
How I Taught My Kid to Read - objections
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/
======
burfog
You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word.
English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic.

An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are
pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless
phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word.

A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specific vowels
with consonants. For example, B is not buh. It is equally bye, boo, bah, and
so on. When describing the sound B makes, it is best to always resist giving
just a single example. Instead: babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub. That mistaken
association causes trouble when sounding out words, because the extra vowel
ends up in the resulting word. Something like "baby" turns into buh-ay-buh-ee
with 4 syllables.

Untreated speech problems also interfere, no matter if you want to call them
accents or dialects or whatever. It is common to fail to distinguish running
from run-in, or pin from pen. It is common, particularly in New England, to
drop or add an "R". This makes reading so much harder. Teaching a person to
read can easily turn into speech therapy.

Late readers face the additional problem of not wanting to read books that
parents would buy for 4-year-old kids. (the intersection of things 4-year-olds
like and the things that won't offend or embarrass parents) There really isn't
much adult fiction with the vocabulary at the level of The Cat in the Hat.

~~~
a-saleh
I don't envy native english readers, as my teacher said, "I wouldn't be
surprised if one day English write Manchester and read Liverpool".

I am not sure of all Slavic languages work best with phonics, but one I
learned seems it does. Like if you just read the sound of each letter fast
after the other, you are 80% saying the word :)

~~~
freediver
Serbian is a slavic language with 100% letter for letter pronunciation. You
can probably learn to read in Serbian in 30 mins and impress your friends.
Understanding it is another matter :)

~~~
tomp
No, you still actually need to properly _learn_ the language. Just reading the
letters out loud will make you miss the word accents/stress, at the very least
you'll sounds wrong, at worst you'll mix up words.

Russian is even harder, as accent can change the sound a letter makes - e.g.
unstressed "o" is pronounced as "a".

~~~
Fins
That's regional accent. In Moscow it would be like that, but in other parts
unstressed "a" would be pronounced more like "o" instead.

------
skywhopper
I love McWhorter but this is a disappointing mishmash. While it does seem that
a lot of new educational techniques seem to be based on skipping past the
underlying fundamentals and trying to teach kids to immediately start reading
by whole words before learning the sounds letters represent and giving the
brain a few decades to recognize whole words at a go (as McWhorter describes
here), or by doing math by estimation before learning how to add or multiply
(and thereby developing an intuition for what estimate to even make) as my
daughter faced in elementary school, or as my accounting professor partner
struggles with as fundamental textbooks attempt to de-emphasize debits and
credits and just skip to the financial report; even so the lesson we should
probably take is not “just use phonics dummy!” But rather “maybe use multiple
methods and find individual paths for each student to be successful”.

We tried to teach my daughter to read using the exact book McWhorter praises
when she was that same age. She hated the lessons and didn’t progress, and in
fact didn’t learn to read until she was eight years old, and yet somehow she
is now, at 17, an avid reader and writer, having completed multiple NaNoWriMo
projects, an editor on her high school newspaper, and a star student in every
writing class she can get enrolled in.

Ultimately she benefitted from patient teachers and a nurturing environment
and a heavy dose of innate interest and the right disposition, not from a
specific teaching method. The only right answer is that there is no one right
answer for every kid.

~~~
Iv
> Ultimately she benefitted from patient teachers and a nurturing environment

All of the calls to alternate education methods fail to recognize the weakest
link in the education system: teachers. Teaching methods are not designed just
for kids but also for teachers.

Almost any method will work wonders with good teachers who know when to wait,
when to push, who are competent and empathetic. Methods need to be tested and
proved to work with below-average teachers to be considered a solution.

~~~
barry-cotter
The great strength of child centred instead of teacher centred methods is in
realising that it doesn’t matter whether a child learns to read at four, or
nine, or twelve. Once you really understand that Vygotsky’s zone of proximal
development means you can teach it to a four year old in 100s of hours, a six
year old in tens of hours and that a nine year old has a decent chance of
picking it up more or less by osmosis you wonder why we bother. The hard part
of reading isn’t sounding out words, it’s understanding complex thoughts. Four
year olds can’t do that.

