I just finished reading Anthony Pedriana’s Leaving Johnny Behind, an enormously important and under-appreciated book that I discovered by chance, thanks to a post on Facebook. (Social media certainly does serve a purpose other than being a black hole of procrastination from time to time!) The author is a retired teacher and principal who, quite by chance, found himself at the center of the reading wars: in an attempt to boost the reading performance of a class that was falling behind, Pedriana went against everything he had been taught and permitted one of the teachers in his school to im ..read more

Notes from a bookseller’s daughter Books were an integral part of my childhood. Not just because my family valued reading, but also because my dad managed bookstores. Some of my earliest memories are of my little brother and me running up and down the stacks after closing hours giggling and screaming. Of course, not everyone giggled at the sight of books, my mom often grumbled about his penchant for filling the house with them, but the book tsunami was unstoppable! To sum it up, I never wanted for books and could easily challenge you to find another person who had more of a print-rich environm ..read more

Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen is a fictional German nobleman created by writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785. The Baron’s fantastical and ludicrously impossible exploits have delighted children and movie goers for decades. Munchausen is known for his wild, outlandish stories, told in the first person, and his bravado and daring––taking part in such activities as riding a cannonball and traveling to the moon. Far less whimsical is the Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. The syndrome, named for Munchausen, also called Factitious Disorder, is a very dark mental health condition wherei ..read more

This column has been working itself out through my brain for months now. It starts here. Some years back I assessed a 5th-grade student, Jessica, and was very impressed with her skills. She could read seemingly effortlessly to the 12th grade level, and her math skills for all basics were at a high school level as well. She was going to prepare to take a test to enter a very competitive private school. When her mom returned to talk about the assessment told her how impressed I was with Jessica’s skills. But she shocked me by saying, “Yes, she can read to the 12th grade level, but her ..read more

A Child is Not a Mollusk. That sounds like a really enticing Lewis Carroll poem—I’d half expect a walrus to come waddling into that title, or maybe a march hare. I’m here to bring up the constructivist Walrus in the room or, rather, in the classroom. We all learn about the theoretical work of Jean Piaget in psychology 101. Biologist, epistemologist, and darling of developmental psychology. Piaget’s work, though not intended as a pedagogy, has come to influence thousands of schools around the world. The idea of a traditional school experience, at least in the United states, has been bound to th ..read more

Some learned to bake sourdough bread. Some took on home improvement projects. However, when it came time for me to choose a pandemic project, I decided to be a precision teacher. Unfortunately, it is not Instagram friendly, so I will simply write about it. Let me introduce myself. I am a seasoned teacher with thirteen years in the NYC public school system with licenses in French and ESL. In fact, according to the NYC ratings system devised by the infamous Charlotte Danielson, I am even considered a highly effective teacher. I have also had skin in the game long enough to watch t ..read more

A few weeks ago, after emerging from a multi-month bout with pneumonia, I decided to try cooking a recipe from one of my favorite contenders on Britain’s Best Home Cook. The first time I made the recipe, zucchini and sweet potato fritters with avocado to be exact, it was something of a disaster when it came to flipping the fritters in the boiling hot oil. Flecks of olive oil-coated sweet potato covered my walls, and I was down a frying pan. The fritters looked terrible, but they tasted incredible, and so I tried again with slightly better results. The fritters were still not holding together t ..read more

Tess practicing! There are increasingly wonderful pieces now on the web about reading instruction. Each of them possess strong and thoughtful ideas about how to teach reading down to the tiny elements that make it work. This is an enormous improvement over the previous “mysterious and magical” way that teachers thought children learned to read. “Give the child an authentic text and she/he will automatically LEARN” was a dangerous and widely believed poison that harmed almost half of our children. Now we know about all these elements that function as the critical pieces of learning to read. Bu ..read more

One of Richard McManus’s favorite stories about a student involves a young girl who was brought to the Fluency Factory to prepare for a private-school admissions exam. She was clearly very bright, and when she was asked to read aloud, she did so quite fluently. Richard assumed that she’d ace the test with little trouble. When he told this to her mother, however, the woman’s response was that her daughter sounded fine but in fact understood almost nothing of what she read.  Richard was baffled. Luckily, though his friend Jean Tucker—a speech-language pathologist, reading specialist, and cr ..read more

In the summer of 2020, the well-known researcher Louisa Moats published an article in AFT magazine entitled “Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science,” in which she laid out the daunting series of challenges involved in turning children into skilled readers.  For the record, I have immense respect for Dr. Moats; and from what I know of her LETRS program, it seems extraordinarily well done and highly effective. She’s done more to advance SoR-based approaches and to train teachers than almost anyone else around.  And yet, I have to disagree with her on this one—or at least with her (or perha ..read more