As a high school student in the mid-1960s my honors history class was required to read "A Tale of Two Cities" while we were studying the French Revolution. There was nothing on our test about this novel and we did not discuss it in class. It had been assigned for enrichment purposes only. Yet everyone read the ENTIRE book. I know this because we talked about it outside of class. It was fun.
I appreciate your comments as an educator. Rigor in education is no longer a priority. A friend who is a teacher said most students have difficulty reading aloud. We remembered reading books in class where we read aloud taking turns up and down the row and students had to keep track in the book. That apparently is no longer the way reading is taught. There are also techniques for reading quickly (one way, is not to verbalize the words in your head) and I took a speed reading class in high school that was invaluable in college and law school. I was an academic librarian at a university and I saw so many students taking short cuts like reading only the abstract of an article but not the entire thing for their research, or asking me to find them 5 peered reviewed articles without they themselves doing the grunt work. Sorry, no go, we teach you how to find them, not hand them over. The philosophy is do the bare minimum to pass the test.
That's fascinating. I have my MLIS degree and wondered what modern challenges librarians face. I've heard from educators throughout the academic spectrum relay that students demanding the shortcut is a huge problem. That's not how life works. You must put in the work to gain the benefits. Thank you for sharing.
My son goes to Chicago Public Schools, so, one of the biggest public school systems in the country and also one that gets a lot of negative press. He goes to our neighborhood school, (so not one of CPS's selective enrollment schools that your kid has to test into). I couldn't be happier with how reading has been taught. They use phonics. The teachers have read novels to his class every year since Kindergarten. Now he's in 3rd grade and they just finished The Witches by Roald Dahl (which the kids LOVED). Basically, I'm just trying to provide an example to show that it isn't necessarily a public vs. private thing. Public schools certainly have a different kind of pressure when it comes to standardized testing, but that doesn't mean there aren't amazing public schools and principals out there who do everything in their power to focus on what kids really need. Great video - thanks for sharing your take!
Thank you! And absolutely! I hope I didn’t too heavily imply this is a public school thing because it’s not. I’ve met and taught very smart students in public school. Also, most schools vary widely depending on the teacher, principal, district, and state. And my oldest son went to public school for two years. We were really happy with the education he received. I happened to switch to teaching private school and brought my boys along with me. Several states have implemented a “no cell phone policy” in their schools which I think is great step in the right direction. Thank you for your wonderful comment.
One of my favorite memories is from my 7th Grade English class in the 70s. During the last 10 minutes of every class, our very diminutive teacher would hop up on her table-desk and read a novel aloud to the whole class. She would always ask us to put our heads down and close our eyes to better listen to the novel. I loved it and looked forward to it every day.
It blows my mind that kids are not being read to. I went to school from the mid-eighties thru 1999, and I was read to, by my teachers, every day of my academic life. We also had time set aside every day for silent reading. Back then, it was called D.E.A.R. In middle school and high school, we always studied entire novels. This was very interesting.
late 90s/early 00s elementary school we had silent sustained reading time as well and were read to at different times. Sitting in a circle listening to our teacher read was the best part of my day (edit: I just remembered it was listed on the board as USSR, "uninterrupted sustained silent reading")
I was a substitute teacher's aide for a few years. I was mostly in special education, but when I was in regular classrooms, I noticed that even when an excerpt of a novel was used, it was usually to teach a concept like primary vs. secondary sources, with no mention of how to get meaning from the text. Sometimes the passages used were beautiful, but no comment was made on the writing quality or the events in that scene, and how they could relate to the children's lives. I guess there was no time for such lessons. No wonder kids don't read if they don't have to. They don't know that reading has anything to do with finding meaningful life lessons, comfort, joy, etc. I guess I got lucky. I was in public schools in years when phonics was taught. Grandparents volunteered to read novels to us, and teachers had us read novels to learn to write small papers on them. I guess that was allowed back then. Then I was homeschooled after fourth grade. My mom made sure I read a lot. When I got to college, I wasn't a good test taker at first, but my reading stamina was good. Cell phones weren't smart then. My reading stamina is not nearly as good now.
Great video! Reading AND reading comprehension is so important and foundational to a child’s education. I love the insight you shared re: education system.
I appreciate the addition of your point of view. I wish I had said this in the video, but I think the order of causes I cited also mirrors their impact; whole language is a problem, but the excerpt-based curriculum is much worse, and then I suspect phones are the thing doing the most damage.
You did such a great job with your video. And there are a few things I wish I would've said in my own. Primarily, that I didn't intentionally mean to draw a strong comparison between public/private school, but used those experiences to illustrate that how education is executed is incredibly important.
This is not surprising to me as I have observed that many people struggle with pretty basic reading as adults, but it’s a tad surprising because (like you) my experience was being taught phonics as a homeschooled kid and I always read whole books to learn. Glad that schools are slowly changing this! I think cell phone policies need to happen everywhere
As a current homeschooler (primarily with Charlotte Mason method -whole living books- though I do phonics specifically) I find this information heartbreaking, but as a state university elementary ed graduate I can 100% agree with your thoughts here. It's so sad that this is our current state. I had a conversation with a college graduate teaching high school literature in a private Christian school and I asked what her favorite book was to teach? She told me which text book "grade 10 textbook". 😭 She couldn't even tell me names of quality classic literature because she had graduated from the school she taught in and just didn't know!
Jesus Christ! I’m an English teacher in Switzerland, and if I tried to get away with teaching only excerpts, I’d get fired! And that’s in a second language!
That's really overexaggerated. Reading excerpts in a textbook to study technique, test comprehension, or analyze grammar and syntax is not the end of the world.
Great video Shelly! I've been personally struggling with my kids and reading and I think a lot of your points make sense and I completely agree with you on cellphones!