A good teacher can make a big difference to how a child experiences a year of
their life but the long run effects on them are unlikely to be large. Children
of normal intelligence learn to read easily once they’re ready, just as you
can cover grade school math in under 40 hours with a normal twelve year old.

~~~
ksdale
I didn't know there was a term for this! My children are just starting to
enter the education system and I constantly find myself thinking, "Why are we
devoting so many hours to learning this (something like the alphabet) when we
could just spend a few minutes on it here and there and in 6 months or a year
they'll be able to pick it up with minimal effort?"

------
wisty
Phonics will always be unpopular with teachers for at least 3 reasons.

1\. Teachers are typically from good middle-class backgrounds, and will
naturally assume children will just learn to read because their parents
basically tutored them for hundreds or thousands of hours and they just
magically taught themselves.

2\. It's hard for an individual practitioner to have any idea whether their
methods are wonderful or absolute garbage. Look at how long it took doctors to
figure out hand-washing - now think about how hard it is for a teacher with 20
students (all of various ability levels) to know whether their methods have
any real impact. The kids grow up and are reading better after a year, it must
be the teacher, their method must be good.

3\. Boring stuff is boring for teachers. How are they meant to be entertained
in class if it's just mindless drill and kill routines?

So you've got "professionals" with no idea what actually works, some weird
notion that reading is easy (because they're good at it) and a choice between
boring methods that some researcher claims works, and interesting methods that
some other (not so nerdy) researcher also claims works (and they use bigger
words that are harder to understand when they explain their ideas).

~~~
hutzlibu
Well, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are
effective or not. As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are
individuals, but usual still average. So you could experiment. In real life
you probably can't as (at least in germany) it is pretty strict and fixed what
is about to be teached in class, when and how. That kills all creativity and
creates boredom in the teacher and his class.

~~~
wisty
> Well, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are
> effective or not.

Any evidence?

Doctors could figure out that not washing hands was killing patients, but
didn't.

> As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are individuals, but usual
> still average. So you could experiment.

There will always be multiple things a teacher does differently so it will be,
in practice, impossible to attribute success or failure to any particular
practices. That's aside from random noise (which might be more systematic -
what if some random good / bad kid happens to have a large influence on the
whole class?).

Remember how Skinner proved pigeons could develop superstitions? Or look at
any other profession that deals with a little bit of randomness (human factors
/ biology) and see the stupid stuff they used to believe.

------
spraak
We do a free schooling approach. My daughter speaks 3 languages and learned to
read all 3 simultaneously on her own* once she was ready (around 9). I felt a
lot of pressure from everyone (family, friends, etc.) to teach her earlier,
but now she reads just as well as her peers, and most of her peers/friends
only speak/read one language.

*literally on her own in that one day she wanted to learn to read, so we got a stack of books and she started stumbling through each word and asking how to pronounce it. She already knew some words from the environment, which provided the foundation. I also guided her on the books to choose so that she wouldn't feel overwhelmed, which was in the beginning board books for babies, that way she could feel satisfaction without giving up.

