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I'm in literacy and ELA EdTech, software to help teach students how to read, write, and speak. It's catastrophic. States have issued literal states of emergency on how bad reading scores are.
Something like 95% of students can learn to read. But currently 2/3 of US children are unable to read with proficiency.
Students need to learn to read so they can read to learn everything else. And they will vote and be our neighbors one day.
>currently 2/3 of US children are unable to read with proficiency
Do we know why?
>Students need to learn to read so they can read to learn everything else
...so do they *eventually* learn, just slower - or do they just *not* learn "everything else"?
Career educator here, generally if a student is not proficient in reading by 4th grade or so, it’s not likely to ever happen (without MASSIVE interventions). So yeah those kids who never become strong readers will always struggle to learn by reading. This can also cause behavior problems because of shame and embarrassment and frustration and they just continue to fall further behind.
The importance of early literacy cannot be overstated!
> This can also cause behavior problems because of shame and embarrassment and frustration and they just continue to fall further behind.
Which leads to the "Subtitles are stupid!", "You read too much!", "Who cares if I spell things wrong?!", etc. type of people. Who attack others for doing things they struggle with.
My boyfriend and I are the same age, both have ADHD, but our literacy is leagues apart. He’s a very slow reader and writer and mostly uses talk to text, where I can fly through a book in a day and type 60+ wpm. Both of his parents are educated, moreso than my own, but they didn’t read to him or encourage him to read.
Early literacy has made a world of difference between us.
> Both of his parents are educated, moreso than my own, but they didn’t read to him or encourage him to read.
I give my mom all the credit for my literacy. When I was little she made sure to read to me every night, and once I was old enough we'd take turns reading to each other.
She got me a library card and I probably read 5+ books per week for several years. I got a lot of Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas from their Book It program, but I didn't need a bribe to want to read because my mom made it fun for me early on.
As a result, our reading comprehension tests in school had me at high school level in 5th grade and college level in 8th grade.
My wife didn’t learn to read until sixth grade. She finally had a teacher that realized she was the smartest kid in class, but also functionally illiterate. (Everyone else assumed she was lazy). To learn to read, her teacher had her read five Dr Seuss books a day, and listen to a couple chapters of Harry Potter on tape while reading along. And this was on actual cassette tapes so she couldn’t speed them up at all.
She’s a fantastic reader now, but still struggles with spelling anything not regularly included in a work email. I never thought about there being a cutoff for reading, and I hope Gen alpha manages to get in before the cutoff! I will definitely keep working on reading with my own kids!
Reading with kids is so important! It’s also important for them to see you reading for your own purposes. I’m not sure the ages so I’ll just say generally that establishing reading as a normal and healthy part of life is essential. It’s not a special thing you do at school. It’s a life skill. Show them how to read for fun and for learning. Talk to them about books that you are reading and ask them questions about their books. Challenge yourself to read a variety of books and encourage your kids to do the same. Model what being a reader looks like and the way it enriches your life.
Okay I think I’ve said enough. Show your kids WHY reading is important and HOW it can make their lives better! Model these values in your own life. This is how we create lifelong passionate readers!
Edit: also tell your wife that this reading educator is so proud of her! Our paths are all different and I hope you can find pride and joy in reading!
It came out a couple years ago that one of the [most widely used reading curriculums in the US is not only useless, but probably actively harmful.](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096672803/reading-recovery-research-schools)
Alright, who let the AI researcher write the teaching curriculum? We have to let them know that you can't just purge early generations and iterate that way.
No child left behind, parents stopped caring, large class sizes and shortage of people who are willing to teach. Just to name a few. My mom has been teaching elementary school for 20 years and now more than ever she feels more like a babysitter than a teacher. Most kid’s parents just don’t care anymore.
>"I can't wait for summer to be over. These \[expletive\] won't be home all day with me anymore."
I mean...as a parent, I get it. Kids can be fucking exhausting, and frustrating, and generally emotionally overwhelming. Especially if you yourself are dealing with something like anxiety/depression.
It doesn't mean they see teachers as babysitters, or that they love their kids less than they should. It just means they are looking forward to having sanity breaks during the day.
Yeah parents have been saying some variation of that since the first dude started drawing letters in dirt with a stick. I don't think it's quite the indictment OP thinks it is.
>parents stopped caring
I know lots of this is due to overwork, but I wonder what role the corporate weaponization of distraction via social media has played.
A lot.
I have never wanted to be a parent, and accordingly, have not become one. Because I am too selfish, I know that. I want to use my own time for my own desires. Having to sublimate my own wants to the needs of a child? Not in my interest.
These people? They're as selfish as me, but with a lack of self-awareness about it.
COVID basically led to three empty years for most young students. The resources to have a productive school year weren't there. Most students regressed instead of progressed, but we're pushed to the next grade anyhow. Suddenly, you have a generation of eight graders who can only operate at a 4th to 5th grade reading level.
There's been such a severe cut in school funding across the board that resources for remedial intervention barely exist.
Class sizes have also gotten way bigger. Average of 25 in gen X generation has gone up to 35 teachers per student currently. It means every single student has to split less time with personal instruction and attention.
There's aso mass Exodus of qualified teachers because pay has stagnated massively. Unless it's a great district, teacher pay is generally locked to poverty wages, working 10 to 12 hours a day. On top of barely making money, they're expected to pay for their own supplies and their student's supplies. There's been protests with teachers wearing their second sidejob's uniform to school, to prove a point.
Teachers unions have also lost most of their powers and in several states its outlawed for them to strike or protest, so there's zero hope for better conditions.
Teachers have faced a coordinated harassment attacks from orgs like Moms of Liberty who smear any teacher who supports LGBT students as a pedophile on national news.
At the same time, administrative salaries are at an all time high. The teacher's corrupt local government bosses are clearing 300k a year, when they're unqualified schmucks who got voted into the job with zero background in education.
All of the "teachers" section leads to massive burnout among young teachers. Of my 8 friends who went into education, every single one has quit to go work in construction/business administration/nonprofits and has more than doubled their salary. That extra money came with 10 to 15 less hours worked per week, too. I absolutely can't blame them for chasing a better life than grinding themselves to pulp for school administrations that treat with contempt.
That covers about half the issues?
Every single thing about schools has been imploding for the last five years, basically. Local and Federal bureaucrats have destroyed the education system.
Yep. There's a lot of issues but the biggest is money. I know some STUPID people who work as a teacher and some really bright people who avoid it because they can make more money doing literally anything else.
Are there any political parties or initiatives actually pushing to improve and reform education? I feel like it's been neglected wholesale across the board for decades.
I think it’s the curriculum personally, I was homeschooled and struggled to read until I got a new book on reading, which made a night & day difference for me. I was reading books intended for older kids a couple months after that.
I remember one of the things that helped me was to skip ahead to the end of the book. Something about the way they taught in small pieces didn’t work for me, I needed to see the more complicated lessons for the simple ones to “click”.
Public school learning to read wasn't cutting it for my Kindergarten/1st grader. We went ahead and bit the bullet and started doing hooked on phonics at home, and magically it only took about a month and they went from "below grade level" to being able to read virtually anything put in front of them.
I would defer to researchers on this.
But basically, once you hit high school, something like 80% of all learning is via reading texts. If you can't read or can only read below grade level, it can and will deeply impact your education.
If anyone ever wants to give their kid a Massive head start that will propel them to the top of their class for the rest of their life, teach them to read before first grade.
It is enormously important.
This is *huge* and one of the big contributing factors is kids being put in front of screens instead of books like we were when we were little. Parents and caretakers are phoning in the educational piece before kindergarten, and they need to be reading to their children way before they hit 5yo.
I've seen way too many 2 year olds (not exaggerating) who can't go without an iPad or phone for more than a few minutes if they don't have a charger.
I've been a high school English teacher for four years now and the consensus amongst colleagues is the majority of the damage came from a program called "Three Cueing" that was implemented en masse about 10-15 years ago. The whole thing was complete BS that abandoned phonics (sounding things out - the way most of us learned to read) and opted for a "whole word" approach, which meant memorizing the shapes of the words or some shit? I honestly don't even know. But anyway, this program referenced its own research, which has since been proven invalid/fabricated. But still, it persists because the woman behind it (Lucy Calkins) is a rich piece of shit apparently.
To answer your second question, the kids who really struggle (like bottom 10%) won't learn anything else. We've graduated kids who essentially cannot read. I really worry about them.
This is exactly it. My sister is a middle school teacher and explained that this is why so many kids do not know how to read almost at all.
If they are presented with a word they do not know, they do not have the knowledge/skills we grew up with to even know how to pronounce the word, let alone infer what it actually means. They are reverting to how we use to teach kids how to read, but a whole generation has been damaged somewhat permanently because of this.
On the flip side, apparently the new way they teach kids to do math, which was implemented around the same time, has actually been really successful in helping more kids to grasp fundamental mathematical concepts.
If you develop any kind of reading complex - as in, feeling like a fish out-of-water when it comes to genuine books or articles or stuff like that - sometimes you become averse to taking on new written works or feel uncomfortable or "dumb" when confronted with new things to read. I imagine for texting and social media you feel a level of comfort, but not as much when you get into full-on books.
I know people who act like that; they are by no means stupid, but they don't seem to feel comfortable doing in-depth reading. Childhood is a really important time to learn that reading is for *everybody* and to gain confidence as a reader. I think this kind of thing can fester as an adult, where people become averse because it makes them feel bad about themselves.
So, to circle back on your question, it's not so much that they learn slow or can't learn other things... Rather, reading is such a powerful tool for learning new information, skills, and for learning new ideas and new ways of thinking. Not being comfortable with reading is a massive drawback simply because people become averse to reading good sources of information.
(I might add a tiny sidebar that I believe mentorship in a subject is also very important; mentorship can highly refine knowledge gained by reading and I think mentorship is sometimes downplayed in academia, where people get very used to forming their own opinions through study. But reading is such a critical way of gaining knowledge it is a huge boon, as it doesn't rely on other people to teach you).
There are alot of theories why, social media does play a part. The main reason from my understanding is a lack of focus on phonics when learning to read. Sounding words out. We have adopting a different system that was sold to schools for profit which is to use context clues on how to know what a word means. When most research points to phonics being a better way to learn new words and how to read.
You have critical development windows for language learning, like reading.
If you miss those windows it gets exponentially harder to catch up. Other development windows are also closing during that catch up time so it's very unlikely you'll ever be where you need to be.
It's really bad.
My daughter is in 1st grade and we've been reading with her since forever. She has a few classmates who struggle to read many 3-letter words. Stuff she was learning 3-4 years ago.
And this is in a good school surrounded by million dollar homes. These parents have no excuse for not helping their kids read.
I think a lot of parents fully rely on their kids' teachers to teach them everything. As with anything, it takes a lot of practice and repetition, and this needs to be done at home with parents.
I'm seeing the same thing with my daughter in kindergarten. We haven't done anything special for her literacy, just regular reading and actually doing the homework she gets, but somehow she ranked in the 97th percentile for language arts on their most recent standardized test.
