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Pedagogy of the Distressed : "Science" of Reading
85 Plays2 years ago
Join Rafa and Emily, two educators, on processing and talking thorugh things that are on our mind in education - the inaugural episode is on the "Science of Reading". Listen in to hear our thoughts and perhaps why we use quotation marks.
Feel free to email us with questions, comments, thoughts at pedagogyofthedistressed@gmail.com!
Con amor,
Rafa y Emily
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Transcript
Podcast Relaunch and Motivation
00:00:01
Speaker
Here we are.
00:00:03
Speaker
How are you Emily?
00:00:05
Speaker
Hi Rafa, how are you?
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm well, I'm well.
00:00:08
Speaker
It's after Thanksgiving, we're recording this on Sunday, November 27th, 2022.
00:00:16
Speaker
And yeah, no, I'm excited to relaunch, well for us, relaunch Pedagogy of the Distressed.
00:00:23
Speaker
Yes.
00:00:24
Speaker
This came about because we've long wanted to have a podcast.
00:00:29
Speaker
We're both teachers.
00:00:31
Speaker
We've taught in a lot of different contexts.
00:00:33
Speaker
And this week, I listened to a podcast that really fired me up and gave me lots of thoughts.
00:00:40
Speaker
So...
00:00:41
Speaker
my immediate response was to call my longtime friend Rafa.
00:00:48
Speaker
And we just started gushing about all the things that frustrated us about this podcast, which I'll leave shrouded in mystery until the reveal.
00:01:00
Speaker
And we decided why not record this conversation?
00:01:03
Speaker
Why not record some of our
00:01:06
Speaker
feelings and process things around because this podcast is really an example, I think, of a lot of the reasons we wanted to have a podcast in the first place, which is we feel like teachers' voices are missing from a lot of popular media covering education issues.
00:01:22
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:01:25
Speaker
So, I don't know.
00:01:26
Speaker
I can share a little bit about me quick before we run into it.
00:01:29
Speaker
I'm currently an adjunct professor at a couple institutions in the Northeast.
00:01:34
Speaker
I teach a variety of subjects, but my specialty is in teaching English to speakers of other languages, multilingual education with a focus on literacy across the lifespan.
00:01:44
Speaker
That's kind of my background.
00:01:46
Speaker
Rafa, do you want to give a little intro?
00:01:49
Speaker
Sure.
00:01:49
Speaker
Well, how many years would you say you've been in education?
00:01:52
Speaker
Pretty much since I graduated from college, so 10 years.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:57
Speaker
10 years.
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:59
Speaker
So I'm similar.
Introduction of Hosts and Background
00:02:01
Speaker
I'm Rafa.
00:02:02
Speaker
I have taught, this is my 11th year of teaching.
00:02:05
Speaker
I've taught mostly elementary school, dual language, a little bit of special education of district schools, public charter schools, and now I work...
00:02:13
Speaker
as a teacher and a director of a Spanish immersion independent school in Brooklyn.
00:02:18
Speaker
So quite the gamut of experiences there.
00:02:23
Speaker
And yeah, we wanted to, Emily and I have all these conversations and just wanted to chat about things that distress us, quote unquote, even if it's a slight exaggeration at times.
00:02:34
Speaker
It has a nice ring to it.
00:02:35
Speaker
And if you get the illusion to
00:02:38
Speaker
the book, Pedagogy
Inspiration from Other Podcasts
00:02:40
Speaker
of the Oppressed.
00:02:40
Speaker
Well, even more power to you.
00:02:44
Speaker
And yeah, but really for me, it's a big exploration of what is it about what distresses us, which hopefully gets us to the other side of things, which is what might we do instead?
00:02:56
Speaker
So I'm excited to process with you and-
00:03:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:00
Speaker
And just learn more what you're learning about.
00:03:01
Speaker
So tell me, let's get right into it.
00:03:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:04
Speaker
What's on your mind.
00:03:05
Speaker
So I listened to a podcast that when I listened to it, it was in the top 10 podcast like charts.
00:03:16
Speaker
It's called sold a story from America public media.
00:03:18
Speaker
And the journalist who put it together is named Emily Hanford.
00:03:25
Speaker
So,
00:03:26
Speaker
Different Emily, very different Emily.
00:03:33
Speaker
Um, but yeah, it's, it is a, uh, six part podcast.
00:03:37
Speaker
It's kind of a culmination of years of this reporters, Emily Hanford's reporting on what she terms and discusses as a crisis in American education.
00:03:49
Speaker
She identifies the problem being that, um,
00:03:53
Speaker
Many schools are not using science of reading in their curriculum.
00:03:57
Speaker
And as a result, many children are not being taught how to read.
00:04:03
Speaker
So she advocates for a focus on the science of reading.
Debate on Reading Instruction Methods
00:04:09
Speaker
And before I get into unpacking this, what give you like the Cliff Notes version, because Rafa hasn't listened to it, but sometimes it's fun to listen to the Cliff Notes version anyway.
00:04:19
Speaker
So we thought we'd do that.
00:04:22
Speaker
Rafa, I'm just curious, when you hear the science of reading, what does it make you think of?
00:04:28
Speaker
When I think quote unquote science of reading, I definitely think of Manhattan Institute.
00:04:33
Speaker
I'm like conservative think tanks.
00:04:37
Speaker
When I've taught in schools, it's come up here and there.
00:04:42
Speaker
It reminds me of this idea of the reading wars, which were in short, it continues to be this idea of different camps of thinking of how to teach reading.
00:04:52
Speaker
And one camp that's very much explicitly about explicit phonics instruction and another camp about
00:04:58
Speaker
the whole language and the whole words and looking at the pictures and all that jazz and they even present this opposition to each other.
00:05:05
Speaker
So that's mostly what I think about.
00:05:07
Speaker
And I just think of like an agglomeration of ideas.
00:05:09
Speaker
I mean, I do want to emphasize that we have nothing against the journalists, just that it's the amplification of some of these ideas that alarmed, alarmed us.
00:05:21
Speaker
And these have been things that have been simmering under the surface for years, I feel like, in education.
00:05:26
Speaker
And Emily, like you were saying, your dad was saying before we recorded this, back to basic movements aren't new, right?
00:05:36
Speaker
But that's just the gist of it.
00:05:38
Speaker
Science of reading makes me think of packaged curriculum that says that this is the way to teach reading and then
00:05:48
Speaker
and then trying to force teachers to implement it is the short of it.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:54
Speaker
That's kind of before, you know, I would, you know, I did a little bit about me to understand also why I probably have some baggage around this.
