Silent Letters, Silenced Teachers
A Work of Speculative Fiction with Simulated Illustration
A government-grade phonics workbook sits open on each of the twenty-nine cramped desks as Mrs. Biddlebaum from Winesburg, Ohio, bravely works through the day's decoding exercise. She scans the faces of her first-grade students and, discounting the boy who always looks sleepy, confirms that everyone is ready to begin. She shivers inwardly as she feels a cold psychic breeze.
"Let's say the short e sound together, class. Remember, it's the sound in 'bed' and 'pet'," she says, hopefully. She models the impoverished sound, the sound that gets swallowed in unaccented syllables: /ĕ/. The doomed, ambiguous schwa. She knew not the schwa from a unicorn until mandated training on site began. The tongue mid, central, relaxed, the half-open acoustic chamber of cheeks and molars, the troubled vowel that every other vowel collapses on in a swiftly flowing speech stream. The little vowel that keeps her awake at night counting phonemes like sheep in a desperate invitation to the sandman.
The class responds with a scattered, uncertain chorus, a resonant, jaggerish choir of coughs and chokes.
"Hmm, I need a better /ĕ/ from everyone. Sit up. Pay attention. The short e is tricky because it's not as tense as other vowels—it's not like /ah/. Say /ah/ like a sore throat /ah/. Feel the muscles working, the jaw dropping—/ah/, /ah/. The shape for eating a hot dog. The short e puts my mouth in the shape of a dog’s mouth when it’s panting. See? Let's try again, panting: /ĕ/!"
Perhaps she would do better sticking to the script, closing her eyes to the children, pushing ahead to assessment.
These materials represented a neutral, scientific approach to teaching reading carted into the classroom—a medical-grade toolkit for immunizing everyone against dreaded dyslexia, so well-proven nobody need cite evidence anymore; by citing evidence, one incited doubt.
The technician in her valued how the science opens words up like good, dependable wrist watches tick-tick-tick—or maybe deep down even the technician saw the proof in the pudding—but now maybe she sort of believed this methodical approach benefits all students equally. She must believe. After the new law went into effect, the orientation speaker in the cafeteria spoke ominously about fidelity and ethical professional obligations.
***
Louise, her grade level partner, was depressed. Louise claimed that Mrs. Biddlebaum’s required belief in phonics as a neutral, scientific approach to teaching reading was designed by way of social engineering through political maneuvering aided and abetted by Sold a Story, podcast from a journalist who became famous by peddling horror stories of soldiers shot in war zones and the like because their teachers never taught them to read communiques, phonics as a matter of national security. Read for America, Reading Rockets, the Common Core State Standards, the Reading League, who knew who else. She, of course, Cindy Biddlebaum, was not a conspiracy theorist as a first-grade teacher.
Mrs. Biddlebaum was not drawn toward cynical arguments, though she thought maybe there could be a conspiracy. She recognized that publishers stood to make profits from mandates, that phonics scientists gained respect and admiration for speaking truth to mainstream power. In her heart she had an unshakeable faith in the goodness of others. Yet something larger than a book club or a disgruntled grandmother had set these phonic wheels turning.
Phonics was hardly emotional before—perhaps conspiratorial? Who knew? She claimed no personal interest in phonics. If more of it helped, she would do it. Of course. These laws were written backed by scientists, nor mere mortals, she was told. Her job was to believe, not to question.
Her belief frayed after monthly quasi-administrative visits to her room from district literacy coaches who inspected her records, examined the phonics posters on her walls, and watched her teach like hungry hawks from a mile away. Heaven forbid she inadvertently said “buh, buh” instead of /b/, /b/. She rarely saw the same coach twice.
Some of her fellow teachers called them intruders, who never announced their visits, the phonics police. Her fellow teachers were happily unhappy, cheerfully cheerless, victorious in their defeat. Her fellow teachers went silent like a final e or the -gh in bought when an administrator who had been sold a story was within earshot.
This all happened shortly after the law passed, the undercover literacy coaches, the government-certified science-based phonics workbooks, the pedagogical police. She came to fear the schwa, the panting dog, the default vowel, the fly in the ointment.
She feared the police might crash through her door on schwa day.
***
Oh, she’d been lectured at first, sometimes sternly, on a science of reading. The certified trainers contrasted science darkly with balanced instruction, an archaic, quasi-demonic method from before based on fake science published pre-1984. Ignore those who believe in the semantic system, which is a fickle distraction. Ignore those who believe in the syntactic system, which is far, far afield, better taught in middle school. Beware of children’s books with illustrations.
