I have no idea what is going on with this. I've heard so very many people arguing that various pedagogical things are disasters over so many years, that I've decided to ignore it.
Just on the face of it, learning to read with no phonics seems stupid though.
Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. It worked for the percentage of kids who were always going to learn to read, and it worked in affluent areas where parents would either teach their children themselves or hire tutors, but everyone else was done a terrible disservice. In places where home/language factors gave administrators an excuse for failure kids were out of luck. No phonics also means none of these kids can spell, although administrators will tell you to your face that this is not an issue because spellcheck.
All you need to do to see the effects of balanced literacy is to look at reading proficiency scores in NYC, which was a huge balanced literacy district.
I will say that many schools supplemented with outside phonics programs, but the time spent on it was minimal and the actual reading instruction explicitly taught children to guess based on pictures/context rather than try to sound out words, so it was not emphasized in any way.
Also, I did not read this article, but my 10 year old is dyslexic so this has been my life ever since my super curious and verbal kid failed kindergarten. Changes are already being implemented (the difference in instruction my 10, 7 and 5 year old have received is stark), but kids like my daughter who didn't have families with tens of thousands of dollars to spend on outside tutoring and a parent able to make it a job are shit out of luck.
It's bad. The problem might not be with the approach in its ideal form but its implementation, but a lot of kids just don't learn from people reading to them and making books approachable by putting them in baskets solves a problem that wasn't there. It's easy to measure books in baskets and blame the rest on not doing at-home reading.
My kids' preschool teacher estimates that 10% of kids will learn to read on their own if someone reads to them or puts a book vaguely near them (the Calabat was like this) and the other 90% need some kind of help (Pebbles was like this, because it took a long time for the idea that letters-make-words to click, but, you know highly educated mom meant we bought the BoB books..) The kids' school now is one where plenty of the first graders just don't have the tools to figure out what the words say.
The kindergarten missed that my friend's kid is dyslexic, and similarly: highly educated mom means this is a fixable problem but woe to anyone else.
I recently listened to what I assume is the same podcast your mom did ("Sold a Story"--it's great), and do I think it's as bad as it sounds. The balanced-literacy people actively think that learning to sound out words is bad and not how good readers read. The biggest nod to "words make sounds" is that students are taught to check the first letter of a word to see if the word they're currently guessing from context would start with that letter.
Another thing I took away is that it's also probably not good to teach some form of balanced literacy alongside phonics. Phonics education works less well when the message to kids is "sound out this unfamiliar word, but you can also guess from context/the illustrations/whatever."
Another parent of a dyslexic (more dysgraphic than dyslexic) child, and she had enough phonics-focused work in early elementary school that it showed up and hasn't notably held back her love of reading. (The dyslexia was masked by the fact that she was reading above grade level, apparently because she often *could* guess the word, just not remotely spell it.)
One of the biggest tells that balanced literacy is nonsense is that kids only "read" books that they've already had read to them. My older kid (3 1/2) is very verbal and loves books, and seemingly memorizes them after hearing them once or twice. He absolutely cannot read words--he only knows half the letters in the alphabet and is only beginning to understand what a written word even is--but he's so convincing with these recitations that sometimes we're like "Uh ... did he learn to read since yesterday?". That experience gave me a lot of appreciation for how older kids, who DO understand that words make up text, might be functionally illiterate but still able to perform "reading" in a way that fools educators into thinking they're teaching a viable method.
I will say that the association between phonics and the right is long-standing; before balanced literacy, a term I confes that I hadn't heard before, there was a vicious and politicized fight between whole-language and phonics advocates.
Obviously you need phonics since the alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians.
11: Yes, it was incredibly frustrating to listen (in the podcast series) to the history of how this got politicized. I doubt this is the whole story, but the part of it I learned about was that Laura Bush got phonics-pilled at an education conference and so phonics got imported into NCLB (with tons of funding for just phonics), and was then the subject of a very understandable partisan backlash.
And yeah it sounds like "balanced literacy" is a new term for whole language, although I'm sure the proponents insist that the subtle distinctions make it a completely different thing.
Sorry, I meant 12 as a reply to 10.
Should call basic number recognition Arabics.
It sounds horrible to assume that deficiencies at school are due to deficiencies at home. But the problem is doing it in a parent-blaming way.