00:06:04
Speaker
I did complete a PhD in reading, writing, and literacy at the University of Pennsylvania, where I learned about
00:06:13
Speaker
approaches to teaching literacy.
00:06:15
Speaker
I learned about research-based approaches to literacy teaching that mostly revolved around whole language, which is an approach to teaching reading and writing that centers meaning above language.
00:06:28
Speaker
I shouldn't say above, but meaning is the focus.
00:06:32
Speaker
So teaching a meaningful, engaged, culturally sustaining curriculum that engages students thinking on multiple levels while also embedding in foundations of reading, including decoding, including comprehension, and including things that might be isolated in other curriculums as skills.
00:06:52
Speaker
Or that might even be thought of as hierarchical skills that you need to learn first.
00:06:58
Speaker
For example, you need to learn decoding before you can learn.
00:07:02
Speaker
You need to learn how to decode individual words before you can learn to put a sentence together before you can put together a paragraph, blah, blah, blah.
00:07:10
Speaker
So that's very simplified, like these different paradigms for teaching reading.
00:07:14
Speaker
But I certainly was educated in approaches that some might term more progressive and more critical.
00:07:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:27
Speaker
So I also learned about the reading wars.
00:07:31
Speaker
Rafa mentioned the reading wars, which date back a long time.
00:07:36
Speaker
I'm not a reading wars historian, so I'm not going to pretend to like, and I didn't do a ton of research before this chat.
00:07:44
Speaker
It's more just sharing my reaction to how this podcast was presented.
00:07:50
Speaker
But yeah, I knew there, this debate between the best way to teach and
00:07:55
Speaker
Children, how to read is not new.
00:07:56
Speaker
It's been going on for many, many decades.
00:07:59
Speaker
And as mentioned, my dad is in education research as well.
00:08:05
Speaker
And he has talked about, you know.
00:08:08
Speaker
Everything kind of comes back around again.
00:08:10
Speaker
My mentor, Dr. Vivian Gadsden in grad school has always said there's nothing new under the sun, right?
00:08:17
Speaker
A lot of ideas in education especially get recycled and kind of every 10 years ideas that were thought of 20 years ago are presented as new and innovative and told a story to me plays into that.
00:08:32
Speaker
And what I found so remarkable about it is that it doesn't lay out that history beyond – it kind of starts in the late 80s and goes from there when really it's a debate that predates that.
00:08:48
Speaker
And that's like one beef I have with it.
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:52
Speaker
Before I get too far into my critique, I want to give you kind of the Cliff Notes version of the podcast.
00:08:58
Speaker
So my husband and I, on a road trip for Thanksgiving, listened to all six episodes with increasing shock and disbelief.
00:09:10
Speaker
Just some of the gaps and some of the assumptions that were being made without much insight.
00:09:18
Speaker
empirical data cited in the podcast.
00:09:21
Speaker
And I recognize, first of all, this is a journalistic piece.
00:09:25
Speaker
This is not a research piece.
00:09:26
Speaker
It's not an academic piece.
00:09:27
Speaker
So I know the limitations of the genre.
00:09:29
Speaker
So I don't want to, you know, pack unfair punches.
Impact of COVID-19 on Reading Education
00:09:33
Speaker
But basically, Rafa, the story starts, it presents, I'm looking right now at the plot outline.
00:09:40
Speaker
It starts with the problem and the
00:09:45
Speaker
Reporter states the problem as being that parents, basically she starts with parents who came to awareness during COVID teaching when their children were home.
00:09:58
Speaker
And these were children that went to very well-regarded public schools.
00:10:03
Speaker
So these are not under-resourced schools.
00:10:07
Speaker
Racial identity wasn't really discussed of the students.
00:10:09
Speaker
So I can't really get into that.
00:10:11
Speaker
But I do know that they were painted as
00:10:15
Speaker
parents of means, not wealthy, but definitely probably middle-class parents in well-resourced school districts.
00:10:26
Speaker
She kind of focuses on a couple parents.
00:10:29
Speaker
They're increasing awareness that their children are learning an approach to read.
00:10:33
Speaker
They're young children.
00:10:34
Speaker
I think one was the parent of a six-year-old.
00:10:37
Speaker
And the other was a parent of a seven, six or seven year old.
00:10:40
Speaker
And what they were watching on these Zoom classes during the pandemic was
00:10:45
Speaker
their children being asked these questions to, instead of asking to sound out words or decode explicitly, like they were asked to look at the first letter of the word if they didn't know it, look at a picture.
00:11:00
Speaker
And decoding is basically figuring out, sending out a word, right?
00:11:03
Speaker
Or how would you say, how would you define decoding?
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, decoding is putting the letter sounds together to make the word, you know, make sense.
00:11:13
Speaker
Got it.
00:11:14
Speaker
And right.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so they couldn't like they would get to a word and they wouldn't know what it said.
00:11:18
Speaker
You know, they couldn't say it.
00:11:20
Speaker
And they couldn't seem to figure it out.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:22
Speaker
And then they saw their teachers instead of saying sounded out, which is kind of, I would say what.
00:11:29
Speaker
most of us heard when we encountered a word we didn't know, you know, is to sound it out, sound the letter sounds.
00:11:36
Speaker
They heard their children being told to use the first letter, look at the words around it, I think, and try and make sense of the words around it.
00:11:46
Speaker
And then also look at a picture.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:48
Speaker
Use context clues and then look at the picture, right.
00:11:53
Speaker
To help make sense of it.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so that,
00:11:57
Speaker
The parents are disquieted by this because it doesn't seem to be the way that they remember learning how to read, but they go along with it for a while, but they kind of raise some eyebrows and chat with other parents.
00:12:14
Speaker
And...
00:12:15
Speaker
Then they do some research and lo and behold, they find Emily Hanford's reporting about the science of reading and about how this approach has been privileged in schools through a couple of what she identifies as well-moneyed students.
00:12:31
Speaker
curriculum sellers.
00:12:34
Speaker
And, you know, she kind of goes on in later episodes to take down a couple of researchers and people who run curriculum, you know, who sell curriculum and training and professional development programs in addition to a publishing house.
00:12:53
Speaker
And what she states is the problem in the first episode is that this approach is disproven.
00:12:59
Speaker
Teaching students to decode and understand, teaching students how to read a word by using context clues only looking at the first letter and only looking at the picture is not what science of reading research shows is the best way to decode.
00:13:13
Speaker
to teach children how to read.
00:13:15
Speaker
They should be taught explicit instruction in phonics, basically, to decode words and make meaning of text by just looking at the word, you know, and looking at the word itself.
Critique of Singular Teaching Approaches
00:13:32
Speaker
Does that make sense?
