The Miracle of Reading
Another Short Story in the Bubbles Series
Mrs. Moody’s Doubts
The sun had not yet risen when Bubbles parked in the front parking lot. As soon as he opened the car door, he smelled the pungent odor of a dairy farm.
“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Moody said, rising from her desk to meet Mr. Bubbles, who, nothing if not metacognitive, filtered out stating the obvious: He had no choice in the matter.
“It’s my job,” Bubbles said jovially, offering his hand, gathering his thoughts. Mrs. Moody had aged well, he thought, a happy surprise. He hadn’t seen her since the early in services on the Common Core several years ago.
Bubbles wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Moody’s classroom looked different from other classrooms. The feel was different, efficient, well organized. She was an outlier cut out for a one room school house with a garden and animals, an outlier in an outlier school near a dairy farm in the outlying countryside. Generations of migrant children had learned to sound out words in Moody’s room.
Bubbles had always respected her commitment to her students, her clarity of purpose. Teachers sometimes forget why they wanted to teach. He recalled comforting her during the time some fondly think of as Whole Language, assuring her that phonics wasn’t the baby in the bath water. Psycholinguists weren’t psychopathic. Literature-based reading instruction in second grade for Mrs. Moody was unthinkable, but words in literature relied on vowels and consonants as surely as the sun came up. She found her own way through an uncontrollable flow of vocabulary at the cost of isolating herself in her room.
The tables were quickly turning. Dyslexia was in the air, an epidemic inside the COVID epidemic. Curiously, he’d heard through the grapevine that she continued to read aloud literature from the district’s core literature list to her students during odd moments before recess or lunch. She didn’t have to. Even so, he would discover that she never let children hold a copy of the book to follow along with their eyes.
After pleasantries were made exchanged Bubbles turned to business. They talked about the Superintendent’s desire to accommodate Cassie if possible without transferring her to another teacher for obvious reasons.
“With teachers as polarized as they are now, I’ve been expecting something like this,” Bubbles said, sitting on a stool near her desk. “Kids are getting mixed messages. As a district it’s important to avoid the scheduling nightmare we would face.”
“The science is clear,” Moody said. “The science has been clear.”
“I put my money on expert clinical experience in regular classroom instruction grounded in teacher research,” Bubbles said. “Teachers ought to reserve the right to judge for themselves the appropriate application and limitations of scientific theories. Children are getting confused about reading, Caroline. In one room, subtract means add. In another, multiply means divide. Teachers have no right to confuse children because of their scientific theories.”
“This isn’t about mathematics,” she said, gesturing toward some bookshelves tucked into a corner. “Besides, science has some things to say about math instruction, too, things they don’t want to hear about.”
“No, but it is about academic language and instructional agreements among colleagues.”
“Colleagues?“
“Students change teachers every year. Teachers have to work together.”
“I thought I was in compliance. Look. There are the leveled books, my students get guided reading, I’m following the mandate, but Cassie… She doesn’t need pictures to read.”
Her room was like her preferred teaching materials for reading—sterile, bland, distraction-free. Her walls were bare except for charts of letters and color-coded posters with diagrams of the inner workings of the mouth during the articulation of speech sounds. Unbidden, Bubbles flashed on his physical therapist’s office and the laminated posters of skeletal figures in perfect posture in repose.
There were a few trade books visible, coffee table books. Student writing on display consisted of a single bulletin board of cookie-cutter manuscript sentences about “my career goals.”
Caroline Moody joked that she kept the hard stuff hidden. Shelves of folders and workbooks were organized in color-coded sections that aligned with the rainbow charts and diagrams. You had to unshelf and unsheath to unearth the contents,
Mrs. Moody sighed and cast her eyes toward the floor.
“To be honest, I haven’t been sleeping well. I don’t have the answers. We have to trust the science.”
She paused, her eyes moistening, an expression of despair unfolding, then:
“What if she’s right? What if I’ve always been wrong?”
“I’m sorry, Caroline. Teaching is hard. The learner has something to say. Scientists are not teachers; teachers are not scientists; kids aren’t subjects in experiments,” Bubbles said. “What time do you expect them to arrive?”
Superintendent Goldenrod Seeks to Avoid Disaster
A day earlier Superintendent Goldenrod had summoned Bubbles to his office. Getting teachers to teach collaboratively was tiresome, tedious, yet totally typical in this district. Too many independent contractors with tenure.
The Reading Wars had returned with a vengeance during the immediate aftermath of COVID, and he wanted to begin the year with a truce. Instead, he got a dreaded phone call from a worried parent .
