The Bluestocking 344: Millennial snot and Teaching Lucy
A lot of this boils down to an inability to age with grace
Happy Friday!
Slightly self-indulgent one this week, featuring a longread (by me) and a piece of theatre criticism (by me). More on me as we get it.
This week’s Page 94 podcast has the best explanation of why Justin Welby resigned—the details of what John Smyth did (and was tacitly allowed to do) are some of the most shocking I’ve heard in my time in journalism. He was beating boys so hard in the shed at the bottom of his garden that they had to wear adult nappies to prevent them bleeding everywhere afterwards. And this guy was Mary Whitehouse’s lawyer and a lifelong campaigner against gay marriage!
Meanwhile, on Strong Message Here, Armando Iannucci and I go into “listening mode” to understand what DOGE means, and why everyone wants to be a tsar.
Helen
Millennial Snot (Substack)
You need to be dropping devastating truthbombs, but with quirky, girlish ‘tude. You have to be a cocky teenage Latina. You have to talk like a badass kid in a Joss Whedon script who outsmarts the adults with clever wordplay. You need to be processing your childhood trauma through a filter of tired Hollywood tropes, like the rich-kid 80s movie bully. Remember, Biden is “Joebi Wan Kenobi.” Tim Walz is the Ted Lasso veep. He’s your dad, and Kamala’s your fun aunt and they’re gonna do some hardcore Tarantino stuff to the bad guys. The Dems are the Avengers, and the Republicans are the Sith. The world is your stage. You must ENTHUSE. You need to be GUSHING. You need to be a bald freak obsessing over celebs like you’re paging through Tiger Beat. You need to be saying “y’all” and “sis” and “bb” and “hunty” and “mother” like you’re in the front row in a drag ball. You, the Vice President of the United States, need to be mothering.
A lot of this boils down to an inability to age with grace. Millennials are now moving into their 40s and growing old and frumpy is especially difficult for them because the cultural distance between millennials and their parents was wider than any generational divide since the 60s. Millennials grew up with the internet and access to digital communities their clueless parents didn’t know about. They took pride in being “in the know” in a way that their parents were not, and as millennials grew up, this need for knowingness extended beyond fashion and into politics.
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I love a piece on new language trends, and I confess I hadn’t realised quite how many of beloved examples of millennial internet slang sound obnoxiously preachy and sassy. As ‘Dudley Newright’ argues: ‘Trust that Gen Alpha is looking at their dork-ass parents who tweet like this and thinking “I will never say y’all.” I will never write “um…” for emphasis. I will never speak like a GPT trained on Chandler Bing dialogue. I will never, ever call someone a “douche canoe.”’
Teaching Lucy (The Atlantic, gift link)
Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?
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Here’s something I’ve been working on for a fair few months—a long read about Lucy Calkins, the pioneer of an approach to learning to read and write called “balanced literacy” embodied in her curriculum, Units of Study. Recently, Calkins has been accused of harming America’s children by refusing to acknowledge the importance of phonics (sounding out words) in early years. But is that fair?
For me, the reason to do this story was that I’m fascinated by the way that problems become personalised—how a big argument got reduced down to “teaching Lucy” (or not).
That’s because the advocates of the “science of reading”, a research-based movement into literacy, want schools to adopt an evolving practice based on the latest studies. But in America, most districts buy a curriculum package off-the-shelf (some create bespoke ones, but these are usually at least based on commercial elements). There is big money in this—as there is in instructing teachers on how to use these curricula. And the progressive, more child-focused approaches also tend to be imbued with more progressive stances (such as showing gay families in textbooks, or teaching kids about other cultures) so there’s a political fight going on here too.
Did Lucy Calkins make mistakes? Undoubtedly. But the question is whether she has ended up as a scapegoat for other things beyond her control.
Bluestocking recommends: Giant. The Royal Court has a new artistic director, David Byrne, and looks to have got its zip back after a dry few years: next year, the theatre hosts a reunion of the original cast and crew of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, as well as Robert Icke’s play about Raoul Moat, Manhunt. Right now, though, Giant is playing to sold-out houses—however, I hear that the team is trying to make a West End transfer work, so hopefully more people will have a chance to see this play.
Giant takes place on one afternoon, at Roald Dahl’s house, after he has published a book review attacking Israel’s conduct in the Lebanon war—a piece that also condemns all diaspora Jews as cowardly for not disowning Israel. Also present are his soon-to-be-wife Felicity; his English publisher Tom Maschler, who escaped Nazi Germany as a child and would really like to just get on with his life without being asked about Israel; and an emissary from Dahl’s American publisher, Jessie Stone. The latter is much more fired up about anti-semitism, allowing first-time playwright Mark Rosenblatt to mine the interesting seam of intra-Jewish divisions. (A few years ago, I did a really interesting interview with Andy Nyman around his appearance in Fiddler on the Roof in which he explored how different the European and American Jewish experiences were).