00:13:33
Speaker
Instead of like trying to put it in context
00:13:36
Speaker
Trying to guess the word instead of using the sounds.
00:13:41
Speaker
She would argue using a systemic approach to phonics, they would learn all of the ways that English makes sense even though it doesn't.
00:13:51
Speaker
There's a lot to say on that.
00:13:54
Speaker
Maybe we slow down a bit because I think it's good to... Stop me because I could go on forever.
00:14:00
Speaker
I was up all last night being like, what are the points I need to do?
00:14:03
Speaker
Just to summarize.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker
Let's just summarize.
00:14:08
Speaker
There is this method of teaching reading that's called the three cue system, which is what you were referring to, right?
00:14:13
Speaker
And it's basically children are reading words on a page and a simple story like, I see Carlitos run.
00:14:23
Speaker
And then they get to the word run and they don't know, let's say what the word is.
00:14:29
Speaker
And then the approach in the three Q system as described by many people who supports quote unquote science of reading is that it's asking them to guess.
00:14:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:14:39
Speaker
So the word are, now look at the picture was Carlitos doing in the picture.
00:14:42
Speaker
Oh, run, running.
00:14:44
Speaker
So what makes most sense with the syntax or like the grammar, like, Oh, run, run.
00:14:49
Speaker
So I see Carlitos run period.
00:14:52
Speaker
So,
00:14:53
Speaker
But they're arguing that like a better approach would be to say, okay, you know the word I, you know, C, Carlitos, you just happen to know how to sound out.
00:15:05
Speaker
And then run, run, run.
00:15:08
Speaker
And then that's how you figure it out.
00:15:09
Speaker
And then that unlocks meaning.
00:15:11
Speaker
That's the I. Which is, I would say right now, both you and I do not disagree with it.
00:15:18
Speaker
Right.
00:15:19
Speaker
In and of itself.
00:15:22
Speaker
Anyway, so that's both the three Q system and Q meaning C-U-E, Q as in what's Q-ing you to know what the word is, right?
00:15:30
Speaker
Thank you.
00:15:31
Speaker
Thanks for putting it in better terms.
00:15:34
Speaker
No, no, no.
00:15:35
Speaker
The three Qs are meaning, does it make sense, syntax, does it make sense in the grammar of it all, and visual.
00:15:42
Speaker
Are you relying on the letters or not relying on the letters at all to figure out what the word is?
00:15:48
Speaker
And you can tell Rafa's the elementary person.
00:15:50
Speaker
I do more adult than I taught middle school before.
00:15:55
Speaker
And can A also just... Mm-hmm.
00:16:00
Speaker
No, I love it.
00:16:00
Speaker
I mean, can I also just say that we both definitely support systematic phonics instruction?
00:16:07
Speaker
I mean, it definitely has a place.
00:16:09
Speaker
Right.
00:16:09
Speaker
But anyway, but it sounds like you're saying families are really upset about this because they see it as like a total disregard for the science.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so what everyone needs to do is hunker down on these systematic approaches to phonics.
00:16:23
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:24
Speaker
So continue.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yes.
00:16:26
Speaker
And the problem I have with the way the reporter lays this out is not that...
00:16:33
Speaker
I obviously I think phonics needs to be embedded within early learning.
00:16:39
Speaker
Like when students are learning how to read, like decode words on a page, make sense of letters and put them together and make words on a page.
00:16:48
Speaker
Um,
00:16:49
Speaker
It's not my expertise, but I understand – I understood as being trained in understanding whole language approaches that that would happen within a meaningful curriculum that privileges – like a focus that's meaningful to the children in your classroom above a one-size-fits-all systematic approach that would get –
00:17:13
Speaker
rolled out the same for all students regardless of what community they're in.
00:17:17
Speaker
And
00:17:22
Speaker
what she's advocating for is not a curriculum.
00:17:26
Speaker
She's not advocating for this lockstep systematic phonics approach necessarily, but she is trying to take down.
00:17:33
Speaker
And it's like, it's very
Commercial Influences in Education
00:17:35
Speaker
clear.
00:17:35
Speaker
She has a central thesis and she almost sees her work as social justice work.
00:17:40
Speaker
You know, that she needs to make this intervention.
00:17:43
Speaker
She needs to bring attention to the fact that these curriculum practices,
00:17:48
Speaker
creators and like what she sees and paints as powerhouses, and they are powerhouses with a lot of power and money in education, are peddling, not necessarily maliciously, but falsely peddling, you know, from either ignorance or willful ignorance, you know, they're peddling this, this erroneous queuing system, which has been queuing specifically has, she has shown in her
00:18:14
Speaker
Her research, she says, her research that she's done.
00:18:18
Speaker
She spent many years in a PhD program.
00:18:21
Speaker
No, I'm just kidding.
00:18:22
Speaker
I got bitter and salty.
00:18:23
Speaker
But she's taught so many children how to read.
00:18:27
Speaker
Anyway, but she talks about that.
00:18:32
Speaker
Sorry, I got lost being salty.
00:18:34
Speaker
What was I just saying?
00:18:37
Speaker
You got lost in the salty broth of your...
00:18:40
Speaker
of your decompression.
00:18:41
Speaker
Just like, it just, the point of like- What distresses you about this?
00:18:45
Speaker
Let's get to that.
00:18:46
Speaker
Like what distresses you?
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, it distresses me that she- What is under that you think?
00:18:49
Speaker
She makes, basically, she says like, you know, she takes down Lucy Calkins.
00:18:54
Speaker
She takes down people who advocate reading recovery.
00:18:58
Speaker
She takes down Fontas and Pinnell and she takes down Heinemann who she sees as being, you know, she profiles each of them in a separate episode of the podcast, like throughout the series.
00:19:09
Speaker
And she acts like people who are pushing the science of reading don't have their own curricular products that they're selling and their own agenda and their own like that they don't need to make money as well.
00:19:27
Speaker
And I feel like she misses the critique here, which is that education is
00:19:34
Speaker
Researchers have been pushed to make money for their institutions.
00:19:42
Speaker
Some of them are making a lot of money for themselves, to be certain.
00:19:45
Speaker
I think from what I know about Lucy Calkins, I'm the most familiar with her stuff.
00:19:50
Speaker
I know she makes a lot of money for what she does and brings in a lot of money to Columbia for what she does.
00:19:56
Speaker
But
00:19:58
Speaker
to think that the science of reading people are only operating out of the goodness of their heart and giving their research away for free is, and giving free, you know, curriculum and professional development to schools is really naive, you know, and false, you know?
00:20:18
Speaker
And in that same vein, it just contributes to what's plagued
00:20:26
Speaker
our discussion and education around reading, which is pushing.