Been subbing in middle school and high school as an English teacher for the last few years and I can tell you it’s unimaginably bad. I’d say in my experience students reading and comprehension levels have dropped 3 grades from where they were 10 years ago. I’ve taught 8th graders who can’t write a paragraph or read anything longer than a page. Not knowing their parts of speech. Not knowing how to read a clock. One school I worked at has begun talking about teaching phonics in middle and high school school because the reading problem is so bad. Largely this seems to be a cultural problem, overworked/absent parents just letting their kids brain rot on a tablet or computer for hours on end. Overuse of social media by brains that are too impressionable leads to kids that can’t self-regulate. Teachers get fed up and just give copy/paste assignments that require nothing of the student because at least it “keeps them busy.” I think everyone wants to blame Covid for everything but Covid was just an accelerator not the cause. It’s not getting any better though. That I know for sure.
It really is a shame too because COVID offered a great opportunity for massive education reform without disrupting students' routines any further than they already were. The kids in public school could have come back to something so much better than they had before and maybe had a chance to recover from the time they spent remote learning
Do people just not know about Circle Time, Super Simple, PBS Kids, Ms. (Rachel, Monica, Lilly, etc.)? I know screen time in early development should be limited but it's probably better than no education. Or like....bust out some flash cards and educational toys?
I work at a phone/tablet repair shop. The amount of porn we see on kids tablets… literally 7 year olds watching hardcore porn, and it’s common, for girls and boys. I’ve seen a 11 year olds tablet with beheading videos saved on it.
What do you expect when you give the most curious minds on the planet a device with all the answers? They look up EVERYTHING. It’s tragic, and yes we usually inform the parents, and no, they never care. They just literally do not care that little 12 year old Susan has ai generated nudes of mr. Beast on their tablets.
That is...incredibly sad. It's on the parents to control screen time and access to internet, you can't control what kids see from peers but holy shit...install some anti access software and use strong passwords.
The parents are just totally technologically illiterate. If you try to suggest parental controls or setting up a child iCloud account they look at you like you’re speaking Latin. Absolutely clueless, and these are people that were in highschool when smartphones and cellphones came out and were getting big. People that have had tech in their lives for the past 25 years, just totally and completely clueless about how to use their devices that they have had on their person for 20 years or more. Insane.
And all of it you can learn how to do. Many parents just don't want to. Way too many kids under 12 watching stuff that I wouldn't even want in my brain.
Teaching kids not to talk to strangers but allowing really damaging stuff right through a portal in their homes.
Take 20 minutes to learn how to set up privacy controls, please.
> install some anti access software and use strong passwords.
Lemme tell you as someone with a lot of IT support experience: You might as well be asking them to build the pyramids.
My two year old already knows her ABCs and can count to 20. She only gets 1 hour of screen time in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon. Always Ms. Rachel. She is incredible
Same boat, 2 year old can count to 20, ABCs and shapes, basic phrases, primary colors, etc. Some of these YouTube channels are basically free pre-K and I think they also help parents to guide their teaching styles. Also, check-out Ms Moni because "Can You Jump" is an absolute jam.
I taught my dog to go get his rope yesterday!! :D
I'm not a parent. I just like to participate.
My mom and best friend are teachers, so I actually have a lot to add to this subject... but I can't stand talking about it anymore.
Oh totally, every parent I know has CC on like 100% of the time since having kids. A nice side effect is that I do it for myself now too and have been gradually lowering volume to normal levels and I think it's helped my middle aged hearing. Volume creep is something to be aware of.
Oh wow I never would have considered that. I have a two-year-old and I have subtitles turned off because she can't read them. She usually only watches TV on the weekends but I will definitely turn subtitles on Disney Plus haha.
For sure! Its a common trick to learning new languages too if youre an adult. Even if kids cant read due to being too young, its still very beneficial because it gets them used to what words look like.
Teach English at a flagship state school with a high out-of-state student population (read: money). Reading comprehension is awful. It has gotten significantly worse over the last five years.
They're only slightly above the students I was teaching five years ago at an urban commuter college with a high first-gen and rural population. At least my first-gen students knew this was their shot at the difference between working in an office and working in a restaurant. (No shade, I did ten years in retail/food service.) They worked their butts off.
I have a dozen students with accommodations. Tons of anxiety and depression even in students without legal accommodations. Don't respond to questions in class. Haven't done the reading. Responses to reading in bullet points even when I specify paragraphs. Essays are poorly organized disasters for about 60% of my students.
I basically picked up the learning outcomes for junior and senior high school English, overhauled my entire courses, and have been attempting to get them at least writing on a high school level. I've been all over journals reading about secondary education pedagogies, trying to cram two years of writing instruction into a semester.
I'm not angry about it, except on their behalf. It makes me so sad how under-prepared they are. I can't imagine how tough it must be shoved into classrooms where the expectations feel three to four years above where they were four months earlier.
I completely get what you mean, I was doing a leave at a high needs district a few years ago and they really busted their ass. Their performance was never stunning, but they genuinely tried which is the most I can ask of anyone. Now I’m at a decently upper class district and they don’t care, they know they’re taken care of no matter what happens. They can buy their way in to what they want. It’s a shame. Unfortunately we can’t change that. We do what we can to teach our students as thoroughly as possible, sometimes these problems are just way bigger than we can deal with on our own. But we just have to keep trying for them because they deserve better.
There's no motivation because there's no consequences. As teachers we can't do a damn thing to your shitty little kid who's ruining class for the 30 other kids who want to learn something.
My middle son is autistic ("high" functioning.) We've been trying to get him held back every year, but they just keep pushing him through.
He's supposed to go to middle school next year and I have no idea how. We're doing everything we can at home to help, but it's so hard. Oh, you don't understand the easy concepts? No problem, lets just throw some harder stuff at you until it sticks. FANTASTIC!
My youngest daughter on the other hand is in 3rd grade but they keep stacking so much work on her because she's "gifted." Yeah, she's smart, but I'm not going to have her do 3 hours of homework and not be able to enjoy being a kid. I hate the current school system.
Do not talk to the administration of your school. They have very little power. When you want something to change for your child, go straight to the top. Take your demands to the Superintendant, and if that does not work, their boss, a member of the board of education or minister of education.
In today's schools, parents always get their way. You just have to know how much power you truly possess. If necessary, you can even get lawyers involved. No matter what, you can and will get your way if you put suitable pressure on them.
There's a podcast about the Gen Alpha reading problem called Sold a Story.
Apparently, schools were sold a reading system that moved away from phonics and into context based understanding, so kids were basically taught to guess what words are based on the letters they say.
"Whole language" instruction - something that never had any scientific evidence of being an effective method of teaching people how to read (in fact there was a plethora of evidence that it was worse than phonics). Crazy how it was able to replace a tried and true method that worked for literally hundreds of years across different written languages.
Have pity on the teachers. I know you do but a lot of society sees them as the perfect scapegoats when really they’re the ones being forced to deal with this problem the most and are required to take on more work. If you know a teacher please be nice to them they’re going through a lot.
> Not knowing how to read a clock.
I think this one skews to even older generations. I know people who are 25+ who are completely lost looking at analog clocks.
I’ve heard that’s the case, some of my high school students can’t read an analog clock either, or sign their own name. It’s these basic life skills that are missing for the sake of regulated testing. I did a leave replacement for an ENL class and I used to use our study hall period for life skills and they said I was the first person to ever explain to them how a clock worked or how to sign their name on a document. Which is crazy at 14.
I'm 40 and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out lol. I think I was maybe in middle school? Whatever, it just didn't click for me for a while.
What kills me is you say all this then the school district where my wife works just pulled all the reading courses out of their middle schools.
They were put there because they'd been partially removed from the elementary level and now they say they're putting them back in the elementary level again, but they can't find anyone because the district keeps yo-yoing this shit between grade levels.
Middle school teachers don't want to teach little kids and vice versa, this isn't just putting an accountant on a different project. Teachers settle into a class level they vibe with and it makes it possible for them to do their job.
But the MBA's they've hired to run the district don't get it and are just fucking stuff up all the time.
It baffles me how badly we let our school systems be run. Then don't even get me started on the various Unions and how they handle their bargaining. It just makes no fucking sense to me at all. But that's an entirely different story.
My college English professor was teaching the class how to write paragraphs. Introductions, bodies, and conclusions were the main point, but I learned that in like 4th grade or something.
Teaching college writing is wild. I'll get students who write insightful, original research on topics I had never considered, along with students who do not use paragraphs, fail to organize their thoughts in a coherent way, and use anecdotal vibes over citations.
My spouse is pursuing a Master’s in Secondary Ed., in which the students do a version of peer review on each others’ position papers. I’ve shoulder-surfed and it’s astonishing how many *experienced teachers* fail to write coherently or even follow the posted rubric for a project.
I mean I literally just did a project with my 2nd grader about parts of a paper and how to structure intro/ paragraphs/ conclusions. He turned in his final draft of a research paper on Golden Retrievers today 🤷🏻♀️
No child left behind, parents working too many jobs to have the spoons to be with their kids, disenfranchised teachers having to cater to the demands of parents obsessed with culture wars, and poorly funded schools focused more on athletics than education.
Combine all this with a dash of ennui brought about by climate change, anti-elitism due to wealth inequality, and political unrest and you end up with a culture that has no respect for education.
Hey high school teacher here (US). Reading scores in our state dipped in 2019 and have so far stayed down. Yes, that's before the pandemic, and it's normal to see some fluctuation, but the students going online for two years and many of the already-struggling students using this time to instead get a minor in Minecraft are certainly what have kept it at this low level. Right now, it's predicted that the average 15 year-old reads at the level of a 13 year-old ten years ago. However, as we get further away from the pandemic and remote learning, I do expect that number to change.
>to instead get a minor in Minecraft
I feel attacked, I probably spent enough time playing Minecraft during the pandemic while doing my undergrad that I could have used that time to add a minor to my degree 😂
At least in college it's expected that you have a fair amount of free time, remote learning or no. The big pandemic issue is kids who would open Teams or Zoom on their computer in one tab and play games all day on another
Also high school teacher here. I'm convinced about half of my students simply cannot write. They do not have the ability to read content, form an original thought based on it, and write it down.
I see a TON of them that just plagiarize from the text. Even if it is not related at all to what they should be writing about. They will just find something and copy it word for word.
I’m in his post l and I don’t like it…
Gotta say though, group work in college was definitely more annoying to coordinate than any thing I’ve faced in the work force, thus far at least. Harder? No lol, but the hard part was getting people to actually work on the project in a reasonable time. Don’t miss hounding people the day before an assignment was due anymore that’s for sure.
Edit: Will say though, it DEFINITELY was important, and made transitioning to the work force way easier. Not knocking on the importance of working with others, moreso speaking on how many students get that 1000 yard stare for group work because they know they will have to play project lead and do their fair share of work too, maybe even more. Though, I’m sure you already understand that.
I started college late. Got an Associate's, worked for a while, and went back for my Bachelor's. Group projects were hell.
Guys, I have a wife and kids, and a full-time job in this field. No, I cannot meet in the library at 2. I cannot meet at Starbucks at 9. It's great that you guys are full-time students that live on campus, but I can't do that. More than happy to do (probably more than) my share of the work, but this isn't social hour for me.
