see a bunch of course reading lists on my website; either you think they suck and indicate a poor understanding or you don't. But presumably I think they are pretty good, or I wouldn't, you know, put them on my website.
Like I said: I actually do think that expertise is sharply circumscribed. There's a lot of things to know in the world and a lot of books to read. Honestly, one thing writing a book about radiation therapy has convinced me of is that expertise is highly overrated--like, am I an expert in the history of radiation therapy? There is so much stuff I don't know, and especially some questions that I still think are very poorly answered in the book, but I'm not convinced that anyone else knows the answers to those questions, either. And I'm also not at all convinced that the last 10% of my specialist knowledge on that subject is worth as much, in terms of my "expert-ness," as the first 90%; I think I quite possibly learned more of use for policy questions in the first year of my research than in the last two.
So I think your core problem is that you and I actually deeply disagree about what constitutes expertise and about the limits or value of that kind of knowledge. You think I'm a charlatan, but it is because you want to ascribe a value to a theoretical non-charlatan something that I'm not actually convinced is warranted even in the areas where you would concede that I belong.
I'm literally the guy who sounds really arrogant to you saying, "I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis." And I feel like if I said that to you in a bar, you would nod sagely and agree before taking another sip of your beer. So why does it bother you when I say, "I am an expert, and I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis"? And why does it bother you so much that you need to go over my CV looking for evidence that I don't have the expertise I claim to have?
The acid test of expertise is whether someone writes something dumb about a subject on which they should be smart. So it's easy to prove my non-expertise: go forth, my friend, and point out the subject on which I have something really dumb where I should be smart, based on my supposed expertise. I post way too much on this site. I must have left my butt hanging out stupidly somewhere.
You: "Expertise is highly overrated"
Also you, on Monday: "I'm an actual, honest-to-god historian with a Ph.D. and specific training in this area, which falls within my various areas of specialty training. I'm one of the hundred or so people on the planet with the specific expertise to discuss this issue at length and in detail. As you probably guessed from me doing that much wind-up, I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one."
Which one is it Jeffrey?
For what it's worth, his substack profile has an easy way to get to his CV.
Is the third year of phonics still doing mat cat sat or is it doing through rough dough?
"...still doing mat cat sat or is it doing through rough dough?"
Though, if your training in mat cat sat was thorough enough, you can probably just plough through rough dough.
(I don't actually believe that, I just wanted to see how many "-ough" words I could get in there.)
[cough! cough!] you missed one!
SMBC kinda beat you to the punch on this one a few days ago https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce
And 3 days later XKCD joined the fun (https://xkcd.com/2819/)
Tough, man. Deal with it.
Gough, Hough, Kough, and Pough listened to the sough as they sat on a bough above the wough along the lough fed by the Yough.
To be fair, I had to look several of those up, although "BOUGH" is my go-to fourth pick for Wordle if I can't solve it in three or fewer guesses (starting with MERCH, PLAID, STONY).
CARES, POINT, BULKY are my first three if I just completely strike out on getting any letters.
But the point is not that they are doing three years of hour-long phonics lessons and still not learning to read. The point is that they are doing all those phonics lessons unnecessarily. The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, and they should be spending the time on other things.
"The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, ..."
Maybe? I don't think that is clear from the snippet that Matt gave us, and I have not read the full report.
If each one of these kids is a fully competent reader and is still being forced to do elementary phonics, then that's a different problem. I thought the problem was that some have mastered it and some have not.
It seems pretty clear to me. :
"...in the U.K. they are currently in a backlash phase, based on the finding that British schools spent too much time on phonics instruction and not enough time on developing more advanced reading comprehension..."
[...]
“'There’s no question that phonics instruction is important,' Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University of College London, told Vox. 'But let’s be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You’re wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension.'”
Yeah, I'm honestly blown away by this being an issue for young would-be readers. It's no wonder why a lot of kids, especially boys, who tend to do worse academically, start to hate school, when they get THREE YEARS of lessons, and the feedback they're receiving over the entire time is that they're failing, you're not getting the material as quickly as your classmates, just try harder, etc. What is a 6 year old child supposed to think other than "I must be dumb" when they keep failing? Those things stay with someone for their whole life and self-concept. I'm all for giving people the opportunity to realize their potential, but my God we need to do a better job at giving people opportunities without a thinly veiled credentialism that relies upon largely hereditary traits like IQ and silos people from an early age.