00:20:30
Speaker
It's like, instead of talking about, there's other things about whole language, which are really great and which really could benefit kids, but they just happen.
00:20:39
Speaker
A lot of the curricula that call themselves balanced literacy.
00:20:41
Speaker
She also conflates like balanced literacy and whole language a lot, which I understand them not to be the same thing.
00:20:48
Speaker
She's like,
00:20:50
Speaker
really kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
00:20:52
Speaker
Like she's not trying to pull out this one viewing thing as, as a flaw in curricula that sell themselves as balanced literacy curricula.
00:21:00
Speaker
She's instead like giving parents like these key things that they should look for in their child's education.
00:21:09
Speaker
And, um,
00:21:10
Speaker
advocate that that curriculum be pulled.
00:21:13
Speaker
And I listened to the whole thing being like, maybe she's not trying to get parents to rise up against their schools.
00:21:18
Speaker
You know, maybe she's not being that way.
00:21:22
Speaker
But at the very end of the very last episode, she talks about like strides are being made, like laws are being passed that mandate the science of reading be taught in schools and that, you know, all teachers be trained in the science of reading.
00:21:38
Speaker
And I can speak from personal experience because I have taught in Rhode Island and Rhode Island became a right to read state, quote unquote, a couple of years ago.
00:21:47
Speaker
And through that law that was passed, it was passed to ensure that all teachers got trained in the science of reading.
00:21:53
Speaker
I think all teachers who teach
00:21:55
Speaker
I don't know how it worked, how they determine who needs to get it.
00:21:58
Speaker
I know special ed teachers need to get it because my husband did it.
00:22:01
Speaker
And if I had stayed at my job, I probably would have needed to as an ELA teacher.
00:22:08
Speaker
I think seven or eight of my colleagues got trained in science of reading, but those programs cost money.
00:22:14
Speaker
My colleagues did a program called Letters, which taught a systemic approach to teaching reading.
00:22:21
Speaker
And the letters, if you look it up, cost thousands of dollars per person to be trained in.
00:22:27
Speaker
Not to mention the hours of professional development, the time in their life that it took, the opportunities they missed for collaborating during school PD days.
00:22:38
Speaker
They had to go and sit in a room on Zoom and get trained in this.
00:22:42
Speaker
as seventh grade teachers, you know, to teach this approach to reading.
00:22:46
Speaker
And then when they got there and they asked questions about how it could be used in seventh grade context, they were told, oh, this is an approach mostly relevant to K through two teachers.
00:22:55
Speaker
This isn't really relevant.
00:22:56
Speaker
I don't really know how to make this relevant to you.
00:22:57
Speaker
But why were they training?
00:22:59
Speaker
Because it was like legally mandated?
00:23:01
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:01
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:02
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:03
Speaker
And so it just- Without thought to like context?
00:23:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:06
Speaker
And to me, that's the problem with this approach to advocacy.
00:23:11
Speaker
You know, it's like mandating that it's like a slippery slope.
00:23:16
Speaker
If you think that this isn't going to be approached as a one size fits all thing, that all teachers need to adapt this, that once it becomes a law, it becomes tinged with, um,
00:23:33
Speaker
fear, you know, for teachers, if they don't teach the way that they're legally mandated to teach, um, it would cause a lot of schools to take up expensive professional development, um, trainings that might be very different from the ones they had before and then have to buy a whole new curricula that like, you know, um, is very expensive, just as expensive as the curricula she was critiquing, you know?
00:23:58
Speaker
Um, and, um,
00:24:01
Speaker
I just wish that it had been more balanced.
00:24:04
Speaker
She spends the whole podcasting on balanced literacy, but I wish that it could be more balanced, you know, just of like, I think she just misses the world of education is, is flawed and fraught with people making money off of their approach.
00:24:22
Speaker
You know, like no one approach that you're getting peddled, especially if it's a really popular approach is going to be free from some,
00:24:35
Speaker
overstatement of its abilities, you know, as a curriculum, there's no, the thing I took away from my graduate work is there's no one size fits all approach to teach children and adults different aspects of literacy, right?
00:24:52
Speaker
Or how to learn languages, how to learn how to write.
00:24:55
Speaker
There's a lot of things we can keep in our toolbox, but different things are going to work for different kids.
00:25:01
Speaker
Um,
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:04
Speaker
So that's kind of.
00:25:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:06
Speaker
I don't know.
00:25:06
Speaker
What are you thinking?
00:25:07
Speaker
I railroaded.
00:25:09
Speaker
No, I mean, you kind of got into it near the end.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:13
Speaker
You got it kind of near the end with the toolbox.
00:25:14
Speaker
I think what gets me about this in general is it's part of a wider movement.
00:25:18
Speaker
It's been around for a long time.
00:25:20
Speaker
especially ever since the publishing of, what is the name of that report in the 80s under Reagan, A Nation in Crisis, something like that.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:28
Speaker
But how, we're not reading in our education.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
Let me look it up really quick before I flub it.
00:25:34
Speaker
But keep going.
00:25:35
Speaker
I'm going to look up the report and then you go.
00:25:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:25:40
Speaker
And just this focus on best practices, best practices, this idea that if you just do X, it should work.
00:25:49
Speaker
It should work.
00:25:50
Speaker
And I think what gets lost
Complexity of Learning and Education Policies
00:25:52
Speaker
in a lot of this for me is that, of course, research is a part of this.
00:25:57
Speaker
Of course, theory is a part of this.
00:25:59
Speaker
but on the ground practice and the ability to make sense in a way that makes sense for your context is a part of it.
00:26:05
Speaker
And that's the part that's really, really absent from the system as a whole.
00:26:10
Speaker
So there's just brain, human brains are too complicated.
00:26:14
Speaker
Learning, true learning is ambiguous.
00:26:16
Speaker
And I think that's something as a society we struggle to accept.
00:26:20
Speaker
And that's why we, and we create a school system that assumes learning is not ambiguous.
00:26:25
Speaker
We create a school system that assumes the learning is linear.
00:26:29
Speaker
And so whether one is embracing whole language or embracing phonics all the way, at the end of the day, in both instances, the issue for me is that there's no room for you, the teacher, making sense of it and then seeing what's working in their classroom.
00:26:46
Speaker
There's like that space isn't there.
00:26:48
Speaker
And so in a way where we are in the sense teachers are not really set up to be researchers.
00:26:55
Speaker
They're not set up to be designers.
00:26:56
Speaker
They're not set up as professionals in that way.
00:27:00
Speaker
They're set up to just do what works.
00:27:03
Speaker
And there's not one way that works, period, by definition.
00:27:06
Speaker
And if one believes that,
00:27:09
Speaker
I mean, it does not match my experience.