The virtue lay, she concluded, in unbalanced instruction.
Phonics experts projected colorful graphs on screens showing statistical significance—whatever that was (Louise knew, Louise knew everything)—and colorful brain scans that revealed neural pathways of skilled readers on fire with vibrant evidence of phonological processing. It was all very impressive.
Her methods courses in teacher training school trained her to seek out "evidence-based practices." We must work together to avoid devolving to Whole Language, she was trained, using two words never spoken together at a school meeting. Reading as a guessing game? A misguided path at best, misanthropic at worst.
At first, a vocal few joined Louise in questioning the research during pre-credential training in training school, but the professor silenced them, always respectfully. Louise was one of the holdouts. The professor liked Louise, you could tell—she was smart and always asked great questions—until she stopped speaking. Professor explained there was too much to learn to waste time debating settled questions.
Besides, this was a teaching methods class, not a research methods class.
***
Before the change in the law, district-mandated professional development reinforced her methods professor, featuring consultants with politically neutral and sterile interventions. Things were optional. When there was no law, teachers like Louise couldn’t be so easily silenced. Now teachers were silent letters, no longer permitted to do what they thought best for each child. There were the phonics cops, writing up unbalanced behavior on yellow slips, handing those slips in to headquarters.
The CCSS curriculum guide that accompanied her government-grade workbooks used the language of objectivity—discussing "phonemic awareness" and "decoding fluency" as measurable brain skills, not as children learning to read. Each scripted lesson plan in the materials included benchmark CCSS assessments that validated the approach.
The materials made it easy for teachers to comply. Anyone who could read could teach reading. No one worried about what, exactly, they should be teaching, to whom—nor when. Precision tools rendered teacher thinking not just obsolete, but dangerous. Social justice and equity demanded fidelity.
State-sponsored reading standards and high-stakes tests rewarded those who did the right thing with the discrete skills the workbooks taught. The tests aligned perfectly with the workbooks. School improvement plans tagged "direct, explicit, systematic phonics instruction" as a key driver of reading scores. Beyond the uniformed police, her classroom evaluations by the principal focused on fidelity to the phonics program. Mrs. Biddlebaum was dejected when she learned that she was no longer allowed to choose the subject she would teach for her formal evaluation. She prided herself on teaching math.
No longer. It doubly demoralized her because she knew it shouldn’t. She was a professional. When she was hired, she had a conference with the principal at the start of each school year. They discussed the area of pedagogy she would like to focus on that year. Her formal evaluation came in the area.
Now, all teachers were evaluated based on reading instruction. Choice was dead.
***
She wasn’t sure if others associated the word “fidelity” with religion as she did, a bit unsettling, this speaking in tongues, but the tone of recent staff development meetings took on a church-like feel when joyous emotions ran high. There was the chanting of open syllables, the sizzling of sibilance, the looking into mirrors to watch the tongue gyrate from panting dogs to eating hot dogs.
She heard routine ideological assumptions, which troubled her, the kinds of things Louise bristled at, things like actively disregarding meaning in reading, things like teaching nonsense words, things like knowledge flows one way from one teacher to individuals in a crowd, things like collaboration in joint activity creates dependency, like standard English pronunciation represents correctness while other dialects signal deficiency, like reading is an individual rather than a social practice.
The carefully sequenced letter-sound correspondences, decontextualized word lists, the high-frequency sight words, the standardized phonics inventories all began to speak to Mrs. Biddlebaum about values, about power and authority, about how learning activities can never be scripted ahead of time—about who really counts in a classroom. Nothing against phonics at all, no bad feelings about phonemes or sight words or syllables, in fact, a real curiosity to learn more about linguistics. But in the classroom she preferred to attend to her students.
As students dutifully traced letters and uttered sounds, they absorbed not just phonemic awareness, but also compliance, discipline, self-denial—all while many of her colleagues remained convinced they were simply teaching children how to read, all while she, the teacher, was also dutifully repeating sounds like an automaton.
***
Mrs. Biddlebaum noticed signs in student behavior that concerned her. She’d been duly notified not to notice things. Noticing is illegal in phonics if it means going off script. Some of the children fidgeted during the twenty minutes devoted to government-issued phonics instruction. She tried to act strict and authoritarian, a posture that wasn’t natural, and couldn’t stand herself afterwards.
She began to wonder if scientists knew anything about first graders. Some, a small number of students, struggled mightily to get through each item on the day’s worksheets. It broke her heart not to have time to work with them in small-group centers as her master teacher had done during her student teaching experience. Others answered items instantly and waited patiently for the next item. Others hated it. It was in their eyes and body. Expect this, she had been told during training.
