Paul Thomas of Furman University describes two examples of “epistemic trespassing”: Ruby Payne’s theories about poverty and the current advocacy for “the science of reading.”
Epistemic trespassing occurs when a narrative is driven by people who are not experts in their field.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My nomination for word of the decade,” narrative”- no validity of content necessary.
Schlepistemic Trespass
Schlepistemic trespass
Policy by schlep
Doesn’t know his head from ass
Is really quite inept
I was just about to say, SomeDAM, that a synonym for “epistemic trespassing” is “pulling it out of your a__.”
I love your poem. And I love Paul Thomas’s post, for this term is incredibly useful to the Resistance because “epistemic tresspassing” is the cardinal sin of Deform and Disruption. I read comments by these Disrupters about the Gates/Coleman “standards” and about the high-stakes standardized tests, and they clearly have no clue about the very subjects that they are pontificating about. I often find myself wondering, has this person ever actually read one of the ELA tests? Has he or she ever actually thought about whether a particular “standard” on the Gates/Coleman bullet list is validly testable with with one or two multiple-choice questions on a test?
Deformers/Disrupters simply assume that because they went to school and took tests, that they are experts on these matters. They aren’t, obviously.
But here’s the thing that really disturbs me. The tests and the “standards” are so bad that they should have been laughed off the national stage by professionals–by people who actually do know something about testing and about education–when they first appeared. That they weren’t seems to me a terrible indictment of our profession. Many professionals took these as an opportunity to get on the Disruption gravy train because there was a river of green flowing from Seattle. And where were the professors of English, who would have been appalled by the literature “standards,” which leave out most of the fundamental content knowledge in the field? Or the linguists, who would have been appalled at the lack of understanding, evinced by these “standards,” of how vocabulary and grammar are actually acquired? Or the experts on rhetoric, who would have considered the “writing standards” completely childish and uninformed about what’s actually involved in writing and how types of writing can be sanely categorized? Well, all these folks were absent. I am particularly furious that the National Council of Teachers of English didn’t do an intervention to head off these puerile, backward “standards.” And that so many of our EduPundits sold out in exchange for fat contracts to develop materials, tests, professional development, and so on based on the Common [sic] Core [sic].
One more comment about “epistemic trespassing.” That’s the Scylla. But the Charybdis is blind acceptance of prevailing “expert” opinion–what folks like Ivan Illich (DeSchooling Society) and Thomas Szasz (The Medicalization of Everyday Life) warned about. In the age of the Know-Nothings v2.0 (Trump and his gang), we have abundant evidence of the horrors that come of epistemic trespassing, but we must remember, as well, that real expertise comes with built-in checks and balances (peer review, for example).
The main credential of many of the disrupters is that they are arrogant billionaires that weaponize their wealth to destroy the common good. Many politicians are willing to take the $$, and some of the right wingers are more than happy to undermine public education in keeping with their small minded beliefs.
This is to be expected from those bozos. But what of the meretricious creeps with education credentials who sign on to do the Billionaire Bozos’ dirty work? That seems, to me, particularly ugly. Many of these people know better, or should, but they’ve sold out. They lie and lie and lie because it is lucrative, very lucrative, to do so.
The reason so many teachers simply accepted the nonsense is that they had no choice. In many places they could lose their job by speaking out. And they had nowhere to turn to when even their own union leaders were on the bandwagon against them.
The deformers were quite clever in making sure that when they rolled out Common Core and the rest, they not only paid off the union’s to go along but also included mechanisms to keep teachers in line. That was the purpose of the inclusion of test based teacher evaluations (VAM) in Face to the Top funding.
I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but so be it. This stuff was very well thought out and planned from the very early on.