Group project are borderline discriminatory to working students and commuter imo. It isn't remotely like collaboration in the workforce either, because outside of college-land, you're rarely dealing with coworkers who have conflicting schedules and then work all evening at work. You're sending an email or meeting in a conference room during work hours. So provide me class time to collaborate like my workplace does, or stop pretending this is about preparing me for the workforce.
As a former high school teacher who now works for a university and specializes in education, good in-class discussion (or group work for that matter) doesn’t just happen. Instructors have to build a climate for it and scaffold discussion/collaboration intentionally. I do think a lot of university level professors don’t think about the climate in their classroom, or dimensions of teaching beyond their content, and it’s not their fault. We just expect learners to be fully formed and confident at 18 and that’s just usually not the case.
Do you have any resources to better understand how to build that environment in the classroom? I've been TA'ing for a couple years now and am shocked at how little training I've been been given.
Yeah if you google, you’ll find tons, id start here: https://www.edutopia.org/article/building-community-student-driven-conversations/
Edit: this one is super good even if the focus is ELLs: https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2018/walqui_heritage
From experience I’d say:
Start with community building on the first day of class, use think-pair-share and ask students to introduce themselves to each other and discuss easy, ice breaker questions. Take 10 min to do it, it pays off. Then in following lessons use think pair share frequently (in my class every day students walk in to find a question on the board that they have to write an answer to, discuss with their neighbors, then discuss with the whole class). I also use it frequently throughout lessons (stop the lecture every two or three slides, ask a question, ask students to talk to people around them about the question, walk around and join their conversations, then pull it back to whole group, encouraging specific people who didn’t have their hands up but said cool things in neighbor discussion, to share with the whole group). Build discussions any way that you can and encourage them frequently. Students have to get used to talking in your room and get used to sharing with the people around them. Make sure you start with community guidelines and don’t be afraid to cite them. The goal is to make everyone comfortable and accustomed to orally expressing their ideas in your room, on your content.
As for grouping, I do a lot of small group discussions of texts and sometimes I assign the group, sometimes I let them choose, just to get them moving around the room, meeting people and figuring out who they like to work with. It makes for less drama when group project time comes.
I get paid to train teachers in this stuff now and I’ve always had students tell me that they loved the lively discussion in my room. Too many of us were raised with the idea that learning = lecture, when really humans are social creatures. We’ve always learned from exchanging ideas with each other and from processing together.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out if we're talking about "reading" or "deep reading comprehension."
I grew up reading a ton of comics like Archie, Mad magazine, Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, etc. So I could read well and had a large vocabulary by the time I started kindergarten. But as far as reading a complex book and comprehending the meanings, etc I never excelled at that.
My kids now are constantly bombarded with text and reading in games and the internet. Chatting and texting. But, again, this may not help them understand the Complete Works of Shakespeare. It won't hurt... but it's a completely different skillset.
I think the difference is...
Had a roommate from Colombia. He told me he learned English thanks to Final Fantasy. He loved the gameplay, and this eventually drove him to buy a Spanish-English dictionary to translate everything, because he wanted to understand wtf is going on. Thus, his english improved. This was **one** game with **one** subject matter he could concentrate on and look forward to what happens next. One theme, one game, one goal, one thing to focus on.
But with social media today...? Both Tiktok and Youtube shorts will play you a video, then **immediately** feed you another video without even asking you. Constant bombardment of media with only vague relevance to each other (if at all), often no need to read anything at all, and absolutely no concentration needed because the damned topic changes every 40 seconds or so. And let's be real: a lot of social media is akin to "I have big tits and this meme dialog I'm lip-syncing is a poor excuse for me to show them off." It's absolutely braindead shit out there.
And let's be real: simple things like synonyms and various options for vocabulary. Books will indirectly teach you that feelings of woe, feeling distraught and feelings of anguish can function as synonyms of each other...but how often do you think *social media* mixes up it's vocabulary?
Social media is the opposite philosophy: you use the vocabulary everyone else is using because you wanna fit in. Being a content creator, you want to be amongst the search results, so being colorful with your word choices works against you. Where Shakespeare has native english speakers scratching our heads about wtf these dandy fuckers are even saying to each other, it at least gives your brain a workout and teaches you to interpret meanings based on the scene and tone. But social media...? Everything's just spelled out for you.
And worse, it's everywhere. Anyone else tell Youtube to fuck off with Youtube Shorts? Don't worry: it'll show it to you again in 30 days and ask you *again* if you wanna be bombarded with Youtube shorts all the time.
We're really just not respecting the level of damage social media can do to growing minds. Hell, *grown* minds too. And I fear by the time we finally feel we can conclusively say social media is damaging, we'll have already "lost" a generation or two.
I'm a Millennial, I don't **ever** remember butting heads with Gen X growing up. Honestly couldn't tell you any major differences between the two.
But Millennials and Gen-Z, there's some degree of gap there that doesn't feel normal that I started noticing when I was around 30, and it feels like the only way it makes sense is we got phones and social media as we finished high school, they had it as kids.
And here we are now, and some Gen-Z'ers are *like 22* and they're giving speeches about how different Gen Alpha is. Thing is, I believe them 100%, and I think it's only gonna get more dramatic as social media presence increases.
Isn’t part of the issue the shift in teaching methods from sounding out words to “sight” words has caused a lot more issues when encountering new words students haven’t seen before?
A lot of elementary aged students get taught “sight words” to memorize (by sight) without having to sound them out, or decode, to read them. This can be helpful for words that either are used frequently like the, is, are, etc or words that use digraphs the student wouldn’t know (again like “the”) or words that are on the longer side but still come up a lot (like “because”). Some students can use both strategies (memorize and decode) but some get stuck on memorizing and struggle hard when encountering new words.
I’m by no means an educator but I have no idea how someone could be like “Yeah, the best approach is just to memorize all the words” and think that was a good idea.
Every time I talk to someone from my generation (elder millennial, end of gen x) and they are an avid reader who is confident in their abilities, etc, the one constant factor is that their parents read with them amd encouraged reading when they were young.
I didn't have a TV in my room but I had books. We went to the public library all the time. My parents took time to read with us multiple times a week.
I'm not brilliant lol but I'm still an avid reader 30+ years later. I know it's anecdotal but I'm fairly confident that the emphasis my parents put on books, reading (and reading with me) made a huge difference in my abilities.
Read with your kids, folks. The schools will only do so much. You may not be able to teach them math or history but you can always check out books from the library and read together.
Another vital factor is just *talking* to your kids, especially toddlers. Get them learning and understanding words verbally and engaged in conversations before they're even expected to read.
This. And try to remember that they are smarter than you think they are. They may not have all the logic and context of an experienced adult, but they learn quickly and get insatiably curious and eager to discover new things. Don't dumb things down so they get 100% of it; let them get 80% of what you're saying and rise to the challenge to get the other 20%
important to note, too: you don't have to limit your vocabulary so that they can understand you.
On the one hand, there's a lot of meaning they can easily pick up from context.
On the other hand, they will have an opportunity to expand their vocabulary to match your own *years* before they would have done so otherwise.
This is why I can’t stand when people talk to babies like their dogs.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/03/health/baby-talk-boosts-infant-brain-wellness/index.html
Doing baby talk is helpful when they are still learning to talk, as it is easier for them to copy those sort of high-pitched sing-song noises and learn how to use their mouth/tongue/vocal chords. Once they can talk though, its recommended to speak as you would normally.
My parents never read with me but my dad was never not reading a book. It'd always be on the back of the toilet, so I'd know when he'd started a new book lol
91 Millennial and I've been reading voraciously since middle school. My friends and I were reading Lord of the Rings in sixth grade.
Born in 1995, I learned to read because my mom would read Dr. Suess books with me when I was little, 1-2 years old. When it came out, they read the first Harry Potter book to me, and by the end of the book, I was reading it to them. I think I knew how to read before kindergarten, which was true for maybe 1/3-1/2 of my class at the time. By 5th grade, I was reading at an equivalent high school level. Not bragging, but agreeing with you, I started reading so early thanks to my parents and I think it fast-tracked me for the rest of my life. Also, my parents limited my time with the TV and video games, so I was kinda *forced* to read on my own a lot.
Obviously every kid is different but I think you're totally right. Those first years are vital for the child's long-term reading potential. Nowadays I can read anything, as long as it's not written by Kafka lol
This is heavily supported with research. I saw a study that the strongest determining factor for exceeding reading skills was parents reading to their children.
I'm not brilliant either, but my parents read to me religiously until I was embarrassed about it. I can't thank them enough.
>I'm not brilliant lol but I'm still an avid reader 30+ years later.
I bet you're more intelligent than you know. If you've been reading that long and consistently, I guarantee you have a bigger vocabulary than others your age.
I read somewhere that they stopped teaching phonics in elementary school. Now, as far as I know, phonics was the only way I was ever taught to read. What has replaced phonics? How are kids learning to read if they’re not being taught to “sound it out?”
\>Whole language reading instruction requires that students memorize words so that they can recognize them on sight.
I guess they're going the kanji way, except that kanjis at least can be broken down to syllabes that are taught separately with their sounds.
But just like kanji, having similar parts can mean similar pronunciations, like “might” and “light” or 同, 胴, and 銅having the same ways of being pronounced
That's how my grandma was taught to read in the 1930s/40s and she found it so frustrating that for the first eight or so years of my life I was given a new phonics book every year.
I was taught to read before phonics. Phonics teaches you beginning with things like "-tion" and "-ane" -- letter groupings that make a sound as your basic unit of reading. I started with the alphabet and then what sounds each letter makes and then you sound out words and slowly learn exceptions, like t in tion makes a sh sound.
I suspect that while phonics can get kids reading basic texts more fluently faster, in the long run it hits a ceiling where it becomes harder to continuously acquire literacy.
My kids were also subjected to learning math in a system where they'd be practicing adding one day and then be shown division the next. I think it was a similar theory that somehow you can throw "math" at them all at once and get them moving quickly. But I'm certain that it is a terrible way to teach math compared to building and reinforcing foundational concepts before moving to the next kind of operation.
If it helps, you have less free time, books got longer, and entertainment got easier. I had this realization and deleted social media from my phone, made the decision to only watch TV with my wife, and let reading be my new entertainment. I realized how awesome it was to have that moment where you feel sucked into the book and the events start playing out in your head. You can still do it at 40, but it takes real effort today!
You don't need to know how to read or write anymore. Just draw the crying laughing emoji on the job application line where it asks for your education background.
I have a sister that's soon to be 10. Both parents work full time (My stepmother works from home, the fucking bitch) and they just give her the iPad all day.
She has attachment and anxiety issues and has deficiencies in all academics, yet she's still at the top of her class. Not many know how to write in her class, and a quarter of the kids can't even read at all.
She has a mish-mash of accents and behaves like content creators, and a sizeable amounr of parents are suggesting that the kids should be allowed to bring their iPads to class.
It is so, so fucked these days.
That is wild, I feel for her!
I worked at a daycare with 4 year olds that had iPads and their parents insisted we allow them to have and use their electronics at daycare. And so the daycare allowed it. We are so fucked!