~~~
woodandsteel
I don't know much about home schooling (I assume that's what you mean by free
schooling). It seems to me that it could work well for some cases. But most
parents couldn't survive economically with one parent not working (and what
about single parents). Also most parents don't know enough academically to be
able to do it well, and most students are not as smart as I am guessing your
daughter is. So if your goal is to have a well-educated society, free
schooling is not the answer.

~~~
spraak
Check out the book I mentioned, Summerhill by AS Neill for how it could work
at scale. We do it ourselves because there is no analogy to Summerhill where
we live, so I agree with you in that regard

------
llllllla
I learned to read from ”100 Easy Lessons” shortly after its publication,
completing about 80 lessons before starting kindergarten. I never ended up
finishing all 100, however, so perhaps there are some phonemes I have yet to
learn.

One key element that the article misses is that a direct instruction approach
to phonics means that the learner is not just learning to say phonemes fast
and winding up with words, but is learning what it _feels like_ to construct
new knowledge from smaller bits. As a four year old, this meta-lesson was
known to me only as the incredible sense of joy and accomplishment in seeing
my parent’s face light up after successfully sounding out a difficult word. To
be able to read a word _without anyone telling you the answer first_ is
something truly formative for a budding intellect. I believe there is no way
to progress through “100 Easy Lessons” without also learning to some degree
that one can tackle the unknown.

------
technothrasher
_Did my daughter, as the child of two hyper-literate people with doctorates,
have some kind of leg up? I doubt it. Some kids pick up reading with minimal
guidance as early as 3; she wasn’t one of them, nor had she given indication
of any impending breakthrough. Besides, Engelmann’s book is designed for kids
of average intelligence and has worked with legions of them over the decades._

In a word, yes, she likely had a leg up. The credit mostly goes to her, not
you or the book you used.

As the father of a boy with an extremely strange developmental reading profile
(couldn't read a thing at age seven even after much one on one tutoring, to
reading at an eighth grade level at nine) I learned a few things talking to
many other parents and professionals. The most important is that no one method
works for all children, as they each learn to read in their own way. My boy
was definitely a "whole word" learner, and phonetics was a complete disaster
for him. Other kids are clearly the other way round, and many kids do a
combination of both.

Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many
factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them.

~~~
dcolkitt
> Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many
> factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them.

I'd say that's an overstatement and not congruent with existing research in
developmental psychology.

To preface it's important to distinguish between two reading skills.
"Decoding" is the ability to parse the symbols into words. "Comprehension" is
the ability to understand the content after its decoded.

Among children aged 7-8, there's a 40% correlation between general
intelligence and "decoding". With comprehension there's an astounding 62%
correlation with intelligence. Those are about the highest correlations you'll
see anywhere in social science.

Reading skills become progressively more loaded on comprehension relative to
decoding, as students progress into higher grades. Therefore you see the
general phenomenon that reading ability at younger ages is only moderately
correlated with intelligence, whereas for teenagers and adults its extremely
correlated.

[1]
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be1...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be19d76b4ae66a256.pdf)

------
chrismatheson
Well this is the first time I feel like my side “project” is worth mentioning
on HN. Unitsofsound [1] is a course that teaches reading, writing & spelling
using a syllabus based 100% on phonics.

At least that’s my layman’s understanding, we have a number of SME teachers
that guide the actual product development, my dad and I just build it.

I thought I would share here just in case anyone is interested, and would love
feedback for the new (non flash) version, so if you would like to try the home
version for free get in touch and you can become a BEtA tester in the near
future.

[1] [https://www.unitsofsound.com/](https://www.unitsofsound.com/)

~~~
gnicholas
I'd be interested to learn more and chat. I run a startup that, like
Unitsofsound, is in the literacy/dyslexia space. Contact via my website if you
want to chat! www.beelinereader.com

------
oflannabhra
Siegfried Engelmann [0] (the author of _Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy
Lessons_ , referenced in the story), developed a pedagogical model he named
Direct Instruction [1] in the '60s as a direct result of being focused on at-
risk, low-performing children. Here is a video [2] from the 60s of him working
with one of his initial kindergarten classes (doing complex math, etc), and
using many of the hallmarks of Direct Instruction. DI has become popular in
many primary charter schools across the country (ex, Thales Academy [3]),
although many schools transition to an inquiry-based model [4] after primary
grades.

DI is similar to rote learning, which is used throughout much of the rest of
the world. Lessons are heavily scripted, down to the minute, although there is
an emphasis for only focusing on practicing skills that have not yet been
mastered. One of the most controversial aspects of DI, and probably one of the
main reasons it has not been used in US public schools despite having a strong
history of effectiveness (here is a meta-analysis of over 300 studies over 50
years [5]), is that children are grouped according to skill, not age.

My kids are not quite yet old enough to learn to read, but I plan on using
_Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons_. DI might not work for every
child, but it has clearly been shown to be one of the most effective methods
that helps the most children.

[0] - [http://www.zigsite.com](http://www.zigsite.com)

[1] - [https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/basic-
philosophy.html](https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/basic-philosophy.html)

[2] -
[http://www.zigsite.com/video/zig_math_video.html](http://www.zigsite.com/video/zig_math_video.html)

[3] - [https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/what-is-direct-
instr...](https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/what-is-direct-instruction)

[4] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-
based_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning)

[5] -
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465431775191...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654317751919)

~~~
logfromblammo
This is exactly what I used with my kids. Neither finished the entire course
of 100, because they preferred to go to YA novels rather than the structured
practice in the later lessons. Both have consistently tested at multiple
grade-levels of reading ability above their public school age cohort.