“Achille’s VAM Boot”
VAM’s a steel-heeled boot
To guard against an arrow
From teachers who won’t root
For testing straight and narrow
Bill Gates is a cunning fellow. Yes, he paid off the teachers’ unions; and he enlisted a lot of high-powered Vichy collaborators from the professional EduPundit community. I’m not holding teachers responsible. Many of them were and are living under an occupying regime, and that’s frightening. But I have nothing but contempt for those who took the Gates money. And, again, where were the academics in professional fields–the linguists, the literature professors, the rhetoricians, and others who should have blown up the Common [sic] Core [sic]? Well, they were holed up in their ivory towers, writing essays for journals that would be read by the ten other people in their specialties so that they could then refute the essay in the next edition of the journal. Intellectuals have public responsibilities, and in this, too many failed to step up to the plate.
You present a good analysis of the way deform was imposed, top down through mandate with zero evidence, and intellectuals in their ivory towers. Diane was the one scholar that blew the lid off the intellectual lockdown. She wrote best selling books, and let the cat out of the bag.
She certainly did. When all this is said and done, she will be remembered, by the education historians of the future, as the first among equals of the Resistance Movement. Such intelligence and courage and tenacity. I am, quite frankly, in awe of her.
Bob et al–Excellent thread, and damned exciting stuff to find my first pass here today. SomeDAM, you’re right. I myself got into lots of trouble questioning a lot of this crap. Bob, you may remember (you commented on it at the time) that I wrote a post several years ago about the idiocy of “flipped classrooms.” It turned out that this model and the sycophant who presented it as a “professional development” session was a favorite of an assistant principal at the school in which I served at this time. He was a bully and a moral cretin, probably the worst administrator under whom I served–and believe me when I tell you that is a very deep and broad well.
When I returned to work the fall after I wrote this, my classroom had been dismantled, all my materials (including a framed poster of Art Kane’s famous “A Great Day in Harlem Photograph” of the greatest jazz musicians of the time assembled in front of a brownstone on 126th Street in Harlem, and a source of consistent fascination to the nearly exclusively African-American students I served) thrown out, and I was assigned to teach four different subjects to four different grades on four different floors of the school.
The administration of the school would have had a very hard time getting rid of me–I had tenure and the respect of the students I served and their parents. But they could make my life very difficult. That October, when I received an “unsatisfactory” for adapting the curriculum for the special needs students I served (at the time I had developed about 22,000 documents to use with these kids-and which I now give away on my own blog), I gave my notice the next day.
For all the reasons you guys describe about the problems of challenging epistemic trespassers, who have power but no ideas or even any intellect in my experience, my public school teaching career is effectively over. I really cannot put up with any more of this.
Thanks for writing. I needed to hear this….
Mark, I am very sorry to hear that you feel prey to one of these animals. Your work online speaks so highly of you. No doubt you were, are, an astonishing teacher. Love and safety to you and yours during this time, Mark!
Thanks, Bob–you too. Let’s get through this in one piece, and continue the fight this crap.
GIRLFRIEND: When are you coming to bed, honey?
ME: Just a minute. There’s someone who’s mistaken on the Internet.
cx: fell prey, ofc
And Bob? Thanks for your comments. Dealing with this was a professionally devastating experience.
So many examples of this. I’ve seen it again and again. So sorry, Mark!
The whole “reform” movement is an example of epistemic trespassing in which business types have dictated the false value of market based education with no legitimate evidence to support its adoption. It has been a slippery slope of educational decline from market based education through charters and now vouchers where there is lot of evidence that education dollars are flushed down the drain.
As someone with a strong background in linguistics and the teaching of reading, I found this article seeking truth rather than accepting blindly “conventional assertions” of the disrupter cabal. I have recently read some other articles from Great Britain and Australia where the “science of reading” is being sold as the one real “truth.” These are also countries where there are strong interests in moving public money into private pockets. With an awareness of the global scope of the claims, we can understand that the main objective is standardization which is an underlying theme of privatization.
Those of us that have been successful practitioners teaching diverse students to read know full well that there is more than one way to teach students to read. A trained teacher will adjust the way in which students learn to read based on the needs of the students as some approaches may work better with certain students than others.
Everyone’s an Expert
Everyone’s an expert
Except the ones who are
A talent to conjecture
Will really get you far
The trick is to conjecture
Without a bat of eye
Like criminal inspector
To make the public buy
The second epistemic trespass is all the pseudo-psychological babble surrounding the disrupters’ assertions. We can include Duckworth’s “grit,” DeVos’ Neurocore, and Payne’s “Emotional Poverty.” While we are at it, we can toss no-excuses discipline into the pot. Where’s the evidence, folks?
