Ep 739 - Fun With Dick and Jane, and other stories

Summary

Podcast Summary: Overdue – Ep 739: Fun With Dick and Jane, and Other Stories
Date: January 26, 2026
Hosts: Andrew and Craig (Headgum Podcast Network)

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Overdue, Andrew and Craig wade into the history, impact, and enduring weirdness of the Dick and Jane readers, focusing on Fun with Dick and Jane and related "Young Reader" collections. The hosts explore the pedagogical philosophies behind these famous early readers, assess their influence on American literacy and reading instruction, and share their own experiences with learning to read. Along the way, they provide context on the broader, ongoing debates about how best to teach reading, and why, despite their iconic status, Dick and Jane stories are so often criticized (and parodied) by modern educators and parents alike.

The hosts maintain their trademark blend of irreverence and sincerity, playfully lampooning the wooden dialogue and outdated social mores of Dick and Jane, while digging seriously into the evolution of reading education in the United States.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Are Dick and Jane Books?

• Dick and Jane stories debuted in the 1930s, designed as basal readers—beginner-level books—using what’s known as the “look-say” or “whole word” method.
• Original creators: William S. Gray (literacy specialist, institutional education reformer) and Zerna Sharp (elementary school educator, reading consultant, “mother” of Dick and Jane).
• Structured around extremely basic vocabulary, simple sentence patterns, relentless repetition, and bland but broadly relatable illustrations. (06:01–07:06)

"One of the goals of these books is that only one new word is introduced on each page. No story introduces more than five new words in sequence."
— Craig, explaining the philosophy per Zerna Sharp (17:25)

2. The Pedagogical Philosophy: “Look-Say” vs. Phonics

• Look-Say (Whole Word/Sight Word): Children are taught to recognize whole words by sight, not by sounding them out phonetically.
• Early versions relied on heavy repetition (“See Dick run. Run, Dick, run.”).
• Contrasted with phonics, which teaches the building blocks of language by associating letters with sounds.
• Later versions often adapted slightly, but the underlying method didn’t change.
  (19:41–21:26)

"Rather than phonics, which is like kind of learning the sounds that the letters make and then working backwards to figuring out... you just learn each word as its own thing."
— Andrew (19:53)

3. Historical Context: Why Were These Books So Dominant?

• By the 1950s, up to 80% of U.S. classrooms used Dick and Jane or direct imitators.
• Part of a nationwide push toward standardized, institutionalized early education and mass-market curriculum products.
• Previous dominant readers (like the McGuffy Readers) were phonics-based—and often laced with heavy-handed religious and moral themes.
  (24:20–26:00)

"What we are dealing with here is a product that was sold to schools."
— Craig (12:49)

4. Critiques and Backlash: Are Dick and Jane Any Good?

• The method was heavily critiqued by educators and researchers as early as the 1930s (e.g., Samuel Orton), with accusations that Look-Say was “bunk” and didn’t teach generalizable reading skills.
  (29:00–30:12)
• 1950s: The book Why Johnny Can't Read and a famous John Hersey article highlighted Dick and Jane’s flaws—uninspiring, rote, and ultimately ineffective for long-term literacy.
• Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (1957) was created specifically to offer a more engaging, rhyme-based, simple-reader alternative—using phonics-friendly simple words, but with much more imaginative prose.
  (31:12–34:15)

"It is the book I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primer."
— Dr. Seuss, as quoted by Andrew (34:28)

5. Race, Representation, and Gender Roles

• The first Black family appears only in the final 1965 edition, long after the social climate had begun to demand more diversity.
• Gender roles are firmly entrenched; Jane often relegated to stereotyped tasks, which was already being critiqued by the 1960s and ‘70s.
• Zerna Sharp’s defense: "It never bothered the children. That’s all an adult’s viewpoint." The hosts deride this as missing the point, since children model adult behavior explicitly.
  (18:42–19:13)

6. The Modern Debate: Phonics vs. “Balanced Literacy” and Three Cueing

• Ongoing, still unresolved “reading wars”: Phonics-based instruction (now considered best practice in most cognitive science) vs. “balanced literacy” and “three-cueing” methods.
• “Balanced literacy” blends phonics with allowing students to use context or pictures to “guess” words—a direct descendant of Look-Say.
• Example: The “three cueing” model (sentence structure, meaning, and visual info), which research now suggests may actually undermine generalizable reading skills by training kids to look away from the word itself.
  (47:48–56:51)
• New laws and educational standards are now requiring explicit phonics instruction in many U.S. states, validating critiques of whole-word methods.

"You are inviting kids to look away from the written word to other clues that actually disrupt their ability to learn what the word is."
— Craig, discussing three-cueing (55:45)

7. Personal Reflections and Riffing on the Stories Themselves

• Both hosts recount their own learning-to-read experiences (neither used Dick and Jane). They find the books deeply odd, relentlessly repetitive, and, if read with the wrong tone, “short horror stories” or proto-surrealism.
• Repeated mock readings (“Look, look, up, up, up. The family can go away. Father is big, big father”) highlight how unnatural the text is, even for young children.
  (60:00–68:03)
• The hosts question how useful even the illustrations are, since the pictures often don’t obviously support the new vocabulary word.
• Dr. Seuss books (like Cat in the Hat) are praised for being far more fun, memorable, and genuinely helpful for beginner readers.

"If somebody was, like, dripping water on my forehead and reading me Dick and Jane books for eight hours, I would tell them whatever I needed to make them stop."
— Andrew (33:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [17:25] Craig (on Zerna Sharp’s “one new word per page” rule):
  "...only one new word is introduced on each page. No story introduces more than five new words in sequence."

• [18:57] Andrew (on gender roles):
  "It's true. The little people who learn everything about how to act from grown-ups don't know innately to have a problem with the things that grown-ups are telling them. That's a great point."

• [29:30] Andrew (on the “reading wars”):
  "Why Johnny Can't Read touches off a huge debate about these two different approaches. It's a best-selling book for like almost a year."

• [34:28] Andrew quoting Dr. Seuss:
  "It is the book I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primer—cat standing over Dick and Jane with a bloody fishbowl."

• [55:45] Craig (on three-cueing):
  "You are inviting kids to look away from the written word to other clues that actually disrupt their ability to learn what the word is."

• [60:00] Andrew (on reading Dick and Jane):
  "These kids, Dick and Jane, are what, like 6 and 5? 5 and 4, 7 and 5? Yeah. They are too old to be talking like this."

• [67:52] Andrew (on Dick and Jane story prompts):
  "If we have a short story writing contest... we're gonna need to pick prompts from Dick and Jane that people have to write."

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Important Timestamps

• 04:50 — Playful cold open parody: “Funny Craig! Look, look! See me pod!”
• 06:01–10:30 — Intro to Dick and Jane, brief on editions and personal history with learning to read.
• 10:47–19:13 — Deep dive on creators William S. Gray and Zerna Sharp, their mission and criticisms.
• 19:41–26:00 — Pedagogical roots, the “look-say” method, vs. phonics, and McGuffy readers.
• 28:29–30:12 — Emergence of pushback; Why Johnny Can't Read; Look-Say vs. phonics debate.
• 31:12–34:15 — The rise of Dr. Seuss as a direct reaction to Dick and Jane’s failure to engage readers.
• 47:48–56:51 — The current state of the “reading wars”; the science of how children learn to read.
• 60:00–68:03 — Reading passages from Dick and Jane; critique of story structure and effectiveness.
• 73:21–74:06 — Final thoughts on the books’ lasting (but not positive) legacy.
• 75:04–end — Outro and upcoming episode announcements.

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Episode Takeaways

• Dick and Jane were educational mainstays that dominated American classrooms for decades, but are now mostly museum pieces: fascinating for their influence, instructive for their flaws.
• Their embrace of the “look-say” method became a lightning rod for generations of experimental and research-driven pedagogy, and the hosts argue convincingly (through history, research, and parody) that their simplistic approach was ultimately detrimental to fostering actual literacy.
• The episode connects these mid-century debates to the present, showing that the “reading wars” are still very much alive, but science increasingly sides with systematic phonics instruction over repetition and visual guessing.
• Through humor and insight, Andrew and Craig underscore how Dick and Jane have become more curio than curriculum.

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Recommended For:
Anyone interested in the history of education, literacy policy, or classic children's books—and anyone who wants to understand why so many adults remember "See Spot run" with a mixture of nostalgia and bafflement.

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Transcript

[Craig]

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[Andrew]

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[Craig]

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[Andrew]

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[Craig]

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[Andrew]

Don't I know it.