My oldest son when to public school for kindergarten and 1st grade. He had a good experience. I think there are just different paths in education and all have their pros and cons. What's most important is having loving, supportive parents through it all.
I appreciate this video so much! As a homeschooling parent of six, it is absolutely eye opening. In the last few weeks I read the book, "Anxious Generation", by Jonathan Haidt that shares scientific findings about how cell phones are impacting youth's mental health, social connections, and performance in school. I think it very much dove-tails into points that you were making in this video.
What a great conversation! 🙌🏼 I’ll never forget my third grade teacher reading aloud “A Wrinkle in Time” from cover to cover. I was completely engrossed. Children can’t enjoy an excerpt with no context to the story as a whole, all that’s left is analyzing. Two books, “The Read Aloud Family” and “The Enchanted Hour” really encouraged me to take ownership as a mother (and homeschooler) for reading aloud and I highly recommend to parents whether you homeschool or not! 😄
You have a very important message to teachers and parents!! I also encouraged my girls and grandkids to have books they "read for fun" apart from schoolwork. ❤ Thank you for your encouragement of love for learning thru books!!
Certainly, it is of uppermost importance to read good books and literature! We are blessed with a wealth of resources and reading structures our mind! Thank you for sharing this video with us!
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, presents research about access to cell phones, beginning in 2010, and the damage to learning. I have taught high school since 2006 and can testify to having seen in "real life" the data he uncovers. Let's hope schools and school districts will continue to disallow phones in classrooms - it is a recent trend with rewards for students and their classmates.
I graduated a private high school in 83. We read lots of novels and books. Excerpts do you have a place in a reading curriculum, but it’s not the whole picture. Mind-boggling the novel reading would be discouraged.
Excerpt reading only was shocking to me as well at the time. And I can see now appreciate both - novels and excerpts, but, in my opinion, we need a mixture of both.
What an awful way of teaching. I can’t imagine not having read The Giver, Animal Farm, The Outsiders, etc. because the school district didn’t deem it necessary
I think that one of the drivers for testing,esp in state schools (uk) or public schools (us) is the monitoring of the schools’ performance which sometimes seems to take priority over consideration of the long term effects on the students. Attention span is a serious issue when some of these students learn to drive!
Massachusetts just took the first toward deemphasizing testing by removing the standardized test as a graduation requirement. This video describes one major problem with "teaching to the test". I went to public school in Massachusetts and we read significant quantities of novels and plays - I was lucky to just happen to attend one of the best public school systems in the U.S.
This is excellent! I have so many thoughts about school and testing ugh! I homeschool my 3 daughters and we have read at least 30 novels aloud each year since they were about 4 and now the oldest two are 15. We still read together twice a day and they beg for more! I honestly think we learn more through those novels than we do through our “school books”. And we definitely enjoy it more 😊
I sent my boys to private school from pre-k through graduation. As a single mom, it was difficult many years. But I saw the extreme benefit to my boys and it was so worth it. They are both adults and have many times thanked me for sending them there.
Hi Shelly!!!!! I love your videos! I’m sure you are very right in your viewpoint but I also wonder if time management is a big factor as well. College students are bombarded with extra campus activities that take up exorbitant amounts of time. Such has fraternities, clubs, volunteering, sports…. With all of these activities, a class load and probably working to keep up with living expenses, I can understand why a novel a week would be daunting. When do they have time?
A YTer that my girls watched when they were younger went off to college. I remember they were watching when she was complaining for an art course she had to know 20 artists for a test and was upset that she wasn’t given the names who she’d be tested on. I told my girls that the art teacher wants her to know ALL the artists. In high school, it was to learn what is needed for the test, forget, and move on. I think testing is a huge problem within the educational system. I have recently watched some videos about the deterioration of learning to read by site words in both the US and the UK. I believe the statistics in the US is that 1 in 5 graduate without the ability to read-maybe enough to read stop signs or basic forms. The average reading level for graduates is at the 6th grade level. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong.). It’s very sad.
In Brazil reading is taught phoneticaly, but I can relate to the teaching of literature. The whole goal is to get you into college, and the literature test was 25 multiple choice question about Brazilian and Portuguese books. So, not only you don't really need to have read the texts, but I was also being told to read things like Iracema. If that doesn't kill your love of reading, nothing will.
There are multiple factors here. Nowadays, everyone goes to college. It isn't just for the really smart people. To do almost any job, they want a BA. So the university feels that it has to pass everyone. This leads to teaching to the bottom. In middle school and high school teachers are discouraged from giving any homework at all. This leads to five minute assignemts, and the students spend the rest of the time twiddling their thumbs. The experience would be so much more improved if teachers could give out a list of optional assignments. If a teacher said, you can write optional essays, and I will give you feedback, it won't count against your grade, but I want you to grow in your writing skills, it would be a tremendous benefit. Teachers could also provide a list of optional books to read.
Very interesting video. I’m 48 for age reference. I was a voracious reader growing up and graduated with honors but was never taught how to take a standardized test. I always did poorly on them. I realize they are tied to funding but my personal belief is they should be done away with. They do an extremely poor job of testing a child’s intelligence level.
Testing had good intentions but didn’t factor in behavior changes that would follow it. The goal of education shifted from preparing students for life as productive citizens to preparing them for tests and sacrificing long term success for short term wins - wins they aren’t actually achieving.
I learned to read in elementary school in the mid-1950s. The only "technology in the classroom" I ever encountered was the special classroom for the kids in iron lungs down the hall.
Shelly, your description of your teaching experience, of not being allowed to teach a whole book, only excepts, struck me in the heart. Teaching to pass tests, instead of teaching students to love reading, is the real tragedy. I would like to see more nuance in the discussion around phonics because phonics alone is not the answer to better readers. According to reading science research, phonics needs to be combined with other learning and comprehension strategies for best results.