I think I started them at 3 years old, though it took a while to get some
traction. You might have to repeat some early lessons.

------
ttcbj
My wife and I (mainly my wife) used the book mentioned in the article [1] to
teach both our kids (now 5 and 7) to read prior to their entry to
kindergarten.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is so intelligently organized, each
day building on the last. If you just read the intro chapter on amazon, you
will see how clearly they thought it through

That said:

1\. While teaching kids to read is good, I think the real goal should be
teaching them to _love_ reading. My son is now a voracious reader, and both
kids love books. The techniques we used to make this book fun include:

A. Finding something the kid really loves (e.g. tickles for my son, 'squeeze
hugs' for my daughter), and pairing it with each lesson. Every lesson ended
with a giant tickle or a set of squeeze hugs. You would think the kids would
get sick of this, but ours didn't.

B. Massive positive verbal reinforcement. Excitement, joy, at the reading,
amazement, wonder, etc.

C. Regular rewards, including little ribbons every 10 lessons, dinners out,
and a huge celebration when they hit 100. Every 20-30 lessons we would do
something crazy/unexpected, like rolling out a cake for breakfast (That was
just fun, kids love a surprise cake for breakfast).

2\. Our kids are very intelligent, but both hit a wall around 30 lessons. I
think they were both about 4.5 years at the time. The book says any kid over 4
can run right through the lessons, but I don't know. For both kids, when we
sensed they were hitting a wall, we decided to declare victory. We had a big
celebration, and told them to book said we had reached a stopping point. Then
we returned to it 6-12 months later and picked up where we left off. At that
point, we sailed though the rest of the lessons.

All this said, having watched my son, I think the best thing you can do for
your kid is make reading fun. The only way to develop a deep vocabulary is by
reading massive amounts, and you cannot force a kid to do that.

So, as awesome as this book is, and as amazing as it was to participate in the
process as a parent, the number one thing to do is not make reading
stressful/negative. Kids will learn eventually, they don't need to learn
early. The reason to take control of the process as a parent is to ensure that
the experience is positive/filled with joy.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-
Lessons/dp/0671...](https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-
Lessons/dp/0671631985)

~~~
ksdale
These are great points, and I'd take it even further and say the real goal of
all education should be to get them to love learning.

The quantity of formal education 18 year olds receive is potentially dwarfed
by the amount of stuff they can learn in their free time if they WANT to. On
the flip side, if kids really hate participating in education, they pass out
of the school system having learned astonishingly little.

------
robbrown451
I've been using the technique they describe with my daughter, but it often
takes a long time for her to get from saying "pi" "ih" "gu", to "pig".

I have had more success with an experiment I'm doing, which is a side project
of my bigger project, a music learning app. Since she loves to sing along with
songs, I put words of some of her favorite songs displayed where they are
highlighted syllable by syllable, synchronized with precision timing. This is
displayed on top of the YouTube video of the song. It's more effective than
reading aloud while pointing at the words (we do that too of course), and I
think having it to music helps a lot.

Here's an example (she likes Taylor Swift of course)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln9BenYpimQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln9BenYpimQ)

------
noufalibrahim
I used this book to teach my daughter (and now my son) to read
[https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-
to-...](https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-teaching-
reading/)

Worked really well.

------
lordnacho
I've got school aged kids in the UK, and I've never seen anything other than
phonics as the way to teach reading.

Seems to work just fine, never came across a kid who couldn't read quite soon
after they started being taught.

But of course that may just be my particular environment.

