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.
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.
I agree with you, and I also think the average parent has no idea who the heck Calkins is. They just know something went horribly wrong and their kid never learned to read fluently. I'm less interested in litigating the past as it pertains to this or that figurehead and more interested in whether this changed course is going to stick and they're going to teach reading properly from here on out. 🙏🏼
I think all the time about how this has impacted families that aren't as bookish as ours, too. My older kid started out with cueing and when I think about how my questions to the kindergarten teacher ("But... there's not always going to *be* a picture of a frog on the page...?") were brushed off, a chill runs up my spine. Even with all our support, as a middle schooler she reads at a level around where I was in 4th grade. Meanwhile my younger kid started out on a pilot program for a new phonics-based curriculum (that's now been officially adopted, yay) and was reading within two months of starting kindergarten. Slowly, yeah, but like actually reading. I'm cautiously optimistic!
Regarding the education of readers using whole language versus phonics: when my profoundly deaf child was in elementary school they were using whole language for hearing kids and sign language for deaf kids in Segregated classrooms. I heard about Cued Speech, a phonetic based system of teaching profoundly deaf children how to read. By seventh grade, when most of the children in her school were reading so far below level they had implemented a school wide reading recovery program she was not only the best reader in her school but she was reading at college level. This was before computers in classrooms. I wonder if the ability to read was enhanced by texting or if YouTube videos, programmed reading modules and zoom made the written word obsolete.
Somehow, I wisely subscribed to you a while back, and then unwisely forgot to actually read any of your posts. I’m glad the recommendations shoved this one under my nose— terrific writing here, and it’s nice to see something on substack described as journalism that doesn’t turn out to be a crabby opinion piece padded out when the author called an acquaintance and got a quote from them.
FdB had a really good companion piece on the Millennial Snot article. I found myself purging all the really annoying phrases I’ve adopted using over the past couple years in text conversations. Every time I notice I’m using one of those snotty/smug phrases I picture the meme of the guy pointing to himself in the mirror saying “do better”.
I found Giant a superb play, and one that didn't shy away from making the audience gasp and feel uneasy on their seats by portratying Dahl as a three-dimensional human being, who was at once a talented writer but also a confessed anti-semitic. Like you, I couldn't help but sympathise a bit with how his former life experiences as a child may have shaped him and his vision of the world but at the same time his incapacity to see Jewish people as individuals was also evident. Everyone was fantastic in this but I absolutely adored Romola Garai and the dialectic battles with John Lightgow.
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.
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.
I agree with you, and I also think the average parent has no idea who the heck Calkins is. They just know something went horribly wrong and their kid never learned to read fluently. I'm less interested in litigating the past as it pertains to this or that figurehead and more interested in whether this changed course is going to stick and they're going to teach reading properly from here on out. 🙏🏼
I think all the time about how this has impacted families that aren't as bookish as ours, too. My older kid started out with cueing and when I think about how my questions to the kindergarten teacher ("But... there's not always going to *be* a picture of a frog on the page...?") were brushed off, a chill runs up my spine. Even with all our support, as a middle schooler she reads at a level around where I was in 4th grade. Meanwhile my younger kid started out on a pilot program for a new phonics-based curriculum (that's now been officially adopted, yay) and was reading within two months of starting kindergarten. Slowly, yeah, but like actually reading. I'm cautiously optimistic!
I really appreciate your pieces in The Atlantic on this topic and the tone you take: clear and firm, but nothing easily construed as unkind.
My 29 year old son sent me the EXACT same quote from Sam Harris’s soliloquy the day it “dropped.”
As the Millenials say, that bit was a banger. Or do they say baller? Someone get a Kamala adviser on the phone!
Regarding the education of readers using whole language versus phonics: when my profoundly deaf child was in elementary school they were using whole language for hearing kids and sign language for deaf kids in Segregated classrooms. I heard about Cued Speech, a phonetic based system of teaching profoundly deaf children how to read. By seventh grade, when most of the children in her school were reading so far below level they had implemented a school wide reading recovery program she was not only the best reader in her school but she was reading at college level. This was before computers in classrooms. I wonder if the ability to read was enhanced by texting or if YouTube videos, programmed reading modules and zoom made the written word obsolete.
Somehow, I wisely subscribed to you a while back, and then unwisely forgot to actually read any of your posts. I’m glad the recommendations shoved this one under my nose— terrific writing here, and it’s nice to see something on substack described as journalism that doesn’t turn out to be a crabby opinion piece padded out when the author called an acquaintance and got a quote from them.
Terrific writing, I hugely admire your work, always thoughtful and insightful. Thank you.
FdB had a really good companion piece on the Millennial Snot article. I found myself purging all the really annoying phrases I’ve adopted using over the past couple years in text conversations. Every time I notice I’m using one of those snotty/smug phrases I picture the meme of the guy pointing to himself in the mirror saying “do better”.
https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/everyone-online-sounds-like-an-absolute?r=89jz6&utm_medium=ios
I found Giant a superb play, and one that didn't shy away from making the audience gasp and feel uneasy on their seats by portratying Dahl as a three-dimensional human being, who was at once a talented writer but also a confessed anti-semitic. Like you, I couldn't help but sympathise a bit with how his former life experiences as a child may have shaped him and his vision of the world but at the same time his incapacity to see Jewish people as individuals was also evident. Everyone was fantastic in this but I absolutely adored Romola Garai and the dialectic battles with John Lightgow.