I agree with this. I teach statistics at what is called the practitioner level. These are grad students who will use statistics in their research, but who are not primarily statisticians and never intend to be. People's background varies _widely_ from having a strong math background and having taken stats before to being math phobic and totally unfamilliar. That is by far the biggest challenge.
ok if we've got this phonics issue solved, can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables again?
It seems like this was foolishly dropped because no one likes "drill and kill" anymore, but now I watch kids hit trouble when they have to find common denominators for fraction or factor equations in algebra :(
We do arithmetic drills in our family, particularly focusing on multiplication. We do pencil and paper workbooks rather than an app, which is a sore point for my kids, but I think it is really good for them and I tell them they will thank me someday.
I just don't see how a kid can do math effectively until all the basic operations and tables are memorized and automatic.
They go to Catholic school, so the methods and content are a little more traditional than public school, but we do the drilling independently.
Memorization is very underrated.
I was always top of my class in elementary school math due to my parents installing a program called "Math Blaster" on our 386.
Yeah, Edutainment software is just phenomenal when it comes to math, since it can force you into memorization patterns that would be "too boring" otherwise. I'm trying to remember if my kids had access to anything like that...they are pretty bad with multiplicate tables sadly, though they understand the higher level concepts.
I think part of my luck was this being the early nineties, when other computer games were pretty terrible. It would be hard for math games to compete with Fortnite.
I don't know anything about education, so I do wonder: might it be extremely effective to have math classes basically all just be done on computers? It seems that just working problems is the most effective way to learn math. Computers can present endless problems on very narrow topics and can pace students so that core concepts are very solid before other topics are introduced.
"ok if we've got this phonics issue solved, can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables again?"
The main obstacle to acquiring elementary arithmetic facts is phonics.
I mean, "one"? "two"? What's up with those words? I don't see any "W" in "one"; how come I hear it? And why is the "W" silent in "tWo"? How come I say it where it isn't and don't say it where it is? Is this one of those "borrowing" operations? Am I supposed to "carry over" the W from two to one? Don't even get me started on "eight".
The fact is, phonics won't help here. Kids are never going to be able to learn their math facts until we have wholesale spelling reform.
Bring back the rôle of accentéd letters in English! We can do it if we all coöperate! (This comment brought to you by The New Yorker.)
Spanish uses accents to help differentiate which syllable is stressed, which can certainly make for different words.
papá (second syllable stressed) = father(papa)
papa (first syllable stressed - I can never remember the auto-stress rules but they are consistent) = potato.
My husband frequently sees writing in Spanish fail to add these accents, so the evidence is even if we taught it we'd never all coöperate.
Spanish also has the rare ü to indicate when it should be pronounced in a gu[e/i] setting, because regrettably like many dominant European languages, they also have contain the utter scourge of the soft G that should have been cast into the hottest dumpster fire ever.
Classic rock bands tried their best!
Counterpoint: https://clickhole.com/going-rogue-the-new-yorker-has-announced-that-they-r-1841068853/
I don't know about wholesale spelling reform as a necessary precondition. What I do know is that improving kids reading improves their math performance too. They can read word problems more accurately and parse the language into mathematical operations. They can read the instructions on written tests and use the given formulas - lots of kids ignore the little box at the beginning of various standardized exams that explains what to do and which equations are given/helpful in this section of the test because they can't read it.
There has seldom been a more foolish, superficial, shallow, lazy and thoughtless fad than this inane mantra “rote learning bad critical thinking good”. Rote learning is the basis and foundation of all learning. That goes to both quantitative and verbal thinking. Show me a school that forces kids to memorize multiplication tables and poems and I know there is potential for real education there.
Rote memorization of multiplication tables is important.
I cannot for the life of me think how memorizing poetry helps anyone; are you using poem memorization as a signal that the school probably has other good practices?
Well, a lot of poetry (song lyrics, epics, Shakespearean lines) was written with the expectation that readers would memorize and then recite it. We don't have to be whipping out the quills and parchment, but I do think there is something to be said for experiencing works of literature in their intended medium.
Absolutely. If you have to stop and think about every single digit multiplication operation in an algebra problem, solving a problem is going to take a LOT of time and extra cognitive load.