Yes, that stuff provided the “scientific” (sic and sick) underpinning for deform.
And don’t forget Chetty’s famous “study”.
It’s amazing how easy it is to sell nonsense when you have a President touting it in his state of the Union address.
Richard Feynman is best known for his research in nuclear physics, but he was interested in everything that surrounded him, from flowers to faraway stars, this is how his father brought him up. Feynman reviewed school textbooks and found most of them unacceptable (this means the schools never had a shining moment). He wrote small poems and played musical instruments. One of his famous ideas is that if you cannot explain a concept to complete layman in simple terms, then you don’t understand it yourself well enough. Not being a rocket scientist, he explained to the whole world in a simple experiment with a glass of water, why the solid booster on the Challenger failed.
One does not need to be an expert in physics to use a lever or a pulley. One does not need to be a TV engineer to realize a concept of persistence of vision, a trick that was used by magicians long ago television and cinema were invented. One does not need to have more than two brain cells to figure out that just like we can write infinite amount of numbers using only ten digits (heck, we can even use just TWO digits, this is how all modern computers work), we can make infinite number of words out of finite number of letters. With each letter (and certain letter combinations) having specific meaning, we can read words that have not existed, we can create new words, and everyone will be able to read them. One does not need to be a professor of Education to understand, that by learning a handful of rules one can get a power to read and write anything made up of these letters. Five hundred years ago Europe took over China, which invented many things like gunpowder, rockets, paper and toothbrush, in part because limited number of letters allowed building efficient printing machines (thank you, Herr Gutenberg) and thus, accelerated the spread on information.
P. L. Thomas is “a former column editor/co-editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English)”. NCTE is known for its aggressive support of “look-say”, “whole language”, “balanced literacy”, whatever they call it now, and for resistance to phonetic-based reading education. NCTE and its minions want children to learn English as if it were Chinese. A hundred years ago this idiotic concept took over American schools, and these “professional educators” kept the grip on the language instruction ever since. NCLB’s Reading First program mandated to explicitly and systematically teach five skills:
* Phonemic awareness
* Phonics
* Vocabulary
* Comprehension
* Fluency
The backlash against NCLB risks losing these gains. Whole Language myrmidons are anxious to remain relevant.
Elementary school teachers using whole language approach are pleased with their students’ immediate progress when those kids read from books with controlled vocabulary. Sure, young kids can memorize several hundred of graphemes with ease. I suggest these teachers to visit middle school classes once in while to see how their former bright students struggle, trying to figure out how to read the words they’ve never come across and were not trained to read. “What does the picture show, Johnny? It is not a puppy, it is a molecule of Sodium chloride. Can you read Sodium chloride, Johnny?”
I have no more intention to trust Mr. Thomas, who is biased with his allegiance to NCTE proclamations, than to trust the likes of Emily Hanford and my own common sense.
By resisting to use proper teaching methods and consistent curricula, schools are digging their own grave. Well, they’ve pretty much dug it. Why would one let their child spend three or more painful years trying to “learn” reading, and then labeled as “dyslexic”, if they can use an app that would teach the kid to read and write in just several months? “Bye-bye, Ms. My-First-Grade-Teacher, I can do on my own now. I can read ANY books, not just those stupid readers.”
You obviously are completely ignorant about Paul Thomas and his extensive body of work. He was a high school teacher for 18 years and now teaches teachers at Furman University. You know nothing about him but feel free to insult him. That’s shameful. How many years were you a classroom teacher?
Stalin and Putin also have 20+ years of “experience,” should we revere them for that?
“After 28 years of kids coming into my class who couldn’t read and then leaving my class and they STILL couldn’t read because I didn’t know how to teach them, I found the Orton-Gillingham [approach to reading instruction] on my own. I took an 80-hour class that changed my teaching and changed the lives of countless students.”