[Craig]

Every new year I say I will get better at it, but life gets busy and next thing you know, I'm back to ordering takeout.

[Andrew]

I'm always saying this to you. Is Craig, you're back to ordering takeout again.

[Craig]

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[Andrew]

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[Craig]

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[Andrew]

This is a headgum podcast.

[Craig]

While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy.

[Andrew]

Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[Craig]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Look, look Andrew. Oh, Andrew.

[Andrew]

It is Funny Craig. Funny Craig. He is.

[Craig]

See me pod. See me podcast. Pod. Oh, podcast.

[Andrew]

I can't keep doing like this.

[Craig]

Welcome to Overdue, a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig. Funny Craig.

[Andrew]

My name is Andrew. I am Andrew. I am the boy who reads books. Look, look. See? Books.

[Craig]

Oh. Oh. This is our book podcast where each.

[Andrew]

One I am the big father.

[Craig]

Look at me funny. Big, big father.

[Andrew]

See how big I am.

[Craig]

This is a book podcast where each week one of us or both of us read a book we've never read before and tell each other about it and talk about where it came from. This week we are celebrating public Domain.

[Andrew]

Month here, January, everybody.

[Craig]

And we are talking about those lovable scamps, Dick and Jane. Specifically. Fun with Dick and Jane and other works by. Who made these? William S. Gray and Zerna Sharp. Other people contributed along the way. William Elson, right, is the guy who created those readers with Gray.

[Andrew]

Yeah, the Elson Gray readers. The. The very first Elson Gray reader with Dick and Jane in it was in 1930. And that is in the public domain. I think we can link that on social or in the show notes or something somewhere. But it is on archive.org the versions you can get now are not really. Are not the same thing.

[Craig]

No, they are not.

[Andrew]

They're doing the same thing. They're operating in the same space. But they are Penguin Young Readers books that have also been sort of reclassified into the rubric that Penguin Young Readers uses for early childhood kind of reading education books that you. You've got four different levels, level one to four, with level one being the simplest and. And four being the most complex. And then you've also got like a sub or like a side designation that uses letters.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

And each. And each thing is kind of. Each letter sort of means a different thing.

[Craig]

Okay. So the. I know that the editions we read, I believe were part of a publication run in 2012 from Penguin Young Readers.

[Andrew]

The end of the world with. It was all kind of downhill after that one, wasn't it?

[Craig]

Was.

[Andrew]

I think everyone was expecting it to be a big thing. Like in the movie 2012 was the tan. It was just. It was just going to be a slow decay.

[Craig]

Was the tan suit a first term or second term tan suit?

[Andrew]

Was like 2015. Tan suit is so much later.

[Craig]

So. Yeah. So on the. Down on the downswing, as it were.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Post. Post apocalypse was the tan suit. Wearing his tan suit and eating seven walnuts or whatever.

[Craig]

They're almonds. Almonds on the roof.

[Andrew]

Yeah, walnuts. Walnuts have too many, like, grooves and too many interesting things going on and all that.

[Craig]

No, the stories in these young readers collections are, you know, based on stories.

[Andrew]

Based on true events that were published on a true story.

[Craig]

In collections such as we Work and Play. We read pictures. We read more pictures. The new, before we read the new, we come and go. That is level one. Dick and Jane. We play Dick and Jane. Fun with Dick and Jane. Level 2 is taken from fun. From Fun with Dick and Jane or the new Fun with Dick and Jane.

[Andrew]

Ooh, the new Fun with Dick and Jane.

[Craig]

And I think, think the. Probably our favorite chapter, A Funny Ride is from Fun with Dick and Jane Part 2, which was published in the 1950s. So we will probably. This might be a Bit of a messy episode. We wanted to talk about Dick and Jane. We want to talk about the history. We want to talk about reading instruction in the United States. We want to talk about these two weird books we read. And we'll probably talk about other things along the way.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And we've, you know, we've done Children's Book Week. We've done kids books before. And I think a lot of, like, the default mode that I go into is I'm gonna really consider the ramifications of every. Every plot device in these books. But these books don't even have that much to grab onto. I think, you know, I think we are gonna talk a lot about the sort of little, like, short horror stories that they turn into if you read them with the right intonation.

[Craig]

Yeah, sure.

[Andrew]

And then there's just, like, a lot of unintentional, I don't know how many entendres we're talking.

[Craig]

No, but there.

[Andrew]

But there are some. They exist.

[Craig]

They do exist. I had never read, to my knowledge. Now, when I was a little baby, who knows? But to my knowledge, I don't think I'd ever read Dick and Jane before.

[Andrew]

No. When we were. When I was learning how to read, it was like. It was. It was heavy Seuss. Like, Seuss was big into the rotation. That heavy Seuss getting into that heavy Seuss. And then. Yeah, just a bunch of other kids books that I don't, like, had. I don't think had really a. I don't remember them having an agenda or, like, a set, like, way that they were trying to teach me how to do stuff.

[Craig]

Yeah. And we will. I remember a lot of commercials for Hooked on Phonics, but I don't think we ever subscribed to Hooked on Phonics.

[Andrew]

Even though it didn't work for us.

[Craig]

Yeah. So, yeah. I don't really know how I learned to read. We'll talk about learning to read today. And I truly can't tell you how I learned to read.

[Andrew]

You would only say Hooked on Phonics works for me. If you were, like, making fun of. Making fun of somebody's inability to read.

[Craig]

Yeah, that kind of.

[Andrew]

Did that happen. Did happen in your school?

[Craig]

I don't know. I don't think anybody was doing Hooked on Phonics slams.

[Andrew]

Okay, well.

[Craig]

But I can see how you would arrive there. Let's talk about our creators of Dick and Jane.

[Andrew]

Andrew, please tell me more about the creators, and then I can tell you more about the reading philosophy that is espoused. We will talk about These two, these two jokers, Dick and Jane.

[Craig]

William S. Gray, born in 1885, passed away in 1960 from Illinois. Fun little fact. His cousin.

[Andrew]

He passed away tragically from Illinois after a long battle with Illinois.

[Craig]

His cousin was Harold Gray, who created Little Orphan Annie. Just fun, fun fact.

[Andrew]

Just little, little ragamuffins left and right coming out of this family.

[Craig]

I learned about that from a historical society website from the county where he was born. And they were like, he knew the power of pictures and words because of his cousin. I was like, I don't think that's how that works. But I don't think good on you.

[Andrew]

Teach anybody anything except how to like, cuss.

[Craig]

Yeah, that's.

[Andrew]

That's all I learned from my cousin.

[Craig]

He was a teacher. He taught at a one room schoolhouse before he went to study at Illinois State Normal University. I don't. I think it's. I think it was in Normal, Illinois.

[Andrew]

And now it's just Illinois State Normal University. T shirt is. That's a lot of questions raising a lot of questions that are answered by my shirt.

[Craig]

He went off to get another degree at the University of Chicago in 1913. He went to the teachers college at Columbia. Worth thinking about all of this as kind of institutionalized education. Like institutional education for young people. And like, how can we standardize some of this is still seemingly a nascent field at this point, especially in the United States. And I think my thesis about all of this stuff is gonna come down a little bit. Gonna come down to like. And there were business incentives. Like some of this is that what we are dealing with here is a, a product that was sold to schools.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

That is kind of the overall story of reading instruction is these curricula that get built and then are sold to schools or sold to colleges of education and then people use them while there is ongoing research about the best way to, to teach people to read. So.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

So he goes back to University of Chicago to get his PhD and then he stays there as a researcher and professor for a good long time. He starts working with this guy Scott Foresman in 1929.

[Andrew]

Now, are you sure that Scott Foresman is an individual guy or are you talking about Scott Foresman, the publishing company that is just named like a man is named?

[Craig]

I may have, I may have left a comma out of there. He meant to put a comma of Scott comma Forsman.

[Andrew]

Well, Scott Foresman is the whole name of it. It's just like a publishing company that's called Scott Foresman. Like it's a guy. And so I. I don't know. There's some ambiguity in some of the research materials I found about whether it was a guy or whether it was a company, but it does seem like it's a company.

[Craig]

Okay. All right.

[Andrew]

Scott Foresman. The company is the entity that's updating these stories once they're in circulation.