~~~
m-i-l
Yes, only ever seen phonics taught in the UK - wasn't aware there were
alternative approaches, let alone any controversy on the topic. It might not
be clear from the original article, but it isn't just single letters, there
are also digraphs (i.e. two letters that make one sound, e.g. bee is read
b-ee), split digraphs (i.e. where a digraph is split by a consonant, e.g. a-e
for cake), and later on things like the magic e and suffixes with a-y for
baby. There's some resources at
[https://www.gov.uk/education/phonics](https://www.gov.uk/education/phonics) ,
and you can look on iPlayer or YouTube for
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphablocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphablocks)
.

~~~
timthorn
Alphablocks is excellent and is also now accompanied by Numberblocks, which
was developed in conjunction with the National Centre for Excellence in
Teaching Mathematics.

There was a big push by the Conservative government as soon as they got into
power to get all primary schools to teach synthetic phonics. Before then,
whole word teaching was quite common.

------
eppp
I'll put this here since I learned of it from a Hacker News thread and taught
both of my boys to read with it: Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach. My
youngest still picks it up just to read it from time to time.

~~~
andrewgleave
I'm using it with my eldest also after seeing it mentioned here. I can't
recommend it enough, it has helped him enormously.

------
ggm
The problem with children is that we don't have an EEPROM erase function which
works. So, every individual is an autonomous experiment of one, with no
control and no repeatability: It is impossible to ever answer the question "if
I had done this differently, how would things have changed"

I say this, because in matters of learning, the pedagogy, the mechanisms,
especially when it comes to the learning of language and written language, is
HUGE. Some of it is burned in (Chomsky) and some of it not. Some of it relates
to age. Some of it relates to sound vs shapes. Its not simple to say "because
I did this, it works for a vietnamese person" because the scripts and
intonations and a whole bunch of stuff are different.

How well does it work to teach Chinese to people assuming left-to-right
scanning when chinese ideograms can be read up to down? Or how about when its
boudustrophon? How many written works assume left to right, and actually make
little sense for a right-to-left reader?

In many economies, and I include my own (Queensland, Australia) the whole word
vs phonics debate became hugely political. Its riven the early education
community: It is now actually quite hard to have a rational conversation about
teaching and learning in early childhood now.

Maths ability is similar. Start talking about rote learning and the "times
table" and watch people foam at the mouth.

Kids have amazing models of abstraction in part wired in. This is why "I
shutted the door" happens: its not because grammatical errors are in the
child: its because rational abstractions Shut -> Shutted happen _in the model_

------
mattrp
We've used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons with 4 of our 5 children
(the 5th is 2 years old). Starting at 3, they generally completed the book by
4-4.5, one took until he was 5. After they finish the book, the authors have a
list of recommended books for the kids to read next. It's a good list, but one
other source we added were travel brochures. Anytime we stopped somewhere on a
family trip, we'd load up on all the brochures of things to do in the area. My
9 year old is the oldest of the group, she's completed the Chronicles of
Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House Series each multiple times.
Our 8 year old just finished reading the "Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" and just
asked me for 100 feet of copper wire....our 6 year old wants to go to Round
Rock, TX - his favorite brochure and our 3 year old is on lesson 40... if it
were just one kid, I'd say it was just luck. But the book really works. And
each lesson takes between 10-15 minutes. If you figure over the course of a
year, you're spending roughly 25-40 hours on developing an independent reader,
it's a no-brainer.

------
musicmann
I'm always fascinated and curious about language learning. We seem to just
pick up our native language so easily as we're growing up, but it seems
difficult to pick up a new language with the same ease later on.

I don't have kids, and can't remember what my reading ability was at 4 years
old, but I thought when I started reading that I started out by identifying
individual characters and trying to sound them out piece by piece? I can't
imagine that I built my native language using the whole-word system, but at
the same time, that may explain all the spelling tests that I used to do.

