This is The Reading Instruction Show. I am your
host, as always, Dr. Andy Johnson. The title
of today's podcast is From There to Here. It
also could be Forward to the Past. Let me explain.
One of the first things I do every morning is
to engage in some form of academic reading. I
read books and journal articles. and I reread
the books and articles that I've read in the
past. And when I do this, I highlight passages
where I made marks in the margins. And with these
already read books, I also read the notes that
I wrote to myself in the margins and I often
write new notes to myself. My future self will
look back and see these. This process helps me
understand what I thought was important at the
time of the original reading. And it helps me
remember some important points. And I find it
extremely pleasurable, and it focuses my mind
for the writing that I do every day. Now, I was
re -reading Ken Goodman's On Reading. This is
a great book, by the way. As are all of his books.
He was talking about transactions between readers
and text. And I realized that one of the reasons
why so many people have been snookered by the
incessant bleeding, bleating for structured literacy,
as opposed to unstructured literacy or chaotic
literacy or random literacy, One of the reasons
why so many have been snookered and bleated at
is because we, us in the meaning -based literacy,
we've been writing and talking to ourselves.
We write the things that we believe to people
who believe the same sorts of things. And then
we wonder why people who believe other things
don't believe us. And there's a tendency for
us to exclude those who believe other things.
These are the ones who believe us to be clowns.
And a clown, by the way, is a person who thinks
they know a lot, but in fact they know very little.
And of course those who believe us to be clowns
are doing the same sorts of things to us. Send
in the clowns. I used to be an avid letter writer.
Get to the point, Dr. Clown. Okay, before email
I used to write a lot of letters to people, and
the people I wrote to most often were my Aunt
Emmy and Uncle Neil. My Aunt Emmy must have thought
I had something to say or she liked my writing
style, but she saved all my letters and sent
them to me recently. As I read through them,
I realized that I was wrestling with some deep
issues back then, as well as describing some
complex things based on the stuff I was reading.
But also my writing style sounded nothing like
my writing today. It sounded nothing like the
books in which these complex things I was reading
about were found. I also realized that my writing
was pretty gosh darn good. Illusions of grandeur
fully noted here. But I was writing to them.
I wasn't throwing out words and expecting invisible
people to figure them out. You didn't have to
read things twice to get my point. And I included
myself, a real person, open for debate, in the
writing. And I even threw in a joke here and
there. Today, the kinds of books that I find
fascinating are the same kinds of books that
I had to force myself to read back when I was
an undergraduate student so many years ago. These
books haven't changed a bit. But I have. Those
books were written to people like the current
me, with heads full of knowledge and a deep passion
for things the authors were writing about. They
weren't writing to a college kid who just wanted
to go out and drink a lot of beer. Writing to
you. Again, do you have a point here? Yes. One
of the reasons why people don't hear our very
reasonable voices and aren't attending to our
very reasonable arguments is that we're writing
to each other. And we're using the same kind
of writing we use to write to invisible people
who will review our work to make decisions about
accepting our articles or offering us book contracts.
We use a writing style that sounds very different
from the language that comes out of our mouths.
And I'm hoping those authors don't sound like
that in real life. In this style of writing,
the writer disappears behind objective pronouns
and second or third person language. The first
person, the writing person who's writing doesn't
exist. Now, of course, I want everybody in the
world to read the book I'm working on. But who
I really want to read this book are two people.
First, those who don't quite know what to believe,
and second, those who think me to be a clown.
I'm writing to you. but in so doing I'm not writing
down to you, I'm writing over to you. I understand
that I'm over here with my knowledge and set
of beliefs and you're over there with different
knowledge and a different set of beliefs or perhaps
a little knowledge and a set of forming beliefs.
My ultimate goal, and I admit this upfront, is
to move you a little closer from there to here.
That is, I want you to have some of the beliefs
that I have about reading instruction. I believe
that the utter clownery that is the science of
reading and structured literacy will go away
if you just have a bit of the knowledge that's
in my head. It's impossible to think things with
the knowledge in my head. One of the reasons
why the science of reading people have been so
successful is that they've been writing to the
people over there. They've used stories in radio
documentaries that sound very much like the way
people talk. They've enabled the people over
there to see and hear real people while our quiet,
very reasoned, third -person voice has been ignored.
So here's my letter. Dear Emmy and Neil, this
is all nonsense. It really is. It's like a bad
movie. It's like Back to the Future, except it's
forward to the past. The same sorts of Back to
the Basics movement has happened in the past,
but this time it's much worse. It's like I woke
up and my worst nightmares have come true. The
government is banning books. Professors are forced
to teach things that aren't true. Teachers are
told what to teach and how to teach it. And schools
can only use approved reading programs. And worst,
children don't read, write, and think. they respond
to letters. Now I know this kind of thing has
happened before to a lesser degree. Things like
the Reading First initiative that was part of
No Child Left Behind, these things have come
and then disappeared as they proved to be useless
and expensive. But it feels different this time.
And can we afford to lose a generation of kids
while this boondoggle plays out once again? Your
nephew, Andy.