"can we also get kids to learn their multiplication tables…this was foolishly dropped"
Is this really true? I remember multiplication table drills in second (2005) and third (2006) grade; I may well have had them in first and fourth and just don't remember. (And yes, this was a public school.)
I don't hate the common core math approach as much as many people seem to–it's how I intuitively do math and I was great at K-12 math. I am, however, disappointed with just how much it sounds like learning multiplication tables has been de-emphasized in a lot of cases. I really do consider it a foundational element up to a point.
Also, we drilled in multiple ways. I was good at those 60 second tests with a sheet of problems. There was a class clown that didn't seem like a great student otherwise but he *destroyed* at this around the world game with flashcards.
And it doesn't even have to be "drill and kill" anymore--I'm sure there are gamified arithmetic drill computer games out there. Adults ignore the fact that things that are boring for them can be a lot of fun for kids--playing Candyland made my eyes glaze over, but little kids love it.
There are computer flashcards, so you don't even need a para to do that. It's been two decades or more since I've seen the inside of an elementary classroom, so I don't know what I am talking about, but are kids still expected to be able to work independently and self-direct some of the memorization work that is needed in the early grades?
1. It's important for kids to learn phonics if they're going to become good readers.
2. It won't happen unless teachers agree.
3. The internal politics of public school education is complex.
4. New teachers in the US don't get enough support/advice from their more experienced colleagues.
5. The US system of teacher training is seriously flawed.
6. I'm delighted that Matt cares about these issues, but it makes me wonder why they aren't more widely discussed within the "punditocracy." I speculate that only a small minority of pundits have school-age children.
I'm guessing that the punditocracy has kids who likely learned reading at home and/or has the resources to supplement if their kids are struggling to read at school
yeah at first I did not know our schools were skipping phonics and multiplication tables because I was just teaching these things to my kids casually at home.... Sometimes I wouldn't start the car until someone could tell me what 8x7 was. And we had fun game where they would type random letters on the keyboard and then try to pronounce these silly words - pretty pure phonics fun.
I remember this series of songs we learned in third or fourth grade to memorize multiplication tables and there was a whole song for 8x7 specifically, because I guess that's one of the harder ones to remember. Still pops into my head from time to time. (your comment made it start playing in my head--eight times seven is fif-ty-six--it's not hard, for you!)
I liked your list, but I want to offer an alternate theory for 6. I feel like these issues actually are widely debated in the pundit class--education reform is perennially on the menu in political debates. I mean, it became a major feature of our national fights over Covid policy, just to take one example.
So my theory is that I think that there are so many different things in ed to fight about, because it is such a fearsomely complex problem, that we don't notice how many different fights are about the same thing. There's a guns-in-school debate that we lump as guns, more than school, and a Covid-school-policy debate that gets classed as Covid, rather than school, and a gentrification-and-schools debate that gets classed as a fight over property values, rather than schools, and a race / desegregation-in-schools debate that gets classed as race, rather than schools, and so on.
Like, it seems to me that you can find a school angle on 90% of the fights in our society, which is why it is such a f-ing hard problem.
Most adults (and that's most by a big margin) have at least one child in their lifetime. 40% of households have a child under 18 in them, which is a majority of all people (because households without a child are smaller on average), and if you add on everyone whose children are now adults and everyone who is intending to have a child in future, the majority of adults who care about schooling is huge.
Single adults without children or couples with no intention of having children are a pretty small minority of people (we're a fairly small minority of households, but being households of 1-2 persons, we're a much smaller minority of people). That means that almost everyone has a personal stake in education, and so anything that involves a lot of people is going to get tied back to education.
It's like how healthcare gets tied to everything: a small group of (mostly) young (mostly) men have relatively little personal need for healthcare, but everyone else needs regular contact with a doctor, so any big issue has a healthcare element to it.
"Most adults (and that's most by a big margin) have at least one child in their lifetime."
100% of adults were children in their lifetime!
True, but a) a lot of young people who may ultimately have children don't now, and b) I suspect that childless adults are more likely to spend their time writing essays.
I agree with you, and I agree with what I take to be Matt's main point, that solving the technical issues that make it hard to teach a specific skill is only a small part of a large problem that involves politics, society, and values.