I have been learning a completely new language (Polish) for a while now, but I
started with learning the sounds of the language first (and how to pronounce
the written language) which set up the framework for learning words and
phrases later on. I couldn't imagine starting off with learning whole-words.
That being said, I think once you have the basic framework start up, you
naturally move on to whole words, sentences, and eventually become free with
expressing ideas.

~~~
jacobolus
> _We seem to just pick up our native language so easily as we 're growing up,
> but it seems difficult to pick up a new language with the same ease later
> on._

Easily? It takes many thousands of hours to learn our native language in the
first few years of life.

> _I started with learning the sounds of the language first (and how to
> pronounce the written language) which set up the framework for learning
> words and phrases later on._

That’s not how language acquisition works.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FRKBxLvKmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FRKBxLvKmw)

------
WA
On a side note: Please remember that teaching your kid to read should come
from a place of curiosity from the kid itself. There is likely no advantage
from learning how to read at an earlier age (than school) [1].

[1]:
[https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/otago006408.html](https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/otago006408.html)

~~~
andrei_says_
I’d like to use this opportunity to remind everyone that extrinsic rewards and
punishment (withdrawal of rewards is also punishment) kills intrinsic
motivation and poisons the relationship destroying trust.

In other words if you want you child to stop enjoying an activity, encourage
or reward the activity.

For more, and a ton of research, see the work of www.alfiekohn.com and more
specifically Punished by Rewards.

~~~
mruts
I mean, is this even true? I love programming for example but love it a lot
more when I’m being paid a lot of money.

~~~
laumars
I _think_ the previous poster meant learning should be incentivised with
rewards; rather than a behaviour forced because the alternative is punishment.

~~~
andrei_says_
Incentivizing human beings means treating them like the rats and birds
Skinner-ian techniques were derived from. But we’re not rats nor birds and
thus such attitude is not effective long term. Apart from being condescending,
humiliating, degrading and destructive.

Rewarding a child for reading makes them read for the external reward (for
someone else) and makes them hate reading even more because of the humiliation
and having to go against their own internal compass in order to get something
they want.

You may say this prepares them for the “real world” of exploitation but maybe
1, truly successful people find ways to include their internal compass in
their daily flow career-wise and 2., a society where almost everyone tolls at
the whims and pleasure of a very few ought to be questioned (reference the
insane levels of inequality worldwide, having a king emperor is not
sustainable).

~~~
laumars
> _Incentivizing human beings means treating them like the rats and birds_

Not at all. Incentivising means to motivate. How many people work because they
want money rather than because they like to work?

> _Apart from being condescending, humiliating, degrading and destructive._

You're being a tad over dramatic :)

> _Rewarding a child for reading makes them read for the external reward (for
> someone else) and makes them hate reading even more because of the
> humiliation and having to go against their own internal compass in order to
> get something they want._

The first part might be true in some cases. But the latter part certainly
isn't. We might try to take the moral high ground but parents effectively
bribe their children on an almost daily basis: "if you eat all your dinner you
can have ice cream / chocolate for pudding"; "if you go in the bath now I'll
pour extra bubble mixture in"; "if you're a good buy while we are shopping
then I'll buy you a magazine / chocolate"; etc. Even just the process of potty
training involves giving over-enthusiastic praise every time they use the
potty / toilet instead of wetting themselves - effectively rewarding them with
gratitude.

Children are wilful creatures and, as much as we promote independence, we
still have lives we need to manage with chores and other stuff that isn't
always fun. Even as adults we manage that by saying things like "if I tidy the
kitchen now I'll chill with a glass of whisky and an episode of my favourite
show" or "I'll go for a run 3 times a week then reward myself with an ice
cream at the weekend"... etc. I used HN as a reward for some really dull work
(eg I'll write 10 sprint tickets then read something interesting on HN).

Suggesting that the whole concept of a reward system is broken is a massive
over-exaggeration. True, rewards _can_ be a broken way of encouragement when
used inappropriately but lets not throw the baby out with the bath water
(proverbially speaking).