I also have to add an economic slant too. As public school budgets are consistently slashed, no matter how well the school tests well, it's probably hard to acquire a copy of a physical book for each student in the class, and worry about them taking said book home where any number of things can ruin the school property. So not only is it probably discouraged on an academic standpoint (aka the test) but discouraged on the grounds of economic standards as well.
Friendly reminder that you don't have to passively accept the status quo when it comes to schools. You can participate in your local school board meetings and municipal government meetings and advocate for better policies in your area. And of course, call your local and state representatives and tell them what you want to see in the education standards.
This is all so bonkers to me. When I was in 6th grade (back in the olden days LOL) we read entire books in class together. We read silently in class every day. We were required to read for 20 minutes at home every day. I read 150 books over 5th and 6th grade.
I guess it would have been about 1998 I remember feeling like I was going to die of boredom when we were studying "Great Expectations". I swear it went for a month if not the whole 6 weeks. Weve gone from overanalyzing novels to the point of trying to find hidden meaning in the color of the curtians in the room where a scene takes place to not being able to handle more than a few paragraphs. Can we find a middle ground between those two extremes?
The excerpt thing is so interesting - another element that wasn’t really touched on was the cost-benefit analysis of dissecting literature and poetry as if it were a skill subject, like math. Even when. I was assigned great, whole books back in school (late 90’s-2004), often the assignments would ask us to dissect themes and learn frankly useless and numbing literary terminology that had zero bearing on what we actually gleaned from the book. Perhaps literature and poetry are too subjective to ‘teach’ in this way at all. In college, we can dive deeper into the nitty gritty with books, but I see even upper elementary and middle school English curricula nowadays utterly wringing all of the joy and curiosity out of books in favor of ‘analysis’. As I get older and now homeschooling my children, I realize that just READING the dang thing - reading a great book perhaps multiple, multiple times throughout our lives - that is the reading curricula. Agreed on phonics as well! I don’t recall how I was taught but am using phonics with my youngest and when we go to the library for ‘early readers’ - there are hundreds and none are phonics based except for Bob Books. I don’t understand how these children are supposed to memorize everything as a sight word? Our language has some eccentricities but is overwhelmingly phonetic - the bigger question to is WHY is the American school system taking this paradoxically harder and less successful route to teaching English, to teaching most subjects in such a way? I echo the other commenter that mentioned John Taylor Gatto - he went politically a little far libertarian at times but his Dumbing Us Down and Underground History of American Education are eye opening and thought provoking.
Interestingly, AI hasn't been a problem for me as a teacher because a good bit of the essay writing and reading is done in the classroom. As workloads get heavier and more assignments sent home (like in high school) I would imagine it's more of a challenge.
Maybe not as relevant here, as I'm not from the US, but to me this was also very surprising to hear. I'm from Germany, went to school in the 80s and 90s and we had to read (and write essays on) a lot of books, not just for German class, but even for English class, or French or whatever your foreign language(s) were. I have to admit, for a while, it discouraged me from reading as a hobby though, because the books we had to read for school were just not my cup of tea (a lot of classics that I only understood half of, especially things like e.g. Shakespeare in English, but also old German ones). But I did pick it up as a hobby after finishing school again. I don't have kids, so no idea how it is here nowadays. I'm wondering if they changed that here as well.
I have a question about illiteracy. I saw something on TV about a seventy-five-year-old woman in America who was illiterate. She obviously went to school well before common core, and so that is hardly the culprit. She was white so one cannot blame it on racism. Furthermore, she went to school in the 50s and 60s when education was "great." How was it that she was illiterate then? How come no teacher ever noticed that she could not read and write? I'd be interested in your feedback.
@@vonbrach Maybe she had a reading disability such as dyslexia? I doubt there was the knowledge or help on the level that we have today. She was probably labeled for her inability to read and slipped through the cracks.
Have you ever seen Chinese sinograms (i.e., the characters of the Chinese languages)? Have you seen Japanese Kanji? I have read somewhere that in order for a Japanese student to get into the University of Tokyo, probably the most prestigious and competitive university in the country, that student must have mastered about 20,000 such Japanese ideograms. I doubt that that there are phonics for these languages. Yet I am not hearing about articles about how Asian students are not able to read a whole novel. For alphabet-based writing systems, I do think phonics are important. To not use phonics negates the advantages of having an alphabet to. But I think the issue of not teaching phonics is separate from not teaching novels.
Even when teaching mandarin to Chinese kids they have pinyin to start out on which is the phonetic system of their language. They dont just expect them to look at symbols and remember what word is what symbol.
@@ClaireGreen-wd2gm The Chinese have been teaching Chinese for centuries long before pinyin came along. In any case, the Chinese do not wait until pinyin is mastered before starting the teaching of classical Chinese, and at some point they do require that students know what word is what symbol, since the pinyin is of absolutely no use in reconstructing the written Chinese ideogram character. (I agree phonics is useful for learning pinyin. But phonics is irrelevant for hanzi.) I am not saying "whole word" instruction is sound pedagogy. It is not. I am however skeptical that it is the reason why students at "elite" colleges cannot read a novel. To me the crux of the matter is that the reading that they do in K through 12 is all excerpts, "short form" stuff. It is the written equivalent of sound bites. When I read Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses too, for that matter, I had a hard time coping with the sheer length of those novels, since if a character was reintroduced (after a long absence) hundreds of pages from where I first encountered or last heard from the character, I had a hard time remembering what was said about him or her earlier or even who he or she was. Even if I dedicate myself to reading one novel at a time, sometimes I have to set the book aside for a day or two or more, and that requires remembering where I left off. So I have had to devise strategies for successfully getting through the book. Basically, sometimes one cannot just read the book from cover to cover. Sometimes one has to go back and reread. Sometimes one has to put pen to paper and create one's own Cliff Notes. I have read some fairly long books, and I would not have succeeded if the professor required that they be done in a week. Examples: The Count of Monte Cristo. Les Miserables. War and Peace. David Copperfield. Anna Karenina. Stephen J. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (possibly the longest), and my personal favorite, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (which I loved so much I've read it twice, so far.)
