ThatReadingThing

There’s not much to say about this episode so I’ll let John speak about the exams they were asked to sit:

“Bollocks. No point at all for what I need for my reading and writing.”

There’s no doubt that Teresa seemed to benefit from writing the tests, but I’m not sure it was worth the cost to Kelly, James and John (or any of the others that we didn’t see).

But I come to the exam debate with my own cultural baggage and at least Phil could demonstrate that some of his students had made huge progress in a short time and at the hands of a self-confessed amateur in the adult education classroom. Overall, we have to congratulate Phil and be thankful that the whole world of struggling adult readers has been accurately portrayed on television.

I know (because they call me) that there are individual instructors and whole college departments out there doing what they can on very small budgets to make phonic based reading instruction available to their students.

So, overall, thanks Phil for sticking your neck out.

Thanks for taking risks and demonstrating that everyone learning to read needs to figure out the connection between the sounds that they hear and the squiggles on the page. There IS age-appropriate material out there. Just ask.

And finally, thanks for showing us the people behind the statistics.

For more from Phil, see today’s Guardian.