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Electronics companies should stop killing themselves

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coppice:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 10, 2023, 12:17:34 am ---My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)

--- End quote ---
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.

coppice:

--- Quote from: coppice on July 10, 2023, 01:50:16 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 10, 2023, 12:17:34 am ---My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)

--- End quote ---
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.

--- End quote ---
I've been looking at ITA. It seems like it didn't get that much traction, unlike the crazy whole word or look and say approach. However, it looks like it was in the same vain as whole word. That is, a system designed to minimise the effectiveness of schools in teaching basic reading skills. Its seems there is no limit to how far some people will go to give their own kids an edge over others.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: coppice on July 12, 2023, 08:07:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on July 10, 2023, 01:50:16 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 10, 2023, 12:17:34 am ---My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)

--- End quote ---
You must be younger than me, as ITA is from the 60s, and I could read before that. We were not inflicted with insanity like the "whole word teaching" of English reading either. So, even the weakest kids in the school learned to read fairly quickly. Your school must have turned comprehensive quite late. Lucky you. Where I grew up (Enfield, North London) I was in the last year of grammar school admission. It had no impact on us, and little in the following few years, but things gradually went downhill.

1960s grammar schools didn't work well across the entire UK. That's something I didn't really appreciate until later in life, talking to people from various places who had mixed views of these schools. The solution was not to tear the system down, though. It was to learn from the best, and spread that more evenly across the UK.

--- End quote ---
I've been looking at ITA. It seems like it didn't get that much traction, unlike the crazy whole word or look and say approach. However, it looks like it was in the same vain as whole word. That is, a system designed to minimise the effectiveness of schools in teaching basic reading skills. Its seems there is no limit to how far some people will go to give their own kids an edge over others.

--- End quote ---

Wow. That would be one hell of a conspiracy!

It is much easier to believe ITA was a well-intentioned cockup concocted by a few academics in a mutual-admiration support group - and which rapidly sank when its idiocy was exposed to daylight :)

I have no idea what the "whole word" and "look and say" approaches might have been. As I have said, learning to read is one of my earliest memories, so even if they existed I would have ignored them and continued reading the newspapers (family lore says I was doing that when I entered school; I can't remember either way).

Watching my daughter's primary school arithmetic lessons were interesting, and markedly better than when I was at school. She wasn't taught there was One Way to Multiply and Divide. She was taught that there are many ways, all based on how numbers work. Example: to multiply X by 99, it is easier to multiply X by 100 and then subtract X.

Mind you, the algorithms I was taught turned out to be useful when I had to implement floating point arithmetic on a 6800 during a vacation job in 1976 :) The only thing I had to ask was how to implement sin() and cos(). They spent 30mins introducing me to CORDIC algorithms, which made perfect and beautiful sense :) IIRC a sin/cos pair took about 30ms to compute on a 6800.

coppice:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 12, 2023, 09:06:40 pm ---Wow. That would be one hell of a conspiracy!

--- End quote ---
Why does everything have to be described as a conspiracy. There are simply things where some idiot proposes a dumb idea, it fits the needs of various groups for various reasons, and they all run with it.

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 12, 2023, 09:06:40 pm ---It is much easier to believe ITA was a well-intentioned cockup concocted by a few academics in a mutual-admiration support group - and which rapidly sank when its idiocy was exposed to daylight :)

--- End quote ---
There's usually a good reason why stupid ideas aren't nipped in the bud. They suit enough people to keep them moving forwards.

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 12, 2023, 09:06:40 pm ---I have no idea what the "whole word" and "look and say" approaches might have been. As I have said, learning to read is one of my earliest memories, so even if they existed I would have ignored them and continued reading the newspapers (family lore says I was doing that when I entered school; I can't remember either way).

--- End quote ---
Look and say is the system the phonics people are still fighting against, which has wrecked reading standards in every English speaking country except South Africa, who did buy into it (at least that is my understanding). It basically turns learning to read English into learning to read "Chinese" by teaching kids to recognise whole words, instead of scanning them phonetically. This is based on only 80% of English spelling being close to phonetic. So, they even things out by making 100% of words hard to learn, instead of only 20%. If you can read Chinese you'll know that even Chinese isn't taught like that. Even in Chinese you break down the characters into parts (radicals) and recognise whole characters by parts that give phonetic clues, and parts that give clues to meaning.

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 12, 2023, 09:06:40 pm ---Watching my daughter's primary school arithmetic lessons were interesting, and markedly better than when I was at school. She wasn't taught there was One Way to Multiply and Divide. She was taught that there are many ways, all based on how numbers work. Example: to multiply X by 99, it is easier to multiply X by 100 and then subtract X.

Mind you, the algorithms I was taught turned out to be useful when I had to implement floating point arithmetic on a 6800 during a vacation job in 1976 :) The only thing I had to ask was how to implement sin() and cos(). They spent 30mins introducing me to CORDIC algorithms, which made perfect and beautiful sense :) IIRC a sin/cos pair took about 30ms to compute on a 6800.

--- End quote ---
I wasn't taught there is only one way to multiply and divide. They taught us a standardised method and notation, then soon moved on to things like you described. I think they started with pointing out the pattern in the 9 times table, and how you can use things like that to reduce effort.

TimFox:
The ITA scheme assumed that learning to read and learning to spell English were different subjects.
My mother taught ITA to second-graders in the 1960s, and understood that it was a variation on phonics (sounding out words from the spelling), without the irregular rules found in real English.
The parents hated it, since they couldn't read the new notation.
The reading instruction went to phonics with regular English spelling after the introduction through ITA.
She found that students that had transferred into Minnesota schools from other states that used "look-say" instruction were far behind the local students in early grades.

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