— Mary Binnion, former Indianapolis teacher, now a private reading tutor.
“Neither my teacher preparation program nor my first master’s [degree] in education covered reading instruction as a science. It was all whole language and completely useless in teaching struggling readers to break the code.”
— Cindy Kanuch, K-5 reading intervention teacher, Calhan School District, Colorado
“I began teaching when whole language was the buzzword in education. I was convinced that it was the latest and greatest thing … It did not take me long to realize that it was not. I was fortunate enough to have mentors who still taught phonics.”
— Sandra Sanchez, fourth-grade teacher, Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District, Texas
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2019/03/14/we-asked-you-answered-teachers-weigh-in-on-how-they-learned-to-teach-reading/
Rather than debate the merit of a particular approach to reading, it is more useful for teachers to assess what students know and don’t know. Of course, students need to know phonemic awareness and phonics. If students already know them, it is time to move on. Often early grade reading and classroom teachers put students into groups based on an assessment. Some instruction may be whole group while others may be small group or even individual.
The Orton-Gilligham is generally reserved for students that have a neurological problem such as poor auditory discrimination and/or memory. It requires the student to learn through the kinesthetic modality, and it is appropriate for certain learning disabled students.
It is important that students get what they need in order to become fluent readers. One size fits all in lock-step fashion will not do it for everyone. Teachers need to be trained, and they need to be flexible. Most of all, they need to meet the needs of their students.
retired teacher, “multi-sensory” mumbo-jumbo simply means they teach reading AND writing simultaneously, like all decent reading programs. Touchy-feely portion is just pinstriping and whitewall tires, it is there to superficially make the program stand out of other phonics-based programs. Kids would do just fine without touching themselves or moving their bodies. This is pure marketing. But I don’t mind kids this age to think that learning is just like playing, because it is. Learning is fun. It should be. Which, with the whole language method, it is not. There is no end of the tunnel. You cannot learn all the words. The idea that learning to read does not have an end, that it is “a journey” is deeply demoralizing.
As for their program being “reserved for students that have a neurological problem,” it is a misconception, this program works for regular students just as well. Therefore, it is in fact one size fits all approach.
I quoted the teacher above not to promote a particular program, but to point out that experience does not mean knowledge. The teacher who switched to Orton-Gillingham was training young kids like dogs for 28 years until she realized that hey, if kids don’t get it, maybe something is wrong with the method she have been using. Quick thinker, she is.
Most regular students would find Orton-Gillingham approach tedious and limiting. It is not necessary for them to do all the kinesthetic repetitions. The best advice I ever got about teaching was: If students need something and works, continue with more of it. If they don’t need something, stop it, and change course. I taught ELLs for 36 years, and I am a certified NYS reading teacher.
“The backlash against NCLB risks losing these gains.”
Do you know where you are? Have you read The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Reign of Error, or Slaying Goliath? (OK, I haven’t read the latter one yet, but I’m hearing it has promise.) When you can come up with evidence- and experience-based data to refute even one of the arguments contained in any of those, please feel free to check back here, we’re listening.
What on earth are you talking about?
Feynman was obviously brilliant in his own field of physics, but also suffered from the belief (shared by many physicists) that he knew more than the practitioners in fields outside his own.
He did not think much of psychologists and psychology, for example.
Or even of dentists and dentistry.
Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman’s colleague , collaborator and also a Nobel physics laureate, talks about the latter in this video.
And i would take Feynman’s assessment of textbooks and education system in general with a block of salt — even with regard to physics.
Feynman produced his now famous Lectures on Physics (allegedly) for freshman physics students but anyone with a more advanced background in physics who has ever delved into them will quickly recognize that what Feynman thought a college freshman (even at Caltech) should be able to understand/follow and what the average freshman can actually understand are two different things entirely. And not because students have been improperly prepared in high school physics.
Feynman himself later said he had “failed” when so many in his class did not seem to follow/grasp his lectures. I actually agree. He did fail. They were simply not written at a level that lent itself to understanding by most freshman students.
