Comments by "A.J. Hart" (@cobbler88) on "Jared Henderson" channel.

Phonics is our mental default. They can end phonics teaching all they want. We all sound out words when we're learning them.
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Yes. I remember all the complete books I had to read when I was a child in the 70s and 80s, which amounted to maybe three. I read many more books at home in my spare time. Damn that No Child Left Behind, implemented when I was 32!
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Phonics has never been a thing of the past. Everyone learns words by sounding them out, etc. No one is taught to just look at the word "bill" and just remember how it's said. We all sound words out. People are being a little selectively disingenuous on this comment board and, I believe, in the vid. Take care.
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@celan4288 She didn't realize that EVERYONE learns through phonics to some extent. I was an ed major for awhile. They fill their heads with a LOT of silliness.
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@kimberlytross9864 It just always seemed to me that sounding out words was baked into the cake, like using pictures of apples to learn early math. Ots done even if we pretend it isn't. Take care.
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I guess I don't recall having to hone my reading comprehension skills when I was 4. We all learn to read through phonics. WWL is perfectly fine for teaching students how to then pluck understanding from what we read. As for stamina, God forbid students read something they are not assigned at school. I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault. Take care.
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@thedave1771 That happens even without that policy. Go to a small town with a Tyson facility nearby and ask how much the public school kids are slow walked because they have to accommodate the 20% of their classmates who can't speak English.
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@artelisx To be honest, I think that was overblown. There's more evidence that people were ONLY reading that type of book during the broader YA trend, rather than that their book reading in general went up significantly. The Harry Potter books did tend to appeal to the previous generation of readers to an extent than the Hunger Games, Maze Runner, etc., books, but my experience is that those people were readers to begin with. Regardless, these millions of new readers we allegedly produced sure fell out of love with reading the second that trend/era - and the respective series they were reading - ended.
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We've taken those tests for generations, and if placing an emphasis on reading comprehension after we all already know how to read by sounding out the words is a problem, I'm not sure he proved it. It was a fine way to learn to read. And, really, how many of us are ever required to read a book in a single week unless we're taking a college lit class - which makes us a self-selecting group - and it's a relatively short book? I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault.
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@amw6846 See, we rarely had to read books, period, for a standard English class. We only really had to do it in lit-type classes. If the schools were burning kids' education hours having them read books in standard English classes, I could honestly argue that - counter to the general theme of all of this - having kids reading so many books was detrimental to their education.
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@mr.selfimprovement3241 I can see why this would prevent you from building up your reading stamina outside of what you were assigned in school.
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True. I would never notice the gaps in time where I DON'T get a bj if it hadn't been for all the bjs I've gotten in the past. Truly profound.
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@sovietunion7643 i'll buy that people busy themselves because the economy may cause some to have to find additional employment, but for the most part the jobs we do are exponentially easier and quicker to do than in the past. We are making a lot of bad choices, from where we spend our money to how we spend our down time. People used to complain about how tired they were after returning home at the end of the day because they had to spend the entire day staring at a monitor. Now those same people can't wait to stare at their phones or tablets for an additional few hours after they get home.
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Blame it on the method of learning that was in place when you DID read a lot! That's what we're supposed to believe here, it appears.
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In the dark ages (1970s) we learned the letters, then learned their sounds, then sounded out words, etc., and the next thing we knew we were reading. This sh!t wasn't hard. It may have BECOME difficult once people (usually academics) decided we needed to buckle down and come up with the one true way to teach reading, and it had BETTER differ from the one that has worked for centuries, or those of us creating it won't appear to be very useful. On what I'm sure is a completely unrelated topic, the Department of Education was established in 1980.
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To all the people still blaming NCLB for the fact that you didn't have enough emphasis on education in your homes and you never had any interest in reading anything outside of what was assigned (thereby not building their stamina), did you need a government entity to tell you when to wipe your backsides as well, or did you kind of just figure that one out? 🤣
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@artelisx Then all those added "readers" apparently stopped reading, so ...