I mean, this is unquestionably true in some areas. Kids who don't get a good breakfast, who don't feel secure at home, who don't have quiet space where they can go at home, who have chaotic family lives - these kids are definitely going to struggle at school. Even if they don't fall behind, they'll have to work harder to keep up. Absolutely doesn't mean the parents are always at fault, or always negligent or abusive, much of the time they'll be trying the best they can, but the correlation's there.
But - and I too have difficulty believing it was quite this stark, but it seems it was - "bad home environment means kids struggle at school" does not imply that all you need to succeed at school is a good home environment, far less a simulacrum of one created at school.
ISTR that the last time this came up, one reason why teachers were against phonics was simply that teaching small kids to read using phonics is really dull _for the teachers_. No doubt it is but that isn't an excuse for not doing it.
For six months a year these kids learn to read by sounding out letters, and for the other six months they just sit in a room full of books in the hope that they work out how to read by themselves.
Hooked on Persephonics.
Teachers can wear googly eyes when explaining the concept of necessary but not sufficient.
Teacher hades this one weird trick for learning to read
I think teaching kids that they can't use pronouns would be funny. They'd all sound like Bob Dole.
I'm first cousin to the person in the headline but might not have anything interesting to add because of that. But I have been aware of this discussion, let's say.
I credit an early focus on phonics with teaching me to hate school.
This is not meant as anti-phonics as a way of teaching reading, but as a partial explanation of why teachers are opposed: it's not just miserably dull for teachers, but for prematurely literate children as well. I have vivid early memories of first grade worksheets that were painfully, hatefully tedious given that I was reading fluently at the time.
It has to be weird for teachers using a method that your most successful students hate and don't get any benefit from. Obviously, the solution is to be able to peel off the kids who are reading already and stick them in a corner with a good book, but I bet that reaction from kids is part of the explanation for teacher resistance.
I did spend huge chunks of time in elementary school off in the corner reading. This wasn't unpleasant, but some of the other kids thought it made me weird.
Also, teachers are probably disproportionately from the part of the population that read easily -- they're less likely to have early memories of "learning" to read as opposed to it just sort of organically happening. I bet part what's going on psychologically for teachers is that phonics feels like punitive contempt: smart children learn to read pleasurably and naturally by being exposed to books; phonics is the grim way we teach dummies who need remedial help; why not teach all children the way that works for successful readers instead?
This seems to be dead wrong and counterproductive, but I get it as a natural way to react.
My granddaughter was in kindergarten last year, and they learned to spell words like they sound. She was always asking me how you really spell the words. Now a first grader, she helps her old grandparents with wordle (even if she doesn't really have the vocabulary). She reads better than most of the other first graders -- having attended a different kindergarten -- but hasn't yet discovered the joy of reading. She's rather watch youtube videos.
We have lots of books in baskets.
When you don't have the vocabulary, Wordle is like Sudoku.
Something I remember fondly from my kids learning to read is new-reader phonetic spelling. When a literate person tries to spell things phonetically, it's always heavily influenced by their knowledge about how English words are spelled. Little kids generate these absolutely baffling looking spellings that work remarkably well phonetically if you just go with it.
Hawaii definitely got phonics - I remember her talking about blended sounds and so on. "This week we're practicing ch, sh, and th!" or whatever.
The other three were taught to read in Spanish, which is significantly easier than learning to read in English, because nearly every word is well-behaved under a much smaller set of rules. Our kids transitioned easily to English, the way the Dual Language proponents promised they would*. But from what I understand, this was a significantly more difficult challenge for many of the kids, and the educators were probably a bit facile with the challenge, and I think many families were very frustrated.
* The cutest thing in the world was when they'd sound out English words using Spanish rules. I can't remember the best ones off the top of my head, but especially with g's and j's and h's, and including extra syllables for silent e's and so on.
Yeah, reforming English spelling is probably the right answer here, hard to see it happening though.
I didn't learn to read using synthetic phonics. That wasn't the pedagogical orthodoxy in Scotland in the mid to late 1970s. My son, on the other hand, has been taught to read in a system where synthetic phonics is massively emphasised for the first 3 years or so at school and is required by law.
I think the eye-opening thing for me wasn't the phonics teaching, but the sophistication of a lot of it. Kids were expected to know terms like "digraph"/"trigraph" and "diphthong" and they were taught a lot of rules such as "super E!" (the way in which the silent e on the end of the word modifies the vowel in the preceding syllable, etc). Kids who didn't pass the phonics tests, or who looked like they wouldn't pass the statutory phonics tests had extra intervention lessons before school.
