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I had been taught in these education courses that reading was a natural process and that what you needed to do was provide kids with rich, interesting literature and motivate them, and that they in fact would then inculcate the principles and move right along. I was taught not to deal with specific skills because that in fact would be de-motivating. I tried that and I didn’t help anybody.
I could see even with the nine year olds that when they were unable to read it seemed to me that, even if I had a magic bullet, they didn’t even want to try it. They had already started to avoid print and a lot of these kids would become active and look, in a sense, attentionally different and possibly would have been diagnosed as ADD. But their attentional difficulties were just simple avoidance. They would become distractable and fidgety when they had to read. Why? They wanted to get out of it.
The toughest challenge we have is in moving the science to the development of teachers and their preparation, such that what they learn is actually objective and is based upon converging evidence rather than philosophies, belief systems, or appeals to authority. We need to get the information to teachers who have been, in a sense, propagandized into these very broad and general and non-evidentiary kinds of approaches that they use in teaching reading
But it also made me feel dumb, foolish, embarrassed. Our teachers sometimes feel the same way, but they can only teach what they’ve been taught, typically.
 Reid Lyon Quotes 62.30 Kb
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