I genuinely wonder how much normie, non-activist parents think about the method of teaching their kids to read. Our oldest learned how to read at 4 years old by sitting in our laps every night before bed and working through the words in a book, after we spent the previous 4 years reading to her every night. I have no idea whether this is the phonics method, or the 3 cue, or something else.
Was this phonics? Was it optimal? No idea! It just felt like the intuitive way to teach her to read. I have no idea what reading system they use at her school to supplement this either. She just started 4th grade and reads roughly two grade levels ahead and scores well on standardized testing, so I assume her comprehension levels are high enough, but I've never gotten feedback from the school one way or the other about it.
This is a meandering way to say that I'm not sure a lot of this debate about pedagogy filters down to parents. We're involved, educated parents who take an active role in making sure our kid learns, but we're totally oblivious to this debate roiling educational circles, and considering I've never once heard another parent bring it up at any play date, social function, PTA meeting, etc, I have my doubts we're the outliers here.
That said, our kid attends one of DC's premier, extremely in-demand charter schools which has excellent testing results, and I've become fully convinced this has more to do with self-selection of parents who want their kids to attend it rather than the actual education the kids receive, but that's a story for another day.
similarly, i first learned to read (at age 3) by my parents reading me books enough times that I memorised the words and eventually read them back to them. but i doubt my experience generalises very much, and my phonetic skills have never been great; i frequently mispronounced words growing up especially if I only ever saw them in text.
Isn't the mispronunciation of words you've only read a function of the non-phonetic quirks of English? Like how would anyone learn to pronounce lasagna or Worcestershire correctly unless it's heard.
For whatever its worth, I'm in my late 30s and still get caught (and mocked by my spouse) for mispronouncing words that I only ever see in text. I still don't know if biopic is supposed to be pronounced bio-pic or bi-aw-pic, and at this point I'm too scared to ask.
You're in good company; I don't think I stopped pronouncing "decipher" to rhyme with "Lucifer" until college. (I say "bi-aw-pic", which conforms to the natural tendency of English words to stress the second syllable, but Wiktionary lists that pronunciation as non-standard.)
My eternal curse on this is the evil soft G. My mind still thinks that the first syllable of Kirsten Gillibrand's last name should be the same as the breathing organ of fishes.
Probably but I really am relatively bad at English phonetics
I imagine the vast majority of parents (understandably) won't care about all of this unless it's pointed out to them that their child is behind other students–regardless of the method the school is using–or is unable to do things out in the world that their parents expect them to be able to do at their age.
I have a lot more to add since this is an area I know a lot about but I think “we” have a pretty good sense of how much phonics instruction kids need and it’s about 30 minutes a day. Most elementary schools have between two and three hours of literacy/ela every day - more than any other subject. The consensus among people who do phonics instruction in classrooms (as opposed to what’s needed for intervention in specific cases of students who need more help) is that you can take half an hour to do structured explicit phonics instruction and use the rest of your readings and writing time for building knowledge and working toward fluency and comprehension.
The extreme anti-phonics position can be summarised in the form of a joke told by linguists: "English uses an ideographic writing system that composes words from 26 radicals".
This is clearly not literally true: most letters have no more than three phonemes associated with them, outside of specific contexts: so "c" can be /k/ or /s/ or silent; in the context of "ch" it can have that distinctive /tʃ/ sound, and there are some other special cases (e.g. /ʃ/ "sh" in machine, /x/ in loch). There are a few cases that are very irregular, most notably "-ough".
Still, this is why it's possible to go "too far" with phonics; English spelling is a useful but unreliable indicator of pronunciation; any adult who reads a lot will tell stories of words they have only encountered in writing, which they use regularly in writing, and which they have no idea of the correct pronunciation.
Phonics will get a reader started, but real comprehension comes when the reader moves beyond phonics. Knowing when to move from phonics because the learner has learned to read is a skill that is one of the things that you're paying for when you hire professional teachers
"a joke told by linguists: "English uses an ideographic writing system that composes words from 26 radicals"."
Another version:
"English spelling is completely regular and follows a strict and unvarying set of rules. Each word has its own rule."
