How I Taught My Kid to Read
I love McWhorter but this is a disappointing mishmash. While it does seem that a lot of new educational techniques seem to be based on skipping past the underlying fundamentals and trying to teach kids to immediately start reading by whole words before learning the sounds letters represent and giving the brain a few decades to recognize whole words at a go (as McWhorter describes here), or by doing math by estimation before learning how to add or multiply (and thereby developing an intuition for what estimate to even make) as my daughter faced in elementary school, or as my accounting professor partner struggles with as fundamental textbooks attempt to de-emphasize debits and credits and just skip to the financial report; even so the lesson we should probably take is not “just use phonics dummy!” But rather “maybe use multiple methods and find individual paths for each student to be successful”.<p>We tried to teach my daughter to read using the exact book McWhorter praises when she was that same age. She hated the lessons and didn’t progress, and in fact didn’t learn to read until she was eight years old, and yet somehow she is now, at 17, an avid reader and writer, having completed multiple NaNoWriMo projects, an editor on her high school newspaper, and a star student in every writing class she can get enrolled in.<p>Ultimately she benefitted from patient teachers and a nurturing environment and a heavy dose of innate interest and the right disposition, not from a specific teaching method. The only right answer is that there is no one right answer for every kid.