The Questions Lyn Stone Never Answered
I recently read a post by Lyn Stone in which she expressed concern about Lucy Calkins appearing at a reading conference. Stone wrote that she is "interested in accountability before reconciliation" and suggested that before being welcomed, Calkins should publicly acknowledge where she was wrong, apologise for the damage caused, and explain what she is doing now to correct it.
On that principle, I have no disagreement.
Enough is Enough – The Gatekeeping Must Stop
After more than 15 years tutoring dyslexic and struggling readers one-on-one – watching kids light up when confusion clears and they finally read fluently – I'm done holding back.
I've poured my observations into this blog since 2010, only to face silence, blocks, and herd-like defensiveness from the "experts" in the Science of Reading (SoR) and structured literacy world. Parents are desperate, kids are suffering needless disengagement, and yet the echo chambers on Twitter/X rage on, protecting egos, products, and flawed dogmas. It's time to call it out plainly: We're creating "dysteachia" – preventable reading failure through poor instruction – and mislabeling it as incurable dyslexia. And the gatekeeping? It's a big disservice to every child who could thrive with simpler, common-sense fixes.
Different Perspectives: Tweets That Echo Across Continents
Good evening, readers. The reading wars don’t respect borders — they leap from U.S. threads to Aussie classrooms faster than a kangaroo on caffeine.
Tonight’s dispatch takes us Down Under to Narelle Lynch, a 19-year veteran teacher from Australia whose tweets on phonics pitfalls and the power of context have fueled fierce exchanges since 2020. Trained by the THRASS Institute — a multi-sensory literacy framework blending phonics, morphology, and more — Narelle champions a holistic approach: grammar, syntax, etymology, and real-world transferability over isolated sound drills.
Here are a few more comments I have on the podcast by Kate of IDA Ontario and Lyn Stone.
Sunk cost fallacy
People will keep investing in that thing rather than scrap it. We spent all this money and time and can’t possibly be wrong. The sunk cost fallacy exists and it makes you think that something is working when it is not working.
My comment:
Sunk cost fallacy is the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast by Kate of IDA Ontario and Lyn Stone from Australia.
The topic was: Literacy Myth-Busting with Lyn Stone (LINK)
The episode was propaganda against Balanced Literature and Whole Language and nothing more.
Hundreds of children didn’t progress because of instruction. (Lyn)
Here are extracts of an article by Stephen Parker and my comments. You may read the article here.
I have decided to break this up into bite sized posts.
Stephen Parker:
Orthographic mapping is the connection-making process that automatically creates sight words – words that are simply recognized at a glance, with decoding no longer necessary.
The connections that need to be made, according to Ehri, are between the letters seen in a word’s spelling and the sounds (phonemes) heard in that word’s pronunciation. This is precisely what decoding (sounding out) a word accomplishes. For most students, decoding a word successfully 2-5 times creates a new sight word.
I read a well written blog post by Lindsay Kemeny. Here are extracts and my comments on the article. (LINK)
I have always tried to be careful with how I bring this up, because people get so upset and defensive when confronted with the fact that there is no research to support these reading strategies and, even worse, they are doing harm to students. But my patience is wearing thin on this topic. Just when I think that the tide is turning and that the majority of educators now realize the problems surrounding 3 cueing, I hear an edu-celebrity tell teachers on Facebook to simply “tweak” the strategies instead of get rid of them or a reader emails me asking me to take down this post stating that it’s only my opinion and that 3 cueing works. This particular reader told me not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but 3 cueing is exactly what needs to be thrown out. I stand by what I said. There is no research to support these strategies and you don’t need to take my word for it. You can read about it here, here, and here.
Lyn Stone had blocked me for commenting on her tweet. Only recently have I seen her tweets again. Here is one such tweet I read yesterday and believe she does not know what she is talking about other than quoting what someone had said about 20 years ago.
Here is the URL to Lyn’s video clip and my comments.