[Craig]

Sure. He starts working with him and him or them in 1929, publishing Basic Readers that were co authored, as we said, by William H. Elson. And then in 1930, creates Dick and Jane with Zerna Sharp, who we'll talk about in just a second. Gray just kind of devoted his life to reading and reading instruction. He was a part of, like, Worldwide Studies on Literacy. He was elected the president of the International reading association in 1955, an organization that he founded. Funny how that works when you get elected president of something you started.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Published hundreds of materials and articles and books on reading and reading instruction, including a lot of research on adult literacy and the readability of text. So I don't know that. I don't know what the line between what his work was and, you know, when you use Microsoft Word to analyze, like, what grade level your paper is at.

[Andrew]

Sure. Or whether it's AI. Yeah.

[Craig]

But there's something there. You know, assigning point values to certain complexities of. Written. Of the written word to try and measure reading difficulty for all sorts of reasons. One of the. One of these things where, like, I come away from a lot of the research I did for this show very frustrated with this style of teaching reading. But that. I don't know that that means that William Gray is here, like, inflicting it upon kids. He wants kids to learn to read. I don't think he was doing it out of some purely, you know, nefarious business motive.

[Andrew]

But no, I don't. I don't know. I don't think. And especially if we're talking about, you know, like, pre. Let's, let's. Let's draw a line through the 80s just to pick a. Just a random place.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

If you're talking about American business pre the 1980s, I do think sometimes people did have genuinely altruistic.

[Craig]

Yeah, that's a fair point.

[Andrew]

I'm not. I'm not saying always, but I'm saying I find it.

[Craig]

I find the whole point in 1980.

[Andrew]

A lot of charts. I just find it easier to. To believe people when they say they. They wanted good things for people when they started a business.

[Craig]

Yeah. Even while they made money. Yes.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Then, of Course there is Zerna Sharp, born in 1889, passed in Indiana, passed away in 1981. She studied at a teachers college, never received a degree. And she taught first grade for a decade, even served as a principal of that school. She began working with Gray through Scott Foresman, whoever or whatever he is, and worked with. She was a reading consultant for them and worked with Gray to develop readers where kids would identify with the events of the story. She said in an interview that she used to listen to kids playing on the beach in Chicago and noticed how kids would repeat words like look, look. So a lot of her, you know, she, she never had kids. She referred to Dick and Jane as her children, which is a thing that somebody said.

[Andrew]

It's not the same, not the same.

[Craig]

She per her in New York Times. I think this is in her obit, not a different article. You know, one of the goals of these books is that only one new word is introduced on each page. No story introduces more than five new words in sequence. I think that that probably changes over time, but that's kind of the, an example of the ethos. She was proud that the children in the book did what children do. That it is, you know, kids are gonna recognize themselves in these pages. I think. Andrew, you might have a little bit more on the background here that I want we'll get to in a second. But this seems to be done in response to the prior like popular publication that draws on a lot more maybe adult materials. Not, not, not adult themes. But, but I mean, listen, you could.

[Andrew]

Read adult themes into Dick and Jane stories also. That you can and I have and.

[Craig]

I will and we'll get to some of the pushback to Dick and Jane.

[Andrew]

I've got a lot on pre Dick and Jane and then like how people respond once they're under the yoke of Dick and Jane.

[Craig]

Responding to criticism that Jane was cast into stereotyped female roles subordinate to Dick, Ms. Sharp replied, it never bothered the children. That's all an adult's viewpoint.

[Andrew]

It's true. The little people who learn everything about how to act from grown ups don't know innately to have a problem with the things that the grown ups are telling them. That's a great point.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

That's a really good point actually.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

It's interesting that that definitely doesn't make the exact opposite point of the one that you're trying to make, especially when.

[Craig]

These are books that kids read with teachers. Anyway, Andrew, tell me what you know about where this kind of work came from. I have some other Notes I might pepper in along the way.

[Andrew]

Yeah, here's some stuff just right up front. Here's what kind of books these are. Here's what kind of people Dick and Jane are.

[Craig]

Oh, my goodness.

[Andrew]

These are Basil readers that are focused on the. It's alternate. Alternatively called the whole word, the sight word, or the look, say, method of reading.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Which is basically just like you. You look at a word, you memorize the whole thing, just that one word, and you memorize what the meaning of it is. And that's how you learn what the word is, rather than phonics, which is like kind of learning the sounds that the letters make and then working backwards to figuring out, you know, how they go together to make words that way. And they are provided with the text, is provided with illustrations that reinforce the words. And the books are kind of bland in part because they're designed to be used, like, nationwide and have broad appeal and not to, you know, you don't want a kid from the, from the plains looking in a book and seeing mountains and being like, what are those? You just want them to be focused on like, what this little girl and her dog are doing.

[Craig]

And that father wears a suit, and.

[Andrew]

That father wears a suit. Big, big father wears a suit.

[Craig]

Big, big father wears a suit.

[Andrew]

Look how big I am. In father's defense, I don't think father ever says, look how big I am.

[Craig]

It's just when baby wears a suit.

[Andrew]

It'S just the kids are talking about how big father is. A common criticism of this, of this approach is that the rote memorization of these words is really effort intensive. I don't know, Craig, when the last time you tried to learn, like, vocab flashcards was. But yeah, it definitely takes a lot of doing. Um, and it doesn't do enough to teach kids how to encounter new words. Like, you know, they, they don't. They. They could see the word cat and they could see the word hat, and maybe they would be able to make the jump and maybe they, Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they just need to memorize, like, a whole nother word instead of realizing that, like, two thirds of the work is already done for them.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

These stories. Yeah. So the ones we read are, Are not the originals. Like, the. They've been, like, chopped up and regrouped a bunch of times, which you already talked about.

[Craig]

They've also been, like, chained.

[Andrew]

They've also been changed every five years or so. Scott Foresman. The person or the entity the, the legal entity knows, known as Scott Foresman. Would update the books and then the last edition comes out in 1965 and it was the first one to include a black families. And it was just like a fun note change times.

[Craig]

Well, fun that. That was the last time they made one, huh?

[Andrew]

Well, I mean, I don't. I, I think the books for other reasons were on their way out by the time that happened, but who knows?

[Craig]

Well, that's what I'm. Could have done it earlier.

[Andrew]

Sure. I don't know that that would have saved them. I don't think what people. I don't think people's problem with the books had anything to do with the like the whiteness of the family.

[Craig]

No, I don't think that they got canceled because they were too woke, you know.

[Andrew]

But a predecessor to the Dick and Jane stories in American schools were these McGuffy readers, eclectic readers, which are phonics based. So they are teaching you how to sound out words.

[Craig]

1836 was the date I saw they.

[Andrew]

Yeah, they start coming out in the 19th century. And the, the big thing to know about them now is that the, you know, the content of these readers reflected their authors. Extremely religious leanings.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And you know, subsequent editions of them as they, as they got more popular did get secularized more. But to the extent that these readers are in use now, it's mostly like I read a paper about this mostly evangelical Christian parents who are homeschooling their kids and want to instill in them, you know, like 19th century Christian value.

[Craig]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Andrew]

But they did, you know, they did introduce and popularize several concepts that are so widely used. And I think some, some of these concepts are useful regardless of which, you know, method of, of teaching, like the building blocks of reading that you're, that you're using. You know, they, they are, they came. It came out in several books that were designed for. Each was. One was designed for different reading levels. So you would start with the first one, the easiest one. Then you proceed onward into the more difficult ones as you kind of got a hang of the concepts made really extensive use of repetition, repetition of old words along with the new ones to make sure that the old ones are kind of sticking. So you know, you can still see the DNA of these in, in modern kids books.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

And then Dick and Jane comes out. Dick and Jane Scott. The look say approach. And these books become sort of the dominant reading like reading instruction material in American schools for like what, three or four decades?

[Craig]

Something. Yeah, the, the. There's a little like transition period that came up in some of my Reading just noting that like John Dewey. I think of the decimal system is, you know, they're pushing for just broad reform.

[Andrew]

I'm thinking, I'm sorry, I was thinking of Tom Dewey. Who is the guy who. The Dewey from Dewey defeats Truman.

[Craig]

Yeah, different guy. Different guy.

[Andrew]

I think it's a different guy. Two different Dewey's.

[Craig]

We're like so McGuffy's decimal system to keep these Dewey straight who McGuffey is there in you know, as early as the 1830s. And then we're getting the late 19th century. We're entering the progressive era where like generally people are just like looking around being like what can we reform? Things are different now. We need to start changing things. And so there is just this be.

[Andrew]

Cool if we could get one of those movements every hundred years or so.