You don't have to "go beyond phonics", because while everything you said is true, there's a very basic glue that ties everything together: English spelling has a few different orthographic systems combined into one, and you just have to learn those (and which words come sit in what system) and you can pronounce any word. That's certainly more complicated than languages like Spanish and Japanese that adapt loanwords into their native orthography, but it's systematic.
edit: haha you literally made this point down below
Years ago, my parents and I were new immigrants in Vancouver. We spoke English, but we didn't speak it very well, and there were lots of words we had seen written but never heard spoken.
One day we had to find Hastings Street, and in an age before smart phones and GPS, we would stop random pedestrians and ask them for directions to "Huss-tings Street." Nobody had ever heard of such a place! We were puzzled. Hastings was supposed to be a major street in Vancouver!
Finally an intelligent woman looked at us for a moment and said, "Huss-tings... Ohhh, you mean HAY-STINGS!"
Yes, yes, we mean Hay-stings. Thank you, English pronunciation.
Exactly. English orthography is a mess. There are good reasons why it's a mess, but that doesn't make it not a mess.
Most of the languages with non-phonetic orthography are where the orthography predates historic sound changes - that is, it represents how the word used to be pronounced, rather than how it is now pronounced. This has the advantage that you can read older texts, even if the words have changed pronunciation a lot. There is an example elsewhere in the thread of Greek, which is deliberately spelled so that Greeks can read older Greek writing - for them, the New Testament is about as difficult as Shakespeare is for us (though Homer would be like us trying to read Beowulf in the original). There have been lots of sound changes since the New Testament, though, so they wouldn't be able to have a conversation with the gospel writers. Thai is another language where they can read things written over a thousand years ago at the expense of a messy orthography. Other languages have done a major orthographic reform (e.g. Turkish and Vietnamese), giving them regular orthographies, but also cutting them off from being able to read texts from before the reform - in both those cases, they switched to a new alphabet (to the Latin, from Arabic for Turkish and Chinese for Vietnamese), meaning that historians have a major barrier to reading older texts.
English is partly this - we still spell as if the Great Vowel Shift had never happened, for instance - but the other problem is a very strong tendency to not change the spelling for borrowed words - at least if they were borrowed after the invention of printing. Almost every other language will change a word to follow their own orthography, so they'll either change the spelling or the pronunciation (or, often, both). English tends to keep the original spelling (discarding all accents) and then to mildly anglicise the pronunciation (changing the French R sound to the English R sound, etc). The result is that the spelling rules depend on what language it came from and when it was brought into English. This really is gratutious complexity. There is no good reason not to respell it as mustashe, and expecting people to know the orthographies of about half a dozen European languages and the etymology of any word that has recently entered the English language in order to be able to pronounce/spell it correctly is absolutely unreasonable.
*mustash
Excellent points.
Re: keeping original spelling and/or pronunciation, when Polish (which has a very logical orthography) borrows words, it changes the pronunciation and/or spelling as much as it needs to to make the word both sayable and spellable. Simple example: the Polish word for computer is spelled "komputer" and pronounced "kom-POO-ter." If it were spelled "computer," it would be pronounced "tsom-POO-ter."
And two-vowel combos don't work well in Polish unless one of the vowels is "i,", so they've got to go.
"And two-vowel combos don't work well in Polish unless one of the vowels is "i,", so they've got to go."
Irony abounds, though: the diphthong in "computer" uses "i", and could be profitably spelled in Polish as "kompiuter".
There's also the different pronunciations of Houston that lurk out there.
I've always heard it pronounced "HYOO-ston." What other pronunciations are there?
"House-ton" as in "south of houston" aka SoHo
And paging Just some guy on this one, but there's also some fun street name pronunciations in Portland.
I would love a short post on your daydreams regarding English spelling reform. Bonus points if posted in standard English and your ideal reformed spelling.
You can basically get a flavor of this by reading historical documents, particularly ones written in the United States pre-twentieth century. (I'm a historian.)
I think spelling reform is hard partly for two reasons. 1) It always kind of scans as hilarious, at least to me, when I read old documents where people are doing this, because as an adult you are already so deep in the tank for our stupid spelling. 2) My sense is that we don't actually have enough letters for all of the sounds we want, so we have all these digraphs and letter combinations that try to muddle through, with the result that even people trying to do the reformed spelling STILL spell the words differently from one another.
I agree, though, that I would love to see Matt write that column and think it would provoke a hilarious comments section.
