I figured out why podcasts can be so damn irritating, they can be this patronizing, belabored setup to some ill thought out intellectual takedown you can't argue with in the same way you can with the written word.
Teach kids (and the teachers) the scientific method, apply it everywhere ruthlessly. If you are "teaching reading" but not measuring reading comprehension and adjusting your methods for that student, you aren't teaching reading.
Do science, demand that everyone does science. Stop using magic incantations.
The rebuttal was to the conversation about the purported efficacy of Reading Recovery (or lack thereof) reaching enough of a critical mass that policy makers started paying attention (in 2024) and threatening its publisher's revenue stream. (the final podcast episode aired in 2022)
Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms.
It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors.
There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems.
If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone.
Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen.
In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for.
If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
I will admit that I was not able to get to the core of the thesis in the podcast (s) and that I was being led around. I never experienced Reading Recovery first hand.
3-queuing seems like a heuristic that escaped the lab. Useful, but it should be the method of last resort if you can't ask an adult or find a dictionary.
I am also not saying that everything needs to have a scientific study to be shown effective. I learned to read by being read to, and having the joy of reading instilled at a very young age. I was encouraged to ask about passages or words I don't know.
Your writing is excellent.
Even if it wasn't intended, anything that as a byproduct, encourages kids to makeup definitions of words or skip over anything is an affront to our collective body of knowledge.
My experience leans more to the Sold a Story line. Schools were quite active in not teaching phonics. To the point that I am meeting people with the absurd notion that "English is not a phonetic language."
It was frustrating to see the rubric used in some schools. My kids with amazing memory could ace some readings, but only because they memorized the story. To the point that some of the teachers were confused that my kid could fully read back some books to them with perfect recall, but seemed lost if given a new book.
I've been seeing this extend to math. We seem to not be teaching how to read equations. They are things to be computed. With the best many can do is to point to it and say "that is the equation."
My kid pulled that trick on me when she was about 4. She memorized a passage, and could point to each word as she read it and tricked us that she could read, she took such great joy in it. "Ha ha, not so smart now are you adults!" :)
I don't know what all the root causes are, but these kids should be getting read to, questioned about what they heard and then reading out loud themselves.
Not defending Clay, but on the surface, "figure it out" is a pretty good heuristic. But we should be sounding out a word, breaking it apart, understanding what it could mean in that context, looking it up somewhere else. But if all you do is kinda fake it from the context, that might help in an emergency, but learning to read shouldn't be an emergency.
We should be creating children that are curious enough to want to solve the puzzle of meaning when they encounter words they don't understand or know how to pronounce.
Exactly. And I think this anecdote really underlines another point. It isn't that the kids are dumb! Quite the contrary, the better their memory and the better they are at connecting other things, the easier it is for them to skirt through without learning to read!
Totally, those little RL agents call us out when we just teach to the test.
I think we ask too much out of kids in the now and too little in the long term, this reinforces adult exceptionalism, that kids aren't capable.
By in the now, I mean that the kid has to show great 1 or 0 shot performance. Nearly everything is slow to start but gets bigger than we can imagine. More gradual slopes with a slight acceleration.
You mentioned video games in another thread, it was interesting to see the gradient in the combat mechanics in Street Fighter as you beat more characters. I was watching that same kid play, and you could see the difficulty gradient teaching, rewarding and ultimately training the player to feed quarters into is mechanical mouth.
I think there is a lot of overlap between game design and learning theory.
Agreed that there is a lot of interaction between game design and learning. It is difficult, as I think you can learn a lot of conflicting lessons depending on you look at things.
The largest lesson for me, at the moment, is that people love complaining about "rote memorization" but throw out the baby with the bath water, as it were. Memory is a large part of learning, such that trying to do anything that doesn't lean on it feels wrong.
And I don't mean just recall memory. Learning to juggle is one that showed me that memory can be a full body activity. Same for running/cycling. And getting good at things means doing it a lot.
Yes, "deliberate practice" is different than "rote practice." But they look an awful lot like each other. And I don't think anyone has a good trick for how to skip straight to deliberate.
I agree on memorization, it is very important esp in a complex domain where you have many concepts that are close and mislabeled, you cannot redetermine their local ordering every single time, at some point you have to remember things.
I think because our tests have generally sucked, and people like easy answers to problems, that leaning really hard on rote practice seemed like an easy win. It is necessary, but it is just a small part of a greater understanding.
My philosophy is the following.
Memorization enables fast recall and composition of concepts, which encourages one to be in the flow state, which is very rewarding. But overfitting by too much memorization prevents creative exploration.
My kid doesn't have instant recall for all the products through 12x12, but they can fill in the missing pieces pretty quickly. This is improving, but I also showed them how to round and make back of the envelope approximations, so they aren't calculating the number of eggs needed in a recipe to 3 places of accuracy.
I think the memorization portion of education should see the task of memorizing certain facts as a toolbox, and that with that toolbox you will be able to fluidly work on these kinds of problems. Without out, you will be knee deep in mud.
Because it's a dumb thing to lie about. This guy is part of the U.S. government now, so it's important to know if he's lying to us. This is something relatively inconsequential, but if he lies about more important things, well, that's not something you want in a government official.
Also, I'm bad at video games, but I don't care about that because they're fun to play. When you get someone else to do it for you you're taking all the fun out of it. I learned when I was younger that cheating ruins the experience. So if you're all about winning, that shows a lot of naivety.
1) it's really weird. He's the richest man in the world, and he's spending his time by pretending to be good at video games? Humanly, it's just darkly fascinating.
2) an important part of his public persona is that he's supposed to be genuinely super smart and capable at everything. Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
If he is willing to make under the table payments and shamelessly pass off other people's work as his own for such an insignificant feat as being good at video games, what does that say about his involvement with actually important things? The parallel is very easy to draw.
> Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
Do you have examples of this? In the past, I've looked for accounts of people who've worked with Musk praising his technical (not product, not sales/marketing) skillset, and I have been unable to find any firsthand accounts. Such an account would somewhat change my assessment of Musk.
> Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
I mean, one assumes that this is in the same sense that Kim Jong Un happens to be the world’s leading expert on whatever the factory he happens to be visiting does.
Nobody cares for people like me, but the consequences of the actions of this guy may now impact life of millions. Questionning his sanity, ethics, sense of priorities is always a matter of public interest. I don't know if HN is the place for that though.
Sheer curiosity. Good engineers and other technical people are often curious about how things fail. Elon Musk serves as one of the more interesting case studies in "How long can he possibly keep this up?!" since the late Howard Hughes.
Hughes's downward spiral occurred before most of us were old enough to watch it happen, so Musk is our next best chance.
Yeah. There is an api call that shows the mapping between a region's az names and the static az id's. I wasn't an early adopter but encountered the random az assignment in 2010.
R.I.P. Dark Skies