The play’s big flourish is having a full-blooded version of the leftwing argument against Israel—that it treats Palestinian lives as lesser; that it bombs indiscriminately; that it justifies its current actions with reference to past victimhood—voiced by . . . well, a self-confessed anti-semite. The play leaves you in no doubt by the end that Dahl hated Jews as Jews, seeing them as cowardly and insular. (Stone even suggests to him that The Witches—with its cabal of child-killing, money-printing monsters—reads like an anti-semitic allegory.) But I found myself feeling sorry for Dahl nonetheless—he was packed off to a sadistic boarding school as a small child, he lived through a war, then lost one child to measles aged eight and nursed another one back to health after a terrible brain injury. By the time we meet Dahl in the play, he’s a cranky old man with a sore back—but the mind, as Stone says, of a “broken boy.” John Lithgow’s performance is beautiful, switching between sniping and baiting to an instant lachrymosity when children are mentioned.
At the end, his Dahl does something completely self-destructive: he phones up a New Statesman writer and gives him what we journalists would call the money quote: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
In the play, Dahl does this with an air of perfect tranquility, of sweetness and light—even the journalist can’t believe what he’s hearing, and asks if he should call back. It reminded me of telling a toddler not to hit their sister, and them looking straight at you, maintaining eye contact, and doing it again. That was a perfect acting and directing choice, because it completely explains an otherwise inexplicable act—and it’s a reminder that Dahl’s books sell so well. His characters are rebels. They hate authority. They often have no real sense of danger. Danny and his dad steal the pheasants; George poisons his grandmother; the BFG is bullied by all the other giants; James buggers off with the peach to escape the evil Aunty Spiker and Aunty Sponge.
Quick Links
“What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Honesty. I’m sometimes asked by people who’ve just seen one of my films, ‘Do you mind if I’m honest?’ I do.” Hugh Grant does Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire.
“Many people (hello, me!) warned that Corbyn’s foreign policy views were wildly outside the mainstream traditions of mainstream British politics. But voters either didn’t accept or didn’t care that, amongst other things, Corbyn had supported the IRA or that he would cheerfully hand the Falkland Islands over to Argentina. Their reasoning was, I think, something like this: “If this was true, Jeremy Corbyn could not possible have become leader of the Labour party. But he is leader of the Labour party. Therefore this cannot be true.” (The penny only really began to drop in the aftermath of the Salisbury Poisonings and that in turn helped explain why Corbyn did so poorly in 2019.)” Alex Massie has a good analogy for why the “Trump is a would-be fascist” attacks didn’t land with American voters. If he was so bad, how did the entire Republican party let him be the candidate? Think about it (Substack).
Paul Bloom on how he does (and doesn’t) use AI when writing. Yes to brainstorming. No to finding quotes (Small Potatoes, Substack).
In the wake of the U.S. election, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic about how this is a good opportunity for the Democrats to have a moderate, open conversation about their approach to gender identity. Good-faith compromise is possible! On the same topic, Sam Harris has an extremely measured ASMR voice, so I appreciated his quiet fury in this episode of Making Sense on the Dems losing the 2024 election because they didn’t realise how far they had got away from mainstream opinion: “Congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the f***ing galaxy and hung it around your necks.”
See you next time—if you want to leave a comment, please do, or you can hit “reply” to send me a message.
Are you sure that Lucy Calkins is getting too much blame? She made millions promoting a system that doesn't work, didn't have good data behind it, and doesn't make sense. It's not just that she didn't pay attention to phonics; she actively promoted techniques that don't work. Why would we teach children to guess what a word means based on a picture, for example? Why were we teaching kids to emulate people who fake knowing how to read? And yes, there were plenty of schools and teachers that actively suppressed phonics. My child's school sent parents a letter warning them against teaching children to sound out words, and it wouldn't take much to gather similar stories. She's also slippery when it comes to her defense. No one is claiming that it's not important to build a love of reading. But that love comes from actually reading, which you're not doing if you don't have the tools to understand what the words are.
If anything, there's a case to be made that the damage done to reading instruction has had an underrated role in societal dysfunction. Even a career violent criminal would do less damage to fewer lives than the people who broke reading instruction. If she's still teaching people to guess what the words mean based on the picture, the first letter, and other nonsense, then she deserves all the criticism she's received and more. She may not be the only one with penance to serve, but she belongs in that conversation.
Helen you piece in the Atlantic about the Dems and identity politics was excellent. It is the reason I subscribed. Wonderful journalism, which is to be expected from you. Congratulations.