[Craig]

Maybe, maybe it would be good. Be good and. But Dewey is not, you know, in the weeds on reading instruction. Just that we need to, you know, there's room to. For change in primary education.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And so that is where the Dick and Jane stuff can kind of. And the whole language, whole word stuff can kind of slot in. Because it's a new idea, it's doing something different. And yes to your point Andrew, it becomes the dominant. Some articles I read put it at in the 1950s, 80% of US classrooms were using either Dick and Jane or some like imitator.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And there if you read archive.org the Internet Archive has a bunch of different. What's it the Elson Gray readers, including a bunch that aren't Dick and Jane. Many of them are just like other like boring white kids with boring white kid names. But they're also. There's also like a lot of animal based stuff. There's some stuff that's a little like slightly more complicated in terms of like the story it's telling and the kinds of words it's using. So you do. You do get some variety in there. But you see the through line of approach with Dick and Jane.

[Craig]

Some of the first books are illustrated by Eleanor Campbell and later Keith Ward. Campbell says that I think she was inspired by contemporaneous Sears catalogs for the fashion. A fact I found repeated in a 1996 article about Baby boomers just losing their mind over museum exhibits about Dick and Jane art.

[Andrew]

Just, just like being upset about being old or no.

[Craig]

Kind of like wow, I remember. Wow, these books.

[Andrew]

Losing their mind in a good way.

[Craig]

Yeah. You know, all the little kids had.

[Andrew]

This is like. This is like when the little. When the public library near us introduced A window display called Ancient Technology. And I was like, what. What thing from my lifetime is this gonna have? It's gonna make me feel awful. But no, it's. It mostly it stopped in the 60s.

[Craig]

So I was safe after those two folks. Robert Childress took over, and I believe Richard Wiley was doing the art when they introduced the first Black family in 1965. So, Andrew, I think one next step before we talk about the book might be talking about contemporaneous pushback, but maybe we.

[Andrew]

I just. I. Yeah, I want to talk about breaking the iron grip of Dick and Jane. We're talking about 80% of American classrooms. Gee whiz.

[Craig]

Let's take a quick break.

[Andrew]

Oh, we're taking a break before we overthrow Dick and Jane.

[Craig]

All right, let's find out what happens next. New year. Same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only.

[Andrew]

Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for deliver every.

[Craig]

Okay, Andrew, I am. I'm suffering under the oppressive rule of Dick.

[Andrew]

You're a five year old, Dick. Dick introduces Group think.

[Craig]

Oh, Dick, look.

[Andrew]

Oh, look. Group think. Even when these books are widely used, they are far from universally beloved. I think pushback kind of reaches a breaking point in the mid-50s.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Which is a couple different things that I want to focus on there. You know, there's a whole extended debate that goes on for a long time about mostly the phonics versus. Look, say, approach.

[Craig]

We're still doing it today. I haven't thought.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I know. And I know that the modern thing is like, why can't we admit that both. Both systems have value? I know. That's part of the.

[Craig]

Part of.

[Andrew]

Why are you shaking your head?

[Craig]

Well, oh, are you. Are you poo pooing that they both have value?

[Andrew]

No, I am, I am. I am. Derogatorily. I am making light of the. Of the modern beating role. Both sides must have good points.

[Craig]

Great. I have thoughts on that thing of it.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

The first thing I found was that Dr. Samuel Orton published an article in 1929 in the journal of Education Psychology.

[Andrew]

Oh, nice. You. You went back further than I did. I'm. I'm getting to the point where, where the.

[Craig]

Do you have why Johnny can't read?

[Andrew]

I'm. I'm getting. Man. What's one of the Star wars movies where, like, the good guys do good stuff?

[Craig]

A New Hope.

[Andrew]

Return of the Jedi. I'm. I, I'm At. I'm at Return of the Jedi over here, where. Where we're finally breaking the. The grip of Dick and Jane. So you do your thing first.

[Craig]

Well, yeah. So Dr. Samuel Orton is complaining all the way back in 1929, before we even get these Dick and Jane books where he's like, whole word method is bunk. Get it out of here.

[Andrew]

This is a new hope.

[Craig]

Yes. 1954.

[Andrew]

Empire. Empire Strikes Back is Dick and Jane is taught in 80% of American classrooms.

[Craig]

1980. 1954. Maybe we're at the, like the, the job of the hut opening gambit. John Hersey in Life magazine has written, why do students bog down on first R? And he is saying that these books are not effective and they're dull. How could you inspire reading with books like this?

[Andrew]

And around. Around the same time this is happening. A guy named Rudolph Flesch writes a book called why Johnny can't read and what you can do about it. This touches. It's basically just a critique of. Of look, say, and of Dick and Jane. It touches off a huge debate about. About these two different approaches. It's a best selling book for like almost a year.

[Craig]

Wow.

[Andrew]

And then I think, jumping off of the article you mentioned this guy named Theodore Geisel, who. Maybe you've heard of him.

[Craig]

Dr. Seuss.

[Andrew]

Yeah, this guy. Dr. Seuss.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Is he a real doctor? No one can say.

[Craig]

He and Scott Horseman should hang out.

[Andrew]

But he basically, like somebody at Houghton Mifflin reads this article.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And had met Dr. Seuss in the war. I don't know that he was going by Dr. Seuss when he was fighting in the war. And like, rhyming as he's like, killing.

[Craig]

Nazis, saying, I am Dr. Seuss.

[Andrew]

But that would be sick.

[Craig]

I am on the loose. I may have done propaganda, but here is my noose. Like, you know, yikes.

[Andrew]

This guy who runs Houghton Mifflin's education division reads this article and thinks. And the article specifically cites, like, where are. Where are big entertainers? Where's like, Walt Disney? Where's Dr. Seuss? How are they? Where are these people who are doing all this great illustration when it comes to teaching our kids how to read. How can. How can we fix this? And so the Houghton Mifflin guy gets in touch with Seuss and asks him to write a kid's book to help kids learn how to read. As the story goes, Zeus, the version of it that he told changed slightly over the years, like based on when he was asked, but allegedly he was given a list of. Of between 300 and 400 simple words, of which he could use 200 to 250. The final book uses 236 distinct words. And, yeah, the combination you're saying, yes, this is the book, the Cat in the Hat, which comes out in 1957. It is written using the simple word list. Nothing is too long. Zeus's rhyme scheme and the simple word list were both meant to help kids sound out words as they encountered them. So, of course, when you. When you see the word cat and then you see another word with two of the same letters, maybe you can infer that these words might sound the same.

[Craig]

Can I just say, was that as someone who's been reading children's books daily for three years now, and you careful.

[Andrew]

Because we have talked about this a lot. No, I don't want to repeat ourselves.

[Craig]

But you've been. You've been reading them longer than I have. But, like, reading Dick and Jane, I was just so surprised that none of it rhymed. None.

[Andrew]

None of it rhymed. It also, it all made me feel like I was kind of going nuts a little bit.

[Craig]

Like, I was like, I took the mushrooms that make you see machine elves. Like, I was just kind of losing it a little bit.

[Andrew]

If somebody was, like, dripping water on my forehead and reading me Dick and Jane books for eight hours, I would tell them whatever I needed to to tell them to make them stop. But Cat and Hat comes out extremely successful. It launches the beginner books line, which is all, you know, different books both by Seuss and by other people, that continues on to this day.

[Craig]

Mr. Brown can move, can you? Or whatever it's called.

[Andrew]

I can, yeah.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Thanks for asking. And Seuss himself said of Cat in the Hat, quote, it is the book I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the.

[Craig]

Dick and Jane primer cat standing over Dick and J with a bloody fishbowl.

[Andrew]

You know, I mean, he's got. He's got all the. He's got 26 little cats in his hat.

[Craig]

It's true.

[Andrew]

Little cats. A, B, C, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, op in qrs, T and U and V and all the rest of them.

[Craig]

Do we know what thing one and thing two eat?

[Andrew]

No, we don't know what. What he puts in that box with them. I don't think that he. I think it is, like, see spot. Oh. I think it's like when you do medieval torture and you do the thing where you, like, make a rat really hungry and Then put the rat in a bucket and then put the bucket up against some guy's chest. Yeah, I think that's the deal.

[Craig]

Then you put a fire at the end of the bucket.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Get out of there.

[Andrew]

You just don't, you don't feed Thing one and Thing two because you need them to be like, at their most.

[Craig]

Yeah. Okay.

[Andrew]

When they come out.

[Craig]

Yeah. They're Mr. Woo's pigs. Of course. Yes.

[Andrew]

But, yeah, I don't know. That Cat in the Hat single handedly breaks the fever of Dick and Jane. But it is coming at a time where the books are coming under a lot of sustained public criticism. And again, people are thinking, hey, what if we change some stuff?