What makes English spelling hard is not the use of digraphs. It's not that you have to represent "ch" and "th" and "sh" with two letters (note we used to have two characters for the two different "th" sounds in English...) It's that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound. One character can represent many sounds, and one sound can be represented by many characters. And it's hard to break down these patterns into rules that are consistently followed.
There are other challenges to spelling reform include: 1. that you lose the etymological relationships between words (if knowledge and know were spelled "nalej" and "no", for instance, you wouldn't know that they are related concepts), 2. spelling reform will by definition favor certain prestige/standard dialects over others. People speaking dialects with non-standard pronunciations will either have to change their pronunciations, or they will continue to have incongruity between speech and writing, 3. English has a complex system of vowel reduction that may be hard to incorporate into spelling. Most unstressed vowels of any in a word are reduced to a schwa when speaking normally. Now I don't think any of these things are insurmountable. But people may be not willing to make these tradeoffs (favoring certain dialects over others, losing etymological relationships) for the added ease of sounding out words.
Agreed. The reason Spanish (and I guess Finnish) can be spelled transparently is that the spoken languages don't have phonological rules which would complicate that.
English does, but maybe a clearer example is French. Would it actually be easier to spell French words with or without a final consonant, depending on the next word in the sentence, or to keep the current system of always spelling them the same way but having a rule about when it is or isn't pronounced?
I think the second option is obviously easier, just because the rule is one you need to learn for spoken French in any case. (Same with the contextual schwa-ification of English vowels.)
Welsh has rules where the sounds at the beginning of words change depending on the previous word, so Wales is "Cymru", but Welcome to Wales is "Croeso i Gymru".
They do change the spelling when these mutations happen. It means that the orthography is very regular (it's confusing to English-speakers because the letters represent different sounds from what they do in English, but they are consistent)
It makes the orthography easier to pronounce, but means you have to remember the mutation rules when writing as well as when speaking. Is it better or worse than the French way? Not sure.
Is that because Brazilian Portuguese words have context-dependent pronunciation, or only because Brazilian pronunciation has changed since Portuguese spelling was standardized?
Modern Greek, which I've studied a bit, falls in the second category. The pronunciation is usually not context-dependent but the spelling is unnecessarily complex, because it was fixed much earlier than for other European languages and a lot of vowel sounds have changed or merged over time. So "ι", "η", "ει", "οι" and in some cases "υ" are all pronounced the same way: like the English vowel in "meet".
That would make Greek a good candidate for spelling reform except for the other problem Brian Ross mentioned: if you smashed all these down to a single letter you'd obscure some of the language's etymology and disconnect modern speakers from the heritage of Ancient Greek. I don't think they want to do that.
Brazilian Portuguese is a diglossia (actually quite similar to German and Italian). Educated people in the cities speak the standard dialect (which correlates ok with the spelling), while rural people speak a very different dialect that does not. I've heard from folks that it's mostly not even mutually intelligible.
Thanks for this explanation of the digraph thing. That makes good sense.
In reading old medical records, I would often need to read out loud in an effort to "hear" the word and decipher what it was (especially for medical terms), and my feeling was always that it never did not make me sound like an idiot sitting at the research table in the archive.
"My sense is that we don't actually have enough letters for all of the sounds we want...."
Yes. That's why Ben Franklin, staunch advocate of spelling reform, simply created a handful of new characters to supplement the Roman alphabet. It's easier when you are used to casting your own type.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin%27s_phonetic_alphabet
And as others noted, how many different vowel sounds you have depends on which version of English you speak. Do you use one or two or three different letters for the first vowel in Mary, marry, and merry?
Proud merger here. We mergers are the salt of the earth. Contrasters are pretentious suck-ups.
I'm British, so I pronounce them differently - and also non-rhotically (the "r"s are silent).
Well, that's another of those weird gaps between spelling and pronunciation. We write the letters "pretentious suck-ups," but we pronounce it "British".
Oooh, BURN!!!
I'm Northern! At least I don't have the BATH-TRAP split.
I mean, I speak a generic middle-class Northern, not a proper local working-class accent where you can literally tell someone's home to within 10 miles. And when I say "you", I mean "I" - I grew up here and I have a pretty good ear for accents; it's just that I moved around a lot before I was 12 and my accent got all mixed up, so taking on a generic Northern accent was better than having random features from a bunch of different places, like I did in my teens (it was terrible: I sounded like a posh person trying to pretend to be working class and with no real idea where specifically they were trying to be from).