00:27:11
Speaker
And I mean, and research studies are helpful, but they only point in the direction of something.
00:27:16
Speaker
I mean, it's not, I mean, even physics, I mean, you describe something new and things change, right?
00:27:23
Speaker
It's based on observation.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
So I'm really a fan of like really thinking of first principles and something else I find really funny about the discourse of quote unquote science of reading is I read it.
00:27:35
Speaker
I read an article by the journal Emily Hannaford and Hannaford.
00:27:38
Speaker
Is that it?
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:39
Speaker
Hannaford I think.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:41
Speaker
I really want to focus on her ideas, not her.
00:27:43
Speaker
But the one thing I wrote on, I read in one of the articles, it was like two sentences about how it's important for kids to understand there's an association between sounds and letters.
00:27:54
Speaker
And then it moves on to phonics.
00:27:55
Speaker
And it's interesting because
00:27:56
Speaker
That understanding that there's a relationship between sounds and letter names, that's called phonics.
00:28:01
Speaker
But to be able to do that, one has to be able to manipulate sounds by themselves.
00:28:06
Speaker
So without looking at the word run, for example, what is the first sound in run that one hears?
00:28:11
Speaker
And if a child struggles to...
00:28:13
Speaker
To do that, or just even identify the first sound in a word that they hear, not even see, that's one of the most predictive things.
00:28:21
Speaker
I think that's one of the strongest research-based things there is.
00:28:26
Speaker
If a kid's struggling with that, they're very likely going to struggle with phonics and with decoding.
00:28:32
Speaker
That brings me to this other point of
00:28:34
Speaker
I mean, we're talking about decoding, not reading.
00:28:37
Speaker
Reading is so complex.
00:28:38
Speaker
Thank you.
00:28:39
Speaker
Right?
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:28:40
Speaker
Reading is an integration.
00:28:43
Speaker
It's self-monitoring.
00:28:45
Speaker
It's extending.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's enjoyment.
00:28:49
Speaker
And then there's decoding, which of course is a part of it.
00:28:52
Speaker
But I think another part of this discourse for me is let's be very specific.
00:28:55
Speaker
We're not talking about
00:28:56
Speaker
the science of reading we're talking about, if anything, the research and evidence base for helping people decode works, which obviously is important, but that's what it is.
00:29:05
Speaker
Like the whole language and like, for those in the know, like other ways of teaching reading that are more, are rich in many ways are much more based on meaning.
00:29:15
Speaker
As also they all work together.
00:29:17
Speaker
Like there's really, in my head, the queuing system was helpful at times.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then when it wasn't helpful, I wouldn't,
00:29:23
Speaker
lean into it.
00:29:24
Speaker
I would lean into other methods like I love Words Their Way.
00:29:27
Speaker
It's very developmental if people are looking for concrete approaches.
00:29:34
Speaker
Words Their Way recognizes the complexity of reading, including the spelling and all that jazz and writing.
00:29:42
Speaker
So that's just to say that, yeah, the deeper thing for me is how can we get to a place systematically where we're not so much about what's the right, what's the wrong way, but how can we allow communities and especially educators and within communities to be empowered to look at research, look at theory, have the space to do that.
00:30:02
Speaker
be paid and have the mental space and capacity to be able to grapple these very important questions, right?
00:30:11
Speaker
I think we're continuing to ram ourselves into a brick wall with this insistence on, this is the way, you know, this is the way, oh my gosh, it's so erroneous.
00:30:19
Speaker
Right.
00:30:19
Speaker
Well, and it's like, what podcast is going to come around in 10 years where it's like,
00:30:24
Speaker
I had to sit in a classroom and recite R, U, U, N, N, string it together.
00:30:34
Speaker
Because a lot of the approaches that are available now that take that systemic approach also have a lot of...
00:30:43
Speaker
You do everything together.
00:30:44
Speaker
Everything is lockstep, right?
00:30:46
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:30:47
Speaker
It's not personalized.
00:30:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:30:52
Speaker
And how many students are going to be – I think the critique I heard of those programs before was that students can just pretend to be getting it and chanting along with everyone but not really internalizing it because – Mm-hmm.
00:31:05
Speaker
with a whole language approach and a problem solving approach where you ask people to engage the context to make sense of a word they don't know, you're asking them to think critically about, they're asking them to comprehend, right?
00:31:18
Speaker
The sentence at the same time they're decoding, they're learning decoding skills.
00:31:22
Speaker
And, um,
00:31:24
Speaker
As I've worked with adults who I've worked mostly with adults who are learning English, I've worked with adults studying for their GED.
00:31:31
Speaker
So in that sense, I teach adult literacy, but literacy in the research world and in other worlds, literacy isn't just decoding, which often I think people who haven't studied it, they think of literacy purely as decoding a word and being able to read in that sense.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:46
Speaker
Literacy means, like you said, it's a rich thing.
00:31:48
Speaker
It's making sense of the written word, right?
00:31:51
Speaker
And that also means critiquing it internalized, you know, like making it make sense to you, connecting it to you, connecting it to other things, you know, right?
00:31:59
Speaker
And it's not just decoding words, right?
00:32:03
Speaker
So that's how I've understood literacy.
00:32:08
Speaker
And I think why I said thank you when you were talking about it and you mentioned it, that to me, I think, I guess, is another flaw.
00:32:17
Speaker
that I saw in just what I took with the framing of this podcast was it assumed reading alone.
00:32:26
Speaker
And she approached it almost like a non, like a, like a, of coarseness, you know, a kind of like commonsensical, you know, like reading is reading.
00:32:33
Speaker
Everyone knows what reading is.
00:32:34
Speaker
And these researchers who are trying to complicate it are making something that is very simple and straightforward, more complicated.
00:32:41
Speaker
And then it's,
00:32:43
Speaker
shutting down access to the written word because of it.
00:32:48
Speaker
I'm on a job search and I've encountered jobs where they're looking for a science of reading person because I'm a literacy person.
00:32:56
Speaker
I apply to them and see if I can spend my experience on how to fit it.
00:33:00
Speaker
But I always end up just kind of coming to loggerheads with people.
00:33:04
Speaker
who've in their minds have had experiences with older children who don't know how to decode words they feel like they should know how to decode, you know, and that to them is really disturbing.
00:33:13
Speaker
And they think how they slipped through the cracks to get to where they are, you know, and they can't decode words that a third grader should be able to decode.
00:33:21
Speaker
Well, if we're going anecdotally based on that, I have also experienced
00:33:27
Speaker
When I taught seventh grade, I encountered 150 students every year over the two years I was at this middle school.