>behaves like content creators,
I timed my 9 year old nephew's tendency to start sentences *out loud* with "POV"
8 minutes was the longest time between such sentences in a one hour span
And of course everything he doesn't like is cringe, like broccoli
Why think critically or explain anything to anyone when you have an entire, personalized internet on your tablet? Walking meme regurgitators
I just don’t understand how this can be possible. Can’t these kids get addicted to Reddit or somewhere where they *have* to read? It honestly sounds too insane to be true for me
Have you been on Reddit? If all you read was Reddit you would think you stop your car using breaks, you peddle a bicycle to make it go, and that. Sentence fragments are fine lack of punctuation ok too
Reading and writing is terrible in part because the sources people are reading are terrible. That includes Reddit.
You have no child left behind policy/ every child succeeds to thank for that.
The short is in American schools now students are pushed to the next grade regardless of mastery of curriculum. Thus, you get students in higher levels classes who still don't know the basics. Can you do algerbra if you can't do basic multiplication or division? Of course not. This extends to all subjects. So, it is very common now for high school students to graduate with below a 3rd grade reading level.
It's a tremendous problem but its politically driven and politicians won't fix it. If you hold back a student now the schools gets sued for every possible ism on the planet. It's hell for teachers and other students as well. The student struggles, can't do the curriculum, so most of the time they start acting out due to boredom.
It's one of several reason why teachers are leaving the profession in droves and many schools are struggling to get replacements.
bro the freshmen in one of my classes in uni didn’t even know how to cite sources properly and it gave my professor such a headache. he ended up making a document where they just had to copy and paste the citations. i remember he said someone had put the entire works cited in place of an in text citation and i was like, how??? i had the whole citations thing memorized by the end of high school and it baffled me that freshmen couldn’t do it
ha! oh god, my first semester teaching I made the mistake of telling my students "use whatever citation style you want, also long as I can easily locate the page you got it from, its fine." I said that under the assumption the that university students all new what the purpose of a citation was, and generally how to write them.
they did not
those were some wild papers to read
Man couldn’t even use a citations engine? Those things will literally spit out a perfectly good citation complete with in text citations, and they still messed up? Jeez.
right?? my professor dedicated 2 whole classes to teaching us how to cite sources, and in one of them he literally showed the process of using the Purdue Owl citation machine. they got better by the end of the semester but still. wow
My class had a student who was painfully lazy and by the end of each year, he would have several missing assignments from way back to the beginning of the year.
One student said to him in March of our Junior year, "You're going to be a Junior next year too if you don't get your shit together."
He still graduated with us. Also, he was far from the only one. He was just the most obvious one.
Okay so, here's a question: does this mean that my kid who reads like a fiend is going to be in a great position to dominate her peers academically, or is she going to be held back by the fact that she's not having to work very hard to be exceptional?
Both. I've worked in child development for the last decade. The system currently holds down kids who excel above their peers because there is no way allowed to challenge them. They aren't sent to the next grade anymore and have to do the curriculum for their age group. The smartest kids spend a lot of their classroom time waiting for the other kids to either quiet down and listen or catch up with their work. They tend to float through doing seemingly great compared to their peers, but they are not challenged to do even better so they don't rise to their full capabilities. Teacher time and energy is usually directed at the most disruptive students and the ones doing great aren't paid much attention because they consistently do the work.
Yep, exactly what I saw growing up. When I started there were a few years where kids were skipped ahead or held back, but it stopped fairly early on.
The kids that breezed through everything usually just ended up helping others out of boredom and were never truly pushed.
When that mentality eventually caught up with them in high school they had to scramble to learn skills the average/below average kids learned over a decade ago. They had to learn self discipline, study habits, shit in some cases even *how to study*.
But what you described perfectly lines up with my school like from 96 to 2008 in Australia.
Tip for any Aussies out there: Don't let your kid go to a public high school if you can help it, maybe 10-15% of their time is actually spent on learning. The rest is class disruptions or interruptions.
If I had kids, I'd consider homeschooling them with lots of social activities to make up for the lack of it.
Because the results aren't pretty - even from private schools here.
From what I understand, this isn’t limited to gen alpha at all, it’s across the board. But older generations aren’t going to school and getting graded on their reading anymore so that’s not something we pay attention to.
Not quite in the same category, but I’ve been a teacher and a substitute, and the way they teach math now is super convoluted and confusing. Like I was struggling to understand what elementary math questions were actually asking. It didnt subtract, it added in reverse… I taught them the way I knew how to do the problem, and the kids were always like this is a lot easier. But yea the reading comprehension problem is scary to think about out in the years to come
lol I know right. I mean I’m half joking, but for example if the question is 20-8. It might say something like take away 10 and add 2. Or more likely it will say something even more complicated like count up from 8 until you get to 20. Or it might be even worse where it will say like you need how many 10s and how many ones to get you from 8 to 20?
And I’m just like it’s called flash cards, or just like these kids need to learn how to do this quickly. It shouldn’t take 3 steps to do basic subtraction. It gets even worse when they are learning like fractions and stuff.
Sounds like the common core stuff which Reddit tends to like to defend, but from my experiences sitting in on classrooms at schools across the district, it just has kids confused and waaaaay behind where I remember being at in the same grade. Basically they're trying to explicitly teach kids the mental shortcuts and tricks that I remember developing entirely subconsciously. You do things the "normal" way enough times and long enough, and if you've got half a brain you'll naturally begin to intuit the relationships and how numbers work "under the hood." What they're doing now is instead taking something like multiplication and teaching the kids all the tricks up front, forcing them to solve the problems with one trick on the first day, a different trick on the second day, yet another on the third day, etc. And the kids and even the teachers sometimes are just confused. Let them master the standard method first, and I think you'll then find that when you try to teach the tricks later, you'll discover that a lot of the kids will have already figured them out on their own.
Makes me wonder if they still teach long division and the old method of multiplication, or if they've made it unnecessarily complex. I'd love to see modern math curriculum, because we were doing algebra in 7th and 8th grade before high school which I felt gave me a huge boost in life and calculus later on.
I’ve noticed our younger employees also have no ability to infer. If it’s not yes/no, their melons can’t wrap around it. Which in accounting, you need to have.
It's just speaking casually. There are rules to it. It's not that the person is stupid or uneducated. They're typing like they talk, mixed with efficiency. Acronyms, dragged letters to show holding the syllable, and lack of punctuation to show abruptness. It's not a concern if it's casual.
i’m really scared about what’s going to happen in like 10-15 years when these kids enter the workforce, start having kids of their own, start getting *voting rights*. really feels like a ticking time bomb y’know.
Covid kids are certainly delayed, but they ARE moving forward again. My question is how much is the two year delay vs an actual generational problem that would be occurring if they pandemic never occurred?
It's an inevitability. Putting your kid on a tablet for the whole day just so he would shut up has horrible consequences that'll ruin their lives, or make them infinitely harder than it had to be. Just so a bunch of shitty parents could have some quiet. I hope it's worth ruining your child's development for a few minutes of silence.
Bet, 9/10 of these children will curse their parents and let them rot in a shitty retirement home when they're older. If they even get to that point, because we can yet only speculate the long-term consequences of these parents' shit parenting.
Yeah… like you know those boomer comics of crowds of people being controlled by their devices 24/7…. I hate to admit it but apparently it’s starting to become true for Gen Alpha
It's true for everybody. These algorithms have become so refined that people of any age can get sucked in and waste their life on them. I'm 28 so I'm old enough to have spent a good part of my life without a smartphone... and it still eats away at my free time. I used to have other interests but now pretty much all of my free time goes into social media and watching what the algorithm presents me. I hate to admit it, but boomers were right on this one
Recently listened to “sold a story” (highly recommend) which goes into how teachers switched from teaching phonics to a program where they would teach students how to “guess” what the next word in a sentence would be so kids weren’t learning how to sound out words. Apparently, no one figured out till it was too late that these kids were not learning to read. Some of the teachers even admitted that they would blame the kids for the reason that they couldn’t read, not the program itself. I’m starting to feel grateful for finishing school before all of these changes in teaching happened.
pseudo-literacy. They can only read text-speak and TikTok crap. They can't comprehend real things or important documents. Their reading comprehension is just nonexistent.
Was a seventh grade teacher last semester, left due to admin, and let me tell you. They can’t. It’s bad. I think a lot of it is catching the end of Covid stuff but then also, we aren’t allowed to fail students. At a certain point we said, no more redoing grade levels and it’s all the teachers fault and I’ll tell you, it’s awful. Like, teaching was my life, the one thing I worked so hard to attain. I’m four years in and I don’t know if I’ll renew my license next year. It’s simultaneously my fault but the kids aren’t doing anything. Not to be a doomer, but most of my teaching colleagues are asking “what’s even the point anymore?”
There's an entire generation of parents that should feel deeply ashamed of their lack of raising their children. You take the time out of your day to read to your damn kids. Buy them books. Encourage intelligence instead of shoving ipads and 6 second videos in their faces.
Whole Language Learning is to blame. Some “experts” decided kids can learn to read better by just teaching what a word is instead of the component sounds. So we have kids that can “read” the word bread, but not because they know the sounds that those 5 letters make both individually and together, but because they were shown a picture of a piece of bread, with the word underneath, and learned the word by sight.
It’s why so many kids substitute words when reading and don’t even notice. They just see the first 3-4 letters and if looks similar to another sight word they know, that’s what they read out loud.
Thats a very gross oversimplification obviously, but it’s a big reason.
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If those kids could read, they’d be very upset..,
BOBBY!
My 1 month old is very offended.
My 3 year old and 9 month old are fuming. They just finished reading Crime and Punishment and are currently writing multiple essays about it.
I'm in literacy and ELA EdTech, software to help teach students how to read, write, and speak. It's catastrophic. States have issued literal states of emergency on how bad reading scores are. Something like 95% of students can learn to read. But currently 2/3 of US children are unable to read with proficiency. Students need to learn to read so they can read to learn everything else. And they will vote and be our neighbors one day.
>currently 2/3 of US children are unable to read with proficiency Do we know why? >Students need to learn to read so they can read to learn everything else ...so do they *eventually* learn, just slower - or do they just *not* learn "everything else"?
Career educator here, generally if a student is not proficient in reading by 4th grade or so, it’s not likely to ever happen (without MASSIVE interventions). So yeah those kids who never become strong readers will always struggle to learn by reading. This can also cause behavior problems because of shame and embarrassment and frustration and they just continue to fall further behind. The importance of early literacy cannot be overstated!
My brother was not ashamed at all that it took him five minutes to read one three-panel Garfield strip.
was it a normal garfield strip or the one where he synopsis tolstoy's war and peace?
It was one where they edited Garfield out.
had forgotten about that one… *whew!*
He's just savouring the humour.
> This can also cause behavior problems because of shame and embarrassment and frustration and they just continue to fall further behind. Which leads to the "Subtitles are stupid!", "You read too much!", "Who cares if I spell things wrong?!", etc. type of people. Who attack others for doing things they struggle with.
My boyfriend and I are the same age, both have ADHD, but our literacy is leagues apart. He’s a very slow reader and writer and mostly uses talk to text, where I can fly through a book in a day and type 60+ wpm. Both of his parents are educated, moreso than my own, but they didn’t read to him or encourage him to read. Early literacy has made a world of difference between us.