@OrdenJust Well of course eventually they learn the characters. Id imagine the characters are printed under the pinyin from the start to begin to get them into the kids heads but either eay you said you doubted they have a phonetic representation of the words and I just responded that they do. Aa far as the books. Ya I know the classics can be hard to read but arent the ivy league students supposed to be exceptional? Now I hear they are giving Harvard students crayons and idk chocolate milk or something to help then cope with an election.
@@ClaireGreen-wd2gm They have a phonetic represented of the _sound_ of the words, and that is pinyin. But that is not the same as having a phonics that represents hanzi logograms. To illustrate 男人 is a Chinese word. What phonics allows one to sound that out? Yes, pinyin can tell you the pronunciation, but it won't tell you how to write that character. It won't show the strokes that are needed. So it seems to me that learning written Chinese depends to some extent on "whole word" learning. Now, one can say that phonics is not sufficient in learning to read English either, given all the irregular spellings of, and variant pronunciations of character groups in, English words. (For example, the words "rough", "bough", "through", "cough", etc.)
I homeschool my daughter and have done so since Covid. Her room is a mini library. She’s 14 and it’s hard for her to find friends that have any interest in reading. She has mainly public school friends, the same group she started public school with in kindergarten. That’s what we’re experiencing. Best to you as an educator & I very much enjoy your videos.
I’m a middle-aged Brit and I remember studying full texts for GCSEs back in the day. We had mostly essay questions and we brought our annotated texts into the exam so we could pull quotes to support arguments. I seem to remember the questions tended to be a lot about themes and characters, so you needed to have read the whole thing. I had a whole psychological analysis of Lady MacBeth ready to go ahead of time which was me and my mates just messing around with theories about why she was like that, but lucky me, it came up on the day. And, don’t get me started on Hard Times - why would you make a 15yo drag themselves through that! There were unseen texts as well but I think they came more under English language than English lit - our English tended to get split into 2. As for phonics, I cannot imagine any other way to learn English - it’s a bloody stupid language that doesn’t make sense sometimes but it gets you most of the way there. Incidentally I decided not to study English at A-level, because I loved reading in the whole and lost enjoyment picking it apart. I’m still a big reader and I work in Libraries and see the difference it makes when kids WANT to read. It’s such a big thing to help them in their childhood learning and later in life too.
I went to 4 schools: elementary(k-4th), middle (5th & 6th), jr high (7th & 8th),and high school. I remember specifically in 5th and 6th we were read to in homeroom. The Island of the Blue Dolphins and the Narnia books. Still favorites today. I saw that video and thought of you and wondered if you were going to do a reaction video. What do you think of "unschooling" that is becoming a thing now. I have thoughts, and they are not good. I admire teachers and those who are able to make home school work.
Thank you for your kind comment - I don't know much about unschooling and I don't like to share an opinion on things for which I'm not very well versed.
In the uk in the 70's and 80's when I was at school I only did compression on short pieces. Grammar was never really taught at all. The phonics debate happend in England early 2000s and we have leaped up the league tables. It would be interesting how many students in English litriture as a percentage of actual students. In addition to stats with other courses and their reading. Because as I was told in the 80's we were the worst years ever.
Phonics was sometimes used by my parents and teachers when I would ask what a word meant or how to spell it by them they would start sounding it out. It came across as mocking, condescending, and incredibly insulting at the time. Still makes me want to shake them when they or others do it. I understand the reason why it’s used. I just wish it wouldn’t end up being used as a weapon against others or to insinuate incompetence. I found whole language learning to be the most effective personally as it started being incorporated just before I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. A few years later my reading comprehension and language learning skills improved greatly. I’m one of the outliners that this worked well for. I wish they would use both methods together or change the way phonics is used so teachers, educators and parents learn not to treat the child or student as incompetent or dense when utilising this language learning technique.
Personally I would have been pissed as a student if my phone had been taken from me as I was usually reading a book on my phone and hiding it under my desk 😂 thankfully I’m out of grade school. So know I read without fear of being caught reading rather than doing something else
As a high school student in the mid-1960s my honors history class was required to read "A Tale of Two Cities" while we were studying the French Revolution. There was nothing on our test about this novel and we did not discuss it in class. It had been assigned for enrichment purposes only. Yet everyone read the ENTIRE book. I know this because we talked about it outside of class. It was fun.
@@katherinedote2324 so cool! Thanks for sharing.
I appreciate your comments as an educator. Rigor in education is no longer a priority. A friend who is a teacher said most students have difficulty reading aloud. We remembered reading books in class where we read aloud taking turns up and down the row and students had to keep track in the book. That apparently is no longer the way reading is taught. There are also techniques for reading quickly (one way, is not to verbalize the words in your head) and I took a speed reading class in high school that was invaluable in college and law school. I was an academic librarian at a university and I saw so many students taking short cuts like reading only the abstract of an article but not the entire thing for their research, or asking me to find them 5 peered reviewed articles without they themselves doing the grunt work. Sorry, no go, we teach you how to find them, not hand them over. The philosophy is do the bare minimum to pass the test.
That's fascinating. I have my MLIS degree and wondered what modern challenges librarians face. I've heard from educators throughout the academic spectrum relay that students demanding the shortcut is a huge problem. That's not how life works. You must put in the work to gain the benefits. Thank you for sharing.
