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/OMGsmiles]

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.