00:33:34
Speaker
I encountered a handful of kids who couldn't decode.
00:33:37
Speaker
I encountered many children who could decode entire paragraphs and not tell me what they meant.
Holistic Literacy Approaches
00:33:44
Speaker
And that to me...
00:33:47
Speaker
is just as disturbing as a kid who can't sound out a word.
00:33:50
Speaker
Right.
00:33:51
Speaker
And that means they're just playing along to get along.
00:33:55
Speaker
I don't know if that's the phrase, but you know, it's like, they're trying just to like, they've learned the game of decoding, but they haven't learned what it means.
00:34:02
Speaker
And reading then becomes uninteresting and, and,
00:34:06
Speaker
and not meaningful to them.
00:34:07
Speaker
And that's what whole language advocates would want to caution against, right?
00:34:11
Speaker
An overprivileging on decoding such that it misses, they miss the point of what reading is, right?
00:34:18
Speaker
Right.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you're getting at how everything can work together, right?
00:34:22
Speaker
It's not inevitable that things have to be at loggerheads.
00:34:26
Speaker
I mean, the way I saw the 3-queuing system described as being used as dogmatic in and of itself, that was problematic, but that's never how I've been told to use it.
00:34:36
Speaker
When I read Fountas and Pinnell, that's never been the vibe I've gotten from reading them, which is interesting.
00:34:44
Speaker
It's a way to think about things.
00:34:48
Speaker
But again, I'm not ready to die on the sort of 3Q system in and of itself.
00:34:53
Speaker
In fact, at the end of the day, I really, really, really like a developmental approach to writing and reading that sees writing and reading together and a focus on phonological awareness, which is the awareness that sounds...
00:35:07
Speaker
that language is made out of sounds and words, right?
00:35:09
Speaker
And then getting to the realization that these sounds and words can have meaning is in and of itself a big aha, right?
00:35:15
Speaker
So maybe we talk a little bit about how we might approach reading ourselves.
00:35:21
Speaker
I mean, I imagine that people might be interested.
00:35:24
Speaker
I think one more thing to kind of get at, just one more point I was thinking I wanted to bring up and give us,
00:35:31
Speaker
Knowing we're making a podcast and we're wanting to make this because I think we both – we talk about pedagogy of the distressed, why we feel distressed as teachers is I think we worry that parents are going to listen to this.
00:35:44
Speaker
They're going to internalize anytime my –
00:35:48
Speaker
teacher asks my child to look at a picture or use context for meaning, they're teaching them bad reading skills because that's really what she said.
00:35:58
Speaker
Like the research is framed that the three queuing system is not only not the best approach to teach kids how to decode.
00:36:06
Speaker
It is in fact teaching them poor teachers.
00:36:09
Speaker
reading skills and that she says like bad readers quote unquote do those three things they're not the hallmark of good readers and so she adds this level of of fear and a little bit of hysteria which i feel like
00:36:28
Speaker
accompanies what concerns us so much about things like the reading wars where things swing so far from one direction to the other, right?
00:36:36
Speaker
It also revolves around other, you know, culture wars in our society that really rally around fear, right?
00:36:47
Speaker
And especially around children, right?
00:36:50
Speaker
who are, you know, some of the most vulnerable people in our society, you know, it's like, feels like the stakes are really high, especially when parents listen and they hear they don't like, nobody wants their child to be behind.
00:37:03
Speaker
And of course, like that's stratified that has different meanings for different, you know, children based on their community and their identity and their context.
00:37:10
Speaker
Right.
00:37:12
Speaker
And I think that what I really took issue with was just this,
00:37:19
Speaker
kind of false fear she's drumming up because not once did I hear a statistic quoted that all of a sudden we're graduating classes and classes across, you know, different contexts, across like races, across like public school, you know, it's like, like we are graduating lower and lower rates across all different contexts of children who can't, like we're seeing people graduating from high school and testing very low on like reading assessments.
00:37:46
Speaker
Right.
00:37:46
Speaker
It's like, that's not,
00:37:48
Speaker
That information wasn't shared, nor has there been a discussion about that, right, in research.
00:37:56
Speaker
So it's kind of like she presents this problem that children aren't learning how to read.
00:38:00
Speaker
Like that's her thesis without any demonstration that that's actually happening.
00:38:07
Speaker
And I feel like so often education can be a field really ripe for critique from everybody because everybody, especially people who have parents who have children in the system, but even people who have gone to school themselves feel like they can have a perspective on it because they went to school, right?
00:38:30
Speaker
Or they...
00:38:33
Speaker
see it, even if they don't have children in school, they feel like they have stakes in it because it's like the future of society depends on our education system.
00:38:40
Speaker
And I think this like way that it, science of reading is being drummed up as like the only, like this necessary intervention is, is harmful in that it pits researchers against each other.
00:38:56
Speaker
It pits the,
00:38:57
Speaker
students and it pits like parents against teachers um and it even though she's said a few times throughout she doesn't want to demonize teachers she does it in a way to say well they didn't know what they were doing like you know like if it's not demonizing it's like deprofessionalizing it's kind of dehumanizing they just didn't know like pitying almost right yeah i mean that yeah it doesn't really invite collaboration i can tell you that
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
Just from my experience working with science of reading people in the past.
00:39:28
Speaker
Quote unquote science of reading.
00:39:29
Speaker
And I just, yeah, to think now, okay, about like the future and like where I did find alignment.
00:39:34
Speaker
And like I said, she missed the story to me.
00:39:37
Speaker
critique, please critique these people that are coming in and making mega, mega bucks off of schools, you know, like, please critique them and please think about why teachers aren't making more like why children are there's, we spend so much money per pupil on children, especially in our under-resourced districts, you know, like relative, like we spend federal dollars, you know, at, at high, high, not high, but you know, like we spend federal dollars like in, in certain schools, you know,
00:40:06
Speaker
But they often, this money goes into, often in my experience, from what I've seen, it's like funding coaching, funding professional development.
00:40:15
Speaker
And it doesn't go into investing into teachers directly.
00:40:19
Speaker
It doesn't pay for a higher salary.
00:40:22
Speaker
It doesn't cut our workload.
00:40:24
Speaker
The number one thing I think most teachers would like to see is just smaller class sizes.
00:40:27
Speaker
Class sizes haven't shrunk.
00:40:29
Speaker
It's like...
00:40:31
Speaker
It's like, to me, go for that in general.
00:40:35
Speaker
And science of reading plays into that.
00:40:38
Speaker
There are plenty of people peddling science of reading PDs, science of reading curricula, and this mandate to be...
00:40:50
Speaker
I was like, you are really smart with your critiques of fidelity to curriculum, but like the demand, demand, fidelity, fealty.