> _You may say this prepares them for the “real world” of exploitation but
> maybe 1, truly successful people find ways to include their internal compass
> in their daily flow career-wise and 2., a society where almost everyone
> tolls at the whims and pleasure of a very few ought to be questioned
> (reference the insane levels of inequality worldwide, having a king emperor
> is not sustainable)._

I think you're trailing off into a hugely philosophical tangent and one I
don't really agree with. Capitalism is largely driven by financial reward -
many of the greatest disrupters did so for financial gain (the whole "changing
the world" meme is really a more dignified way of saying "we want this product
to make us rich"). So you can work for personal rewards without being
exploited.

~~~
andrei_says_
I appreciate the conversation but don’t have the bandwidth to engage your
points. If you’d like to explore the research, check out the resources I
mentioned. It’s possible you’ll arrive at a different opinions... different
from mine but also maybe different from your current ones.

I dislike the dismissive + condescending label you try to attach to someone
you haven’t really met. Labeling while effective, is not clean argument.

~~~
laumars
> _I dislike the dismissive + condescending label you try to attach to someone
> you haven’t really met. Labeling while effective, is not clean argument._

You need to read back this discussion because I've been anything but
dismissive and condescending while you have been using language like
"condescending", "humiliating", "degrading" and "dismissive" throughout.

In fact if you do read it back you'd also realise that I'm not even
disagreeing with the research _per se_ but rather disagreeing with the extreme
tone and ideology you're applying to it. The rest of my post is just real
world examples demonstrating that point.

~~~
andrei_says_
> You're being a tad over dramatic :)

You don’t know _me_ , and trying to frame me as something or other is a
technique to dismiss my statements. Ad hominem is not an argument, although it
works because human brains are vulnerable to fallacies.

If you are curious about why I used strong words you may ask :)

And, I appreciate the conversation and your clarification.

~~~
laumars
> _You don’t know me, and trying to frame me as something or other is a
> technique to dismiss my statements. Ad hominem is not an argument, although
> it works because human brains are vulnerable to fallacies._

You're reading far to much into that statement. It was simply an expression
stating "your wording is unnecessarily extreme". A point I stand by. The terms
you used go far beyond reasonable judgement.

> _If you are curious about why I used strong words you may ask :)_

If you're using intentionally provocative wording which requires an
explanation then you shouldn't be surprised if people take those comments on
face value when you don't supply an explanation.

------
gnicholas
I first heard of this book on McWhorter's podcast, in a fascinating episode
titled Why We Stopped Teaching Children How To Read [1]. Highly recommended!

The book has been fairly useful for my child, who at times doesn't want to do
more lessons but at times churns through a dozen lessons at once. Overall,
we're very pleased with it!

1:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/01/mark_seidenberg_and_john_mcwhorter_on_reading_versus_literacy.html)

------
groundCode
My child learned to read using phonics. We didn’t use this book though. At
some point she asked us what the squiggly black “pictures” in her book were.
Once she figured out that we weren’t just making up the stories and that they
were there for anyone to read she was motivated. Then reading time basically
became sounding out words with her until she could read. We were lucky to have
access to a lot of books very cheaply and some good libraries in walking
distance which helped.

------
725686
My kid can read just fine. The problem is that he hasen't learned how to ENJOY
reading... that is the hard part.

~~~
BuddyKallipygos
My sons, who are twins, were similar maybe. They learned all of the mechanics
of reading. They could read. They just weren't super into it the way their
older sister was. Until I let them log in to World of Warcraft with me when
they were around seven. When they realized there was a story to the game that
they needed to understand and details to the quests that they needed to follow
they suddenly cared about reading, they realized that it was a key that
unlocked a lot of really cool things. They because voracious readers from that
moment. Obviously there are pitfalls to bringing kids into an online
community, if I could have played it locally I would have. But it didn't start
out as a plan, it was sort of a whim and when I saw the effect I started to
use it judiciously, as another tool in our tool box.

------
lanestp
Coincidentally, we started using this same book a week ago with my son. It is
FANTASTIC! We've struggled with other methods but this one is working
amazingly well. The best part is that my son's motivation to work on reading
went from zero to off the charts. He's constantly on me to do more reading!

------
RickJWagner
My wife and I bought a 'Teach Your Kid to Read' book when the first one was a
baby. We'd read to the kids every day, encouraging them to read.

It was a great decision. The kids all do well in school, and they all have
benefited greatly from early reading. If you have a baby-- do this!

------
noisy_boy
For my daughter it was phonics at school (which seems to be quite common
nowadays) combined with reading stories to her daily (about 20 minutes or so).
Also took her to library and let her read/select her own books. Seems to be
reading fine.

------
lonelappde
For the child of average intelligence or higher, simply spending time reading
aloud while the child looks and listens and eventuate tries to lead is
sufficient to teach how to read. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's not
rocket surgery.