Don’t get me wrong. The Feynman’s lectures on physics are a remarkable accomplishment and a great reference for more advanced students. But they are not written for most freshman students and are just going to be frustratingly opaque rather than clear and illuminating. That is precisely the reason they are not used for freshman physics at most universities. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they are even used or freshman physics at Caltech.
There is a school of thought that if you don’t eat loads of sugar every day, you don’t need to brush every day. I brush only once a day instead of twice, and my dentist was surprised to see my gum growing around an implant, something he said is quite unusual, normally it would continue receding, and the goal would be to make this receding as slow as possible.
Urine of a healthy human is sterile, but I personally do wash my hands after urinating because I prefer them smell, well, of soap. Also, it irks me seeing other people leaving bathroom without washing their hands, touching everything around. More a psychological thing.
When he writes about education in Brazil or about the textbooks he reviewed, he provides examples of incoherence and utter mess, and it is up to a reader to decide whether this indeed is a problem. I for one can see that modern-day textbooks, if they are available at all, are garbage.
Above all, he was a human, and every human who is not heroified has scars and warts and little idiosyncrasies.
I’m not sure what crackpot “school of thought ” you are referring to (and really don’t care to know), but it’s irrelevant because Gell-Mann did not say “Feynman said you don’t need to brush every day”, he said that Feynman “advocated on national television that people not brush their teeth..or floss either” . In other words, they don’t need to brush their teeth at all
He obviously believed he knew more than the dentists about something that was within their field of expertise and completely outside his own.
Oh, I am so glad someone finally spoke up on this. If I learned one thing from my academic mentors at Hampshire College, particularly the late Allan Krass, it is epistemic humility. Or, as the great tenor saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell once said to a friend of mine who was Mr. Mitchell’s student, “Focus, or you will become a jackass of all trades.”
Oh that is beautiful.
Jackass of all trades ”
That’s me — and DAMmed proud of it.
Jackspertise
A jackass, that is me
An Jackspert, as you see
It took ten thousand hours
To reach my current powers
A comment from above refers – Why would one let their child spend three or more painful years trying to “learn” reading, and then labeled as “dyslexic”.”
I get my so-called dyslexic students to read and wean them off in 4 months of 3 one hour lessons per week.
All my students classified as dyslexic were instructional casualties.
Now, to respond to the quote above – many smart kids shut down from learning to read when they are confused. They cannot connect the pronunciation of phonemes taught to the words they are supposed to represent.These kids are not dyslexic but are logical thinking kids who then disengage from learning to read because of confusion.
I have done extensive ‘research’ on this with my students who could read in two languages and yet were classified as dyslexic.
Those interested are welcome to debate this with me.
The educators who speak only one language do not appear to understand why kids can read in many languages other than English.
For your information, I was the first person in the world, in 2010, to dispute the theory that phonological awareness deficit is the cause of dyslexia. This theory was debunked in 2015.
Google search and read one or two of my articles in 2010.Here is a link:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=phonological+awareness+luqman+michel
Okay, SDP, waiting for a poem about epistemic~epidemic!
Enigmatic and erratic
Empathetic and emphatic
Enematic and endemic
Epistemic epidemic
Thank you; it was worth the wait.
This was such an interesting post and discussion. At the risk of starting an epidemic of the epistemic, I would like to weigh in.
I know less about the teaching of reading than I do about quantum mechanics. I taught math for 29 years mainly due to a chronic shortage of anybody that was capable of doing better (Does anyone recall the math teacher shortage?) . I learned a lot of what makes math stick together logically, and developed the ability to explain this to students who were often cowering behind the onslaught of using language specifically for the first time. Now teaching history, I deal with the student’s fear of facts, each of which is easy to recall but all of which are controllable only if placed into a narrative.
It strikes me that the problem of teaching reading is the problem I faced in both math and history class. The obvious use of Phonics as a teaching tool is that it can be used when students encounter words they know auditorily, but not graphically. That would appear to me to be a good tool to have in a good toolbox. But comprehension of what you are reading is so much more than recognizing the words. Anyone can understand that Washington was the first US president. We teach that to little kids. These same little kids learn to admire people like Washington and Martin Luther King in pre-school. These two very basic ideas are extremely different and point to the complexity.
