Half of Americans can’t read

My dgs could read quite well aged 3, i didn't believe dd when she told me, thought he was memorising the stories.
Aged 4 he took his bedtime story book off me and said he would read it to me, he did in Welsh! It wasn't written in Welsh.
He's a teen now and not keen on reading which is sad.

I think reading just clicks for some people, it did for me, I can't remember ever not being able to read.
I used to read every advertising board as we went past on the bus.
Dh did latin, I wish I had it's the stem of so many words.

i'm an 80s kid and was a competent at reading very early. i essentially recognise the shape of words and can read incredibly quickly. i think this is how most people with a natural talent for it learn. my daughter is the same. she could read chapter books fluently but had to attend intervention groups to pass the year 1 phonics test. barmy!

i think phonics is probably good for people who don't have this natural talent for shape/pattern recognition. or something.

@AirborneElephant I’m in my mid 60s and went to a school in north London. Absolutely no Latin taught there in my time.

My nephew is at a US university. A good one at that.

in his second year they had a compulsory class in the metric system. In university.

yes. Metres, centimetres, millilitres, milligrams, centigrade etc.

it is just something that is not everyday knowledge over there. They were gobsmacked when dn “just knew” the answers. They learned inches, feet, yards, ounces, gallons, farhrenheit at school.

so nothing about their education system surprises me.

Ah I missed the junior school bit. The only people I knew who had started Latin in primary were private school children (mid 1980s).

"Most people in their 50s and above that I know learned Latin. Its major advantage is that if you learned it the Monty python romans scene is hysterically funny."

Well, that's absolutely great for you. But have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps you might have grown up in some sort of upper middle class privileged bubble?

Phonics didn’t work for mine at all. They are both high achieving, especially DS2. He is particularly interesting because he has an excellent vocabulary, but can’t reliably read a totally unfamiliar word. He literally says a few sounds that may or may not be in the word then gets it from context.

Mine would never have learned by phonics. They were late readers, too. They did enjoy audio books and ‘read’ voraciously through those.

Phonics is more useful for spelling, imo.

Personally I favour a whole book method, with individual word work that includes sight and phonics. Once you get them through the starting gate, they then use those skills to take themselves the rest of the way.

I’m not quite sure why you have such a bee in your bonnet about this. Latin was common in the 70s in state primaries. Many other posters have agreed they also learned it. It was a transitional time, and by 88 it was considered an elitist subject and therefore left out of the national curriculum. I also lived in a middle class area in a grammar school county which probably encouraged its use to persist for longer than other areas.

Education in the US is in a pitiful state, rather like they want them.ignorant isn't it. We need to fight to stop the dumbing down currently happening here and I see the erosion from when I first worked in education support till now.

I speed read and do it by the shape of the word. That’s how I describe it.

My school thought I couldn’t read for a bit when I was young, even though I was reading at 3.

I speed read so I struggle with reading out loud, always have done. My mouth can’t keep up with the speed my brain is taking in the words. So they thought I couldn’t read for a bit until one teacher understood where I was coming from, and tested me with comprehension of something I read in front of her and realised my reading was fine.

I even find reading books to my children incredibly frustrating due to it. I can’t bear reading our loud.

I think my 6 year old is the same. She hates reading out loud, you’ll start to point at the words and she will have looked at the page and say, “I’ve read it in my head, the little boy jumped in a puddle with his mum.”

This is interesting to me. I’m about the only member of my family that isn’t a primary teacher. When my oldest started school he did not get phonics at all. Could not remember last weeks sounds at all and therefore couldn’t blend. My family cracked on helping him using every technique but eventually he just seemed to be able to read everything overnight. He preferred just to know the words. Weirdly he’s an excellent speller, even if it’s a new word to him.

did put him permanently off homework though.

I’m autistic and phonics is the only class I ever failed in primary school. It was taught as a separate lesson at the time. I was in the most advanced reading group every year and have absolutely no problems with reading, writing, or comprehension. Phonics does not work for all brains. It relies on rules for which there are always exceptions.

My own ASD child had a neuro-educational evaluation when she was 9 that placed all of her reading and writing measures at the university level. Her school also used phonics and it didn’t click with her at all.

The push for it above whole word reading is biased. People can make the connections intuitively. Trying to show them explicitly when the rules are not actually fixed is problematic.

Yes me too. It's hard to explain to other people but I can read a few lines at once!

Just going totally off-topic here (and please forgive me if this is too personal).

Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language as an adult?

I've tried, (at various times and with varying success) to learn Russian and Japanese as an adult. In both cases I wouldn't have got anywhere with trying to learn whole words. It was only reading them out syllable by syllable that I learned to read those languages.

I did a bit of searching round that remarkable claim. Congruent with my memory of the period (I’m 65), what I found was that Latin was pretty much non-existent in state primaries and secondary moderns. So it would only have been a subset of grammar schools offering it, and then often only to the highest sets. My state grammar didn’t offer it at all.

Latin was taught in my state secondary school in the 90s (but stopped shortly after I left) and is currently taught in one of my local state primary schools from Year 3 onwards. Both in UK.

Yes, I remember telling my dh that and he couldn’t get his head around it!

My daughter is dyslexic. She can't 'read' - just learns the shape of a whole word but cannot read word she has never seen before. She cannot do phonics despite being taught them.

My husband (retired educational psychologist) would absolutely agree with you. Our two DC learned to read back in the mid-70s using the whole word method (DD wasn't quite 3 at the time) and phonics just didn't feature much, if at all, back then. Both were reading way ahead of their age by the end of infant class (Key Stage 1) All this was long before the National Curriculum was introduced and even longer before the Rose Review in 2006 insisted on phonics as the primary method of teaching reading. DH had accepted redundancy well before then as he so fundamentally disagreed with the increasing reliance on phonics.

Even though most common English words are of Germanic origin, and some Norse, rather than from Latin?

I took Latin for a year at my state secondary school in the early ‘80s

My dds grammar is the only one out of 8 in our county/neighbouring county/nearest city that still offers Latin.

The grammar I went to no longer offers it, they haven’t for many years now.

It’s a shame really.

I mean, I hated it, but my dd absolutely loves it. She’s just gone into year 8, and has already decided she wants to do it for GCSE.

In my Catholic state primary school we learned church Latin and then proper Latin throughout convent grammar school (1960s and 70s, England).