00:40:59
Speaker
What would you say?
00:41:00
Speaker
Demand fidelity.
00:41:02
Speaker
That's how people say.
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:04
Speaker
Demand fidelity to their curricula in such a way that like you can't do anything else, but exactly what's written down on the paper.
00:41:09
Speaker
Critique that.
00:41:12
Speaker
Critique that that happens in education and that it disproportionately affects... Regardless of the ideology.
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:18
Speaker
It disproportionately affects urban and under-resourced districts.
00:41:22
Speaker
And it's like, talk about that.
00:41:27
Speaker
Talk about whose research gets privileged.
00:41:28
Speaker
Talk about
00:41:30
Speaker
researchers of color not being listened to talk about qualitative research not being taken up seriously you know it's like yeah talking about research and coming from teachers not being taken up seriously you know um i would love to hear more of that and yeah yeah anyway so to me it was just like
00:41:50
Speaker
Same old, same old Reading Wars stuff repackaged with an extra sense of fear.
00:41:57
Speaker
And to me, what causes it distress is it's like packaging seemingly to the public.
00:42:03
Speaker
It's like made as a publicly consumed podcast, right?
00:42:07
Speaker
That's designed for anyone to listen to and take their talking points away from and make change in their districts.
00:42:14
Speaker
So that's where I'm at with it.
00:42:16
Speaker
What were you thinking about while I was ranting?
00:42:22
Speaker
No, I think we're landing a little deeper into what about this bothers us, right?
00:42:26
Speaker
It's not that it bothers us.
00:42:27
Speaker
I feel that, of course, phonics is important.
00:42:32
Speaker
But it's this idea that there's a way again, like there's teaching is such a science and an art.
00:42:43
Speaker
And for me, teaching is fundamentally about asking questions and answering them.
00:42:46
Speaker
So what is it about our kids that are struggling to read?
00:42:48
Speaker
Maybe we will take more of a systematic approach.
00:42:52
Speaker
Right.
00:42:52
Speaker
You know, that does work for lots of kids.
00:42:54
Speaker
Lots of kids that just learn to read because they learn to read.
00:42:57
Speaker
Reading isn't a natural process, right?
00:42:59
Speaker
I mean, I will say, and we're definitely not going to get into next, like what we would do.
00:43:03
Speaker
That could be a part two if we want.
00:43:05
Speaker
But it's of interest to people.
00:43:08
Speaker
But I will say in my 11 years of teaching, I've never, I've never, I have had children come into kindergarten.
00:43:14
Speaker
And I work with two to five-year-olds now.
00:43:17
Speaker
But for eight years, they taught in first grade, second grade, and kindergarten for the most part.
00:43:21
Speaker
I never had a child who got to kindergarten who had trouble reading, who already could identify the sounds from hearing them, who could identify words when they rhymed, who could make rhyme, that could do all of that.
00:43:31
Speaker
Again, without even looking at a page, that's phonological awareness.
00:43:35
Speaker
And it's interesting, that's very, very absent from all of the talk about science, quote, quote of readings.
00:43:41
Speaker
Again, the strongest science of reading is phonological awareness.
00:43:44
Speaker
Google it.
00:43:45
Speaker
That is definitely the strongest.
00:43:48
Speaker
And lots of times skipping the phonics too quickly results, hampers kids growth.
00:43:52
Speaker
But that's, that can be a topic for the next one, which informs my approach in general.
00:43:57
Speaker
And, but I have had kids come into kindergarten who knew all their letters, but really struggled to identify the first sound in their name when they heard it, who really struggled to identify the last sound in a word when they heard it.
00:44:09
Speaker
And those kids, most of the time were the ones who struggled the most to read, even if they knew their letters.
00:44:15
Speaker
Because they didn't have that fundamental understanding of sound and sound manipulation that is so important for reading that happens.
00:44:22
Speaker
So again, I would take science, quote unquote, science of reading more seriously if it actually more explicitly talked about that.
00:44:32
Speaker
It was more explicitly part of their approach.
00:44:35
Speaker
And second of all,
00:44:37
Speaker
who I would really love for it to be more of a collaboration.
00:44:40
Speaker
I mean, imagine if you go into a school and it feels like, wow, they're really going to 3Q system.
00:44:46
Speaker
What about the 3Q system is so compelling to you?
00:44:48
Speaker
Oh, it's simple and stuff.
00:44:49
Speaker
Okay, well, let me show you this way of thinking that they consider and then have things speak for themselves.
00:44:55
Speaker
The downside of that is that it takes a little time.
00:44:57
Speaker
But ironically, spending the time to plant the seeds, the tree
00:45:02
Speaker
people with respect and to let people see for themselves how things work over like in a decade from now I would imagine a lot of success because everyone is part of that conversation and growing whereas as here down here's this way of thinking down your throat like I wouldn't 10 years from now will actually probably not be as where we want to be I mean a reminder to people that were what was it the 80s when a lot of this started late 80s we're 20 yeah I was 30 years into this
00:45:31
Speaker
I was doing some cursory research and there's a very famous book from the fifties called why Johnny can't read.
00:45:36
Speaker
And it was person taking down what was the whole word approach, which was advocating that students learn whole words, not, you know, phonics, no, not the discreet, you know, I don't know.
00:45:48
Speaker
Phonemes.
00:45:48
Speaker
I don't know.
00:45:50
Speaker
And this person like said that, you know, they needed, you need to focus more on, you know, phonological awareness and it brought in a wave of, you know,
00:46:00
Speaker
phonics first kind of systemic, systematic approaches to teaching reading, right?
00:46:07
Speaker
And so that happened in the 50s, late 50s, I think, and continued.
00:46:11
Speaker
And then in the 70s, like the whole language movement was born, right?
00:46:15
Speaker
And then in the 90s, it swung back the other way because there was some well-publicized districts that saw slides in their reading achievement, right?
00:46:24
Speaker
And, and, and,
00:46:26
Speaker
The last bone I'll pick about this podcast is she critiques the idea that research in education became politicized so that phonics-based approaches to teaching reading became associated with a conservative agenda in the United States, specifically tied to the politics of George Bush.
00:46:47
Speaker
Education research has always been politicized.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:51
Speaker
And it's not that old.
00:46:52
Speaker
And she said, oh, a lot of teachers like miss the science of reading because they associated it with George Bush.
00:46:57
Speaker
And it's like, well, let's think about.
00:47:00
Speaker
Do you want to talk about.
00:47:03
Speaker
What else was happening?
00:47:04
Speaker
It's like even just looking at education agenda.
00:47:06
Speaker
He was publishing like he was advocating for like failing schools and using test scores.
