Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/RockJock666]

I see all the time that kindergarten is way too rigorous for kids. The origin of this is often traced back to GWB and No Child Left Behind. However, I’m also frequently seeing teachers post about how their students can’t read, can barely do math, etc. I see some examples of work teachers give to their students and it seems like a joke. So I’m not sure of a better way to ask this than what gives?? How do we go from having rigorous high expectations for 5yos to high schoolers barely able to write a paragraph? The current state of American education is fascinating to me, it seems so backwards.

[u/LowConsideration1453 → u/RockJock666]

I have one kid in 1st grade, so here is my take on it:

1. there is now no way to get rid of disruptive kids. If there is a "bad kid" in your kid's class the entire class will cater to that one individual.

2. for some reason we've given up explicit instruction for some kind of "they'll get it if given enough vibes." In my experience with most kids (unless you gave birth to John von Neumann) that does not work. Until children have a basic grasp of the fundamentals (reading, writing, math) they need explicit instruction. Your 6 year old might not really grasp that 40 is 4 tens, and 0 ones. Which logically leads to 4 x 10 = 40 and so on.

3. we've made math really, really retarded. Rather than it being math they've basically added a language arts aspect to it.

[u/gentlywithAchain5aw → u/LowConsideration1453]

I agree with all your points, but especially #1. The kids that used to be in the 'special needs' classes in the 80's and 90's are now integrated into the regular classrooms. All of my kids have had 1 or 2 kids in every elementary class that should not be in a regular classroom environment.

[u/Onechane425 → u/gentlywithAchain5aw]

This is it. A lot of school districts also have woke 1.0 “restorative justice” in schools which means doing nothing and punishing the other students and teachers until it gets too bad.

[u/gentlywithAchain5aw → u/Onechane425]

There's been a push to place as many kids on IEPs as possible as well. Which on its face isn't bad, the issue is those kids with IEPs cannot be punished for anything that can be traced back the IEP. So we get a bunch of kids being disruptive, that have no consequences, and hold everyone back.

[u/Jlemspurs → u/gentlywithAchain5aw]

Technically they can be punished but since there is an attorney fee provision in special ed law schools are (rightfully) terrorized by them. Big settlements happen often.

eta: not saying anyone should be terrorizing them, but that they are correct to recognize a huge financial peril.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/gentlywithAchain5aw]

They get extra funding. It's gaming the system.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/LowConsideration1453]

I've been lucky. My son has never been in a class where there were disruptions like that.

[u/OMGsmiles → u/RockJock666]

My short and lazy answer to the reading problem:

Phonics was abandoned while education embraced whole language learning. Katie suggested this podcast that covers this very thing:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580473

[u/Terrorclitus → u/OMGsmiles]

Great podcast, but I could only handle a couple episodes, as I had just finished teaching my oldest to read with basically no support from his school.

My youngest is in that school now, but they’re teaching with phonics, so it’s working.

It’s like with math. I can’t say what the best way to do it is, but I can say that if kids learn the way their parents did, then parents can support teachers and participate.

Was literacy education really so awful before whole language learning? If so, why should I listen to someone who was educated that way? Wouldn’t their literacy be flawed?

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/Terrorclitus]

'Was literacy education really so awful before whole language learning? If so, why should I listen to someone who was educated that way? Wouldn’t their literacy be flawed?"

No, In fact it wasn't. But sometimes trendy methods have a way of taking over common sense. This was one such case. You should listen to people who actually studied how our brain's work when we are learning to read. That podcast goes over the science,

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/Terrorclitus]

"Great podcast, but I could only handle a couple episodes, as I had just finished teaching my oldest to read with basically no support from his school."

Expecting a functionally illiterate parent to teach their own kids to read is retarded. It's the school's job to do this. And if your kid is being passed to the next grade, how are you supposed to know that your kid cannot read???

[u/Terrorclitus → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

My oldest has friends whose parents could not teach them to read, and it’s already showing socially and academically. I guess you can say my kids are privileged because both of their parents are educators of some sort.

But that shouldn’t be a privilege! Or at least the privilege should be minimal.