I don't know how much of a difference it really made versus the way I was taught in the 70s. I think my son is/was probably able to correctly pronounce unfamiliar words much more easily than would have been the norm for children not taught in that way. On the other hand, he is not great at spelling.
31 hoping awl and his loved ones are ok and wishing he'd pop in here soon.
My son (now 9) was taught phonics, but they did it with enough games that he loved it even after he could read fluently-- lots of standing up and chopping words and imagining adventures for super E. But they let him read off by himself for the boring bits. And the classrooms (once schools reopened) also had baskets of books and fun read-alouds and such.
re: 34
Yeah, that was more or less xelA's experience (he's 10). He is a very strong reader now, but wasn't a super-precocious reader. Probably slightly ahead of the average, but nothing impressive until he was about 6 or 7 when he got the reading bug and started reading independently a lot.
I have vivid early memories of first grade worksheets that were painfully, hatefully tedious given that I was reading fluently at the time.
This is exactly my first grade memory. It was a beautiful day outside and I had to work my way through this dumbass workbook of stupid phonics instead of being able to play.
This is a completely pointless navel-gazing comment, but: I'm still fascinated by how much so many people actively hated school for being boring (this is how Elke feels and how a lot of adults I know felt). I genuinely don't remember ever being crushingly bored in school. I was daydreaming all the time, but it was a novel environment, there was lots of social energy, I could just disappear and avoid attention, and the library was pretty accessible. I may just have gone to a decent school that wasn't too oppressive, but the experience just didn't clash with my daily expectations of a good time.
Elke's spelling is mediocre to acceptable, but she really can't use punctuation to save her life. It troubles me more than I let on.
Except for when doctors medically induce a comma, punctuation is rarely that important.
I coped with the boredom by talking nonstop. Mostly on topic, not side-conversations with peers. Just constantly shouting out the answer or sharing what crossed my mind, or I don't even know what. Watching my kids do this makes me feel kind of sorry for my own teachers. They must have spent an insane amount of energy just trying to get me to shut up for a second.
I had an unchecked belief for waaaay too long that the teacher's goal was literally to get the class to get to the answer as fast as possible, by hook or by crook, so if I got there and announced it, I was being great. There were definitely many people who tried to explain to me that this is not the best possible outcome, and I just didn't internalize their random quacking one bit.
I am definitely at the parenting stage where you feel recrimination for your childhood self.
re: 37
That was more or less exactly my experience, too. I was occasionally bored, and I often finished the work a long way ahead of others so had to sit about for a long time, but I enjoyed being around other kids, and there were books to read, and I was often given more challenging (and hence more interesting) work to keep me occupied. So I don't really remember being miserable, or suffering a great deal from boredom.
I really liked grade school. I had a good time, except recess was sometime painful in the sense of rock fights or punch-in-balls tag.
Wow, that's quite a game. We did not play that.
Have assessments shown a drop in reading ability or is this one of those things where US schools never do well? So whatever the current policy is it's failing and then in a few decades the next policy will be seen as failing too.
When the teachers stopped it, no one really regretted it.
42: I don't know what games they played over on the girls' side of the playground, but yeah, I feel confident they didn't play that one.
I coped with the boredom by talking nonstop.
Ha. My first grade teacher sent me to ESL, because I was so silent that she assumed I didn't speak English. (My English was fine -- I was just debilitatingly shy).
I was pretty bored in school, but I don't think it was because I was so smart or anything -- I'm just really bad at passively receiving information, and at sitting still for long periods of time. I did learn to read before I started school though, so from first through fifth grade, my teachers had me and one other kid in a special mini reading group, where we would work on a higher-grade textbook. By sixth grade we had run out of textbooks, so we worked on SRA materials, and read independently from my teacher's classroom library. She had weird taste in books though. A lot of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" or "Strange But True! 20 Stories That Will Amaze You" -type anthologies. Anyway, that's how I learned about ostrich feet people, and how Abraham Lincoln predicted his own death. Also, IIRC, Colonel Sanders tried to kidnap a kid once.
The pro-phonics movement was spearheaded -- as far as I ever knew -- but rightwing assholes. The fact that their view seemed superficially sensible did little to change my opinion. (Something something heuristic something Bayesian something.)