The problem of the teacher is that we have to be a party to this epistemic crime. We are required by the character of our field to be generalists instead of scholars deeply digging into our field. I just read a dissertation by a friend of mine on Quilt making in West Tennessee. It became very arcane and specific. If I had a mind like a steel trap, I could remember enough specifics to convince a generalist that I know something about quilt making in West Tennessee. That would not be honest.
It seems to me that honesty is where this matter has to be resolved. I have never taught a class that did not hear me declare my ignorance on matters deeper than our class. Ultimately, teachers are only authoritative with regards to their students. These are people they know. this is why teaching must be a profession. No one will develop the proper expectation of the process of learning without years in the same classroom with the same group of students. Attempts to codify and script this ancient art are as doomed to failure as empires of old.
Let us teachers therefore admit we know only a shallow pool. But let us all realize that the pool is, like all watersheds, attached to the great ocean.
The obvious use of Phonics is that it frees one from the necessity to “know words graphically” to be able to “read” them. “Knowing words graphically” is not reading of alphabet-based text, it is memorization and recollection of graphemes Chinese-style. Rudolf Flesch said that “the word method consists essentially of treating children as if they were dogs.”
He also said, “I know that educators take great pride in reaching all the way down to ‘non-readers.’ We’ve done away with rigid grade standards, they say, we now pay attention to individual differences in ability. We give each child in each class just as much as he can handle.”
“I don’t think at all that this is something to be proud of, I think it is deplorable. What’s so wonderful about teaching twenty-five children at twenty-five different grade levels, mixed together in one classroom? How can anyone do an efficient teaching job in a third grade that contains Harry who can’t tell the difference between after and chasing?”
“This impossible situation comes directly from the word method—the method by which children are exposed to twelve hundred words in three years and left to learn reading by themselves.”
“Reading, in so far as it is taught at all today, is taught, casually and unconsciously, by fathers and mothers at home. The child who comes from an educated, book-reading home has a tremendous advantage. The son of illiterate parents will stumble for three years through the twelve hundred words without help or guidance and then, as likely as not, develop into a ‘nonreader’.”
Here you have it, coming from a 1955 book no less. So the common refrain of Dr. Ravitch and many of the visitors of this blog that poverty is the real reason of low achievement is true only to the degree that poor and/or uneducated families cannot fix all the mistakes and pain that schools unleash on their kids.
As Dr. Flesch proclaimed, “The word method is gradually destroying democracy in this country.” Quite so.
Rudolph Flesch overstated. The word method was in use since the 1920s in many districts.
Back to basics and phonics got associated with right-wingers (unfairly in my view).
How could a nation educated by the word method elect FDR?
How could a nation inundated with phonics elect Trump?
The association is pretty absurd.
Really, the extremists in both camps discredit whatever they are pushing.
Moderation in all things, my dear commenter.
“poverty is the real reason of low achievement is true only to the degree that poor and/or uneducated families cannot fix all the mistakes and pain that schools unleash on their kids.” (ColorFermat)
Finally, someone is speaking the same language as I do.
There are many rich kids who can’t read too. Did we ask why not?
Yet when it comes to statistics we find that the rich kids who did just as badly as the poor kids in primary 1 to3 are not in the list of failure – why not?
The reason is obvious. The rich kids are sent for tuition and improve while the poor kids don’t get tuition.
Read my post on this at https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2015/09/the-real-21st-century-problem-in-public.html
and then let us discuss.
You posed a question and answered it with little relation to what I wrote. It is preposterous to think that kids who learned to read (or, rather, learned to “read”) using word method become staunch Republicans. Erosion of democracy means that these kids cannot read and write properly, they cannot enroll to college, they cannot operate complex machinery, they do not understand what is written in newspaper, they cannot author a resume, they become lower class or underclass. Unlike working class, which is generally left-leaning, underclass has no political affiliation.
