Anonymous wrote:The professors in the colleges of education are part of the problem too. Check out the Answer Sheet blog in the Post this week. It was pretty horrible to think those authors have been responsible for educating teachers...

I will try to find a link.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/01/26/readingwars-scienceofreading-teaching/

The professors in the colleges of education are part of the problem too. Check out the Answer Sheet blog in the Post this week. It was pretty horrible to think those authors have been responsible for educating teachers...

I will try to find a link.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think they do teach phonics but also, why don't you teach your kids phonics yourself if you're so concerned with it?

This is my favorite argument.

“Stop expecting teachers to educate your kid! Just do it yourself!”

Ok, so then I guess we don’t need teachers anymore, if parents can do it all. I want my tax money back, since it’s gone to apparently a 100% unnecessary institution that I can just replace at home.

Keep the teachers and get rid of the administrators and bureaucrats. That's where these awful decisions happen. Teachers know how bad these curriculums are, but no one cares what we think.

Anonymous wrote:I think they do teach phonics but also, why don't you teach your kids phonics yourself if you're so concerned with it?

This is my favorite argument.

“Stop expecting teachers to educate your kid! Just do it yourself!”

Ok, so then I guess we don’t need teachers anymore, if parents can do it all. I want my tax money back, since it’s gone to apparently a 100% unnecessary institution that I can just replace at home.

Anonymous wrote:Corruption. MoCo cut a deal with Pearson Educational Testing to create their own curriculum - and stayed with it for 9 years, even though they knew it stunk. (Curriculum 2.0) No oversight. No bench research. No success. More than half of children in the county now read below grade level. Hmmm wonder why...

THIS!!!! This is EXACTLY what happened. My children suffered through the Curriculum 2.0 years. It was a nightmare. Nearly destroyed my dyslexic child. They still struggle to read. Awful.

MCPS curriculum is garbage. If you want your kid to learn anything you need to dedicate a significant portion of your life to teaching them outside of school. It's sad and pathetic.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think they do teach phonics but also, why don't you teach your kids phonics yourself if you're so concerned with it?

You don’t think it affects the education your own child receives when half their middle school class is almost illiterate?

Yep, this.

Anonymous wrote:I think they do teach phonics but also, why don't you teach your kids phonics yourself if you're so concerned with it?

You don’t think it affects the education your own child receives when half their middle school class is almost illiterate?

I think they do teach phonics but also, why don't you teach your kids phonics yourself if you're so concerned with it?

Some do, some don't. It especially swings by district. Many years back, when I was a kid, they taught reading through workbooks on phonics. It was boring. Really boring. At times there wasn't even any actual reading. But it worked, most of the time. Not all the time though, because kids were bored.

Then someone had the great idea to teach reading in a more fun, natural way. They had success with their class and wrote a book about it. Academia jumped on board, because people who work in colleges need to pretend to have new great ideas, and that filtered down to school districts who implemented the new "fun" way to learn reading as a canned program that labeled all phonics as "boring" and "drill and kill" and insisted kids could learn to read in a more holistic way.

It didn't work, for obvious reasons. But not being able to perceive shades of gray for reasons of incompetence, bureaucracy, and ignorance, schools continued to believe that it had to be either boring workbooks or learning to read without....learning to read words.

The best schools and teachers have managed to mix both to create great reading programs that work for all kids.

If you're in FCPS, that's not one of them. They are still clinging mostly to a holistic reading program and most of the teachers who have graduated recently don't even know how to teach phonics.

Anonymous wrote:Phonics is the reason we have your-you're, their-there-they're, etc. Phonics in English is a basic start, but it will never make someone competent or fluent. In some other, more regular languages, phonics might work.

Phonics is just a part of the systemic study of language. These example homophones are sound-equivalent but each word/ spelling has a different meaning and purpose.

For those who are interested, I highly recommend reading about the “Simple View of Reading” aka Scarborough’s Reading Rope. It is an excellent explanation of all of the component skills that go into effective reading which includes comprehension.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-childrenslit/chapter/the-simple-view-of-reading/

Direct, systematic phonics instruction should be the low hanging fruit, and yet we are still arguing about it and decodable readers. It is not an either/ or question, kids need support in all of these areas.