My son goes to Chicago Public Schools, so, one of the biggest public school systems in the country and also one that gets a lot of negative press. He goes to our neighborhood school, (so not one of CPS's selective enrollment schools that your kid has to test into). I couldn't be happier with how reading has been taught. They use phonics. The teachers have read novels to his class every year since Kindergarten. Now he's in 3rd grade and they just finished The Witches by Roald Dahl (which the kids LOVED). Basically, I'm just trying to provide an example to show that it isn't necessarily a public vs. private thing. Public schools certainly have a different kind of pressure when it comes to standardized testing, but that doesn't mean there aren't amazing public schools and principals out there who do everything in their power to focus on what kids really need. Great video - thanks for sharing your take!
Thank you! And absolutely! I hope I didn’t too heavily imply this is a public school thing because it’s not. I’ve met and taught very smart students in public school. Also, most schools vary widely depending on the teacher, principal, district, and state. And my oldest son went to public school for two years. We were really happy with the education he received. I happened to switch to teaching private school and brought my boys along with me. Several states have implemented a “no cell phone policy” in their schools which I think is great step in the right direction. Thank you for your wonderful comment.
My children have had a similar positive experience but in a smaller school district. We feel very lucky
@@HavaDay5979 that’s great to read!!
One of my favorite memories is from my 7th Grade English class in the 70s. During the last 10 minutes of every class, our very diminutive teacher would hop up on her table-desk and read a novel aloud to the whole class. She would always ask us to put our heads down and close our eyes to better listen to the novel. I loved it and looked forward to it every day.
What a lovely memory! Thanks for sharing. I may start doing that with my class. :)
This shocked me. I had no idea about policies NOT to read full books.
Shocking, I know.
It blows my mind that kids are not being read to. I went to school from the mid-eighties thru 1999, and I was read to, by my teachers, every day of my academic life. We also had time set aside every day for silent reading. Back then, it was called D.E.A.R. In middle school and high school, we always studied entire novels. This was very interesting.
Thank you!
late 90s/early 00s elementary school we had silent sustained reading time as well and were read to at different times. Sitting in a circle listening to our teacher read was the best part of my day (edit: I just remembered it was listed on the board as USSR, "uninterrupted sustained silent reading")
This is interesting and I love hearing from teachers’ points of view. Thank you!
You’re welcome!
I was a substitute teacher's aide for a few years. I was mostly in special education, but when I was in regular classrooms, I noticed that even when an excerpt of a novel was used, it was usually to teach a concept like primary vs. secondary sources, with no mention of how to get meaning from the text. Sometimes the passages used were beautiful, but no comment was made on the writing quality or the events in that scene, and how they could relate to the children's lives. I guess there was no time for such lessons. No wonder kids don't read if they don't have to. They don't know that reading has anything to do with finding meaningful life lessons, comfort, joy, etc. I guess I got lucky. I was in public schools in years when phonics was taught. Grandparents volunteered to read novels to us, and teachers had us read novels to learn to write small papers on them. I guess that was allowed back then. Then I was homeschooled after fourth grade. My mom made sure I read a lot. When I got to college, I wasn't a good test taker at first, but my reading stamina was good. Cell phones weren't smart then. My reading stamina is not nearly as good now.
Thank you for sharing your experience, it really highlights the issues at play.
Great video! Reading AND reading comprehension is so important and foundational to a child’s education. I love the insight you shared re: education system.
Thank you so much!
I appreciate the addition of your point of view. I wish I had said this in the video, but I think the order of causes I cited also mirrors their impact; whole language is a problem, but the excerpt-based curriculum is much worse, and then I suspect phones are the thing doing the most damage.
You did such a great job with your video. And there are a few things I wish I would've said in my own. Primarily, that I didn't intentionally mean to draw a strong comparison between public/private school, but used those experiences to illustrate that how education is executed is incredibly important.
This is not surprising to me as I have observed that many people struggle with pretty basic reading as adults, but it’s a tad surprising because (like you) my experience was being taught phonics as a homeschooled kid and I always read whole books to learn. Glad that schools are slowly changing this! I think cell phone policies need to happen everywhere
Thank you for sharing your experience. I appreciate you, Grace!
As a current homeschooler (primarily with Charlotte Mason method -whole living books- though I do phonics specifically) I find this information heartbreaking, but as a state university elementary ed graduate I can 100% agree with your thoughts here. It's so sad that this is our current state. I had a conversation with a college graduate teaching high school literature in a private Christian school and I asked what her favorite book was to teach? She told me which text book "grade 10 textbook". 😭 She couldn't even tell me names of quality classic literature because she had graduated from the school she taught in and just didn't know!
Very informative! Thank you.
Jesus Christ! I’m an English teacher in Switzerland, and if I tried to get away with teaching only excerpts, I’d get fired! And that’s in a second language!
That's really overexaggerated. Reading excerpts in a textbook to study technique, test comprehension, or analyze grammar and syntax is not the end of the world.
Great video Shelly! I've been personally struggling with my kids and reading and I think a lot of your points make sense and I completely agree with you on cellphones!
Thank you, Melinda! I loved your Five for Five this morning. ❤️❤️❤️
I struggle reading at home sometimes lol. What I like to do is read at the library
So interesting and so sad. This kind of stuff freaks me out about making the right choices for my son when he is school-age. Oof. Lots to think about!
My oldest son when to public school for kindergarten and 1st grade. He had a good experience. I think there are just different paths in education and all have their pros and cons. What's most important is having loving, supportive parents through it all.
@ yes well said! ❤️
I appreciate this video so much! As a homeschooling parent of six, it is absolutely eye opening. In the last few weeks I read the book, "Anxious Generation", by Jonathan Haidt that shares scientific findings about how cell phones are impacting youth's mental health, social connections, and performance in school. I think it very much dove-tails into points that you were making in this video.