When Kennedy ran for the office, TV became a thing. People did not need to read. Likewise, people elected Trump not because they were taught how to decode words, but because they got sick of Democrats ganging up with Wall Street bankers and looking down on lower classes. For many, Trump was not a savior, he was a middle finger to the Democrats.
And, by the way, the nation was not and is not, as the reports prove, inundated with phonics. Yes, phonics is required by the Reading First program, but as the reports show, in many school it is only a veneer.
As D. Flesch posited, “Systematic phonics in the way to teach reading, unsystematic phonics is nothing” and, “Phonics is not ‘one of many techniques the child can use to unlock the meaning of words’ (you can’t possibly imagine how sick I am of all this jargon)—phonics is simply the knowledge of the way spoken English is put on paper.”
Paul’s article like many of his is spot on. The teaching of reading is indeed complicated and one way to teach reading is silly. However, what I’m thinking is instead of thinking of epistemic trespass as a bad idea, those who teach reading should welcome the other disciplines and what they have to contribute. Cognitive science or how people learn, how the brain works is important. Linguists have much to add about reading and writing and language. People who study disabilities have insights that help many of us. I teach at a community college and have taught many students who have great difficulty reading and understanding the content. But it almost always depends on the content. If they have some prior knowledge of the concepts, then they catch on quickly. Why is it that I can read James Joyce, but struggle when reading a book on physics? What bothers me the most is just those who say they have the key to teach reading or math or whatever. There is not a settled science of reading and our field – education – is a journey not a destination. Thanks Paul.
“The teaching of reading is indeed complicated and one way to teach reading is silly.”
True. This is a truism as people who studied during the whole word period have learned to read just like those who learned using phonics.
But an important question that needs to be asked for which I have the answer is, why is it that many smart kids left school as illiterates during both periods?
We are only looking at 80% of kids who learn to read regardless of the way they are taught. About 20% disengage from learning to read due to confusion caused by teaching the wrong pronunciation of phonemes. I did ‘research’ on this by quitting my work and teaching so-called dyslexic kids who could read in Malay but not in English. I ‘interviewed’ the kids I taught and learned from them they had shut down from learning to read due to confusion. I have written extensively on this on my blog which I urge you all to read and then grill me. http://www.dyslexiafriend.com
” People who study disabilities have insights that help many of us.”
Yes!. I am probably the only person in the world to have researched why kids could read in Malay and Romanised Mandarin, which both use the same letters as does English, but were unable to read in English. Again, I repeat,. read relevant posts on my blog and then grill me.
” If they have some prior knowledge of the concepts, then they catch on quickly.”
Another true statement as I can read anything on quantum physics as many times as I want and yet will not be able to understand. However, is this true with kids learning how to read in primary one and two?
Have we ever tried reading to the kids the same material or similar material and then testing them on their comprehension? I have and I know they cannot understand what they read is because they are focussing on their reading trying to figure words as they read.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/14/vector-in-chief/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Vector%20in%20Chief&utm_content=NYR%20Vector%20in%20Chief+CID_bb1d8a0de4284fdcc817a6a1cb711588&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Vector%20in%20Chief
“The obvious use of Phonics as a teaching tool is that it can be used when students encounter words they know auditorily, but not graphically. That would appear to me to be a good tool to have in a good toolbox. But comprehension of what you are reading is so much more than recognizing the words.” (RT)
Yes, phonics is a good tool to have in a good toolbox. Then, why is it that many smart kids are leaving schools as illiterates each and every year?
The answer to that question was discovered by me way back in 2010 and I have written about it since then.
Many smart kids disengage from learning to read when pronunciation of phonemes is taught wrong.
Now that we all have a lot of time at home do read my post at
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/01/phonics.html
As for comprehension, it is a different kettle fish altogether. There is too much complaint about comprehension without any thought on why many kids can’t comprehend what they are reading. Have teachers ever seen how kids comprehend the same material they could not comprehend when they read as against comprehension by the same student when the material was read to him?
I have done that and discovered that many kids cannot comprehend material they read because of a fluency problem and not because of their comprehension ability. If we teach them to read fluently and effortlessly their comprehension will immediately improve.