But yeah, I have looked at the recent news, and Balanced Literacy is fucking nuts -- something you recover from, rather than something that helps you learn. When I was a kid, we had to contend with New Math, but this seems even worse.
Although I'm now having a recovered memory of kids in high school who would take their hand and kind of brrrrrp along someone else's balls (outside their pants), and then in a single motion, hold their hand under the recipient's nose, in a kind of "here's what your nads smell like" effect.
Kids are so weird.
I was a weird kid, and I think my elementary school teachers reacted to me badly -- like, they were trying to be nice to me and I was kind of a teacher's pet. But I was kind of explicitly recognized as so academically advanced that they weren't going to be teaching me anything useful, so while I was kind of expected to turn in the same work everyone else was doing, it was a waste of time for me to be engaged in what was going on in the classroom when the focus could be on the kids who might learn something from it. (I was not, to be clear, all that unusually academically advanced, but the teachers treated me as if I was because I read early and sounded precocious.)
So I was socially isolated and disengaged and incredibly bored, sitting by myself in the back of the room reading endless paperbacks. Elementary school felt like I was being punished for something for six years. High school was much better. (I was so grimly braced to keep that sort of thing from happening to my kids, and then it didn't seem to be an issue at all. Honestly, I'm completely mystified by what went wrong for me.)
"Except for when doctors medically induce a comma, punctuation is rarely that important."
Not true - especially at our age, you need to get your colon checked regularly.
Yeah. I have the Cologuard box here, but I haven't opened it yet to read the instructions. I've been rating my poops though, thinking whether one or the other would be more worthy of the box.
17: oddly, "here is some phonics and here are some books" is how Pebbles, whose middle name is from the myth, learned to read. Persephonics, indeed. It was hard to teach her to read because I had no memory of having learned and the Calabat I think just memorized 500 words and figured out phonics later.
She reads at an astonishing rate now but has zero fucks to give about spelling. She writes stories non stop with her own spellings (and makes 100% on spelling tests. I'm mystified. She can spell but thinks that English is bullshit so why shold I bothr with speling).
Anyhow, I agree with heebie that poverty explains a lot, except that the problems with reading aren't confined to those who struggle with income insecurity. It wouldn't be necessary for mom to teach a kid to read if the school could do it, and while one needs some resources to help a kid read we're not exactly talking advanced tech here.
Bob books + Starfall ABCs
32:
The silent e at the end of the word
End of the word
End of the word
The silent e at the end of the word
Makes the a say "a"
A!
Anyone else want a Bluesky invite code? I have a couple more.
I went the the annual Montana Water Law conference tis week, and an engineer who was explaining the fine details of reservoir operation told an engineer joke.
How can you tell if an engineer is an extrovert?
He/she looks at your shoes, instead of their own when they talk to you.
It can't be that they look at your shoes when they talk, because that's the tell for extroverted mathematicians.
YOU ONLY GAVE US TWO MINUTES TO ANSWER!! Unacceptable!
I think it wasn't supposed to be a contest.
Too late, I filed an official shenanigans report already.
59: I thought it was fashionistas that look at your shoes.
I thought the way you can tell if an engineer is an extrovert is if they talk to you.
Anyway I remembered that I was the only one in my first grade class that could read and do arithmetic. The other kids called me Univac. Were they implying that I was slow and very large?
I have a hard time think about this because I had so much trauma in first grade from my family losing our home and going to three different schools. My second first grade teacher was incredibly mean...I once got kept in at recess for using a blue-green crayon instead of a blue crayon per worksheet directions even though I had just moved ( having lost our house) and the bulk of my crayons were stull packed. Clearly the absolute injustice of this still stings. I only sort of jest. I was a pretty easy going kid primed to love all teachers and this woman made me hate her. BUY I do think her phonics instruction was actually weirdly fun and it was by fary favorite part of the day. I think part of this was that it was the whole class together, so the chances of her being specifically mean to me were lower. But part of it was that it was sweorsly fun. We had these three limited sheets of paper , with the letters common fragments of words on them one fat one and two strips, and we moved them around in this choreagraphed way to form words and shouted the words together, in unison. Maybe the shouting made it fun? Like one strip would have the chon it and the middle would have the air and the other strip would have the n, and we'd shout chain. . I knew how to read a little bit before that...I could read some Dr. Seuss....but somehow that was what really made it click.
I actually remembered it because of wordle too.
I have often wondered where one could get these three strips of paper ..No clue.