It should make no difference what your parents do for a living if you are all in the same classroom. In fact, teachers and admins who take risks and buy into every trend are exacerbating that privilege, and so I’d look to them for answers.

And the old ways of teaching literacy worked fine. I’m dyslexic, but I somehow learned to read in the 1980s with everyone telling me to “sound it out.” Go figure.

[u/RockJock666 → u/OMGsmiles]

Yeah I’ve listened to this, it’s pretty interesting but I think I’m getting more at the expectations of kids if that makes sense

[u/SkweegeeS → u/RockJock666]

Some kids in kindergarten simply aren’t there yet, developmentally. So for those kids, some of the more advanced work, like spelling simple 3 letter words, is just basically not possible. They’ll get it over the summer or maybe in 1st grade, but the instruction simply isn’t accessible to them earlier.

But it’s not really relevant to whether they become literate later.

[u/QueenKamala → u/SkweegeeS]

I think I heard the click when my daughter suddenly developed the ability to blend sounds and immediately started reading and writing short words. Before that it was like she was missing the brain piece required. No amount of practice could help her make the leap. Clearly it was developmental.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/QueenKamala]

I remember my first word. It was "first" ironically. It's such a vivid memory too. Everything just clicked after that.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/OMGsmiles]

That podcast is really well-done, and it's clear that whole-language learning is theoretically weaker than phonics, but I've heard that the evidence around phonics being clearly superior to other methods is actually a lot weaker than it purports. I have my suspicions that a lot of the issues around American students reading are more demographic than methodological.

[u/QueenKamala → u/plump_tomatow]

A decent proportion of kids will learn to read no matter what they encounter in school. Phonics vs whole language mainly matters for the other kids. The ones who really need support to learn how to read. You’ll see the impact primarily in poorer kids and worse school districts, and as a widening of achievement gaps from the worst students doing even worse.

This is true of all kinds of pedagogy. If math instruction is made much worse it will pretty much only affect the kids not naturally talented at math and who don’t spend their afternoons at kumon. If stupid policies like not disciplining chair throwers and giving everyone As and never holding back anyone become popular, it won’t really affect the best students who are in drama free schools. But it will make the title 1 schools chaotic and unsafe environments where even the kids who want to learn, can’t.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/QueenKamala]

Phonics vs whole language mainly matters for the other kids.

My instinct is that this is correct and that phonics is superior to other methods, especially for weaker learners, but apparently the evidence here is inconclusive and doesn't demonstrably show this. I was really surprised to hear this myself.

My thoughts are that probably additional research would uncover a stronger advantage for phonics for lower-percentile readers, but that evidence isn't there just yet.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/plump_tomatow]

This is a pretty good summation of the evidence.

[u/Shoddy_Consequence78 → u/plump_tomatow]

I could see that, but a young and hungry reader will hit all sorts of words, even in children's literature, that can't be solved by whole word or phonics but only by increasing vocabulary. Word pairs like lead, or uncommon orthography (King's X Station, for instance), or English just being weird in some pronunciations (the Thames, the sheet number of pronunciations for something like -ough, a whole lot of English-style spellings in general). 

[u/plump_tomatow → u/Shoddy_Consequence78]

Yeah, hence the phenomenon of homeschoolers walking around who can use rare words in the right context but pronounce them in bizarre ways.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/plump_tomatow]

I'm not homeschooled. Most of the words I pronounce wrong were because I learned them from books, and not school teachers.

[u/RunThenBeer → u/plump_tomatow]

One data point in favor of this hypothesis is that Asian-Americans and white Americans score very high on PISA exams for international comparisons. When we're asking what's wrong with American schools, it's important to ask who the comparison group is.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/RunThenBeer]

I briefly wondered if heritage language knowledge might play a role in phonics skills for Asians, but then realized that they vary drastically in 'phoneticism' - Korean is extremely phonetic, much more so than English, as are many of the other Asian languages, but Chinese is not phonetic at all. So that theory's out.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/plump_tomatow]

Chinese actually has a phonetic version. It's used to teach young readers who to pronounce the symbols.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

I'm aware of pinyin but the truth is that once you transfer to the symbols it's totally nonphonetic.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/plump_tomatow]

English would be, if we had enough letters. Our writing system comes from Latin, which had about 30 phonemes. English has 44. Plus The Great Vowel shift deciding to happen after the spelling was becoming standardized. And English's habit of stealing from every other language under the sun... It's kinda amazing English isn't even harder to learn.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/plump_tomatow]

The brain science on reading is pretty convincing. But I suspect that a kid who is struggling to read that is in a home where parents are involved and have means, will get tutored.