00:47:13
Speaker
He like ushered in this like massive like right.
00:47:17
Speaker
boost and standardized testing and like grading teachers based on how their children did on standardized testing, which many researchers have critiqued as racist, like ableist, like a whole litany of things that are not good for children.
00:47:31
Speaker
Right.
00:47:32
Speaker
And it's like, why a bit?
00:47:33
Speaker
Sorry.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:35
Speaker
I'm like, I got really tired of it.
00:47:37
Speaker
I'm not going to call someone out.
00:47:38
Speaker
I'm not going to say it.
00:47:39
Speaker
I shouldn't do it.
00:47:41
Speaker
But I need to be civil.
00:47:43
Speaker
But like, it's like, that's why.
00:47:46
Speaker
And she did not mention once.
00:47:48
Speaker
No Child Left Behind did not pass her lips.
00:47:50
Speaker
And I'm just like.
00:47:53
Speaker
you know.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a little weird to me.
00:47:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:56
Speaker
Like, if you're going to report on something, like, maybe analyze a little more why something's not being a, yeah.
00:48:04
Speaker
There's a lot missing there that leaves me with many questions about what's going on there.
Call for Collaborative Educational Reform
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
But, like, to summarize, I'm going to keep repeating this, say, you and I are all about teaching kids to read it, all the different ways they learn to read it.
00:48:19
Speaker
It's just, like, let us be able to do that.
00:48:22
Speaker
And why we want to talk, like, just a plug for this podcast.
00:48:27
Speaker
Like, it's like, let's listen more to people who have worked with learners trying to do the things, like teaching them to read, that you –
00:48:44
Speaker
are advocating for.
00:48:46
Speaker
Right.
00:48:46
Speaker
It's like, why only we all want, we all want the same thing in that way.
00:48:49
Speaker
You know, we do want people to read.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:52
Speaker
And we need to listen to more people in practice, how they learn, how people learn matters.
00:48:56
Speaker
I think that's also process product is being emphasized way more of a process, but you know, that's a very capitalist American way of seeing things.
00:49:03
Speaker
And I don't think that's unrelated to other things such as racism and white supremacy and all that jazz.
00:49:09
Speaker
I really buried the lead on that, right?
00:49:11
Speaker
I should have mentioned up front that she had first talked about No Child Left Behind.
00:49:15
Speaker
Like, maybe I lost it.
00:49:18
Speaker
People made it this far.
00:49:19
Speaker
She probably didn't talk about standardized testing and the regime of standardized testing he ushered in.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
So anyway.
00:49:29
Speaker
Anyway.
00:49:32
Speaker
We just want more complexity and to hold complexity.
00:49:35
Speaker
But the system struggles with that.
00:49:37
Speaker
Yeah, it does.
00:49:39
Speaker
So many places we could go.
00:49:40
Speaker
And the way people think they need to advocate for themselves, unfortunately, is also born of this system that pits people against each other.
00:49:48
Speaker
Exactly.
00:49:49
Speaker
And asks you to demonize people, even though you say you're not demonizing people.
00:49:53
Speaker
It's like inevitably...
00:49:56
Speaker
you know, it just, yeah.
00:49:59
Speaker
I would welcome a conversation with Emily Hanford.
00:50:02
Speaker
I would call it Emily to Emily.
00:50:03
Speaker
And we would talk about, you could be the moderator and I could fight her.
00:50:09
Speaker
No, I'm just kidding.
00:50:11
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:50:14
Speaker
The voice of reason, as I clearly got too fired up listening to this podcast.
00:50:18
Speaker
No, no, not the voice.
00:50:20
Speaker
No.
00:50:22
Speaker
We'll contain it together.
00:50:23
Speaker
I'm sure I'll have moments where I'm like... Yeah, I know.
00:50:27
Speaker
We'll have to take breaks.
00:50:28
Speaker
We'll tag in for each other to go shake our head and what?
00:50:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:36
Speaker
But yeah, we definitely not going to get to actual things.
00:50:38
Speaker
But we can think about if there's a part two.
00:50:40
Speaker
But it's exciting.
00:50:43
Speaker
I know.
00:50:43
Speaker
Are we getting to the end of this for now, you think?
00:50:46
Speaker
I think so.
00:50:46
Speaker
Thanks for letting me rant and tell you about a fun... I don't know why I said fun.
00:50:52
Speaker
A painful experience I had on my road trip.
00:50:57
Speaker
I always appreciate your thoughts.
00:50:58
Speaker
You really helped process and bring to light things that I wanted to take from that.
00:51:05
Speaker
critique so yeah I'm looking forward to our next conversation I know I know me too and for those listening we do have an email we don't check it we do we could check it again what if there's an email in it what the email oh can you imagine about the podcast that we never ever ever posted about yeah the ghost about the ghost in the email yeah
00:51:35
Speaker
um but anyway it's pedagogy of the distressed at gmail.com uh but if that's too difficult that's an email right yeah pedagogy of the distressed yeah pedagogy like the podcast name at gmail at gmail.com so yeah the podcast name that hopefully you can see yeah um
00:51:59
Speaker
But please send us an email with that pedagogy.
00:52:01
Speaker
See, I already misspelled it.
00:52:02
Speaker
That's the issue with this long email.
00:52:07
Speaker
What was the password?
00:52:09
Speaker
We shouldn't say it on... Yeah, we don't want to get hacked from all of our listeners.
00:52:17
Speaker
But do you feel a little less distressed at the moment, Emily?
00:52:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:22
Speaker
It was really helpful to process.
00:52:24
Speaker
And I just need to not get caught up in it because I think the thing that happens in these situations, in this polarized world we live in, you know, is that...
00:52:33
Speaker
You know, we think that, you know, when we're in our car just processing everything, it can feel lonely, you know, that everyone's against you and what you think is right.
00:52:48
Speaker
When really I think we have more companionship and, you know,
00:52:56
Speaker
people who share our values and approaches in key ways than, you know, we always understand.
00:53:03
Speaker
And that's why I love talking with you because I always feel so affirmed and I can't wait for more conversations that do that.
00:53:10
Speaker
Me, likewise.
00:53:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:13
Speaker
Very life-giving.
00:53:14
Speaker
I was so excited for today.
00:53:15
Speaker
Me too.
00:53:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:16
Speaker
With that, thank you all.
00:53:18
Speaker
Hasta luego.
00:53:20
Speaker
Bye.
00:53:21
Speaker
And we'll see you next time on Pedagogy of the Distressed.
00:53:24
Speaker
Con Rafa y Elmo.
00:53:26
Speaker
Ciao.
00:53:27
Speaker
Cute outro music.