Meghan

In his recent writing, and especially this talk with @ehanford, @markseidenberg is remarkably direct about the phonics overteaching problem that emerged in the Science of Reading era. “Typically developing children might not need all the instruction that was being specified in structured literacy, but — this is an important point — people said, "Well, that's okay, because it's not going to be harmful. if the kid gets extra instruction on these things or if they get extra opportunities to practice what they know." So there was indeed a sense that there wasn't much danger of too much of a good thing, so if it's good for dyslexics, it's going to be good for everyone. So what's happened? Well, if you treat everyone like they might be dyslexic, you get an intensive, slow, incremental approach to instruction, with no stone left unturned. In practice, what it's meant is a barrage of explicit instruction. So I would say the science of reading has an overteaching problem. Is all this explicit instruction necessary? No, because children don't only learn from explicit instruction. Moreover, the opportunity costs of doing all this instruction are huge. Instruction time in schools is limited. Teachers have enormous demands on their time. Over-teaching the components of reading eats into time for other learning activities, such as reading itself. So, I want to be clear here. Some explicit instruction is needed to help beginning readers get off the ground. There's no question. The whole language balanced literacy approach that came before did not do an adequate job with this. That had to be corrected. But the science of reading has overshot the target, because most kids aren't dyslexic, and most of the knowledge that supports reading isn't actually learned from instruction, as I'm going to illustrate. If you try to teach it all, you're interfering with or taking away from other learning opportunities that kids need.” @C_Hendrick @MeganGierka @ReadSimplified

'Illiteracy is a policy choice' is a great line.

Democrats sour further on Harris amid book tour ow.ly/8eX9106myyy

My entire life for twenty years is completely ensconced by my community of friends and colleagues who work in conservative politics or media in one form or another. Every SINGLE one of us is despondent - and truly furious. I’m telling you, this is a paradigm shifting moment.

Teachers plates were spilling over a decade or more ago. Time to make this happen for real. Teachers - try to resist working extra hours this year and professionally let your admin know you couldn’t get it done during work hours. It’s hard. I know.

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.” — Thomas Sowell

I’m going to try this again. Teachers- when you do Amazon wishlists you only make @JeffBezos wealthier and give NO incentive to your district to provide you with needed work tools. If we can all go collectively without these tools for a year and express professionally what’s missing, districts will fix this.

This seems like a really good idea, especially if Costco is the owner of the apartments and they can basically use it to entice their workers to live there. They could do a high discount for Costco workers to live there. This should be a more common thing (Walmart, Target).

For the first time in almost 30 years, my stocking was filled and I’m pretty sure it’s because last year after everyone opened their gifts I said, “How come no one ever fills my fucking stocking?”