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As someone who has a fake going on the computer job and a degree, I've gotten roped in to tutoring/babysitting a psuedo family members kids. They go to one of those classical academy style charter schools everybody is excited about and got dANG: These 3rd - 5th graders don't know how to fucking read.
They are learning through something like systematic phonics (probably), where you learn letter and syllable sounds first; resulting in two kids who REALLY slowly scan through a sentence like human recursive descent parsers and one brighter middle schooler who totally ignored the teachers and taught himself how to read on his own by simply picking up a book and plowing through it.
Interestingly, one of the two kids in elementary is doing pretty good in math, so I gotta assume that the IQ is there. Little dude might be a little dyslexic, who knows?
Apropos: Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own? What are the kids reading these days? I'm gonna see if I can't find them a bigass children's science encyclopedia, that was my jam as a little babu but I welcome any suggestions from ya'll.
Speaking of reading well - this sentence took me far too long to parse. You're talking about an "email job" where you are required to do very little? And a "pseudo family member", whatever that means, knows you have plenty of time on your hands?
I don't know much about the subject, but I think what you are describing is actually the correct or less bad way for kids who aren't naturally gifted towards reading to learn to read. You have to build on simple fundamental blocks. For some kids this takes a week, for others it takes years of training. You're not supposed to work your way through the building blocks after years of school, so I don't know what's going on there. I've heard of a far worse trend from California and elsewhere in the US, where they try to teach all kids the smart kid version of scanning a full sentence, and looking for context in the paragraph etc. They're producing total illiterates.
The actual young family members I've seen recently all go to CA public schools as we (the extended family diaspora) all firmly believe that private schools are for richie riches or assholes. They are all doing something like whole language learning, and all are way more advanced in all subjects than any of the charter school kids I know (sample size: like 5. Basically worthless).
That said, they share some of my crazed book addict genes so maybe it's a worthless comparison.
That said that said: maybe I'm seeing these shitty results because this is the puritanical version of phonics where you aren't allowed to even look at a complete phrase incase it makes you go into hysterics, where as the public schools in my area are just doing common sense readings of"The Kuh AH TUH in the HUH AH TUH", you know what I mean?
I swear that fragmented phonics bullshit actually discourages kids from reading. My sample size is similarly useless, but of the eleven kids I know who can read, the three who were taught that way all hate reading and do it slowly, while the two who were taught the whole language method love it (and the other six all learned to read before they started school, and they of course love it.) And while I know it's conspiracy theory talk, it wouldn't surprise me if it was deliberate - an illiterate population is a more manageable population than a literate one after all.
That sounds like an applause light line. Reading won't save you, if all you read is propaganda, and some of the most easily managed Current Thing followers I ever met are avid readers.
Fair, I can't say my experience with current thing followers is any different. I was under the impression that it's not that being able to read can save you though, it's the not being able to read leaves you at the mercy of those who can. I figure if you can't read, what can you do? Follow instructions, or work out everything from first principles based exclusively on the information in your memory. And when you are forced to follow instructions out of necessity you also implicitly trust the person who instructs you. Same with maths really.
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