I also think while language reading is a bit classy because it relies on context, and context relies on knowing a lot of random facts about something, and rich kids have way more.opportunities to be exposed to the kind of random facts likely to be the context of kindergarten and first grade books than poor kids.
I have no memory at all of learning to read. But I think my brothers learned using some sort of phonics, a word at a time? I have a memory of one of them having z small tin box and when he learned a new word, a slip of paper with the word typed on it went in the box.
A literal word-hoard.
What I remember about reading is memorizing books and pretending to know how to read when I did not know to as a kid. Maybe in preschool or kindergarten? The other kids said something, and I respobded "haven't you ever heard of reading to yourself?" At which point, I became pretty determined to learn how to make sense of the marks on the page.
I am apparently Ile's phonics teacher. You make the little strips yourself.
"Balanced" is one of those rhetorical red flags isn't it. Nobody ever says they want unbalanced literacy, an unbalanced diet, etc.
67: Email me at the address linked from my name? I can't find your email.
re: 69
That's not phonics. That's the old method. That's how I learned in 1970s Scotland. I had a little tin with words in it and had to memorize them. The breaking that down into sounds and then being able to pronounce unfamiliar words was supposed to sort of happen by osmosis. Kids these days are taught very specific rules, and methods of constructing words from scratch.
They get tested, in fact, using made up words, e.g. they get a list of alien's names like "Blarp", "Pheeb", and "Moze" and they have to pronounce them.
My favorite made-up word is 'inator', as in "The home is the inator for living."
74: ah, OK. That sounds right. Knowing what the letters mean and using that to build up what the words are - "cuh-ah-tuh equals cat" is what the next generation all seem to do.
My most vivid memory of phonics is from Sesame Street, by far, with the two monsters walking towards each other with parts of a word, where they keep saying their halves until the word comes together. I'm pretty sure Sesame Street taught me to read.
Does anyone else remember "Between the Lions"? It was an early 2000s pbs literary show with muppet lions (based on the NYPL library lions, I assume). And they had a phonics bit called "Gawain's World" that was a Wayne's World parody on some level, but was also two parts of a word jousting until they crashed into each other and formed a single word. I loved the show when my kids were little.
Literacy, not literary. I hate autocorrect so much.
Literacy, not literary. I hate autocorrect so much.
No. I just remember the woman who did the kids yoga.
The breaking that down into sounds and then being able to pronounce unfamiliar words was supposed to sort of happen by osmosis.
OT, I just remembered that one of my old teachers had an exquisitely pedantic habit of saying, in response to things like this, "NO! Osmosis is the flow of WATER between areas of different osmotic pressure across a semi permeable membrane! It only applies to water! I think what you meant to say is 'happen by diffusion'!"
78 Yes, I think it was on after the daytime Charlie Rose reruns (in my defense this was during an extended period of unemployment).
But learning to read must have massively improved your prospects of employment as a librarian.
I think you mean de-fusion.
Another pedantic point - we should say "defuze a situation" not "defuse a situation", because we are using the metaphor of making some sort of explosive safe, and the thingy that makes explosives explode is a fuze, not a fuse. The thingy that cuts off your electricity when there's a short is a fuse, because it works by getting hot and melting - fusing, in fact. Fuze in the sense of an explosive comes from fusus, a spindle, and fuse in the sense of melting from fundere.
I may or may not have said the exact same this as 82 to my kid this week (taking AP bio, studying active va passive transport)
77-78 are exactly the things they have in the Starfall app our kids used to learn reading. Wouldn't be surprised if they just copied from older sources.
I asked my teacher wife "have you heard of balanced literacy" and it led to a 30 minute rant. It was actually supposed to be a combination of phonics and whole reading (actually balanced) but was used in reality as described here. But even in places that are using phonics balanced with whole reading parents show up and say "we demand phonics!" because they hear it's a controversy.
She said the problem with phonics-only is that kids never actually get stories read to them. It's just decoding with no larger introduction to literacy, actually sounding out words and the saying "oh I heard that word when we were reading a story book.
If you really want to, that's your prerogative, but I'm re-fusion.
Is fuze the British spelling? I don't recall ever seeing that but if I'm called on to disarm a bomb in the UK I am now prepared. Over here in the U.S. I'm pretty sure we light fuses.
If you're talking about the burning string attached to dynamite like in cartoons that's a fuse, but there are US military terms for specific more complex ignition devices that are called fuze.