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There are multiple problems here, but I'll take things as they come. One issue I have is that we never actually abandoned phonics (I mean, who was never told to not sound words out at some early level?), and Whole Language Learning absolutely worked. The number of people from my generation (Gen X) who read copious amounts of books - and still do - is not under dispute. Perhaps they skew the average, but that has always been the case, just as how Larry King used to skew the divorce rate. I'm also seeing no real evidence whatsoever that any decline in literacy is a "systemic" issue. This ignores basically every other variable regarding home and family environment. etc., that seem to be just as likely evidence of creating children incapable of - or not interested in - learning, rather than indicting the way they are being instructed. (by the way, the first item shown on the screen was from 2020 - not some time relevant to the assertion, which would put it more at sometime in the 80s) As for the "language wars," that item was printed in 1997 by PBS (take the source for what it's worth). As I recall leading up to that time, that didn't actually speak to traditional phonics and Whole Language Learning, but more to a very strange offshoot of phonics that was to language learning what Common Core was to math - a nonsensical approach that was more confusing than educational. I had several relatives who were educators at the time who tried to tell me how kids in some locations were being taught language via "phonics" and it sounded insane. I believe it was mostly an early- to mid-80s thing. Again, taking place after what was described earlier as the phonics and WLL learning eras being held up for criticism in this vid. Drawing any conclusions about learning from the COVID era is sketchy at best. This is a period during which children in their developmental stages were not even allowed to see people's mouths move while producing language, which has been held out to being very detrimental. I can agree that it may have REVEALED that younger people were not reading a lot of books but, again, it's a Graham Hancock leap, logically, to then attribute it to methods that actually worked. I'm also noting this seeming belief that if you didn't read 20 books last year, it's the school's fault for not assigning you 20 books to read to build up that "reading stamina." Here's a wild idea. Maybe a child can read a book outside of school? Granted, if a child isn't assigned those 20 books, maybe we can't expect them to all make up for it outside of the classroom. This brings us to the movement over the last generation to require LESS reading in classrooms. Homework is just too burdensome nowadays, right? Kids need that time to stare at screens, game and become the victims of sexual predators via social media. Educators have been pressured to not require so much of the students. And it wasn't the educators doing the pressuring. I will not blame the kids for complaining about homework. That's what kids do. But, again, we CAN hold parents accountable for suddenly embracing the lunacy of actually listening to their griping offspring and taking it seriously because, ultimately, a satiated child requires less of a parent who, not coincidentally, wants to spend most of THEIR time on screens. Not exactly a unique approach in this world where we've decided to constantly be held hostage by this or that group's tantrums. Maybe when a student claims they "can't" read an entire book in a week, we should (likely rightly) interpret that as they don't WANT to read an entire book in a week. Along those lines, how many of you have EVER been required to read a book in a week for a class that was NOT a lit class? And even there, that book would have to be relatively short. We almost always had weeks to break down books. And this might shock people, but you usually can go your entire school career without signing up for a lit class. I was good through differential equations. I didn't then turn around and sign up for Calc III. By college, students required to do that much reading in that short of a time is a pretty self-selecting group. My experience has also been that student's lack of desire/ability to read an entire book - or how they were taught - has next to nothing to do with whether they can take a standardized test (exams we'd already been taking GENERATIONS before either Bush administration, by the way) well enough to get into top schools. They just happen to be good students who are also very good at taking standardized tests. I know just as many of my friends who were battling for valedictorian honors who never cracked anything but a text book in high school. Even if the language learning approach IS a big deal in this regard, I think it can be argued that the ability to understand what you just read might be a skill that at least complements your ability to sound those words out. Maybe toward the very end, we finally arrive at what appears to be the likely purpose of this exercise from the start, which was to make an excuse for people who simply choose to do things other than reading. Reading a book isn't a high enough priority to leave the phone inside so that you can absorb a good book in the back yard, so let's blame Whole Language Learning's. We can argue about whether children are being raised in a manner and environment that make them less able to learn what they're being taught, but I'm really not seeing an actual connection between their lack of reading skills and the teaching approach being put forth here. This all written, I obviously have a bias considering that I was actually witness to all of this and am willing to put what would admittedly be considered anecdotal evidence against studies that - at least as presented here - seem to be taking a conclusion and working backward, rather than showing a causal relationship. Or maybe I'm just full of sh!t. Take care.
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Cliff's Notes version (of my much longer response): We don't prioritize reading today - in favor of screen time and less parenting or emphasis on education in the home - so blame it on how it was being taught when many of you were reading TONS of books when you were younger.
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@darkhighwayman1757 I mean, we learned the letters, then learned their sounds, then sounded out words, etc. This sh!t wasn't hard. It may have BECOME difficult once they decided we need to buckle down and come up with the one true way to teach reading, and it had better differ from the one that has worked for centuries. And - on what I'm sure is a completely unrelated topic - the Department of Education was established in 1980.
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