[Craig]

Did you see any of the stuff around lbj?

[Andrew]

No.

[Craig]

Okay, so the other.

[Andrew]

What did that guy do? That guy's always getting up to something.

[Craig]

He's always getting up to something. I had trouble kind of connecting the dots, though. I saw references to this in a number of articles. Like, obviously 1954 Brown v. Board happened. So we're talking about how public education in the United States has to serve the needs of all sorts of people, not just the very lily white people depicted in Dick and Jane. And LBJ is pushing for Lyndon Johnson, of course, is.

[Andrew]

I know about Lyndon Baines Johnson, thank you very much.

[Craig]

Pushing for federal funding for schools that can meet more diverse student needs with the elementary and Secondary Education Act. That act goes on to become all sorts of other things that may or may not have actually achieved their ends. But there are. There is now like, a federal funding stream that is at least like, nominally supposed to address modern student needs, both in terms of like, you know, nom representation maybe, but also like stories that kids can respond to and actually help them learn. So there, there's like another injection into the evolution of reading pedagogy here that is coming from the government. I think that is like a little less one to one, probably than Cat in the Hat killing Dick and Jane, which I think is actually a pretty compelling argument, in my opinion.

[Andrew]

Well, because just, I'm thinking about it a lot in terms of like, music. Music instruction too, because we've got Henry in piano lessons right now and I'm always like, learning guitar stuff and like, fits and starts and watching guys with hats on YouTube tell me about how to play guitar.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And the, the point that they, that they make frequently is like, yeah, you can start with all this, like, building blocky stuff. But I think, you know, most, most people who are trying to pick up an instrument would just like to Learn how to play, like, a recognizable song that they like.

[Craig]

Yes, sure.

[Andrew]

And I felt kind of a similar way. Reading these Dick and Jane stories is like, man, at least Cat in the hat and Mr. Brown, Camus and Marvin K. Mooney. Will you please go now? Like, at least they got, like, fun, fantastical, wismatic old stuff going on that my brain can latch onto. And they've got all these funny illustrations. Dr. Seuss loves to kind of draw, like, a little fuzzy creature with, like, a very defined butt.

[Craig]

Yeah, he does.

[Andrew]

Which I always find entertaining.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And it's just. Yeah. These. These books make me more interested to read because I'm more interested in the stuff that's going on in the story and in the illustrations.

[Craig]

Yes. And it's.

[Andrew]

And I. And I read Dick and Jane, and I'm like, this is the. Not only is this weird torture material, but I do. I am the least interested in this I've ever been in anything.

[Craig]

They are insipid. I know. I don't really, like, know how else to describe how uninteresting they are.

[Andrew]

It's just like, why did everybody in this family have a lobotomy and then get sent home? Ah. What doctor performed the outpatient lobotomy on doctor says of these people? It must have been.

[Craig]

But. Okay. I was reading a little bit about why you might teach sight words. And this is the thing that, like, even. Well, even in the beginning of these readers, from young Penguin readers, there was, like, a little thing of, like, what sight words your kid might learn in. In Dick and Jane, we play.

[Andrew]

I like. I like Penguin's approach of just kind of subsuming this into, like, a big, like. I don't know. Here's just like, a big pile of stuff with a 2 on it.

[Craig]

Yeah. I don't know, man.

[Andrew]

Like any. I don't know. Whatever works for you. Yeah.

[Craig]

But they have, like, 10 sight words that they think your kid might want to just, like, know. And sight words are like.

[Andrew]

They got any of the cusses?

[Craig]

No, they don't have the curses. But I like.

[Andrew]

I want a kid's book that acknowledges that learning the curses is the most exciting part.

[Craig]

I. Here's where I'm at. I have in a lot of my research and in reading that I've been doing the last few months as I'm anxious about making sure my kid learns how to read, that phonics is the way to go. And I don't. I. I know some of why people think sight words are useful and English is a mess and There are words that don't, like easily map to phonics construction.

[Andrew]

Well, and if you're talking about a list of like a few dozen very important like load bearing, functional words, then.

[Craig]

It'S hard to argue with start with.

[Andrew]

Yes, start with start with look, say, because it's more important for my like 2 year old to like, know what the word food is or like and for him to like, understand why each letter in that word makes that sense.

[Craig]

I think the first word that. And I don't, I don't know that Simon really can recognize a lot of words right now at all. But he knows, he knows his name on site and he knows the letters that make up his name because that's important and he's known that for a little while and it's very useful in his classroom to know that sort of thing. Right? I was reading a little bit because.

[Andrew]

You see it and you're like, oh, somebody's talking about me or I'm interested.

[Craig]

Someone's in my chair. Get out of my chair.

[Andrew]

Yeah, what gives?

[Craig]

But there are common words like was or said that are not. They don't really follow typical English phonics rules and they also lack easy picture clues. So like another big thing of the the Dick and Jane and look say and we'll get in. I want to talk about the three queuing method that has been around for the last 50 years.

[Andrew]

You mentioned this in Slack earlier and I didn't want to say that I had no idea what you're talking.

[Craig]

Get ready, buddy, get ready. But you can't do up up with like was or said. Like even said.

[Andrew]

You can't do up up with us.

[Craig]

Sorry. Not everybody listening has read Dick and Jane, but the, the way that the Dick and Jane books work is that there are like little kids looking up in the sky and on the page it says up, up, look up. And like, you can't, you can't look at the past tense of mother and go look. Was, Was.

[Andrew]

Yeah, you can't do that, right? Or you can't. Like, it's not like when your big, big father comes up behind mother and covers your eyes and everybody's like, oh, it's just big, big father.

[Craig]

There are very few words that have a as the vowel that go in them like was does like. It's just like, that's a very good example of a word that you might just need to teach as a sight word because it doesn't really work. But that means you're teaching to the exception you're you're teaching to the, like, outliers as opposed to teaching, like, the system of how the English Alphabet works. And the reason, like, it's an alphabetic language because all the. The symbols that we use to write meaning correspond to certain sounds. It's not a. It's not an iconography. That's not the right word. But it's logographic, maybe. I'm not sure.

[Andrew]

I can't help you. I'm sorry.

[Craig]

Like, typically, like, written Chinese is not, like, corresponding certain sounds. It's different. Yeah, sure, but so, like, it's better to do. If you're going to do rote memorization of something, it might be better to do rote memorization of the building block phonemes rather than the words, because then you can piece together other words later, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah, they're. Absolutely, absolutely. Even. Even if you're talking about other, like, just, you know, regular nouns and verbs, every once in a while you're going to run into one where it's just like, this is just how it is, because this is the word that it is.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

And you just learn this one and we'll all move on in English.

[Craig]

And I want to acknowledge, like, English is particularly tough. Right. Because we. We have, like, through, I guess, the Union Jack and other things that have happened in history, we've just absorbed a lot of other languages and a lot of other ways of expressing certain, like, vowel sounds that just are not consistent with each other. I don't know what you're supposed to tell a little kid, but it just. That's just how it goes.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Do you want to get into the modern stuff, Andrew, or do you want to do Dick and Jane books first?

[Andrew]

No, I would love. I'd like to get into the modern stuff and then we can do Dick and Jane at the end. Because I feel like doing. Doing actual Dick and Jane books is gonna psych me so much that I'm not gonna want to keep podcasting after we're done.

[Craig]

That's great. So a couple of different.

[Andrew]

I mean, is it great? I don't know, but it is what.

[Craig]

It is the main article that, like, set me on this, like, radicalization path.

[Andrew]

If.

[Craig]

If you read newspapers and you don't have to, there's no judgment. If you do read newspapers, over the last few years, you have probably encountered editorials or other news articles about, like, they're teaching the kids how to read. Wrong. None of the kids know how to read. Things are bad out there for kids learning to read.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Here in the United States, I've Seen.

[Andrew]

A lot of that, A lot of that panicking. And I, I don't know, I'm not like, I'm not super well versed on it, but I do think, huh, this, A lot of this feels intuitively right to me. In a, In a society where everything is incentivized toward like, short form video or whatever.

[Craig]

The, the. The nation's report card. This is the national center for Education Statistics that administers a National Assessment of Educational Progress.

[Andrew]

Talking about the. Is they still doing that?

[Craig]

That's a great question. I don't know if this is all data from 2024.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

Rad.

[Andrew]

I feel like there's as, as we go, there's going to be a lot of stuff where the data just like suddenly stops.