(My kid had to learn how to report IEDs last weekend)
I have a possibly incorrect belief that US usage is 'fuse' with an 's' for a flammable cord that burns at a predictable rate that is used to set off an explosion, and 'fuse' with a 'z' is for some other kind of mechanism for setting off an explosive.
Crossed with SP, but looks like we're on the same page.
My kid had to learn how to report IEDs last weekend
Wait. What? The active shooter drills weren't dystopian enough?
I didn't realize "fuze" was a word in American English.
90: I just looked in on the same question! Merriam-Webster has fuze as "or less commonly" in its entry for fuse, while googling "fuze british or american" turns up fuze in the Cambridge dictionary and wikipedians insisting that fuze is preferred. So I am going to go with British and the overly pedantic (nb: these categories may overlap).
I think it's sort of professional/technical jargon, so you'd kind of never use it or hear it unless you were professionally involved with explosives, but most people aren't. Amateur explosives are limited to fireworks, mostly, and those have fuses.
Cala's around, and Shivbunny was a professional exploding things guy, right? Thoughts?
85 it certainly didn't hurt though regrettably I don't recall that they ever covered the fuse/fuze distinction.
My favorite made-up word is 'inator'
Is this a word teachers are actually using in class, a Phineas & Ferb reference, or both?
My kid had to learn how to report IEDs last weekend
Ah yes! Does he have the CATUXO app? Brilliant bit of software (and free).
Phineas and Ferb, but I'm trying to put it into general circulation.
Actual conversation about treatment of mental illness I had last month: "But it's really whatever works for each individual patient. Cold water baths, some people find them very helpful. A colleague of mine has a PTSD patient who thinks they're great. He was in the forces, and he got PTSD after he was injured by an IUD explosion."
(solemn pause while everyone else tries to keep a straight face)
That would have been a fuze, rather than a fuse, I'd imagine.
(TIL I learned that fuze is a word. Just trying it out. Spell-check flags fuze as not a word.)
re: 88
She said the problem with phonics-only is that kids never actually get stories read to them. It's just decoding with no larger introduction to literacy, actually sounding out words and the saying "oh I heard that word when we were reading a story book.
That's not how it is in the UK. Phonics is a huge thing. The Tory government were very keen on it, so it is backed up with legislation and statutory tests that schools have to do. So phonics is very full on in the first 2 to 3 years of school.
But, kids still have books read to them, and talk about stories, and get to bring little reading books home from the class library, etc.
How does phonics work with so many accents and so many words that are just flat out pronounced in ways unrelated to spelling? I'm guessing "Cholmondeley" doesn't wind up in the flash cards, but still.
re: 108
Teachers have to do the phonics material with a vaguely RP accent as far as I can tell. It's taught in quite a uniform way.
Lots of the standard pronunciations for various phonemes are wrong for my accent, and I don't just mean in some dialect sense, even if I'm talking in what would be standard class-neutral or middle-class educated Scottish English,--the sort of language use that you'd hear from an academic or a BBC newsreader--the sounds would be quite different. For example, a lot of diphthongs in RP are monophthongs in Scottish English, and Scottish English is usually rhotic. Scottish English has different rules about vowel length, too.
Shiv was a professional exploded things guy, but I've only ever seen 'fuse'. But he tended to speak of "charges" and I don't actually know how they went boom. I'd guess 'fuze' is British/fussy (fuszy?)
He decided to try Air Force ROTC so they had a training exercise he went to. He hasn't taken any scholarship from them so he's not committed to doing any service yet but it aligns with some of his other interests.
Anyhow, "defuse" is fine because clearly we are snipping ACME-branded old-timey TNT situations.
I thought Fuze was the iced tea brand that is one of the only non-soda options at some fast casual restaurants.
The hotel vending machine has three beverages, Orange Crush, Dr Pepper, and Mountain Dew.
110: Hope you and your loved ones are doing well
The hotel has an original Joust game, just like the one in the Pizza Hut in 1983.
Allentown looks nicer than I was expecting based on the Billy Joel song.
This place is really preppy. (Not Allentown now.)
"While I was taking a shit, a hare came by at arm's length without noticing me. Pale brandy on my left thigh which hurts from my groin downwards with every step. Why is walking so full of woe?"
I don't know about that, but I have learned that Wawa is better than Sheetz.