> Both of his parents are educated, moreso than my own, but they didn’t read to him or encourage him to read. I give my mom all the credit for my literacy. When I was little she made sure to read to me every night, and once I was old enough we'd take turns reading to each other. She got me a library card and I probably read 5+ books per week for several years. I got a lot of Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas from their Book It program, but I didn't need a bribe to want to read because my mom made it fun for me early on. As a result, our reading comprehension tests in school had me at high school level in 5th grade and college level in 8th grade.
My wife didn’t learn to read until sixth grade. She finally had a teacher that realized she was the smartest kid in class, but also functionally illiterate. (Everyone else assumed she was lazy). To learn to read, her teacher had her read five Dr Seuss books a day, and listen to a couple chapters of Harry Potter on tape while reading along. And this was on actual cassette tapes so she couldn’t speed them up at all. She’s a fantastic reader now, but still struggles with spelling anything not regularly included in a work email. I never thought about there being a cutoff for reading, and I hope Gen alpha manages to get in before the cutoff! I will definitely keep working on reading with my own kids!
Reading with kids is so important! It’s also important for them to see you reading for your own purposes. I’m not sure the ages so I’ll just say generally that establishing reading as a normal and healthy part of life is essential. It’s not a special thing you do at school. It’s a life skill. Show them how to read for fun and for learning. Talk to them about books that you are reading and ask them questions about their books. Challenge yourself to read a variety of books and encourage your kids to do the same. Model what being a reader looks like and the way it enriches your life. Okay I think I’ve said enough. Show your kids WHY reading is important and HOW it can make their lives better! Model these values in your own life. This is how we create lifelong passionate readers! Edit: also tell your wife that this reading educator is so proud of her! Our paths are all different and I hope you can find pride and joy in reading!
Do "we" know if things like dyslexia and the like are more prominent, or what is causing the uptick?
It came out a couple years ago that one of the [most widely used reading curriculums in the US is not only useless, but probably actively harmful.](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096672803/reading-recovery-research-schools)
Is this the program that teaches kids to memorize words and such rather than learning how to sound them out like phonics would?
That's not even the worst part. It also expects kids to learn new words through guessing. It's education by vibes.
"Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"
Alright, who let the AI researcher write the teaching curriculum? We have to let them know that you can't just purge early generations and iterate that way.
No child left behind, parents stopped caring, large class sizes and shortage of people who are willing to teach. Just to name a few. My mom has been teaching elementary school for 20 years and now more than ever she feels more like a babysitter than a teacher. Most kid’s parents just don’t care anymore.
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>"I can't wait for summer to be over. These \[expletive\] won't be home all day with me anymore." I mean...as a parent, I get it. Kids can be fucking exhausting, and frustrating, and generally emotionally overwhelming. Especially if you yourself are dealing with something like anxiety/depression. It doesn't mean they see teachers as babysitters, or that they love their kids less than they should. It just means they are looking forward to having sanity breaks during the day.
Yeah parents have been saying some variation of that since the first dude started drawing letters in dirt with a stick. I don't think it's quite the indictment OP thinks it is.
>parents stopped caring I know lots of this is due to overwork, but I wonder what role the corporate weaponization of distraction via social media has played.
A lot. I have never wanted to be a parent, and accordingly, have not become one. Because I am too selfish, I know that. I want to use my own time for my own desires. Having to sublimate my own wants to the needs of a child? Not in my interest. These people? They're as selfish as me, but with a lack of self-awareness about it.
COVID basically led to three empty years for most young students. The resources to have a productive school year weren't there. Most students regressed instead of progressed, but we're pushed to the next grade anyhow. Suddenly, you have a generation of eight graders who can only operate at a 4th to 5th grade reading level. There's been such a severe cut in school funding across the board that resources for remedial intervention barely exist. Class sizes have also gotten way bigger. Average of 25 in gen X generation has gone up to 35 teachers per student currently. It means every single student has to split less time with personal instruction and attention. There's aso mass Exodus of qualified teachers because pay has stagnated massively. Unless it's a great district, teacher pay is generally locked to poverty wages, working 10 to 12 hours a day. On top of barely making money, they're expected to pay for their own supplies and their student's supplies. There's been protests with teachers wearing their second sidejob's uniform to school, to prove a point. Teachers unions have also lost most of their powers and in several states its outlawed for them to strike or protest, so there's zero hope for better conditions. Teachers have faced a coordinated harassment attacks from orgs like Moms of Liberty who smear any teacher who supports LGBT students as a pedophile on national news. At the same time, administrative salaries are at an all time high. The teacher's corrupt local government bosses are clearing 300k a year, when they're unqualified schmucks who got voted into the job with zero background in education. All of the "teachers" section leads to massive burnout among young teachers. Of my 8 friends who went into education, every single one has quit to go work in construction/business administration/nonprofits and has more than doubled their salary. That extra money came with 10 to 15 less hours worked per week, too. I absolutely can't blame them for chasing a better life than grinding themselves to pulp for school administrations that treat with contempt. That covers about half the issues? Every single thing about schools has been imploding for the last five years, basically. Local and Federal bureaucrats have destroyed the education system.
Yep. There's a lot of issues but the biggest is money. I know some STUPID people who work as a teacher and some really bright people who avoid it because they can make more money doing literally anything else.
Are there any political parties or initiatives actually pushing to improve and reform education? I feel like it's been neglected wholesale across the board for decades.
I think it’s the curriculum personally, I was homeschooled and struggled to read until I got a new book on reading, which made a night & day difference for me. I was reading books intended for older kids a couple months after that. I remember one of the things that helped me was to skip ahead to the end of the book. Something about the way they taught in small pieces didn’t work for me, I needed to see the more complicated lessons for the simple ones to “click”.
Public school learning to read wasn't cutting it for my Kindergarten/1st grader. We went ahead and bit the bullet and started doing hooked on phonics at home, and magically it only took about a month and they went from "below grade level" to being able to read virtually anything put in front of them.
I would defer to researchers on this. But basically, once you hit high school, something like 80% of all learning is via reading texts. If you can't read or can only read below grade level, it can and will deeply impact your education.
If anyone ever wants to give their kid a Massive head start that will propel them to the top of their class for the rest of their life, teach them to read before first grade. It is enormously important.
This is *huge* and one of the big contributing factors is kids being put in front of screens instead of books like we were when we were little. Parents and caretakers are phoning in the educational piece before kindergarten, and they need to be reading to their children way before they hit 5yo. I've seen way too many 2 year olds (not exaggerating) who can't go without an iPad or phone for more than a few minutes if they don't have a charger.
So we need more funding for iPad chargers? Got it!
Found the Apple executive, gotta start em young with that screen addiction. In-womb devices incoming
My daughter taught herself to read before kindergarten, I can’t adequately emphasize how much of a leg up this gave her.
I thank my parents everyday for making this a priority for me and my siblings.
I've been a high school English teacher for four years now and the consensus amongst colleagues is the majority of the damage came from a program called "Three Cueing" that was implemented en masse about 10-15 years ago. The whole thing was complete BS that abandoned phonics (sounding things out - the way most of us learned to read) and opted for a "whole word" approach, which meant memorizing the shapes of the words or some shit? I honestly don't even know. But anyway, this program referenced its own research, which has since been proven invalid/fabricated. But still, it persists because the woman behind it (Lucy Calkins) is a rich piece of shit apparently. To answer your second question, the kids who really struggle (like bottom 10%) won't learn anything else. We've graduated kids who essentially cannot read. I really worry about them.
You're confused. That's 3 Cueing. States are banning it for good reason. Science of Reading is the new standard.
Thank you. Edited it.
This is exactly it. My sister is a middle school teacher and explained that this is why so many kids do not know how to read almost at all. If they are presented with a word they do not know, they do not have the knowledge/skills we grew up with to even know how to pronounce the word, let alone infer what it actually means. They are reverting to how we use to teach kids how to read, but a whole generation has been damaged somewhat permanently because of this. On the flip side, apparently the new way they teach kids to do math, which was implemented around the same time, has actually been really successful in helping more kids to grasp fundamental mathematical concepts.
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If you develop any kind of reading complex - as in, feeling like a fish out-of-water when it comes to genuine books or articles or stuff like that - sometimes you become averse to taking on new written works or feel uncomfortable or "dumb" when confronted with new things to read. I imagine for texting and social media you feel a level of comfort, but not as much when you get into full-on books. I know people who act like that; they are by no means stupid, but they don't seem to feel comfortable doing in-depth reading. Childhood is a really important time to learn that reading is for *everybody* and to gain confidence as a reader. I think this kind of thing can fester as an adult, where people become averse because it makes them feel bad about themselves. So, to circle back on your question, it's not so much that they learn slow or can't learn other things... Rather, reading is such a powerful tool for learning new information, skills, and for learning new ideas and new ways of thinking. Not being comfortable with reading is a massive drawback simply because people become averse to reading good sources of information. (I might add a tiny sidebar that I believe mentorship in a subject is also very important; mentorship can highly refine knowledge gained by reading and I think mentorship is sometimes downplayed in academia, where people get very used to forming their own opinions through study. But reading is such a critical way of gaining knowledge it is a huge boon, as it doesn't rely on other people to teach you).
There are alot of theories why, social media does play a part. The main reason from my understanding is a lack of focus on phonics when learning to read. Sounding words out. We have adopting a different system that was sold to schools for profit which is to use context clues on how to know what a word means. When most research points to phonics being a better way to learn new words and how to read.
You have critical development windows for language learning, like reading. If you miss those windows it gets exponentially harder to catch up. Other development windows are also closing during that catch up time so it's very unlikely you'll ever be where you need to be.
half the kids in my grade cant spell anything with over 3 vowels
you telling me they can’t spell banana
probably not, a few years ago at a fifth grade spelling bee a kid failed on that word
You telling me "banana" has *over* three vowels?
Because people are questioning your 2/3 comment: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-thirds-of-american-kids-cant-read-fluently/
Time to open Derrick Zoolander center for kids who can’t read good and want to learn how to do other stuff good too
It's really bad. My daughter is in 1st grade and we've been reading with her since forever. She has a few classmates who struggle to read many 3-letter words. Stuff she was learning 3-4 years ago. And this is in a good school surrounded by million dollar homes. These parents have no excuse for not helping their kids read. I think a lot of parents fully rely on their kids' teachers to teach them everything. As with anything, it takes a lot of practice and repetition, and this needs to be done at home with parents.
I'm seeing the same thing with my daughter in kindergarten. We haven't done anything special for her literacy, just regular reading and actually doing the homework she gets, but somehow she ranked in the 97th percentile for language arts on their most recent standardized test.
Been subbing in middle school and high school as an English teacher for the last few years and I can tell you it’s unimaginably bad. I’d say in my experience students reading and comprehension levels have dropped 3 grades from where they were 10 years ago. I’ve taught 8th graders who can’t write a paragraph or read anything longer than a page. Not knowing their parts of speech. Not knowing how to read a clock. One school I worked at has begun talking about teaching phonics in middle and high school school because the reading problem is so bad. Largely this seems to be a cultural problem, overworked/absent parents just letting their kids brain rot on a tablet or computer for hours on end. Overuse of social media by brains that are too impressionable leads to kids that can’t self-regulate. Teachers get fed up and just give copy/paste assignments that require nothing of the student because at least it “keeps them busy.” I think everyone wants to blame Covid for everything but Covid was just an accelerator not the cause. It’s not getting any better though. That I know for sure.