[Craig]

Oh, weird. We don't have that anymore. Nobody ran the survey. Trends in grade four are not amazing relative going back to 1992, when I think their studies started. In particular, they are getting worse for the kids in the lower percentile of reading ability. So it's like, it's an interesting chart where like, everybody is dipping down in the last two years a tiny bit. I would venture to guess that some of that is Covid disruption and we should just like, as a society double down on our efforts to make sure kids are doing okay. But precipitously from 2019, kids in the 10th and 25th percentile of reading ability in grade four are doing worse than they were, you know, 10, 12 years ago.

[Andrew]

Yeah, and that's like my, some of my feeling about like, the, the debate on like, how to teach kids how to read is like, a lot of kids just are not going to be interested in reading beyond, like, the, you know, the functional amount of it that they need to be able to do to survive in society. Like, but the, the flip side of that is, like, the kids who are excited about reading and who do find it, like, innately interesting are going to find. Are going to figure out how to do it. So regardless of how you get them.

[Craig]

Started on, I am basing a lot of my feelings on a very persuasive article and I think a podcast or a radio piece from the American Public Media at a loss for words. How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to Be Poor Readers by Emily Hanford in 2019. And one of the things that come that like, jumped out at me from that is to what you just said, Andrew, I'm going to spend a lot of time critiquing what is called three queuing or balanced literacy.

[Andrew]

And I mean, you should Spell that out so that people know what you're talking about.

[Craig]

Three cueing C, U, E, I, N, G. There you go. And I'll say what that is in just a second. But they acknowledge that, like, 40% of kids will just learn to read. And so some of the data that shows that these methods work has, like, noisy data in it because, like, some kids just learn to read because they like to read.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And actually you're. It's doing a disservice by saying that these methods work really well because you've got all these just like, I don't know, kids love Dr. Seuss. They're just gonna learn how to read a book.

[Andrew]

I think with. With Henry, it's truly been like he.

[Craig]

Learned to read from Mario.

[Andrew]

He works. He wants to play video games so bad that he is. He is getting better at reading.

[Craig]

But he is also a kid who loves a book. Like.

[Andrew]

Yeah, no, it's a. It's applying in other. In other situations too. But the first time I'd heard this kid sight reading a word, it was because we were playing a video game.

[Craig]

It rule. I know so many words from video games that have words like spoony, like ages. I know what an aegis is because I was like 11 and playing an RPG on Super Nintendo. You know, like, come on now.

[Andrew]

Like Phoenix Down.

[Craig]

Like Phoenix Down. So the modern fight is phonics versus three queuing or some version of balanced literacy which is attempting to combine both. Three queuing dates back to a guy named Ken Goodman in 1967. The end of this article includes a fun note where they interview Goodman and ask him what he thinks of all the research. He says, my science is different, and also proceeds to say that he thinks dyslexia doesn't exist. So I don't know if Ken Goodman is still Alive. He was 91 at the time of this article.

[Andrew]

Flawed people can have good ideas.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

3 and vice versa.

[Craig]

3 Queuing also aligns with an M, a method called MSV from Marie Clay in New Zealand, meaning sentence structure and visual information. So these are books where you are meant to not necessarily learn the phonics of a word, but you look at a word in context of a book and you kind of guess at what you think the word might be based on. Maybe like the first letter of the word visual information in an accompanying picture. And what word might make sense given the other words that you know.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

The article makes a pretty compelling point with an anecdote of a teacher who was like, oh, those are all of the Tricks I used because I was bad at reading. Like, they're teaching. Like, this method teaches kids a way to learn reading that is almost starting from a deaf or an implied deficit. Right. Is what the research says. Anyway. There's a. An article. There's like a real handout that is like, the science is settled from Inform. It's a magazine. Research findings and readings instruction are settled science dating back to 1967 all the way to 2015.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

Summarizing all sorts of articles that are like, no, you need to teach phonics. You need to teach kids the way that words work through the letters that are in the words. And all the way in 2015, it lights up the parts of their brain that process language.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

One of the things that crops up in a lot of these articles about this debate is that there is this, you know, body of research by cognitive scientists that education academics just do not have access to. There's a New York times article from 2023 about this woman, Lucy Calkins, who is a contemporary or at least colleague of the folks who helped make these Penguin young readers Andrew Arraign Funtus and gay Sue Pinel. Excuse me. Who are both whole word advocates, whole language advocates, about how her. Her whole thing at Columbia University got shut down because the New York school system and others were moving away from her whole language method.

[Andrew]

Yeah. There's a big New York Times article in, like, 2023 about how the state of New York, I think, is. Is forcing a big change in how the city schools do teaching. And they're moving away from, like, looks. A look. Say whole word stuff.

[Craig]

Yep. And they, like, she acknowledges in that article when she commented that, like, listen, I'm somebody who's kind of ensconced in this world of pedagogy with young children. I've. I don't. Nobody's shown me an mri. Like, no. And I, like, I say that with as much charity as possible. She also is running a business where she's selling all of her curricula to all these schools across the country, and she does not have time or no one is interested in talking to her about the research. That's one way to read it. Also, she thinks that what she's built her life on is the way that it should be taught. So there's that, too.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I'm gonna come out in favor of the opposite point where it's like, it's literally your job. You've got all the time that you want to make to. To do more research on how kids learn. How to read.

[Craig]

There was somebody quoted in that article talking about Columbia kind of, you know, voiding their relationship with her in, in light of evidence and in light of frustration by a lot of school districts and 42 states that had passed laws requiring that teachers update their reading strategies with evidence based, you know, methods.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And this guy is like, yeah, this is a great example of how universities can find themselves in an awkward position where they develop a business relationship with an academic that then becomes part of their, like, cash flow.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And then when this, when that person's method is. Becomes outdated or the research points in a different direction, they take longer than they maybe should to change that relationship or push that person. But yeah, this is just a whole thing of like, you move from three queuing into what is now called balance literacy. It's a thing that Lucy Calkins and others put forward, which is a lot.

[Andrew]

Of this is this the everybody has a point.

[Craig]

This is a bit of the everybody has a point, which is like, yeah, phonics, sure. But also you should give little kids lots of independent reading time.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Where they can just like try to use this cueing method to figure it out. And it's like, I get it appeals to a lot of well meaning instincts. Student choice, like student learning choice is actually, I think there is data that backs up that kids having a say in what they learn is valuable. And so you're, you're, you might be a teacher going, well, I don't want to teach phonics because the kids find that really rote and frustrating.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

Well, but then if you're just letting them like look at a book but not learn how to read it, like, what are you doing?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

There are like inclusive practices. Like, are we strict phonics instruction might be hard for kids with learning disabilities. And do we have the resources to support those kids? No. So let's not do that. Or let's let kids read books that have better representation for their lived experience. And we don't need to worry as much about the phonics part. Or I want kids to just want to read. So I don't want to make reading feel frustrating to them by like making them learn phonics stuff. It's like, okay, but you're actually setting them at a disadvantage if you, if you don't do that.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And a lot of it just because like the, the main thing that was compelling to me is like an understanding of what is called orthographic mapping, which is when you are learning how the written symbols on the page translate to sounds that form the words you're talking about and then correspond to the meaning of those words. And if you are asking them to do three cueing, you are inviting kids to look away from the written word to other clues that actually disrupt their ability to learn what the word is. You're asking them to look at pictures, you're asking them to look at the other words on the page. There was a, there was somebody mentioned in this American Public Media article that talks about, if you look at this, like, meaning, this MSV method, meaning sentence structure, visual information method, that is a great way to think about how you derive meaning from the words on the page, but is less useful in terms of like, what is the word and how does the letters make the sounds?

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

So they're like, it kind of. That, that APM article just ends with one teacher being like, if I hear anyone using this method, I am like, get it away from the kids. And, and my natural inclination is to like. There are teachers who were not even instructed about the pitfalls of this method who are just trying to use the tools that they have in tough educational environments where they are always under resourced and their district says, here's what we have for you. Go for it. And so like I'm not here to impugn any instructor who has used this kind of stuff because that's what they were given or that's what they were trained in. But it just seems like it is not very effective and that there's a lot of data in science that, that backs that up. So maybe let's teach more phonics. And I'm very anxious about my own kid learning phonics. So that's just kind of where I'm at. Andrew. That's where I'm at.

[Andrew]

He's only three. He's going how to read.

[Craig]

He'll probably be fine. Because I'm worried about it. He'll probably be fine.

[Andrew]

I don't know that you need to draw that.

[Craig]

No, that's fair.

[Andrew]

Because then, then, then you start to think, well, if I'm not worried about it, then it's not going to work out.

