Sold a Story

I have been a special education teacher since 1981 and I cannot tell you how much I learned from this podcast. The deep dive into the science of reading and how it is taught, and how it needs to change is absolutely phenomenal!

This series is so well done. I took special education courses, but never took a course in reading methods and never actually became a teacher. I couldn’t imagine learning how to read or teaching how to read without understanding the relationship between the shape of the letter and the sound it should say in your head. I grieve for the bewildered parents, the children deprived of the joy of decoding mystery squiggles and the teachers who struggled with a method that was not science based and did not work. I empathize with their sadness when they had such good intentions of not being able to meet the needs of their students. I binge- listened to all the episodes at once. The intricate story was well told and well paced. And I loved listening to the kids, untangle the names in the credits when phonics wasn’t Enough!

Open, transparent & insightful. Thank you for the affirmation of science and data over marketing and money. I, personally, experienced children AND young adults unable to read the "big" words. Beyond the inability to read, they didn't fully understand what they were reading. I, intuitively, used phonics to help them. They enjoyed struggling through sounding out the word and identifying correctly. There's little that compares to hear the success in their voice and see it im their eyes!

Thank you for this educational and eye-opening report. Over the past year, I questioned my district’s decision to remove all F&Ps kits from our schools. I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it. But today, hearing this, tears filled my eyes as I realized that, without knowing we weren’t truly helping our students learn to read. As a teacher, that breaks my heart. Thank you for opening my eyes and helping understand the real situation.