What a great conversation! 🙌🏼 I’ll never forget my third grade teacher reading aloud “A Wrinkle in Time” from cover to cover. I was completely engrossed. Children can’t enjoy an excerpt with no context to the story as a whole, all that’s left is analyzing. Two books, “The Read Aloud Family” and “The Enchanted Hour” really encouraged me to take ownership as a mother (and homeschooler) for reading aloud and I highly recommend to parents whether you homeschool or not! 😄
Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm going to check out those books!
I'm at a charter school, and we read whole novels and also have a no cell phone policy. I love it!
You have a very important message to teachers and parents!! I also encouraged my girls and grandkids to have books they "read for fun" apart from schoolwork. ❤ Thank you for your encouragement of love for learning thru books!!
I think it's so important to make reading fun!
Certainly, it is of uppermost importance to read good books and literature! We are blessed with a wealth of resources and reading structures our mind! Thank you for sharing this video with us!
Thank you so much for the kind words!
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, presents research about access to cell phones, beginning in 2010, and the damage to learning. I have taught high school since 2006 and can testify to having seen in "real life" the data he uncovers. Let's hope schools and school districts will continue to disallow phones in classrooms - it is a recent trend with rewards for students and their classmates.
Thanks for sharing.
I graduated a private high school in 83. We read lots of novels and books. Excerpts do you have a place in a reading curriculum, but it’s not the whole picture. Mind-boggling the novel reading would be discouraged.
Excerpt reading only was shocking to me as well at the time. And I can see now appreciate both - novels and excerpts, but, in my opinion, we need a mixture of both.
What an awful way of teaching. I can’t imagine not having read The Giver, Animal Farm, The Outsiders, etc. because the school district didn’t deem it necessary
Thanks, Dillon!
I think that one of the drivers for testing,esp in state schools (uk) or public schools (us) is the monitoring of the schools’ performance which sometimes seems to take priority over consideration of the long term effects on the students.
Attention span is a serious issue when some of these students learn to drive!
So true. Thank you.
Massachusetts just took the first toward deemphasizing testing by removing the standardized test as a graduation requirement. This video describes one major problem with "teaching to the test". I went to public school in Massachusetts and we read significant quantities of novels and plays - I was lucky to just happen to attend one of the best public school systems in the U.S.
Thank you!
This is excellent! I have so many thoughts about school and testing ugh! I homeschool my 3 daughters and we have read at least 30 novels aloud each year since they were about 4 and now the oldest two are 15. We still read together twice a day and they beg for more! I honestly think we learn more through those novels than we do through our “school books”. And we definitely enjoy it more 😊
That's awesome! Thank you for sharing.
I sent my boys to private school from pre-k through graduation. As a single mom, it was difficult many years. But I saw the extreme benefit to my boys and it was so worth it. They are both adults and have many times thanked me for sending them there.
That's wonderful! Thanks for sharing!
Hi Shelly!!!!! I love your videos!
I’m sure you are very right in your viewpoint but I also wonder if time management is a big factor as well. College students are bombarded with extra campus activities that take up exorbitant amounts of time. Such has fraternities, clubs, volunteering, sports….
With all of these activities, a class load and probably working to keep up with living expenses, I can understand why a novel a week would be daunting. When do they have time?
It's a hard balancing act for sure!
I got an advert after your video for Speechify, promising that if I buy their product I’ll “never have to read again” lol
Ha! So ironic.
A YTer that my girls watched when they were younger went off to college. I remember they were watching when she was complaining for an art course she had to know 20 artists for a test and was upset that she wasn’t given the names who she’d be tested on. I told my girls that the art teacher wants her to know ALL the artists. In high school, it was to learn what is needed for the test, forget, and move on. I think testing is a huge problem within the educational system.
I have recently watched some videos about the deterioration of learning to read by site words in both the US and the UK. I believe the statistics in the US is that 1 in 5 graduate without the ability to read-maybe enough to read stop signs or basic forms. The average reading level for graduates is at the 6th grade level. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong.). It’s very sad.
That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing!
Excellent!!!
Thanks so much!
Reading is a deeper appreciation than looking on bloomin’ FB.
True.
In Brazil reading is taught phoneticaly, but I can relate to the teaching of literature. The whole goal is to get you into college, and the literature test was 25 multiple choice question about Brazilian and Portuguese books. So, not only you don't really need to have read the texts, but I was also being told to read things like Iracema. If that doesn't kill your love of reading, nothing will.
So true. Thanks for sharing.
There are multiple factors here. Nowadays, everyone goes to college. It isn't just for the really smart people. To do almost any job, they want a BA. So the university feels that it has to pass everyone. This leads to teaching to the bottom. In middle school and high school teachers are discouraged from giving any homework at all. This leads to five minute assignemts, and the students spend the rest of the time twiddling their thumbs. The experience would be so much more improved if teachers could give out a list of optional assignments. If a teacher said, you can write optional essays, and I will give you feedback, it won't count against your grade, but I want you to grow in your writing skills, it would be a tremendous benefit. Teachers could also provide a list of optional books to read.
Very interesting video. I’m 48 for age reference. I was a voracious reader growing up and graduated with honors but was never taught how to take a standardized test. I always did poorly on them. I realize they are tied to funding but my personal belief is they should be done away with. They do an extremely poor job of testing a child’s intelligence level.
It seems like the problem is "teaching to the test". The test taken by itself isn't reality.
Testing had good intentions but didn’t factor in behavior changes that would follow it. The goal of education shifted from preparing students for life as productive citizens to preparing them for tests and sacrificing long term success for short term wins - wins they aren’t actually achieving.
Yes, testing does have the best of intentions.
I graduated in 2013 and we read a ton of books. So upsetting that they discouraged books.