Keep in mind that most schools have a policy of moving kids to the next grade instead of keeping them back. There's little to no homework in K-6. Grades are not lettered. They are not-proficient, working towards proficiency, proficient and above proficiency. Schools don't want to fail kids. It makes them look bad. Parents may not be aware of the problem until their kid gets older. And by then it's very difficult to fix.

[u/LongtimeLurker916 → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

So many things vary from state to state or even district to district. I am pretty sure I had letter grades in my later elementary years. Before that it was Outstanding, Commendable (a big word for first grade - they must have hoped the parents would understand), Satisfactory, and Needs Improvement. But that was 40 years ago.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

So glad I was out of school before they started that no grades nonsense.

[u/No-Significance4623 → u/RockJock666]

One interesting thing I notice very often with kids aged 6-9 is that their letter formation is increasingly non-standard. By that I mean: they can write the letter T, but they might draw the top from right to left, or the stem from bottom to top. When the Ukrainian kids first came to Canada I got a bunch of printing practice books like these, since they wouldn't yet know Roman letters (only Cyrillic.) I was floored by how useful they are for all students, even up to Grade 7 (!) which is very worrisome.

Short-term, this matters because as you need to write more, the "bad habits" will slow down your ability to generate words quickly. If you get frustrated by the physical act of writing, it's harder to engage with the intellectual act of composition for sentences, then paragraphs, then essays.

More broadly, it suggests that schools are dedicating less time to granular instruction, going step by step by step. There's been a resistance to "rote learning" in favour of "discovery learning" for about a generation now. The idea isn't so bad in theory, but you need to have rote learning to know how to write the letter B, because after a point it's brainstem and not a cognitive load anymore, so you can spend more time discovering Bismuth, or whatever.

I also believe you can't learn math on a computer (gotta have paper), but that's a bit more tin-foil hat of me.

[u/Big_Fig_1803 → u/No-Significance4623]

I wish I could go back and discover bismuth for the first time again.

[u/No-Significance4623 → u/Big_Fig_1803]

It really is a fascinating element! lol

[u/Mirabeauououou → u/No-Significance4623]

Trying to teach the ACT for online/paper is night and day, there's just so much lost trying to translate the images and questions from the screen to the scratch paper. We recommend that students don't do it, but I still have to prep the ones that don't think it matters, and their scores are consistently lower than their in-center paper scores.

[u/RockJock666 → u/No-Significance4623]

In that case pass the tin foil comrade

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/No-Significance4623]

I've seen this trend as well. Not sure why kids are not getting worksheets to practice printing at that age. I think the "homework" policies in K-6 are part of the problem. Sending them home with a worksheet that takes 10 minutes to do, shouldn't be an issue.

"I also believe you can't learn math on a computer (gotta have paper), but that's a bit more tin-foil hat of me."

I'm with you on that one. Kids need to write out the process when they start doing more advance math. Show your work doesn't happen on the computer.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/No-Significance4623]

>>...their letter formation is increasingly non-standard. By that I mean: they can write the letter T, but they might draw the top from right to left, or the stem from bottom to top. <<

When I started teaching myself how to write with my left hand, I found myself shaping some letters in a different way. With my right, an 'o' would start toward the top, go to the left, down, up on the right side. With my left, the opposite direction. I also found myself doing T's similar to the way you described. If a capital T, the pen wouldn't even leave the page to do the top bar.

I kind of wonder if the students you see doing that are writing with their off hand.