As a proud and very obvious Northwesterner, I merged as many vowels as I could with the alphabet I made up that I talked about in my top level comment. I think I got it down to about 9 different letters if I remember correctly.
To my ear, Mary and marry sound identical, but merry has a different vowel sound.
Status: American who learned to speak English in Poland and still speaks with a weird Eastern European accent.
I've always been puzzled when I listen to my New York friend pronounce all three differently.
And 3) it's highly daunting to reach a consensus on teaching a new system to a population that already knows the old system. Just look at all the failed efforts to convert to metric over here.
This is fun!
I have to go to work and I don't have time to think of this now, but here's where I would start.
First of all, get rid of the ridiculous "ough" letter combination that doesn't sound anything like how it's spelled. Change to:
enough -> enuf
through -> throo
although -> althou
See? Better already.
Next, let's have two different spellings for the different pronunciations of "th." Let's make "th" mean the sound in "this," and repurpose "x" for the "th" sound in "thin." X isn't a useful letter anyway, it can be easily replaced by ks. Go ahead and replace "ph" with "f" while you're at it. "G" is annoying, because it can be pronounced like in "gravity" or "giant." Let's use "g" only for words like "gravity," and for words like "giant," let's replace "g" with "j." Likewise, replace "c" with "k" or "s" as needed. We can keep "c" around for use in two-letter combos, like "ch" in "chocolate". "Chemistry" is now spelled "kemistri," sorry not sorry.
Now, the biggest problem with English, IMHO, is the vowels. I don't have a great solution here, because the number of vowel fonemes > the number of vowel letters. But let's give it a try.
I would get rid of the "e at the end of words is silent, but makes the preceding vowel long" (see: mat vs. mate, rat vs. rate). And get rid of two-consonant combos; usually two written consonants = one consonant phoneme, like in "comment." Just write "coment"! And let's have each vowel letter represent the "short vowel" foneme, and the "long vowel" foneme will be represented by two letters. Like so:
Lake -> layk
lack -> lak
rat -> rat
rate -> rayt
huge -> hyooj
hug -> hug
like -> liyk
lick -> lik
Aniway, this isn't veri wel xot owt, and aim awer that ai haven't akownted for meni vowel sownds in English. I do hev to go to work now thou. Wood lav to see sam coments!
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
Yoo got it! Wel dun!
"Let's make 'th' mean the sound in 'this,' and repurpose 'x' for the 'th' sound in 'thin.'"
Imagine the "They're the same picture" animated GIF here. (Seriously, if my life depended on it, I would say the "th" sounds in "this" and "thin" were identical.)
You may also find this of interest on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform (The Chicago Tribune in particular spent about 40 years on the effort before giving up.)
This is interesting. I spent 15 minutes trying to think of a pair of words for which I could say: “so do you pronounce X and Y exactly the same?” And the only pair of words I could think of was “loath” and “loathe”. And a lot of people don’t even use the word “loath” — or actually do pronouce it like “loathe” — so that’s not a very good example.
But it doesn’t matter. I was always bemused by the “Mary — marry — merry” trichotomy. Of course they’re pronounced the same!
In my made up alphabet I remember using the Greek theta, /Θ/, for thin, which I think the IPA uses as well, and then drew an additional vertical line for the sound in this.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills -- my tongue is positioned relative to my teeth in exactly the same way for "thin" and "this" and my breathing is the same for both. How is anyone getting a different sound for the start of those two words? I mean there's obviously a different sound to the overall words, but it's entirely in the back half: "th-in" (rhymes with "win") and "th-ehss" (rhymes with "kiss").
It's called voicing, the same difference between "d"/"t" and "b"/"p". Touch your throat; does it vibrate? (It should for "this", but not "thin".) That's your vocal cords at work.
(Edit: Ethics Gradient, responding to drosophilist in a sibling comment, scooped me.)
Does 'this' vs' 'thistle' help?
Like Ace-K above I'm having real trouble finding other examples, kudos to them for loath/loathe.
