In Texas, standardized testing is not only not developmentally appropriate, but also gets rewritten/reconfigured every few years, as soon as students begin to make gains, making it clear the whole point is to destabilize public education, not get benchmarks to understand schools' effectiveness.

Hyperlexia *can* be indicative of other things going on...or not.

Thank you! These are great tips!

A small garlic-related update: alliums are indeed (part of) the problem. 😒

I'm backing off for now and after my insides are back in order will be moving on to gluten. Long term, I have no idea how to make this work, because garlic and onions are EVERYTHING in savory dishes.

Wasn't JD Vance just lecturing parents who were struggling to find affordable childcare that they should just get their parents to babysit for free?

Dyslexia requires phonics AND additional targeted strategies, because it's a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts people's ability to recognize letters, put letters in the correct order, connect letters with letter sounds, and then connect the sounds to words.

Most kids who have dyslexia are diagnosed around 2nd/3rd grade, because that's the age where it becomes more clear that it's neurobiological, and not simply on the longer end of normal development.

Kids who struggle with reading still at age 8 typically have other disabilities coming into play that are hindering their ability to read. Probably the one people are most familiar with is dyslexia. But dyslexia impacts a range of skills needed for word recognition and decoding.

Hyperlexia, while often considered desirable because it means kids are reading early, frequently comes with other learning disabilities or developmental disorders that can, in fact, cause issues with education, social development, etc.

So, for instance, you and your brother are both clearly hyperlexic, meaning you learned to read before the age of 5. Overall, less than 1% of the population is hyperlexic. However, ~10% of autistic people are hyperlexic, and north of 80% of hyperlexic people are autistic.

It's not that most people aren't at a point to learn to read until 8. Rather, there's a broad spectrum of what's considered normal development, and that "normal" range spans from 5-8. Typically kids who fall outside that range, including earlier, have other things going on.

Unfortunately, whole language and balanced literacy are still extremely common in public schools. My youngest's school was still teaching using balanced literacy in 2023, and I'm sure they still are.

...great reader, you may think you've unlocked some secret, magical cure to persistent literacy issues.

The problem with this is that significantly less than 1% of the population is hyperlexic. So this will be counterproductive for 99.8% of students.

I think it also makes sense to certain types of readers, specifically hyperlexical people. They have strong visual memories that enable rote memorization of tens of thousands of words and tend to read in batches of words instead of word by word. If you read like that, and consider yourself a...

It was less that teachers adopted it because it was easier, and more that it was marketed to schools and teaching colleges as a cutting edge way to teach literacy when it first came out. People were looking for solutions to persistent literacy issues and were hopeful this would solve them.

It's also why parents are increasingly red shirting kindergarteners. It's easier for kids to grasp the curriculum at almost 6 or 6 than at 5/barely 5.

It's not quite hyperlexia, which is reading prior to age 5.

But we've definitely pushed when we expect all kids to be fluent readers to the early end of the age spectrum of when the majority of children hit cognitive milestones required for reading. It's unreasonable.

Portland Public Schools are teaching phonics now because in 2023 the state passed a bill that invested significantly in moving away from whole language and embracing phonics.

Oregon also passed a law last year that will require licensed teachers in 2026 to know evidence-based literacy approaches.

It's still in use at my kids' school. Both had to be taught phonics at home to learn to read.