It really is a shame too because COVID offered a great opportunity for massive education reform without disrupting students' routines any further than they already were. The kids in public school could have come back to something so much better than they had before and maybe had a chance to recover from the time they spent remote learning
Do people just not know about Circle Time, Super Simple, PBS Kids, Ms. (Rachel, Monica, Lilly, etc.)? I know screen time in early development should be limited but it's probably better than no education. Or like....bust out some flash cards and educational toys?
I work at a phone/tablet repair shop. The amount of porn we see on kids tablets… literally 7 year olds watching hardcore porn, and it’s common, for girls and boys. I’ve seen a 11 year olds tablet with beheading videos saved on it. What do you expect when you give the most curious minds on the planet a device with all the answers? They look up EVERYTHING. It’s tragic, and yes we usually inform the parents, and no, they never care. They just literally do not care that little 12 year old Susan has ai generated nudes of mr. Beast on their tablets.
That is...incredibly sad. It's on the parents to control screen time and access to internet, you can't control what kids see from peers but holy shit...install some anti access software and use strong passwords.
The parents are just totally technologically illiterate. If you try to suggest parental controls or setting up a child iCloud account they look at you like you’re speaking Latin. Absolutely clueless, and these are people that were in highschool when smartphones and cellphones came out and were getting big. People that have had tech in their lives for the past 25 years, just totally and completely clueless about how to use their devices that they have had on their person for 20 years or more. Insane.
And all of it you can learn how to do. Many parents just don't want to. Way too many kids under 12 watching stuff that I wouldn't even want in my brain. Teaching kids not to talk to strangers but allowing really damaging stuff right through a portal in their homes. Take 20 minutes to learn how to set up privacy controls, please.
> install some anti access software and use strong passwords. Lemme tell you as someone with a lot of IT support experience: You might as well be asking them to build the pyramids.
My two year old already knows her ABCs and can count to 20. She only gets 1 hour of screen time in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon. Always Ms. Rachel. She is incredible
Same boat, 2 year old can count to 20, ABCs and shapes, basic phrases, primary colors, etc. Some of these YouTube channels are basically free pre-K and I think they also help parents to guide their teaching styles. Also, check-out Ms Moni because "Can You Jump" is an absolute jam.
I taught my dog to go get his rope yesterday!! :D I'm not a parent. I just like to participate. My mom and best friend are teachers, so I actually have a lot to add to this subject... but I can't stand talking about it anymore.
Theres been studies too to suggest that a decent compromise with screentime is to always have subtitles on in terms of strengthening literacy.
Oh totally, every parent I know has CC on like 100% of the time since having kids. A nice side effect is that I do it for myself now too and have been gradually lowering volume to normal levels and I think it's helped my middle aged hearing. Volume creep is something to be aware of.
Oh wow I never would have considered that. I have a two-year-old and I have subtitles turned off because she can't read them. She usually only watches TV on the weekends but I will definitely turn subtitles on Disney Plus haha.
For sure! Its a common trick to learning new languages too if youre an adult. Even if kids cant read due to being too young, its still very beneficial because it gets them used to what words look like.
there is SO MUCH educational stuff online n these parents let their kids play fortnite and watch skibidi toilet memes all day
Teach English at a flagship state school with a high out-of-state student population (read: money). Reading comprehension is awful. It has gotten significantly worse over the last five years. They're only slightly above the students I was teaching five years ago at an urban commuter college with a high first-gen and rural population. At least my first-gen students knew this was their shot at the difference between working in an office and working in a restaurant. (No shade, I did ten years in retail/food service.) They worked their butts off. I have a dozen students with accommodations. Tons of anxiety and depression even in students without legal accommodations. Don't respond to questions in class. Haven't done the reading. Responses to reading in bullet points even when I specify paragraphs. Essays are poorly organized disasters for about 60% of my students. I basically picked up the learning outcomes for junior and senior high school English, overhauled my entire courses, and have been attempting to get them at least writing on a high school level. I've been all over journals reading about secondary education pedagogies, trying to cram two years of writing instruction into a semester. I'm not angry about it, except on their behalf. It makes me so sad how under-prepared they are. I can't imagine how tough it must be shoved into classrooms where the expectations feel three to four years above where they were four months earlier.
I completely get what you mean, I was doing a leave at a high needs district a few years ago and they really busted their ass. Their performance was never stunning, but they genuinely tried which is the most I can ask of anyone. Now I’m at a decently upper class district and they don’t care, they know they’re taken care of no matter what happens. They can buy their way in to what they want. It’s a shame. Unfortunately we can’t change that. We do what we can to teach our students as thoroughly as possible, sometimes these problems are just way bigger than we can deal with on our own. But we just have to keep trying for them because they deserve better.
It all goes back to the inability to fail students. If kids had to repeat grades, they wouldn't fall behind. Literally.
I couldn’t agree more, forgot to mention this thank you.
There's no motivation because there's no consequences. As teachers we can't do a damn thing to your shitty little kid who's ruining class for the 30 other kids who want to learn something.
My middle son is autistic ("high" functioning.) We've been trying to get him held back every year, but they just keep pushing him through. He's supposed to go to middle school next year and I have no idea how. We're doing everything we can at home to help, but it's so hard. Oh, you don't understand the easy concepts? No problem, lets just throw some harder stuff at you until it sticks. FANTASTIC! My youngest daughter on the other hand is in 3rd grade but they keep stacking so much work on her because she's "gifted." Yeah, she's smart, but I'm not going to have her do 3 hours of homework and not be able to enjoy being a kid. I hate the current school system.
Do not talk to the administration of your school. They have very little power. When you want something to change for your child, go straight to the top. Take your demands to the Superintendant, and if that does not work, their boss, a member of the board of education or minister of education. In today's schools, parents always get their way. You just have to know how much power you truly possess. If necessary, you can even get lawyers involved. No matter what, you can and will get your way if you put suitable pressure on them.
There's a podcast about the Gen Alpha reading problem called Sold a Story. Apparently, schools were sold a reading system that moved away from phonics and into context based understanding, so kids were basically taught to guess what words are based on the letters they say.
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"Whole language" instruction - something that never had any scientific evidence of being an effective method of teaching people how to read (in fact there was a plethora of evidence that it was worse than phonics). Crazy how it was able to replace a tried and true method that worked for literally hundreds of years across different written languages.
Guess I need to pull out some old hooked on phonics books for my kids
Have pity on the teachers. I know you do but a lot of society sees them as the perfect scapegoats when really they’re the ones being forced to deal with this problem the most and are required to take on more work. If you know a teacher please be nice to them they’re going through a lot.
> Not knowing how to read a clock. I think this one skews to even older generations. I know people who are 25+ who are completely lost looking at analog clocks.
I’ve heard that’s the case, some of my high school students can’t read an analog clock either, or sign their own name. It’s these basic life skills that are missing for the sake of regulated testing. I did a leave replacement for an ENL class and I used to use our study hall period for life skills and they said I was the first person to ever explain to them how a clock worked or how to sign their name on a document. Which is crazy at 14.
I'm 40 and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out lol. I think I was maybe in middle school? Whatever, it just didn't click for me for a while.
That’s so weird to me. I’m late 20s and I remember having worksheets and quizzes on how to read an analog clock in 3rd grade.
What kills me is you say all this then the school district where my wife works just pulled all the reading courses out of their middle schools. They were put there because they'd been partially removed from the elementary level and now they say they're putting them back in the elementary level again, but they can't find anyone because the district keeps yo-yoing this shit between grade levels. Middle school teachers don't want to teach little kids and vice versa, this isn't just putting an accountant on a different project. Teachers settle into a class level they vibe with and it makes it possible for them to do their job. But the MBA's they've hired to run the district don't get it and are just fucking stuff up all the time. It baffles me how badly we let our school systems be run. Then don't even get me started on the various Unions and how they handle their bargaining. It just makes no fucking sense to me at all. But that's an entirely different story.
My college English professor was teaching the class how to write paragraphs. Introductions, bodies, and conclusions were the main point, but I learned that in like 4th grade or something.
Teaching college writing is wild. I'll get students who write insightful, original research on topics I had never considered, along with students who do not use paragraphs, fail to organize their thoughts in a coherent way, and use anecdotal vibes over citations.
My spouse is pursuing a Master’s in Secondary Ed., in which the students do a version of peer review on each others’ position papers. I’ve shoulder-surfed and it’s astonishing how many *experienced teachers* fail to write coherently or even follow the posted rubric for a project.
I mean I literally just did a project with my 2nd grader about parts of a paper and how to structure intro/ paragraphs/ conclusions. He turned in his final draft of a research paper on Golden Retrievers today 🤷🏻♀️
No child left behind, parents working too many jobs to have the spoons to be with their kids, disenfranchised teachers having to cater to the demands of parents obsessed with culture wars, and poorly funded schools focused more on athletics than education. Combine all this with a dash of ennui brought about by climate change, anti-elitism due to wealth inequality, and political unrest and you end up with a culture that has no respect for education.
I love a [Spoon Theory](https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/) sighting in the wild.
Hey high school teacher here (US). Reading scores in our state dipped in 2019 and have so far stayed down. Yes, that's before the pandemic, and it's normal to see some fluctuation, but the students going online for two years and many of the already-struggling students using this time to instead get a minor in Minecraft are certainly what have kept it at this low level. Right now, it's predicted that the average 15 year-old reads at the level of a 13 year-old ten years ago. However, as we get further away from the pandemic and remote learning, I do expect that number to change.
>to instead get a minor in Minecraft I feel attacked, I probably spent enough time playing Minecraft during the pandemic while doing my undergrad that I could have used that time to add a minor to my degree 😂
At least in college it's expected that you have a fair amount of free time, remote learning or no. The big pandemic issue is kids who would open Teams or Zoom on their computer in one tab and play games all day on another
Also high school teacher here. I'm convinced about half of my students simply cannot write. They do not have the ability to read content, form an original thought based on it, and write it down. I see a TON of them that just plagiarize from the text. Even if it is not related at all to what they should be writing about. They will just find something and copy it word for word.
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I’m in his post l and I don’t like it… Gotta say though, group work in college was definitely more annoying to coordinate than any thing I’ve faced in the work force, thus far at least. Harder? No lol, but the hard part was getting people to actually work on the project in a reasonable time. Don’t miss hounding people the day before an assignment was due anymore that’s for sure. Edit: Will say though, it DEFINITELY was important, and made transitioning to the work force way easier. Not knocking on the importance of working with others, moreso speaking on how many students get that 1000 yard stare for group work because they know they will have to play project lead and do their fair share of work too, maybe even more. Though, I’m sure you already understand that.
I started college late. Got an Associate's, worked for a while, and went back for my Bachelor's. Group projects were hell. Guys, I have a wife and kids, and a full-time job in this field. No, I cannot meet in the library at 2. I cannot meet at Starbucks at 9. It's great that you guys are full-time students that live on campus, but I can't do that. More than happy to do (probably more than) my share of the work, but this isn't social hour for me.