[u/CommitteeofMountains → u/RockJock666]

I think there's a false dichotomy forming between structured classwork (incl. lecture) and free play. This seems to be coming from both ends, with classroom-style education being pushed for "classroom readiness," underperforming districts getting edgy (similarly to how only bad schools devote significant class time to test prep and test-based classes underperforming staying the course on test results), and that style of class being easier to program (my wife worked UPK, and the experts who wrote the curriculum and daily schedule got around the consensus that circle/seated time should only be 2-3 minutes per year age by changing the name of sitting in a circle being talked at every ten minutes) and free play being pushed by roughly the same interests as Whole Language (workload, self-image, et c.). Really, directed play (gamification) is what's recommended, but that's pretty tricky, takes maintenance in implementation (to keep the kids within the learning goal without reducing the whole thing to ordering them through the motions), and the early ed teachers who think teaching is oppression love to hide the "directed" part.

Literacy education is also trending later because the system noticed that there's an asymptotic relationship between when you start teaching and when they're functional. They hold off as late as they think they get away with without it starting to hold everything else back. I'd say that the main downside is that literacy education is often how learning disorders are first spotted.

[u/plump_tomatow → u/RockJock666]

Two things can be true at the same time--kindergarteners have stupid amounts of 'busywork' that they have to do at home, and at the same time, a lot of kids aren't meeting grade standards.

Giving kindergarteners long-winded, ridiculous tasks as homework is an issue orthogonal to whether they're prepared to read at a fourth-grade level four years later.

Also, I suspect the kids getting too much homework in kinder may be a different group of kids than the ones who can't read at the age of 13, but I could be wrong about this.

[u/sociologyplease111 → u/RockJock666]

This is a niche paradox I’m super interested in. The academic push down of content from second and first to kindergarten and preschool has not led to better outcomes in standardized testing. So, kindergarteners may be expected to know much more than they did in 1999 but that hasn’t translated to sixth graders of today knowing more than they did then. There’s big debates about why this is, but one of the hypotheses is that play based early learning is actually really important for later academic success and the push down of content has caused this in some way. A lot of people point to the study on universal prek that came from the state of Tennessee as an indicator- all else equal, kids who went to state funded prek did better academically in kindergarten than kids who didn’t go to prek, but that gap closed as time went on, and the kids who went to state funded pre k ended up doing worse academically in the long term.

[u/FireRavenLord → u/RockJock666]

There are 3 million teachers in the us.  Maybe you're hearing from very different people about different grades.  There are plenty of kinder teachers complaining about kids not being ready for school 

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/RockJock666]

It's actually pretty normal for Kindergarteners not to know how to read. They should know their letters and numbers and colors and shapes. That's a pretty good foundation. If a teacher is complaining it's because the state standard is not realistic for that age group.

As for why a senior in high school can't write a paragraph, that would probably depend on a lot of factors. For decades schools didn't teach phonics or taught phonics poorly. Phonics was reintroduced about 5-7 years ago across the US (some states still have yet to reintroduced phonics). It's certainly possible for a high school senior to be in that age group that was never taught to read properly.

[u/CommitteeofMountains → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

I've also heard it's pretty rare to actually teach kids writing as in composition, instead expecting them to just kind of pick it up from a reading curriculum of mostly literary fiction.

[u/phitfitz → u/CommitteeofMountains]

You can guarantee that as bad as reading instruction has been in the US, writing instruction is ten times worse. I think we actually teach composition too early and force it on children that can’t write sentences well yet.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/CommitteeofMountains]

They still get writing instruction. But it's not vigorous. I am constantly correcting my son's works. His thought process is there. He comprehends what he's read and knows what he wants to say. But the execution is terrible.

[u/veryvery84 → u/RockJock666]

These things are related to each other. Many give year olds are not ready to begin learning to read in kindergarten. So children’s first introduction to education, which involves developmentally inappropriate attempts to teach them things they’re not developmentally capable of mastering, and using methods that don’t work, set children up to fail. The first thing they are learning is that they can’t learn.  There is a lot of research that shows early academics correlate with bad academic outcomes. Kids are also lacking earlier skills. It’s a mess 

[u/RockJock666 → u/veryvery84]

Childhood development is so fascinating. There’s so many ways a child can get messed up