Daily Tech News 3 August 2025

• Why Johnny still can't read. (APM Reports)
  
  Well, the original book examining that question was published in 1955, so one possible reason is that Johnny is now 75 and refuses to wear his glasses.
  
  But another reason is exactly what that book explained: Johnny can't read because teachers aren't teaching phonics - aren't teaching the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
  
  Back in 1955 the trend was to jump too quickly from phonics to sight reading - recognising an entire word and its pronunciation from memory. If you were already a strong reader you were likely fine with this; if you were at all behind you would be left struggling.
  
  Fast-forward a few decades and we find new generations of children who still can't read because they have been trapped by new - or once new - trendy pedagogies. Molly Woodworth was a poor reader as a child and came up with tricks to help make it through lessons, though the tricks never worked terribly well.
  
  When she looked at the reading lessons for her daughter Claire, she was horrified to discover that the tricks she created for herself - the same ones that didn't work for her - were being taught as standard practice.

  A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

  The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

  Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

  Why are teachers deliberately sabotaging reading skills?
  
  Enter Ken Goodman.

  The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

  The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

  In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words.

  Goodman still believed that when this article was written in 2019 - the author requested and was granted an interview.
  
  The problem is, he was proven wrong fifty years ago:

  So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

  They couldn't have been more wrong.

  "To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."

  Or to put it another way:

  Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

  "Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

  Why did Goodman still believe in his failed ideas after all this time? (At the time the article was written, he was 91 and had just published a new edition of his book.)
  
  Put as politely as possible, he was a dingbat:

  "Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

  No, he really meant that:

  I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p//o//n//y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

  He dismissed my question.

  "The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

  He tripled down minutes later:

  In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

  "My science is different," Goodman said.

  And why is fashionable nonsense so entrenched in education?
  
  Lots of reasons, one primary reason, it seems to me, is that teachers don't have to live with their mistakes. You have a child for a year, cause lasting harm, and then get handed a fresh batch of impressionable young minds the next year.

• Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An article about companies that were hacked, and subsequently went bankrupt. One paid the demanded ransom; the other did not. The outcome was the same.
  
  Somewhat galling is that German police captured the criminals behind the first company's demise along with their crypto wallets, but refuse to return the ransom payment.
  
  
  
• Reddit is people, so its search function searches content created by people rather than AI slop, says Reddit. (The Register)
  
  Two problems here:
  
  First, Reddit is not magically immune to AI slop.
  
  Second, about 80% of Reddit users are insane, climbing quickly to 100% on any of the major "subreddits".
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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