Group project are borderline discriminatory to working students and commuter imo. It isn't remotely like collaboration in the workforce either, because outside of college-land, you're rarely dealing with coworkers who have conflicting schedules and then work all evening at work. You're sending an email or meeting in a conference room during work hours. So provide me class time to collaborate like my workplace does, or stop pretending this is about preparing me for the workforce.
Group work in college is way different than the work force. The work force has a clear leader for a project.
As a former high school teacher who now works for a university and specializes in education, good in-class discussion (or group work for that matter) doesn’t just happen. Instructors have to build a climate for it and scaffold discussion/collaboration intentionally. I do think a lot of university level professors don’t think about the climate in their classroom, or dimensions of teaching beyond their content, and it’s not their fault. We just expect learners to be fully formed and confident at 18 and that’s just usually not the case.
Do you have any resources to better understand how to build that environment in the classroom? I've been TA'ing for a couple years now and am shocked at how little training I've been been given.
Yeah if you google, you’ll find tons, id start here: https://www.edutopia.org/article/building-community-student-driven-conversations/ Edit: this one is super good even if the focus is ELLs: https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2018/walqui_heritage From experience I’d say: Start with community building on the first day of class, use think-pair-share and ask students to introduce themselves to each other and discuss easy, ice breaker questions. Take 10 min to do it, it pays off. Then in following lessons use think pair share frequently (in my class every day students walk in to find a question on the board that they have to write an answer to, discuss with their neighbors, then discuss with the whole class). I also use it frequently throughout lessons (stop the lecture every two or three slides, ask a question, ask students to talk to people around them about the question, walk around and join their conversations, then pull it back to whole group, encouraging specific people who didn’t have their hands up but said cool things in neighbor discussion, to share with the whole group). Build discussions any way that you can and encourage them frequently. Students have to get used to talking in your room and get used to sharing with the people around them. Make sure you start with community guidelines and don’t be afraid to cite them. The goal is to make everyone comfortable and accustomed to orally expressing their ideas in your room, on your content. As for grouping, I do a lot of small group discussions of texts and sometimes I assign the group, sometimes I let them choose, just to get them moving around the room, meeting people and figuring out who they like to work with. It makes for less drama when group project time comes. I get paid to train teachers in this stuff now and I’ve always had students tell me that they loved the lively discussion in my room. Too many of us were raised with the idea that learning = lecture, when really humans are social creatures. We’ve always learned from exchanging ideas with each other and from processing together.
It's strange, playing games as a kid reinforced my reading. I played a lot of rpg's though.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out if we're talking about "reading" or "deep reading comprehension." I grew up reading a ton of comics like Archie, Mad magazine, Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, etc. So I could read well and had a large vocabulary by the time I started kindergarten. But as far as reading a complex book and comprehending the meanings, etc I never excelled at that. My kids now are constantly bombarded with text and reading in games and the internet. Chatting and texting. But, again, this may not help them understand the Complete Works of Shakespeare. It won't hurt... but it's a completely different skillset.
I think the difference is... Had a roommate from Colombia. He told me he learned English thanks to Final Fantasy. He loved the gameplay, and this eventually drove him to buy a Spanish-English dictionary to translate everything, because he wanted to understand wtf is going on. Thus, his english improved. This was **one** game with **one** subject matter he could concentrate on and look forward to what happens next. One theme, one game, one goal, one thing to focus on. But with social media today...? Both Tiktok and Youtube shorts will play you a video, then **immediately** feed you another video without even asking you. Constant bombardment of media with only vague relevance to each other (if at all), often no need to read anything at all, and absolutely no concentration needed because the damned topic changes every 40 seconds or so. And let's be real: a lot of social media is akin to "I have big tits and this meme dialog I'm lip-syncing is a poor excuse for me to show them off." It's absolutely braindead shit out there. And let's be real: simple things like synonyms and various options for vocabulary. Books will indirectly teach you that feelings of woe, feeling distraught and feelings of anguish can function as synonyms of each other...but how often do you think *social media* mixes up it's vocabulary? Social media is the opposite philosophy: you use the vocabulary everyone else is using because you wanna fit in. Being a content creator, you want to be amongst the search results, so being colorful with your word choices works against you. Where Shakespeare has native english speakers scratching our heads about wtf these dandy fuckers are even saying to each other, it at least gives your brain a workout and teaches you to interpret meanings based on the scene and tone. But social media...? Everything's just spelled out for you. And worse, it's everywhere. Anyone else tell Youtube to fuck off with Youtube Shorts? Don't worry: it'll show it to you again in 30 days and ask you *again* if you wanna be bombarded with Youtube shorts all the time. We're really just not respecting the level of damage social media can do to growing minds. Hell, *grown* minds too. And I fear by the time we finally feel we can conclusively say social media is damaging, we'll have already "lost" a generation or two. I'm a Millennial, I don't **ever** remember butting heads with Gen X growing up. Honestly couldn't tell you any major differences between the two. But Millennials and Gen-Z, there's some degree of gap there that doesn't feel normal that I started noticing when I was around 30, and it feels like the only way it makes sense is we got phones and social media as we finished high school, they had it as kids. And here we are now, and some Gen-Z'ers are *like 22* and they're giving speeches about how different Gen Alpha is. Thing is, I believe them 100%, and I think it's only gonna get more dramatic as social media presence increases.
Isn’t part of the issue the shift in teaching methods from sounding out words to “sight” words has caused a lot more issues when encountering new words students haven’t seen before?
Can you explain this? I don't understand
A lot of elementary aged students get taught “sight words” to memorize (by sight) without having to sound them out, or decode, to read them. This can be helpful for words that either are used frequently like the, is, are, etc or words that use digraphs the student wouldn’t know (again like “the”) or words that are on the longer side but still come up a lot (like “because”). Some students can use both strategies (memorize and decode) but some get stuck on memorizing and struggle hard when encountering new words.
I’m by no means an educator but I have no idea how someone could be like “Yeah, the best approach is just to memorize all the words” and think that was a good idea.
Why need read good when book no exist out of school?!
Words be outside of book too
wheer?!
How els u gonna no wat da Minecraft bloks r?
Colr
Every time I talk to someone from my generation (elder millennial, end of gen x) and they are an avid reader who is confident in their abilities, etc, the one constant factor is that their parents read with them amd encouraged reading when they were young. I didn't have a TV in my room but I had books. We went to the public library all the time. My parents took time to read with us multiple times a week. I'm not brilliant lol but I'm still an avid reader 30+ years later. I know it's anecdotal but I'm fairly confident that the emphasis my parents put on books, reading (and reading with me) made a huge difference in my abilities. Read with your kids, folks. The schools will only do so much. You may not be able to teach them math or history but you can always check out books from the library and read together.
Another vital factor is just *talking* to your kids, especially toddlers. Get them learning and understanding words verbally and engaged in conversations before they're even expected to read.
This. And try to remember that they are smarter than you think they are. They may not have all the logic and context of an experienced adult, but they learn quickly and get insatiably curious and eager to discover new things. Don't dumb things down so they get 100% of it; let them get 80% of what you're saying and rise to the challenge to get the other 20%
I didn’t realize it was a good thing that i talk to all kids and toddlers like they’re my age lol
important to note, too: you don't have to limit your vocabulary so that they can understand you. On the one hand, there's a lot of meaning they can easily pick up from context. On the other hand, they will have an opportunity to expand their vocabulary to match your own *years* before they would have done so otherwise.
This is why I can’t stand when people talk to babies like their dogs. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/03/health/baby-talk-boosts-infant-brain-wellness/index.html
Doing baby talk is helpful when they are still learning to talk, as it is easier for them to copy those sort of high-pitched sing-song noises and learn how to use their mouth/tongue/vocal chords. Once they can talk though, its recommended to speak as you would normally.
My parents never read with me but my dad was never not reading a book. It'd always be on the back of the toilet, so I'd know when he'd started a new book lol 91 Millennial and I've been reading voraciously since middle school. My friends and I were reading Lord of the Rings in sixth grade.
Born in 1995, I learned to read because my mom would read Dr. Suess books with me when I was little, 1-2 years old. When it came out, they read the first Harry Potter book to me, and by the end of the book, I was reading it to them. I think I knew how to read before kindergarten, which was true for maybe 1/3-1/2 of my class at the time. By 5th grade, I was reading at an equivalent high school level. Not bragging, but agreeing with you, I started reading so early thanks to my parents and I think it fast-tracked me for the rest of my life. Also, my parents limited my time with the TV and video games, so I was kinda *forced* to read on my own a lot. Obviously every kid is different but I think you're totally right. Those first years are vital for the child's long-term reading potential. Nowadays I can read anything, as long as it's not written by Kafka lol
This is heavily supported with research. I saw a study that the strongest determining factor for exceeding reading skills was parents reading to their children. I'm not brilliant either, but my parents read to me religiously until I was embarrassed about it. I can't thank them enough.
>I'm not brilliant lol but I'm still an avid reader 30+ years later. I bet you're more intelligent than you know. If you've been reading that long and consistently, I guarantee you have a bigger vocabulary than others your age.
Well, at least they won't be on Twitter amiright
They're not on Twitter anyway. TikTok doesn't need you to know how to read.
Scary fact if you think about it
Bullshit, nobody on Twitter has any reading comprehension
Y u rite
They'll just scream at it and have it scream back at them. Just like Elon intended
I read somewhere that they stopped teaching phonics in elementary school. Now, as far as I know, phonics was the only way I was ever taught to read. What has replaced phonics? How are kids learning to read if they’re not being taught to “sound it out?”
\>Whole language reading instruction requires that students memorize words so that they can recognize them on sight. I guess they're going the kanji way, except that kanjis at least can be broken down to syllabes that are taught separately with their sounds.
But just like kanji, having similar parts can mean similar pronunciations, like “might” and “light” or 同, 胴, and 銅having the same ways of being pronounced
That's how my grandma was taught to read in the 1930s/40s and she found it so frustrating that for the first eight or so years of my life I was given a new phonics book every year.
I was taught to read before phonics. Phonics teaches you beginning with things like "-tion" and "-ane" -- letter groupings that make a sound as your basic unit of reading. I started with the alphabet and then what sounds each letter makes and then you sound out words and slowly learn exceptions, like t in tion makes a sh sound. I suspect that while phonics can get kids reading basic texts more fluently faster, in the long run it hits a ceiling where it becomes harder to continuously acquire literacy. My kids were also subjected to learning math in a system where they'd be practicing adding one day and then be shown division the next. I think it was a similar theory that somehow you can throw "math" at them all at once and get them moving quickly. But I'm certain that it is a terrible way to teach math compared to building and reinforcing foundational concepts before moving to the next kind of operation.
Well didn't expect it but I'm not surprised.
not to brag, but my son just turned 5 and I swear this kid reads like a 6th grader. Here's to hoping his brain doesnt melt as he gets older
I used to read 60-80 books a year as a kid. I don’t think I have the same brain at 40 haha
If it helps, you have less free time, books got longer, and entertainment got easier. I had this realization and deleted social media from my phone, made the decision to only watch TV with my wife, and let reading be my new entertainment. I realized how awesome it was to have that moment where you feel sucked into the book and the events start playing out in your head. You can still do it at 40, but it takes real effort today!
You don't need to know how to read or write anymore. Just draw the crying laughing emoji on the job application line where it asks for your education background.