~~~
jacobolus
Time spent listening to hard books is for most children also more marginally
useful than time spent trying to learn to read very simple books
independently, especially at the earliest ages.

Kids who grow up in supportive and highly literate households are going to
learn to read sooner or later, without needing any excessive focus on drills.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with spending some amount of time on phonics,
but as a minor addition to lots of conversation and reading aloud, not as the
main focus.

If primary schools (some of the most extremely progressive ones partly
excepted) replaced most of the time currently spent on regimented reading,
spelling, and grammar instruction with the teacher just reading a variety of
long, difficult (just within reach of the audience) books aloud, it would do
wonders for student language skills.

~~~
saint_fiasco
"just within reach of the audience" is very hard when there are 20+ children
in a class who have very little in common except age.

If the children were carefully separated by ability it might work.

~~~
jacobolus
It doesn’t have to be perfect. If kids don’t understand every word or every
abstract theme of a book that’s okay. If kids aren’t maximally challenged by
every sentence, or if the teacher interjects a definition of a word they
already knew for the benefit of less prepared students, that’s also okay. Kids
who are a bit ahead or a bit behind will still generally stay engaged if the
story is interesting.

~~~
saint_fiasco
The smarter students can just tune out, read ahead, and enjoy the book. That's
not too bad.

The other way around is much worse. The slower students get frustrated as they
fall further and further behind until they feel it's impossible to catch up
and give up.

Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students,
not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this,
it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it.

~~~
docker_up
> Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced
> students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean
> to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it.

This is almost universally false. They target the least advanced students and
let them more advanced students fend for themselves. In the US it's even more
pronounced because of teacher evaluation by test scores, etc. Teachers are
incentivized to ignore the smarter kids because their test scores are high
already, and they get more bang for their buck by raising the scores of the
kids at the bottom of the range.

------
dusted
I distinctly remember that being how I learnt to read. By sounding out the
words, I couldn't imagine any other way?

~~~
sethammons
I think the level of "sounding out" can vary. I learned to read "on my own"
when I was 3 or 4 by realizing that the story my dad kept reading to me each
night had the same exact words spoken on the same page. I realized the words
on the page were related, so I would scan ahead and see the symbol "by" coming
up, and he would say "by"! I picked out other small words and linked them to
symbols and then linked larger sections of words. This ended up like sounding
it out, but by word-parts, not by letters. My parents were surprised to learn
that I could read when I read aloud a long word on a road sign as we were
driving. "Tippecanoe."

With my kids, they did not follow my path and were uninterested in relating
words to their sounds as we read books together, so we went with hooked on
phonics to solid success, where I first learned rules (as a college educated
adult mind you) like the sound of "x" (I had never realized what it was, like
"ks" in "ax" \- pronounced "ah-ks") and where I learned that a vowel typically
says it's name if followed by a consonant and another vowel. I hadn't
developed sounding out letters, I only sounded out parts of words in relation
to other words I was aware of. I think this could be part of my issues with
spelling in school.

------
tabtab
I learned to read by watching Sesame Street and other PBS children shows.

------
helloindia
"Nothing happened, even though guidelines that govern behavior on the platform
explicitly forbid mocking someone’s physical appearance.

Today, Instagram says, the outcome would have been different. More
sophisticated reporting tools and moderators would have quickly shut the
account down."

\--> This is BS. Just two days ago, I came across an Instagram account, which
had photos and videos of a friend & with captions making fun of my friend. I
reported the account for bullying and got a reply from Instagram that the
reported account doesn't violate it's community guideline.

When reporting an account, there is no way to provide a link of the actual
account.(from where the bully copied the content)

~~~
fheld
you might be in the wrong thread