The stations of the cross were wrapped around its long lean body, below the chrome line that bisected it horizontally. Jesus was condemned at the rear end of the driver's side and carried the cross, stumbled, and encountered his way around the car to be crucified in the middle of the passenger's side, next to the door handle, and he was buried at the back end of that side.
Definitely not my first choice. Safety school maybe.
The shift is away from balanced literacy to "Science of Reading," which is kind of obnoxious name, but is more than just phonics. There's also a big emphasis on developing background knowledge so that students can comprehend the words they're sounding out. This generally involves lots of teacher read-alouds in the early grades. Scarborough's Reading Rope is the name of a slightly twee graphic describing the components of SoR if you want to look them up.
(I also came to this knowledge via a kid with learning disabilities, although dyslexia turned out to be the least of his challenges).
The shift is away from balanced literacy to "Science of Reading," which is kind of obnoxious name, but is more than just phonics. There's also a big emphasis on developing background knowledge so that students can comprehend the words they're sounding out. This generally involves lots of teacher read-alouds in the early grades. Scarborough's Reading Rope is the name of a slightly twee graphic describing the components of SoR if you want to look them up.
(I also came to this knowledge via a kid with learning disabilities, although dyslexia turned out to be the least of his challenges).
Sorry about the double post.
Another thing that distinguishes the SoR strategy is the value placed in developing deep expertise in teachers, which both makes it more effective than previous iterations of phonics, and vastly increases teacher buy-in. However, it also makes it much more of an investment for districts to implement properly, so I do worry about districts just getting new scripted curricula that get used by teachers who still teach kids to guess words based on pictures. Like, to do it well, early elementary teachers need at least the equivalent of two college level courses focused on it, which most teacher training programs don't have (although that's slowly changing).
126: Lafayette? Sally toured that on the same trip where we met you, back in 2017. Cartoonishly SLAC -- it looked like the set of a campus movie.
Yeah. So close to the Delaware Water Gap, but no time for a visit.
These kids look really fit, but Wooster and Kenyon looked more SLACy.
This is on topic because we used a reading tutor in elementary school.
There's a heavy, old bearded guy in Death Eater robes on the quad smoking and standing next ro a woman with a pointed witch's hat.
133: That's Sewanee on a typical day, except for maybe the hat.
At the heavy industrial company I spent most of my career at there were an inordinate number of Lehigh and Lafayette grads--mostly mechanical engineers. (despite being SLACy Lafayette has a fair-sized engineering department). To the extent that there were yearly organized trips to The Rivalry football game from several of our larger plants. Apparently iy is the longest going football rivalry in the nation.
We took my kid up to Champlain College in Burlington last weekend. It was a SLAC that is now about 35% devoted to training future game developers and programmers. Lots of neurodivergency and highly un-preppy.
I saw multiple kids wearing sweaters and collared shirts on a Saturday.
Champlain College has fantastic views of the lake from campus, some of the best views on any college campus.
Case Western has a lake nearby, but you can't see it.
Anyway, I tried to get my son interested in going to college in Vermont, but failed.
135: massive rivalry! (Two of the Calasisters are grads.). Go Engineers! Go Engineers! Hit em with a log..... Naturally.
Yeah, if he gets accepted I'll be pretty stoked about visiting Burlington on the regular. He's going to love that.
143: Yes, our eldest has been living there the past six years and we have taken every opportunity plus some to visit. Were just there for a couple of weeks, but actually a bit early for leaves except for the Adirondacks and higher mountains in Vermont.
140: Though on a clear day, you can barely see it if you stand on the top of the nearby James Garfield monument. Bonus points for yelling "I am a Stalwart of Stalwarts!" when you're up there.
145" "My God, what is this?" or ""I thank you, doctor, but I am a dead man."
I just listened to the podcast referenced in the post, and while probably the podcaster is generally right about phonics being the way to go, the podcast in detail is hateful. Anyone leaning that heavily on "the SCIENCE says" on this kind of thing is a bullshitter even if their policy recommendations end up being right. And she's ridiculously nasty in a one-sided way at anyone who disagrees with her.
I remember bitter fights about NCLB that I never understood. Maybe that kind of thing is why?
||
What a wretched world|>
This would be if this despised,
Quickly passing world
Had no place to hide away--
That is, no mountains in it.
Technically, I was still hiking on the plateau, but 1,200 feet of uninterrupted climbing in less than 1/2 a mile is pretty mountain-like.