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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Whole language learning sounds more enjoyable so I would stick with that. Does it really matter whether they learn to read at 6 or 7 as long as they get there in the end? Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

  • -16

Amazon might pay a team several million dollars over five years to shave .1% off of total delivery costs by optimizing routing. And this has massive benefits both for amazon's profits and for our delivery costs. A million pieces like that make up a part of why modern technology and society is so powerful. 6 vs 7 is a 1% difference in literacy-averaged-over-years-of-life for everyone. Having children sit in reading class for an extra year wastes billions of hours of time, time that could be spent on ... anything valuable, learning more, doing more, etc.

... not that phonics actually does that, the evidence for which is strangely not debated at all in this thread. But it does matter! We could still be using roman numerals for math. "Does it really matter how long it takes to add CXXVMI and VXMCMII as long as they get there in the end?"

In New York, 63% of fourth grade students are not reading at their grade level.

A lot of the lower IQ kids taught under whole word learning never do get there, and taking up several additional years learning to read actually is bad because something had to get bumped to make room for endless spelling tests.

Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

Then it isn't for the smart kids, and the point isn't fun.

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