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(with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course)

INB4 that user who insists on using thorn characters shows up to fight the good fight.

Here's the comment I made last time this idea popped up in a thread:

Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it's impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.

This has already happened with hangul, probably the paradebeispiel for successful intentionally designed phonetic systems: spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.

So, in addition to the dialect problem, you'd end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you'd be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades which b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.

Not to mention the fact that spelling things the way we currently do preserves etymological information (though imperfectly) about the words in question.

That isn't to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention that comes with its own significant downsides.

*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense

good parent ☺️

I knew the kids couldn’t read because I have multiple English teachers in my family, but until I listened to season 1 of that podcast (working through season 2 now) I had no idea it was from them not even being taught the basics of how to read! One guy they interviewed who learned to read fluently as an adult was basically like ‘when I learned I was like, that’s all you do? Why the fuck didn’t anyone teach me this?’

There's some truth to that, but it's also important that phonics lay down the foundation for reading, and let young readers identify the complexities behind the rules, and then internalize the meta-rules governing which rules apply where.

It's frustrating that tough doesn't rhyme with though or through or bough (or that none of those others rhyme with each other). Or that many homographs aren't homophones, to where you need to rely on context to know which pronunciation or meaning applies to words like "read," "lead," or "unionized."

Still, how else are you gonna do it? Lay down the basics, then layer on some exceptions that generally come in as loanwords (entree) or proper nouns (Xi Jinping), but always building on a foundation where new words can be encountered and pronounced. We can read and pronounce newly invented words easily, whether it's slang like "mogging" or fanciful corporate trademarks like "Reddit." We can deal with the exceptions as they come up.

blowing in the wind.

wind the clock.

Common core math is how high performers in math tend to already approach math concepts. The controversial examples focused on "number sense" do instill good habits and instincts for error correction (especially important in the age of calculators and computers), and don't detract from the importance of the actual mathematical operations. Either way, common core math curriculum as a whole is good, and continues to be a good set of goals for learning math. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that the math standards are too high and leave some kids behind, but that's less a problem with the standard and more a problem with our ability to get kids up to that perfectly reasonable standard, of what we should hope that all adults should know.

The main criticisms of common core that I sympathize with are that they deemphasize the humanities too much, but that's not exactly a problem with the math standards themselves.

Oh, this is worse than that: it’s not just about their vocabulary being stunted, it’s that they can’t even recognize words they know because they don’t know how to sound out a word. Grim stuff.

This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”

What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.

The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.

If you were taught how to sound out words you weren’t taught the way a lot of kids are taught to read today. Being able to read the whole sentence and guessing based on context already puts you significantly ahead of kids who have been taught with the three cueing method.

The technique isn't the issue, rather it's the fact that American kids are taught to use context before they're taught to differentiate the words from one another, apparently.