It is.
I learned to read in elementary school in the mid-1950s. The only "technology in the classroom" I ever encountered was the special classroom for the kids in iron lungs down the hall.
Shelly, your description of your teaching experience, of not being allowed to teach a whole book, only excepts, struck me in the heart. Teaching to pass tests, instead of teaching students to love reading, is the real tragedy. I would like to see more nuance in the discussion around phonics because phonics alone is not the answer to better readers. According to reading science research, phonics needs to be combined with other learning and comprehension strategies for best results.
I'm glad you brought up the importance of reading science. Thank you!
I also have to add an economic slant too. As public school budgets are consistently slashed, no matter how well the school tests well, it's probably hard to acquire a copy of a physical book for each student in the class, and worry about them taking said book home where any number of things can ruin the school property. So not only is it probably discouraged on an academic standpoint (aka the test) but discouraged on the grounds of economic standards as well.
True. We even had full class sets of approved novels and even then were discouraged to teach them in class.
Well I haven’t stopped, at least not completely⚛❤
Friendly reminder that you don't have to passively accept the status quo when it comes to schools. You can participate in your local school board meetings and municipal government meetings and advocate for better policies in your area. And of course, call your local and state representatives and tell them what you want to see in the education standards.
That is great advice! Thank you for sharing!
This is all so bonkers to me. When I was in 6th grade (back in the olden days LOL) we read entire books in class together. We read silently in class every day. We were required to read for 20 minutes at home every day. I read 150 books over 5th and 6th grade.
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing.
I guess it would have been about 1998 I remember feeling like I was going to die of boredom when we were studying "Great Expectations". I swear it went for a month if not the whole 6 weeks. Weve gone from overanalyzing novels to the point of trying to find hidden meaning in the color of the curtians in the room where a scene takes place to not being able to handle more than a few paragraphs. Can we find a middle ground between those two extremes?
That's a great point about finding that middle ground!
The excerpt thing is so interesting - another element that wasn’t really touched on was the cost-benefit analysis of dissecting literature and poetry as if it were a skill subject, like math. Even when. I was assigned great, whole books back in school (late 90’s-2004), often the assignments would ask us to dissect themes and learn frankly useless and numbing literary terminology that had zero bearing on what we actually gleaned from the book. Perhaps literature and poetry are too subjective to ‘teach’ in this way at all. In college, we can dive deeper into the nitty gritty with books, but I see even upper elementary and middle school English curricula nowadays utterly wringing all of the joy and curiosity out of books in favor of ‘analysis’. As I get older and now homeschooling my children, I realize that just READING the dang thing - reading a great book perhaps multiple, multiple times throughout our lives - that is the reading curricula.
Agreed on phonics as well! I don’t recall how I was taught but am using phonics with my youngest and when we go to the library for ‘early readers’ - there are hundreds and none are phonics based except for Bob Books. I don’t understand how these children are supposed to memorize everything as a sight word? Our language has some eccentricities but is overwhelmingly phonetic - the bigger question to is WHY is the American school system taking this paradoxically harder and less successful route to teaching English, to teaching most subjects in such a way?
I echo the other commenter that mentioned John Taylor Gatto - he went politically a little far libertarian at times but his Dumbing Us Down and Underground History of American Education are eye opening and thought provoking.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! I'm going to look more into Gatto's work. Thank you.
Wondering how you deal with AI as a teacher. Does that make it even more challenging getting students to read and do the work assigned to them?
Interestingly, AI hasn't been a problem for me as a teacher because a good bit of the essay writing and reading is done in the classroom. As workloads get heavier and more assignments sent home (like in high school) I would imagine it's more of a challenge.
Very interesting
Thanks!
Maybe not as relevant here, as I'm not from the US, but to me this was also very surprising to hear. I'm from Germany, went to school in the 80s and 90s and we had to read (and write essays on) a lot of books, not just for German class, but even for English class, or French or whatever your foreign language(s) were.
I have to admit, for a while, it discouraged me from reading as a hobby though, because the books we had to read for school were just not my cup of tea (a lot of classics that I only understood half of, especially things like e.g. Shakespeare in English, but also old German ones). But I did pick it up as a hobby after finishing school again.
I don't have kids, so no idea how it is here nowadays. I'm wondering if they changed that here as well.
Thanks for sharing!
Have you ever read john taylor gatto
No, but I looked him up after your comment and am intrigued by his work. Thank you!
@ he has some controversial takes but i think some of them should be applied
I have a question about illiteracy. I saw something on TV about a seventy-five-year-old woman in America who was illiterate. She obviously went to school well before common core, and so that is hardly the culprit. She was white so one cannot blame it on racism. Furthermore, she went to school in the 50s and 60s when education was "great." How was it that she was illiterate then? How come no teacher ever noticed that she could not read and write? I'd be interested in your feedback.
@@vonbrach Maybe she had a reading disability such as dyslexia? I doubt there was the knowledge or help on the level that we have today. She was probably labeled for her inability to read and slipped through the cracks.
Honestly, I'm not really sure how that would happen.
Have you ever seen Chinese sinograms (i.e., the characters of the Chinese languages)? Have you seen Japanese Kanji? I have read somewhere that in order for a Japanese student to get into the University of Tokyo, probably the most prestigious and competitive university in the country, that student must have mastered about 20,000 such Japanese ideograms. I doubt that that there are phonics for these languages. Yet I am not hearing about articles about how Asian students are not able to read a whole novel. For alphabet-based writing systems, I do think phonics are important. To not use phonics negates the advantages of having an alphabet to. But I think the issue of not teaching phonics is separate from not teaching novels.
Even when teaching mandarin to Chinese kids they have pinyin to start out on which is the phonetic system of their language. They dont just expect them to look at symbols and remember what word is what symbol.