Stand firm. Tough love. She was assured that everything was normal.
“Those fidgety children will come back to thank you for this when they get to college,” the trainer said. “All children can use phonics, and phonics doesn’t hurt anyone.”
Trust the science.
***
At 11:40, Louise appeared in her doorway, lunch bag in hand. “Want some company for lunch?”
“I could use some company,” Mrs. Biddlebaum nodded, gesturing to the neat stack of workbooks. "Just in time. The /ĕ/ sound nearly broke me today."
Louise closed the door behind her. Something in her posture changed as soon as it clicked shut, a softening around the eyes, a drop in her shoulders. She sat at the reading table.
"I thought you might need this." Louise pulled out an extra chocolate from her lunch bag. "Emergency teacher rations."
"That obvious, huh?" Cindy accepted the chocolate.
"The walls have eyes, but they don't have ears." Louise said, unwrapping her sandwich. "I saw the literacy coach heading to your room this morning. Third one this week. Did they come here?"
"No, thank God, not on Schwa Day. The last one actually corrected my pronunciation of voiced bilabial stops. In front of the children." She unwrapped the chocolate slowly. "You never seem worried about them."
"Oh, I worry." Louise's smile faded. "Seven years teaching, masters in reading development, and suddenly I know nothing. Before this law passed, I had the highest reading scores in the district."
"I didn't know you cared about test scores. You railed against them in Professor Wesson’s class. Remember when he silenced you?"
"I know. I don’t trust the validity of the tests they use. I’m not being completely logical about this." Louise's voice dropped. "My kids read—really read. I’m not changing that. We are doing the worksheets, of course. Twenty minutes, three days a week. The police have my schedule. I don’t expect them to come around on other days."
"That sounds like what my master teacher did during my student teaching."
"Before she was re-educated?" Louise arched an eyebrow.
Cindy smiled. “I have lost touch with her. I need to reconnect.”
"Last night my daughter asked why I don't read bedtime stories the way I used to,” Louise said. 'You sound like a robot, Mom.' Even at home, I'm starting to script myself."
The silence between them felt unexpectedly comfortable, heartening.
"What do you do," Cindy asked, "when your door is closed?"
Louise met her eyes.
"I balance as I’ve always done. I follow the program, but I make time for what my students actually need. Jamal needs more work with vowel teams, but Sofia needs to build a metacognitive mindset—amazing reader for a first grader. That little phonics corner in my room? I meet with three kids at a time for phonics—well, three cueing work which is phonics though not just phonics—while the others are doing independent reading. Real books."
"Isn't that dangerous?"
"Politically yes, but we have tenure, remember." Louise shrugged. "Look, you know I'm not against phonics. That’s insane. I'm against turning teachers into technicians who can't respond to the humans in front of them."
Cindy thought about her own quiet rebellions, the extra five minutes of read-aloud, the free reading periods she’s not supposed to have, the illustrated books she smuggled into the room.
"I worry about you being so... angry," Cindy said. “It takes a toll on your mental health.”
"I am angry," Louise said, gathering her lunch wrappings. "My daughter says I’m reading to her like a robot. But I'm also still teaching. They can mandate programs, but they can't mandate teaching. The door closes, and you're the teacher again."
The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. Louise rose from her chair.
"Same time tomorrow?" Louise asked, pausing at the door.
Mrs. Biddlebaum nodded.
"Bring more chocolate."
Another masterpiece, Terry. This narrative rings so true from my experience as a first grader with the dreaded red phonics workbook, to my years as an elementary school teacher, and the reading wars as a whole language/three cue system proponent — as a principal, to leading cohorts of student teachers at two major universities, to becoming an international literacy consultant.
Wonderful! I love your big picture, and such an accurate fictionalized account. I knew a "Louise" at one of my client school districts. A kindergarten teacher, she annually turned in reading scores that floated high above any other K classes in the district. Even though her students at this Title 1 school were composed of both English language learners and students speaking English as a 1st language, there was no "achievement gap" visible in student performance. Amazed, I asked to observe her class. To my astonishment, she was already taking the language-teaching actions I was hired by the district to share. She provided visual support, held lots and lots of one to one conversations, invited group responses, broke up learning times with physical activities and, most important, used her own language to scaffold what her students were trying to say. When I asked her where she had learned these marvelous actions she said that she just watched her students and kept doing what seems to be helping them the most. Hooray intact feedback loop.