A student in Mrs. Moody’s second grade, a girl named Cassie, was upset. The anti-CRT crowd had been picketing at the high school. Mothers for Liberty and the state chapter of the Reading League were stirring up the smoldering phonics embers. Why was teaching kids to read such a political football?
“So why has teaching reading become this big political football?” Goldenrod asked Bubbles.
“Is that a serious question?”
It was. Bubbles sometimes lost sight of the surface simplicity of reading. He’d said it a thousand times: People who know how to read think they know how to teach reading. It ought to be simple.
“Teaching a child anything is hard,” Bubbles said. “Passions run deep. People look for certainty when it doesn’t exist. This could become a bigger problem.”
“Oh?”
“If you have children demanding transfers because they don’t like how their teacher teaches reading, you’ve got problems. You’ll wind up with red classrooms and blue classrooms.”
Bubbles left Goldenrod’s office and called Mrs. Moody’s school. He scheduled a meeting with her for the following day. Fortuitously, Mrs. Moody already had Cassie’s mother coming in for a talk before school started that morning.
*
One of the most senior teachers in the district, by reputation Mrs. Moody ran a tight ship. Until his visit Bubbles had never seen her classroom. Her principal, who was himself an antique, needed to have an appointment to observe her. She had a closed door policy.
As Chief Comprehension Officer (CCO) in the Curriculum Office, Bubbles had a front row seat on Whole Language and the Writing Process movement. This was before the onset of the Phonics Winter commencing in 1996, freezing the lifeblood out of literacy and literature, putting linguistics on a pedestal, making dyslexics as common as garden variety readers.
Mrs. Moody had been trained in Direct Instruction (DI) in Oregon and refused to relinquish her phonics materials during WL, though no one asked her to.
As the years passed, she changed her approach to writing (she started her version of “teaching it”), but she never renounced her belief that children must sound out words before they can read them or write them.
She was disappointed in 2020 when the district opted to extend Reading Recovery and Guided Reading. She bemoaned the disrespect for science, for the human brain, for her expertise as a teacher.
Cassie and Her Mother Arrive for the Appointment
“Yes, she needs to be here,” Cassie’s mother said when Bubbles asked to speak first with the adults. Her quizzical expression gave away a hint of exasperation. “Mrs. Moody needs to hear what my daughter has to say.”
“Cassie, are you comfortable with that? You could talk with me first. Your mother and Mrs. Moody could talk together. And then we can reconvene.” Bubbles used rather stiff language when he spoke with students, but he made eye contact with them, letting them know they had his full attention.
“You first. That’s better,” Cassie said. “Is it ok, Mommy?”
Cassie’s mother bent to kiss her daughter’s hair. She and Mrs. Moody drifted off to the area of shelves.
“Cassie is such a joy to have in class,” Mrs. Moody said.
“I’m so happy to hear that!”
Cassie and Bubbles Talk Accomplishment
“Well, young lady, they tell me you’re an accomplished reader. Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Cassie said. “An accomplishment is something a person has to try hard to do. Maybe when I was a baby, but I barely remember those days.”
Bubbles was enchanted. Kids kept getting smarter every year, more and more articulate, more and more self-aware.
“Tell me, Cassie, what are you trying for? What do you consider an accomplishment?”
“Well, I’ve been taking piano since kindergarten,” she said. “Ear training is hard.”
“Ear training? I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s when you listen to one note, then another note, and you recognize the interval between them. Miss Tiffany says I’ll need it later when I learn music theory. Or when you hear a sequence of notes and then play them back from memory.”
“That’s remarkable,” said Bubbles. “Tell me, young lady… what do you like to read?”
“I’m in a book club.”
“Really?”
“Well, there are only two of us—me and my little brother. He’s three. He picks the books we read.”
“Where do you get your books?” asked Bubbles.
“In my neighborhood you can get books. People put books out in tiny libraries in their front yard. Jacob and I go for walks, and he picks out books. When we’re finished, we return them.”
“But what do you like to read?”
“I’m reading a book about a spider named Charlotte and a pig named Wilbur.”
“I know that book. It’s one of my favorites. I love the illustrations! What else?”
“I have all of the Little House books. I want to write books like that someday.”
“Another of my favorites. You’re helping me recall the pleasure of illustrated books for young people. Do you enjoy the pictures?”
Cassie suddenly looked stricken.
“Im trying not to look at the pictures.”
“Why? You don’t want to miss out on all of that magic, Cassie.”
“Mrs. Moody says it’s bad to look at the pictures. Eyeballs on letters, she says. Don’t look away.”
“Has she explained to you her reasons?”