[Craig]

No, that's fair. That's fair.

[Andrew]

No, I think it's, he's going to be fine.

[Craig]

But anyway, I, I also think that there are teachers who find like teaching phonics is as an intimidating process. Queuing isn't as intimidating to like run in the room. And there's kind of some of the arguments against it are like, well, but you're wasting classroom time that you could actually just like teach them things that will be useful. So.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

That's where the modern thing is. We are like, looks like we are at a point in time where here in the States, we are tipping back against whole language learning.

[Andrew]

We're just tipping back against learning anything about anything.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Everything that you learn should come from a person on your phone who told you it, while little words flash over their head. And as long as whatever they're saying is like the opposite of what the conventional wisdom is, then it's good knowledge and you should learn it. Yeah, they're just saying that the polio vaccine should be optional.

[Craig]

Like. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

[Andrew]

This is the news that's happening today that's gotten. That's got me pretty bad despairing at the moment. So, you know, Dick said, look, look, look up, look up, up, up. Jane said, run, run, run, Dick. Run, run and see. Look, look, said Dick. See Sally. See, Funny Sally and father. See. See, said Sally. Sally is up, up, up. This is fun for Sally. The end of chapter one.

[Craig]

These are so hard to read.

[Andrew]

These kids, Dick and Jane are what, like 6 and 5? 5 and 4, 7 and 5? Yeah. Like, they are too old to be talking like this. Look, look, look up, look up, up, up. Chapter two. Who is it?

[Craig]

Who is it? Oh, this one's good.

[Andrew]

Craig, read me chapter two. Who is it?

[Craig]

Okay, so the. This is a game where the kids are putting.

[Andrew]

I think if you explain too much about what's going on, it's not going to really reflect the experience of what it's like to read the book.

[Craig]

No. I will also say that the way that this book is formatted is there are times where it feels like a Cormac McCarthy novel where I don't know who's talking because they do use quotation marks, but they occasionally don't tell you who's talking.

[Andrew]

I also feel like there's some kind of potent symbolism that we're not gonna have time to talk about. About how the illustrations just, like, represent the characters. Like, I think it's pretty clear that each story is illustrated by somebody slightly different.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And everybody mostly looks pretty consistent, except for father. Why does father always look so different all the time? He's very Father. Father's face, his. His hairstyle, his hairline, his. The way he dresses changes radically from story to story.

[Craig]

Dick said, who is here? Who is it? Mother. Mother said, it is Dick. Oh, Mother said, dick. You can see who it is. Who is this? Father, who is it? Mother said, it is not Dick. It Is not Jane. It is not little baby Sally. It is big, big father. Yes, yes, said baby Sally. Oh, mother, you can see he is not that big. He's just.

[Andrew]

He's just regular guy.

[Craig]

Who said, oh, mother, you can see it doesn't tell me who.

[Andrew]

Maybe father says it. Jane said, because Dick, in the pre. The way it's constructed in the previous one, Dick, who has his hand on mother's eyes, said, you can see who it is.

[Craig]

So would that be so in this.

[Andrew]

One, I think big, big father has his eye. His hands on mother's eyes.

[Craig]

But that was also because Dick said the previous line. So this one could baby Sally. Yes, yes, oh, mother. You can see this is what. I'm frustrated.

[Andrew]

Why is baby Sally talking so much?

[Craig]

I don't know. Jane said, who is here? Who is it? Mother? It is not Dick, said mother. It is not Jane. Not Jane, said Sally. Oh. Oh, this is fun. Who said that?

[Andrew]

Sally said that.

[Craig]

Yes, mother said Dick. It is little baby Sally. Funny little Sally. See, my family, said, mother, my funny, funny family is here. Spot is here, said Dick and Puff is here. See this big, big family, they like.

[Andrew]

The word funny a lot.

[Craig]

What else? Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

I'm gonna skip pretty much all the rest of the ones. I mean, do you think Jane helps mother is interesting.

[Craig]

I find something pretty kind of silly and unnecessary. I like, where is Sally?

[Andrew]

Okay, you can do where is Sally? And then I'm gonna do a funny ride.

[Craig]

Yeah, you're. You've got funny ride locked in. Where is Sally? Is about Sally causing trouble, and they find what appears to be cocaine on her chair, and they don't know where she is. There's white powder all over her little chair. Here is something funny. Can you guess what it is? Okay, here's another thing. If this is the look, say method, and I'm looking at two little kids squatting down, looking at a tiny chair.

[Andrew]

Mm.

[Craig]

How am I supposed to know how to say the word guess? Like, what are we doing here?

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Craig]

Bring in Dr. Seuss, please.

[Andrew]

And I think it's. It's. It's. They want you to guess the word guess. It's like reinforcing.

[Craig]

It truly is flashcards. How are you supposed to learn to read? Dick said, look here, Jane. Look and see what I see? I see Jane. I see what you see. I can guess where Sally is now. I can find Sally. Oh, Sally. Here you are. And she's covered. The cat in.

[Andrew]

The cat's covered in flower or something.

[Craig]

Some sort of makeup or something.

[Andrew]

Like, no, I think the cat has gotten into the flower.

[Craig]

But she says, puff looks pretty. Puff is not yellow now. Puff is pretty. See? Pretty, pretty puff.

[Andrew]

That doesn't imply that she did it.

[Craig]

I think she did it to Puff.

[Andrew]

Well, that's cruelty.

[Craig]

That's what I read.

[Andrew]

That changes it from a cute story about something that happened to an animal to a story about a little psychopath torturing a pet.

[Craig]

Jay Nelp's mother is about setting the table and having dinner.

[Andrew]

Yep. And about, like, recognizing these. The existence of the self. Yep, I guess.

[Craig]

Tell me about a funny ride.

[Andrew]

Chapter six. A funny ride. Father said, I want something. I want to get something, something. Something for the car. We can get it here. Oh, Father said, sally, what do you want? What do you want for the car? Father said, you will see. You will see.

[Craig]

I hated that. I hated that.

[Andrew]

You'll all see. Up, up went the car. Oh, said Jane, see the car go up. The car can go for a ride. It can ride up. Sally said, oh, see, Tim, he went up, too. He and Spot and Puff went up. Tim is a stuffed bear.

[Craig]

The number of. Okay, we haven't been.

[Andrew]

Tim was introduced without a lot of preamble.

[Craig]

We haven't talked about Dick and Jane. We play, but they say o. O all the time.

[Andrew]

How important is this? How important is this? Like, sort of guttural noise that every kid figures out how to make. Important to the process of learning to read. Sally said, look, Father, Spot and Puff want to jump. Please make the car come down. Can you make it come down? Yes, Sally said, father, we can make the car come down. We will get Spot and Puff and.

[Craig]

I don't like father in this story. I don't like.

[Andrew]

Sally said, dick, see the car come down, see Tim come down, see Spot and Puff come down. Sally said, down comes the car, down comes Spot, down comes Puff and Dunk. Down comes Tim. Oh, Spot laughed. Dick, you ride up. You ride down. You ride up and down. This is a funny ride for you. A funny ride for you. A funny ride for Puff and. And a funny ride for Tim.

[Craig]

I don't. Father Andrew, wait. I know your child and I know my child. Neither of our children talk this way.

[Andrew]

No, not anything like this.

[Craig]

And that's fine. This is a book. It's okay that it's different, but it's also not fun to read. So if it was going to be different, I would wish it would be, like, different in a way that was fun to read.

[Andrew]

Father went to the car. He said, the car can go. The family can go. The family can go away. Away we go, said Sally. We will not ride up and down. We will ride away. Away went the car away went the family away, away, away.

[Craig]

And they were never heard from again. Like, what are we talking about?

[Andrew]

I'm gonna. I did not. I don't like reading Dick and Jane. I would never try to teach a kid how to read this way. But I'm gonna be thinking about. I don't know, I think if we have like a discord, like a short story writing contest or something. I think we're gonna need to pick prompts from Dick and Jane that people have to write. Patreon.com overdpod I just. I'm gonna think a lot about the car can go. The family can go.

[Craig]

The family way is really good.

[Andrew]

Like, if this was my family, I would want them to go away too. Talking about up and down forever.

[Craig]

Look at this father. This is from Dick and Jane. We play. Look at this father.

[Andrew]

Look at this nerd trying to play ball. How's he. Look at how he's gripping the. He's like gripping the ball bat, but he's also got an apple. Is. Is that like a trick?

[Craig]

I think that's the ball. Anybody. But.

[Andrew]

Does anybody. Is anybody in the majors do that?