@@ClaireGreen-wd2gm The Chinese have been teaching Chinese for centuries long before pinyin came along. In any case, the Chinese do not wait until pinyin is mastered before starting the teaching of classical Chinese, and at some point they do require that students know what word is what symbol, since the pinyin is of absolutely no use in reconstructing the written Chinese ideogram character.
(I agree phonics is useful for learning pinyin. But phonics is irrelevant for hanzi.)
I am not saying "whole word" instruction is sound pedagogy. It is not. I am however skeptical that it is the reason why students at "elite" colleges cannot read a novel. To me the crux of the matter is that the reading that they do in K through 12 is all excerpts, "short form" stuff. It is the written equivalent of sound bites.
When I read Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses too, for that matter, I had a hard time coping with the sheer length of those novels, since if a character was reintroduced (after a long absence) hundreds of pages from where I first encountered or last heard from the character, I had a hard time remembering what was said about him or her earlier or even who he or she was.
Even if I dedicate myself to reading one novel at a time, sometimes I have to set the book aside for a day or two or more, and that requires remembering where I left off. So I have had to devise strategies for successfully getting through the book. Basically, sometimes one cannot just read the book from cover to cover. Sometimes one has to go back and reread. Sometimes one has to put pen to paper and create one's own Cliff Notes.
I have read some fairly long books, and I would not have succeeded if the professor required that they be done in a week.
Examples: The Count of Monte Cristo. Les Miserables. War and Peace. David Copperfield. Anna Karenina. Stephen J. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (possibly the longest), and my personal favorite, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (which I loved so much I've read it twice, so far.)
@OrdenJust Well of course eventually they learn the characters. Id imagine the characters are printed under the pinyin from the start to begin to get them into the kids heads but either eay you said you doubted they have a phonetic representation of the words and I just responded that they do.
Aa far as the books. Ya I know the classics can be hard to read but arent the ivy league students supposed to be exceptional? Now I hear they are giving Harvard students crayons and idk chocolate milk or something to help then cope with an election.
@@ClaireGreen-wd2gm They have a phonetic represented of the _sound_ of the words, and that is pinyin. But that is not the same as having a phonics that represents hanzi logograms. To illustrate
男人
is a Chinese word. What phonics allows one to sound that out? Yes, pinyin can tell you the pronunciation, but it won't tell you how to write that character. It won't show the strokes that are needed. So it seems to me that learning written Chinese depends to some extent on "whole word" learning.
Now, one can say that phonics is not sufficient in learning to read English either, given all the irregular spellings of, and variant pronunciations of character groups in, English words. (For example, the words "rough", "bough", "through", "cough", etc.)
I homeschool my daughter and have done so since Covid. Her room is a mini library. She’s 14 and it’s hard for her to find friends that have any interest in reading. She has mainly public school friends, the same group she started public school with in kindergarten. That’s what we’re experiencing. Best to you as an educator & I very much enjoy your videos.
Thank you! I have no doubt your daughter will connect with kindred spirits soon.
I’m a middle-aged Brit and I remember studying full texts for GCSEs back in the day. We had mostly essay questions and we brought our annotated texts into the exam so we could pull quotes to support arguments. I seem to remember the questions tended to be a lot about themes and characters, so you needed to have read the whole thing. I had a whole psychological analysis of Lady MacBeth ready to go ahead of time which was me and my mates just messing around with theories about why she was like that, but lucky me, it came up on the day. And, don’t get me started on Hard Times - why would you make a 15yo drag themselves through that! There were unseen texts as well but I think they came more under English language than English lit - our English tended to get split into 2. As for phonics, I cannot imagine any other way to learn English - it’s a bloody stupid language that doesn’t make sense sometimes but it gets you most of the way there. Incidentally I decided not to study English at A-level, because I loved reading in the whole and lost enjoyment picking it apart. I’m still a big reader and I work in Libraries and see the difference it makes when kids WANT to read. It’s such a big thing to help them in their childhood learning and later in life too.
I went to 4 schools: elementary(k-4th), middle (5th & 6th), jr high (7th & 8th),and high school. I remember specifically in 5th and 6th we were read to in homeroom. The Island of the Blue Dolphins and the Narnia books. Still favorites today. I saw that video and thought of you and wondered if you were going to do a reaction video. What do you think of "unschooling" that is becoming a thing now. I have thoughts, and they are not good. I admire teachers and those who are able to make home school work.
Thank you for your kind comment - I don't know much about unschooling and I don't like to share an opinion on things for which I'm not very well versed.
In the uk in the 70's and 80's when I was at school I only did compression on short pieces.
Grammar was never really taught at all.
The phonics debate happend in England early 2000s and we have leaped up the league tables.
It would be interesting how many students in English litriture as a percentage of actual students.
In addition to stats with other courses and their reading.
Because as I was told in the 80's we were the worst years ever.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
Phonics was sometimes used by my parents and teachers when I would ask what a word meant or how to spell it by them they would start sounding it out. It came across as mocking, condescending, and incredibly insulting at the time. Still makes me want to shake them when they or others do it. I understand the reason why it’s used. I just wish it wouldn’t end up being used as a weapon against others or to insinuate incompetence. I found whole language learning to be the most effective personally as it started being incorporated just before I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. A few years later my reading comprehension and language learning skills improved greatly. I’m one of the outliners that this worked well for. I wish they would use both methods together or change the way phonics is used so teachers, educators and parents learn not to treat the child or student as incompetent or dense when utilising this language learning technique.
Personally I would have been pissed as a student if my phone had been taken from me as I was usually reading a book on my phone and hiding it under my desk 😂 thankfully I’m out of grade school. So know I read without fear of being caught reading rather than doing something else
Hm. That's interesting. I'm sorry you had that experience with your parents and teachers.