![]() Whenever it was time to read, I would sit and pretend to do so because the code made no sense to me. ![]() I very clearly remember how I felt as that kid in class sitting there nonplussed by the lessons. I also discovered that this method was derived from the same method of teaching reading, Whole Language, that had failed me years ago. I was confused by what I was reading in Fountas and Pinnell’s book, but my confusion turned to outright shock as the class continued, and I was thrust into the world of balanced literacy. I remember the tutor, and the location, but the architecture of my literacy skills has faded, and I am left with the automaticity of decoding text. I can remember struggling, and I can remember not struggling anymore, but not the in-between time. The exact details of my own reading experience are hazy. I also remembered blending and manipulating the sounds in words before I even got to a real book. I had learned my sounds, and sound combinations before anything. I was reminded of Louis Pasteur’s encountering the theory of spontaneous generation that preceded his own discoveries in microbiology: life forming out of thin air with no precursor. The very first thing that struck me was that the program was talking about teaching kids to read as if we would just hand them these little books full of pictures, and expect them to be able to do it. I read this opening page about what was to follow, and the methodology behind the program, and I thought “this doesn’t make any sense.” “This is the only way to teach reading,” the teacher of the class joyfully declared. We were asked to read the opening remarks of the book to start off this day-long class. Other than having my background in direct instruction, and having been taught to read very proficiently that way, I had no other keystone in the structure of my understanding of literacy. And yet, here I was prepared to start the process of acquiring my license. It wasn’t anywhere on my top ten list of careers, or even my top twenty. I never thought, not for one second, that I’d ever find myself in a classroom learning to be a teacher. I’d had a great relationship with my teacher, but I wasn’t learning to read. Not having been born with an innate knowledge of ancient Phoenician symbols, it wasn’t clicking for me. Back in 1995, it was the heyday of Whole Language, and guessing at words and sounds. ![]() I had learned on Siegfried Engelmann’s Reading Mastery, and on the Wilson Program, in first grade when I myself was a struggling reader. I knew nothing about how to teach reading at that point. I was holding this big, voluminous textbook authored by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. I was sitting in a room with about twenty other teachers in my first class in a teacher training program eight years ago. I remember the first time I encountered Fountas and Pinnell very clearly. ![]()
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