(Or hold the sounds for both. thhhhhhhis thhhhhhistle - the second one sounds like a leaky balloon to me, the first is more like humming - I can feel the vibration)
Or maybe you just say them the same :)
Actually, yes, thanks, holding the sound like that I can hear a difference in the "th" sound itself, not just a change in the subsequent sound. That said (pun intended), I at the same time can only hear it because of the exaggerated pronunciation. Speaking normally, I'd say those were the same sounds.
Wow, that's fascinating! I've never heard an accent where "this" and "thin" have the same "th" sound.
What about "this" and "thick," do they also have the same "th" sound?
Huh, I don't think I have a particularly distinctive accent beyond "generic American." To me there are only two possible "th" sounds starting a word: one that sounds like "th" (this, thin, thing, thick, three, theater, etc.) and one that sounds like "t", which mostly if not exclusively turns up in proper names (Thomas, Thailand, Thames).
I don't know if this is the correct term for it in English, but the difference between "this" and "thick" is that the former is aspirated and the latter is not (aspirated = that extra little burst of air as you pronounce the sound; I don't know how else to describe it). Think the difference between v and f, or b and p. Linguists, feel free to correct me!
In mai niu and improovd Eenglish pronunsiashyn, "Thomas" and "Thailand" ar simpli speld "Tomas" and "Tailand."
Yeah the difference between this and thin is pretty subtle, but I can feel which one I'm saying.
For your last sentence:
Even though Tomas has an 'uh' for the 'a'(Tom-us) and Tailand has an 'ahh' for the trailing a?(Tile - and)?
Do you pronounce them differently than I do or was it a taipou?
Surely it's voicing rather than aspiration that's the salient feature here?
The lack of an Icelandic-style eth / thorn[1] contrast in the "th" digraph does stick out a bit like a store thumb precisely because voicing is the (nominal, not always observed in pronunciation) orthographic difference between many consonants in English:
b/p (although p being aspirated in various contexts is also salient),
d/t,
f/v
[c,k]/g [2]
s/z [3]
[1] Symbols for the voiced and unvoiced "th" sound respectively, still in use in Iceland, formerly used (I believe with less formal distinction between them than in Icelandic) in English.
[2] Precisely because voicing is way more salient than aspiration in English, I've heard (though don't know enough to confirm) that American English speakers actually better approximate one of the most common Korean family names if they say "Gim" rather than "Kim," because we tend to aspirate our "Ks" but not our "Gs," and aspiration is far more salient in Korean than it is in English.
[3] Note that despite orthography, terminal-S following a voiced sounds is generally voiced a la Z.
I knew you'd like this subject, good to see you here.
For whatever reason, in transportation they overwhelmingly spell it thru, so at least that would kill one of those -ough words. And I can't think of any such word that actually has a /g/ sound in it like it should when you look at the actual letters.
I misd a spot. "go" shood be "gou." Even theez niu rulz ar hard!
If only we had six fingers on each hand instead of five...
We have our solution! Genetically engineer humans with CRISPR to have six digits per hand (and per foot, just to match), and switch to base 12 at the same time!
I for one welcome our polydactylous overlords.
Without this technology, the way I heard we could do it is some society that used the thumb to count the three bones on each of the four other fingers.
Nah go right up to base 60. The babylonians had the right idea.
Base 60 still lives on in our minutes and seconds, and our measurement of circles!
Why? Honest question. Base 10 makes a lot of sense, it's not too big or too small, and it goes well with the ten digits on our hands.
Is it because 12 is divisible by both 2 and 3?
Exactly. While I would never endorse the Imperial system on its merits, the metric system's slavish devotion to base 10 is not maximally useful for everyday measurements, where dividing by 3 and 4 are very common things to do.
Counterpoint: base 16.
Yes, so base 12 improves fractions as long as the denominators aren't too large...but anybody who works with fractions for an extended period of time can tell you that denominators will grow very quickly. Conversely, base 16 is a power of 2, which makes working with computers and most combinatorial enumeration tasks easier.
We taught out kids to read with the book “teach your kid to read in 100 lessons.” It is amazing and I highly recommend it. It is phonics based, but initially scaffolds learning using diacritics (special markings above or on letters) so that each letter produces exactly one sound. It then drops the diacritics slowly. The diacritics make it easy for kids to sound out words initially without worrying about the complex set of sounds each letter can make.