[Craig]

No. He's getting ready to play a little warm up game. So he's got the ball in his hand.

[Andrew]

Looks like he's getting ready to play somebody's windshield with that baseball bat.

[Craig]

Yeah. I don't. I don't care for this, man.

[Andrew]

I don't know if I want to read the whole other book. I didn't think. I didn't think. I didn't think it was as interesting. And that's why it has a one on it instead of too. But is there anything in this book that you. That caught your eye as much as Funny Ride caught mine?

[Craig]

I'm just looking through just to make sure. I want to.

[Andrew]

I want something. I want to get something.

[Craig]

Something for the car. The. The art on Dick on C. Dick play in this.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Dick is like, dad, what are you doing?

[Craig]

What are you doing?

[Andrew]

What devilry is this, dad, you're juggling? What is that's got his pants up to his nipples?

[Craig]

There was one other one I thought might have been interesting. Let me just leaf through real quick.

[Andrew]

Number one has the wider range of like how dad is drawn. And then. And in fun with Dick and Jane, dad is drawn just kind of like a Mad Men businessman.

[Craig]

Oh, there's the one where the dad is playing football and he kicks his shoe off. Hold on.

[Andrew]

Oh, funny father.

[Craig]

Funny father. That is that chapter.

[Andrew]

I don't know if that's the name of the chapter.

[Craig]

Jane, said father, come and play ball. Come and play. I can help you play ball, said father, I can help. Come father, said Jane, come and play ball. Come and play. Oh, funny, funny father. As he kicks his loafer off trying to kick a football.

[Andrew]

Some of the stories straight up don't work without the illustrations. I think the, like the covering the eyes one that we read earlier is. Is one of those that gets close to that.

[Craig]

That's the other thing. If it's. If it's supposed to be. Look, say. And I'm supposed to derive context from the, from the picture. How does. Oh, funny, funny father.

[Andrew]

Because he kicked his shoe off. It's funny. Look at his foot. Look at his dumb sock.

[Craig]

If I showed this to my son, he'd be like, oh, he kicked the ball and his shoe is flying away. Yeah, like, that's not useful. It's not useful. I don't know, man. I think that these books aren't great. That's like how I'm feeling. These.

[Andrew]

No, they're not. No, they're not. They're not good books. They're not good books and they're not useful books. Like, I would reach for a lot of other things to teach Henry how to. He knows how to read. And Dick and Jane had nothing to do with it. They can't take any credit. And I think that says everything.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yeah. Going back to that whole MSV method which does, like, as I was reading some of that, it is very Dick and Jane to me. There is there. This is the like meaning sentence visual method from that one amp article I was talking about. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children. They have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture. Eagle eye, getting their lips ready to try the first sound lips, the fish. Or just skipping the word altogether. Skippy frog. I. If we have any educators listening who have taught any of these methods, I would love to know what your experience was because it. Some of it seems to me like it is not super useful. I look at the photos, the photos, the pictures.

[Andrew]

They are. I mean, they are based on real stories, as we said at the beginning.

[Craig]

I look at the pictures in these Dick and Jane books and I like, kind of half of them don't really feel like I could point to a word and the picture and like draw a connection. And because the. The books don't also seem to be like, and here's how a teacher would give you the phonics underpinning of these words. I'm not sure what we're doing here.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think that's part of, part of what I like about Seuss is that I don't know how Simon likes to read, but when Henry was that age, like, a lot of it was just like, what's that? What's that? What's that? What's that thing doing? And to like, have an illustration, like a load bearing illustration with a miskicked football in it. And to not be teaching the word kick or the word football.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Like, you're just. The pictures are doing a bunch of work that the text is not then taking advantage of. I realize that those stories are grouped and into the level one reader, probably specifically because it's just trying to do like, very, very simple building, blocky kind of stuff. And if you want to. To do something more advanced, you buy the Level 2 book. You read about how the car can go. The family can go. The family can go away.

[Craig]

The family can go away.

[Andrew]

You start doing. You start doing more advanced stuff based on that. But yeah, just. Yeah, I don't know. I don't like it.

[Craig]

No, I don't have to. And, and, and it goes back to my, like, my what I've been convinced of as like solid critiques of three queuing, which is just like you're drawing attention away from the words themselves. Like, let a kid learn how to read the word itself. And there's some pretty good com, like, compelling cases in that amp article about like, yeah, you teach kids vocabulary such that they might actually know bigger words than they can read. And then when they learn how to, like, read out the phonemes, then they will, like, stumble into words they already know how to say. And like, that's pretty cool.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

So I don't know.

[Andrew]

I can't talk about digging Jane anymore.

[Craig]

That's fine. We didn't talk at all about the. The, the movie. The 2005 crime comedy film.

[Andrew]

No, it's. No, I can't do that.

[Craig]

Starring Jim Carrey and T.E. leone, based on a 1977 film of the same name, which mostly just seemed to traffic on the fact that everybody knew what Dick and Jane was.

[Andrew]

The podcast can go. Andrew and Craig can go. Andrew and Craig can go away.

[Craig]

Andrew and Craig can go away. Readers listeners can email. Can email@overdue pod gmail.com email oh oh oh oh. Social media. Oh oh. At overdue pod. Listen Listen, tell us what you think. Theme song Composed Composed by Nick Laranjis Theme song oh oh.

[Andrew]

You sound like you're turning into a Pokemon.

[Craig]

That's sort of what's happening, Andrew. Folks want to know more about the show. Where do they go?

[Andrew]

Overdue Podcast.com's Internet website. You can go go there to see all the links that Craig just said and also a link to our Patreon page. Patreon.com overdue pod join our Discord community. I can't wait to talk about how everybody learned how to read in response to this week's episode. You also get a bonus episodes are ad free feed our monthly newsletter Dusty bookshelves. What other stuff? Long reads project which we just recorded the first episode of our Akira podcast, Tokyo Drifters. The first episode of that. The the like research based episode zero will go up on the main feed as kind of a teaser. But then every episode after that will be on Patreon only for quite a while. So again, patreon.com overdue pod that'll be like six episodes, one book and then a bonus episode for the the anime film that we'll also be watching.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

You want to Talk about subs vs dubs? Patreon.com Overdupod Anything else? What's happening next?

[Craig]

I think I'm ready to talk about the February schedule, Andrew.

[Andrew]

Oh, okay, cool.

[Craig]

Here on the podcast that we can't wait to.

[Andrew]

Can't wait to hear about it.

[Craig]

Next week we'll be talking about Three Lives by Gertrude Stein followed by Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers.

[Andrew]

Can't wait to read this novelization of.

[Craig]

The TV show Monk and iRobot the movie.

[Andrew]

I think it's just gonna be like Monk meets a robot. Oh, he's like, I really like this because I have issues with like cleanliness and human contact and stuff.

[Craig]

Characters welcome. Then for Valentine's Day, we are going to read Game Changers Number two, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reed. I think Andrew's very excited about this one. Andrew's a big hockey head. He loves to puck around and find out.

[Andrew]

Why are you putting me on blast about this hockey book that we do?

[Craig]

No, I'm having fun. It was your idea that we do it on the show. I think I want to give you credit and also just have fun with you.

[Andrew]

Sure. Yeah.

[Craig]

There's a lot I cannot.

[Andrew]

I can't wait to release an episode where we're effusive in our praise, but then secretly we have texts about how much we hated the book, which is happening apparently is a thing that's happened in hockey podcasting. Last week is like two guys were like, I love heated rivalry. And then their text they were like, I hate heated rivalry and it's too woke and it's stupid.

[Craig]

Yep. We will release our.

[Andrew]

I don't know, I feel like this is some kind of a culture war psyop. I'm not sure these guys are real.

[Craig]

Yep. Yep. And then closing out February with the sellout by Paul Beatty. Looking forward to talking about that.

[Andrew]

Can't wait to sell out finally with me.

[Craig]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Mighty, mighty Boss tones. See them boss tones.

[Andrew]

Until we talk to you next week, please go away and try to be happy. Sam. That was a Headgum Podcast.

[Craig]

Hi, I'm Drew O Fualo. And I'm Dason Afualo, and we host the Headgum Podcast Two Idiot Girls. Each episode we're discussing plenty of topics that you would be giggling at at.

[Andrew]

A sleepover with your weird cousins.

[Craig]

We talk about all kinds of things, like weird dating, horror stories, maybe a really bad wedgie you had once, or even a show you're loving and anything in between. So you can listen to Two Idiot Girls on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube. New episodes will be posted every Tuesday.