It's the same with crafts. I crochet, I get pleasure out of the act of creating, then I give it away. Buying a stuffie would be faster, but far less gratifying and far less personal. I like to bake cookies. Again, buying them would be faster, but they wouldn't be MY cookies. I like to create!

I wouldn't have spent a zillion hours doing this if I did not enjoy the act of writing. Even when it's hard (especially when it's hard), it's so rewarding. It's so clarifying. When I finish something, sure I'm proud of it, but I'm already itching to shove it out of my way and start the next thing.

and *The Knight of Swords* by Michael Moorcock, one of the first works of SFF for adults I read, which convinced me that SFF wasn't just fun, it was capable of being "serious" literature (balancing as it did, New Wave literary technique and pulpy adventure, perfect for me in 7th grade)

Other candidates include *Redwall* which, totally reframed what it would look like to value coziness and domesticity for me in middle school? The domestic as communal performance in which men participate rather than a thing women do for men? Not that I realized it did that until much more recently

The only other study I've read on anything related is this one, but it's on third-year college English majors and so while concerning for rates of high-level literacy is not really about childhood reading pedagogy at all: dx.doi.org/10.1353/cea....

And even if it isn't happening, I find it concerning that a supposedly reputable pedagogy scholar would imply that it would be fine if it were (though of course if it isn't happening widely, we can then ask how much Hanford is hiding having led him to provide this example)

Obviously, we'd need more and better studies (probably by sociologists?) to assess how representative those anecdotes actually are. And then further studies to find out if flaws in reading pedagogy in elementary school are what actually cause the phenomenon

Inclduing specifically anecdotes of watching high schoolers invent words with more orthographic similarity than horse and pony (though different enough that sounding the word out would immediately reveal they were not the same) but with much more divergent meanings

I think that is absolutely the claim they are making! And while I am not a scholar of reading education (I'm a literary scholar), I see lots of anecdotes from middle and high school teachers online alleging that their students are engaged in widespread misreading.

Whether or not there is such a thing as "three-cuing." Also this paper is published by the organization it is defending and doesn't address the 2022 efficacy study by Henry May et. al (though it does refer to the earlier study showing Reading Recovery's methods effective in first grade)

but is also a radical misunderstanding of how writng and writers work. Writers do not write "pony" and mean "horse" and so I fail to see that a pedagogical practice that is not interested in word recognition (as Goodman tells Hanford he advises teachers not be) could possibly teach reading

actually said, seemingly more or less unprompted, that a student (an early learner) seeing the word "pony" and thinking/saying the word "horse" is fine. A move that is both not really possible without visuals (how do you know it isn't any other noun) and so likely to cause problems later

This is an interesting argument but it doesn't address the most damning thing that this discussion (and the journalism by Hanford it criticizes) brings up. Which is that unless one believes Hanford is literally lying Goodman (whose work I read as being positioned as the real origin here, not Clay's)