“She said only poor readers look at the pictures. She said our brains are growing, that our brains are making wires, that if we look at the pictures our brains won’t make the right wires for the letters. She said if that happens we may not graduate from high school. We’re supposed to be ready for college or a career when we graduate, that’s the sacred trust, she says, and we need all the wires our brain can make.”
“I see,” said Bubbles. The familiar heaviness of toiling in the vineyards of public school pulsed through Bubbles. He took a deep breath. Goldenrod needed to hear this.
“And you know, Jacob looks at the pictures to help him understand the stories. I just don’t know what to do. I think I used to need the pictures, too. Mrs. Moody says the pictures are a crutch, they keep you from learning the right way, they stop the brain from making wires. I don’t want to hurt Jacob’s brain.”
“So you are caught in a dilemma, aren’t you. Do you know what a dilemma is?”
“No.”
“You’re fortunate, young lady, to have escaped the word until now. In a dilemma you are forced to choose one way or the other. Here, your first choice is to pretend there are no pictures, ignore them, and wire your brain correctly. Your second choice is to dive into the pictures splashing colors everywhere and hope for the best. Of course, Jacob’s future complicates things.
There’s something peculiar about dilemmas, though. Most of them, fortunately, are false. Most of them oversimplify important parts of the equation. Once you think them through with the best science and art you have, most dilemmas offer up a third, fourth, even fifth choice.
Cassie, your brain is already wired for reading and has been getting itself wired for the past several years. Jacob’s brain is younger and so has fewer wires but it, too, is growing stronger, making more wires. That’s what brains do.”
“So I can look at the pictures?”
“Oh, yes. Jacob, too. And as for Mrs. Moody, let me talk with her about this matter. Mrs. Moody tells you things she believes. All teachers do. She is an excellent teacher. She cares very much for her students. Do you agree?”
“I sure do,” said Cassie. “She’s strict but very nice. She is funny. Math is hard for me—like ear training—but Mrs. Moody uses manipulatives that help me, and I love Science. We don’t have Science a lot, but she knows so much about it, especially about plants and the ocean.”
“Is there anything else about reading that troubles you?” Bubbles asked.
“Well, last year, my teacher read aloud to us every day from a chapter book. She had extra copies and she let us follow along if we wanted. We didn’t have to. We could close our eyes and put our heads down and try to picture the story. Mrs. Moody reads aloud to us, and she has a very nice voice, but she won’t let us follow along even if we have our own copy, and she won’t let us close our eyes, and she stops after every paragraph to ask a question.”
“Is it the rule against reading along, the questioning, or both, that bothers you?”
“Well, I guess teachers have to ask questions. Now that I think about it, sometimes the questions are really good. But I understand better if I have the book and read along.”
“Do you mind telling me why? I don’t mean to bug you, but it could be helpful to know when I discuss this with Mrs. Moody.”
“We’ll, I go back and check on something if I need to, and I can read ahead a little if I need to.”
Bubbles Cues In Goldenrod on the State of the Semiosis
Bubbles, Mrs. Moody, and Cassie’s mother had a cordial chat while Cassie sat at her desk, reading a book, eavesdropping.
Bubbles was pleased to hear Cassie’s mother and Mrs. Moody talking happily about Cassie in school and Cassie at home, sharing insights about this bright and good-natured child.
Bubbles scheduled a full hour to meet with Mrs. Moody the following day, again before sunrise, promising to have some suggestions that might help everyone sleep better.
Bubbles reminded Cassie’s mother about all of the good things Cassie enjoyed about being in Mrs. Moody’s class.
When Bubbles left the classroom, the playground was filling with children, laughing, run-walking, burning calories.
Back at Curriculum Headquarters, Bubbles emailed Superintendent Goldenrod with a detailed summary and analysis of the situation. He advised Goldenrod to keep this incident on his radar. Bubbles had seen a similar situation before the Phonics Winter. Elementary students were rebelling in the writing classroom.
Students who’d experienced Writing Workshop in third grade were demanding it in fourth grade—pressure mounted up the grades until teachers were at loggerheads. These kids wanted time and instruction to learn to write what they wanted to write. Freedom is hard to take back.
Bubbles felt a wave of sadness. This wicked false dilemma threatened to distort authentic reading instruction for yet another generation caught in a chronically underfunded, quick-fix seeking, factory model system that grinds on relentlessly with blinders on.
How many cueing systems does it take for policy makers to read the writing on the wall? How many cues does it take to realize that pictures of the brain in operation do not depict how best to teach children?
**************
For earlier post’s with Bubbles, check out..,