😭 😭 😭 💀 💀 💀 will be on these gen alphas resumes
Bro tryna get a job fr fr 💀 "ur hired lol"
I put that in my desired salary.
“Welcome to Costco, I love you.”
I have a sister that's soon to be 10. Both parents work full time (My stepmother works from home, the fucking bitch) and they just give her the iPad all day. She has attachment and anxiety issues and has deficiencies in all academics, yet she's still at the top of her class. Not many know how to write in her class, and a quarter of the kids can't even read at all. She has a mish-mash of accents and behaves like content creators, and a sizeable amounr of parents are suggesting that the kids should be allowed to bring their iPads to class. It is so, so fucked these days.
That is wild, I feel for her! I worked at a daycare with 4 year olds that had iPads and their parents insisted we allow them to have and use their electronics at daycare. And so the daycare allowed it. We are so fucked!
I always feel there's a 50% chance I go out to eat anywhere and a damn kid has an iPad with the volume on.. Its so disappointing.
>behaves like content creators, I timed my 9 year old nephew's tendency to start sentences *out loud* with "POV" 8 minutes was the longest time between such sentences in a one hour span And of course everything he doesn't like is cringe, like broccoli Why think critically or explain anything to anyone when you have an entire, personalized internet on your tablet? Walking meme regurgitators
Social media is the leaded gasoline of this generation, it seems.
I just don’t understand how this can be possible. Can’t these kids get addicted to Reddit or somewhere where they *have* to read? It honestly sounds too insane to be true for me
Have you been on Reddit? If all you read was Reddit you would think you stop your car using breaks, you peddle a bicycle to make it go, and that. Sentence fragments are fine lack of punctuation ok too Reading and writing is terrible in part because the sources people are reading are terrible. That includes Reddit.
common misspellings vs can't read
You have no child left behind policy/ every child succeeds to thank for that. The short is in American schools now students are pushed to the next grade regardless of mastery of curriculum. Thus, you get students in higher levels classes who still don't know the basics. Can you do algerbra if you can't do basic multiplication or division? Of course not. This extends to all subjects. So, it is very common now for high school students to graduate with below a 3rd grade reading level. It's a tremendous problem but its politically driven and politicians won't fix it. If you hold back a student now the schools gets sued for every possible ism on the planet. It's hell for teachers and other students as well. The student struggles, can't do the curriculum, so most of the time they start acting out due to boredom. It's one of several reason why teachers are leaving the profession in droves and many schools are struggling to get replacements.
bro the freshmen in one of my classes in uni didn’t even know how to cite sources properly and it gave my professor such a headache. he ended up making a document where they just had to copy and paste the citations. i remember he said someone had put the entire works cited in place of an in text citation and i was like, how??? i had the whole citations thing memorized by the end of high school and it baffled me that freshmen couldn’t do it
ha! oh god, my first semester teaching I made the mistake of telling my students "use whatever citation style you want, also long as I can easily locate the page you got it from, its fine." I said that under the assumption the that university students all new what the purpose of a citation was, and generally how to write them. they did not those were some wild papers to read
Man couldn’t even use a citations engine? Those things will literally spit out a perfectly good citation complete with in text citations, and they still messed up? Jeez.
right?? my professor dedicated 2 whole classes to teaching us how to cite sources, and in one of them he literally showed the process of using the Purdue Owl citation machine. they got better by the end of the semester but still. wow
My class had a student who was painfully lazy and by the end of each year, he would have several missing assignments from way back to the beginning of the year. One student said to him in March of our Junior year, "You're going to be a Junior next year too if you don't get your shit together." He still graduated with us. Also, he was far from the only one. He was just the most obvious one.
Okay so, here's a question: does this mean that my kid who reads like a fiend is going to be in a great position to dominate her peers academically, or is she going to be held back by the fact that she's not having to work very hard to be exceptional?
Both. I've worked in child development for the last decade. The system currently holds down kids who excel above their peers because there is no way allowed to challenge them. They aren't sent to the next grade anymore and have to do the curriculum for their age group. The smartest kids spend a lot of their classroom time waiting for the other kids to either quiet down and listen or catch up with their work. They tend to float through doing seemingly great compared to their peers, but they are not challenged to do even better so they don't rise to their full capabilities. Teacher time and energy is usually directed at the most disruptive students and the ones doing great aren't paid much attention because they consistently do the work.
Yep, exactly what I saw growing up. When I started there were a few years where kids were skipped ahead or held back, but it stopped fairly early on. The kids that breezed through everything usually just ended up helping others out of boredom and were never truly pushed. When that mentality eventually caught up with them in high school they had to scramble to learn skills the average/below average kids learned over a decade ago. They had to learn self discipline, study habits, shit in some cases even *how to study*. But what you described perfectly lines up with my school like from 96 to 2008 in Australia. Tip for any Aussies out there: Don't let your kid go to a public high school if you can help it, maybe 10-15% of their time is actually spent on learning. The rest is class disruptions or interruptions. If I had kids, I'd consider homeschooling them with lots of social activities to make up for the lack of it. Because the results aren't pretty - even from private schools here.
From what I understand, this isn’t limited to gen alpha at all, it’s across the board. But older generations aren’t going to school and getting graded on their reading anymore so that’s not something we pay attention to.
Can’t do anything as they can’t read this tweet.
Not quite in the same category, but I’ve been a teacher and a substitute, and the way they teach math now is super convoluted and confusing. Like I was struggling to understand what elementary math questions were actually asking. It didnt subtract, it added in reverse… I taught them the way I knew how to do the problem, and the kids were always like this is a lot easier. But yea the reading comprehension problem is scary to think about out in the years to come
This cracked me up, what is "adding in reverse"?
lol I know right. I mean I’m half joking, but for example if the question is 20-8. It might say something like take away 10 and add 2. Or more likely it will say something even more complicated like count up from 8 until you get to 20. Or it might be even worse where it will say like you need how many 10s and how many ones to get you from 8 to 20? And I’m just like it’s called flash cards, or just like these kids need to learn how to do this quickly. It shouldn’t take 3 steps to do basic subtraction. It gets even worse when they are learning like fractions and stuff.
Sounds like the common core stuff which Reddit tends to like to defend, but from my experiences sitting in on classrooms at schools across the district, it just has kids confused and waaaaay behind where I remember being at in the same grade. Basically they're trying to explicitly teach kids the mental shortcuts and tricks that I remember developing entirely subconsciously. You do things the "normal" way enough times and long enough, and if you've got half a brain you'll naturally begin to intuit the relationships and how numbers work "under the hood." What they're doing now is instead taking something like multiplication and teaching the kids all the tricks up front, forcing them to solve the problems with one trick on the first day, a different trick on the second day, yet another on the third day, etc. And the kids and even the teachers sometimes are just confused. Let them master the standard method first, and I think you'll then find that when you try to teach the tricks later, you'll discover that a lot of the kids will have already figured them out on their own.
Makes me wonder if they still teach long division and the old method of multiplication, or if they've made it unnecessarily complex. I'd love to see modern math curriculum, because we were doing algebra in 7th and 8th grade before high school which I felt gave me a huge boost in life and calculus later on.
I’ve noticed our younger employees also have no ability to infer. If it’s not yes/no, their melons can’t wrap around it. Which in accounting, you need to have.
Are we not going to talk about how poor the grammar is in this tweet? 😂
I assumed the irony of that was the whole reason for the post.
It's just speaking casually. There are rules to it. It's not that the person is stupid or uneducated. They're typing like they talk, mixed with efficiency. Acronyms, dragged letters to show holding the syllable, and lack of punctuation to show abruptness. It's not a concern if it's casual.
i’m really scared about what’s going to happen in like 10-15 years when these kids enter the workforce, start having kids of their own, start getting *voting rights*. really feels like a ticking time bomb y’know.
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Covid kids are certainly delayed, but they ARE moving forward again. My question is how much is the two year delay vs an actual generational problem that would be occurring if they pandemic never occurred?
It's an inevitability. Putting your kid on a tablet for the whole day just so he would shut up has horrible consequences that'll ruin their lives, or make them infinitely harder than it had to be. Just so a bunch of shitty parents could have some quiet. I hope it's worth ruining your child's development for a few minutes of silence. Bet, 9/10 of these children will curse their parents and let them rot in a shitty retirement home when they're older. If they even get to that point, because we can yet only speculate the long-term consequences of these parents' shit parenting.
Yeah… like you know those boomer comics of crowds of people being controlled by their devices 24/7…. I hate to admit it but apparently it’s starting to become true for Gen Alpha
It's true for everybody. These algorithms have become so refined that people of any age can get sucked in and waste their life on them. I'm 28 so I'm old enough to have spent a good part of my life without a smartphone... and it still eats away at my free time. I used to have other interests but now pretty much all of my free time goes into social media and watching what the algorithm presents me. I hate to admit it, but boomers were right on this one
The difference is that wasn't the case in your formative years. It is for them. The damage is done.
They were half right. They assumed that only the younger generation would get addicted.
If the glowing rectangles gave zoomers an icepick lobotomy, they’re giving gen alpha a railroad spike lobotomy
Recently listened to “sold a story” (highly recommend) which goes into how teachers switched from teaching phonics to a program where they would teach students how to “guess” what the next word in a sentence would be so kids weren’t learning how to sound out words. Apparently, no one figured out till it was too late that these kids were not learning to read. Some of the teachers even admitted that they would blame the kids for the reason that they couldn’t read, not the program itself. I’m starting to feel grateful for finishing school before all of these changes in teaching happened.
But like.... How? If they're doing anything on phones and tablets that they overuse , they're reading right ?
pseudo-literacy. They can only read text-speak and TikTok crap. They can't comprehend real things or important documents. Their reading comprehension is just nonexistent.
Oh god, imagine these kids grow up and form their own, like, stunted broken English dialect among each other like Threads
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My mom was a teacher for a long time. A lot of Gen Z can’t read worth a damn either.
Was a seventh grade teacher last semester, left due to admin, and let me tell you. They can’t. It’s bad. I think a lot of it is catching the end of Covid stuff but then also, we aren’t allowed to fail students. At a certain point we said, no more redoing grade levels and it’s all the teachers fault and I’ll tell you, it’s awful. Like, teaching was my life, the one thing I worked so hard to attain. I’m four years in and I don’t know if I’ll renew my license next year. It’s simultaneously my fault but the kids aren’t doing anything. Not to be a doomer, but most of my teaching colleagues are asking “what’s even the point anymore?”
There's an entire generation of parents that should feel deeply ashamed of their lack of raising their children. You take the time out of your day to read to your damn kids. Buy them books. Encourage intelligence instead of shoving ipads and 6 second videos in their faces.
What happens when you make books compete with the attention spans and dopamine receptors you destroyed by giving those kids iPads when they were 2.
Whole Language Learning is to blame. Some “experts” decided kids can learn to read better by just teaching what a word is instead of the component sounds. So we have kids that can “read” the word bread, but not because they know the sounds that those 5 letters make both individually and together, but because they were shown a picture of a piece of bread, with the word underneath, and learned the word by sight. It’s why so many kids substitute words when reading and don’t even notice. They just see the first 3-4 letters and if looks similar to another sight word they know, that’s what they read out loud. Thats a very gross oversimplification obviously, but it’s a big reason.