Looking for a (relatively) quick and easy way to improve kids' reading comprehension at higher grade levels? Try teaching them to understand complex sentence structure. A recent study suggests it can be powerful. More in my new post: nataliewexler.substack.com/p…

Or the English spelling system sucks & has always sucked? No English-speaking kid has ever been able to decode & encode all English words in Grade 1 with or without phonics instruction. It takes many years. Virtually ALL Spanish & Finnish kids can decode ALL of their words by Grade 1. Tbf, reform ideas were despotic before, but the French showed us a better way lately. As a retired learning disabilities teacher with a linguistics major & a post-grad diploma in learning disabilities, I know there are about 200,000 weird (illogical) spellings in English that are not phonics-friendly, if we extrapolate on Masha Bell's research (reforming-english.blogspot.c…). For instance, "awe" is not pronounced /ei/ + /w/ + /e/! Right? "The" is not /t/ + /h/ + /e/! 1000s of sight-words need to be memorized. There are 200 ways of spellings 44 sounds. (Ibid) Who buys or drives a car with that many defects? Who gives the keys to the beater to their kids? Phonics misses the mark ½ of the time though! One still has to deal with thousands of sight-words. How is phonics going to help with words that have unphonics-friendly parts like "weapon" & such? Dyk Orwell called the system tormenting (1) & Einstein said it was treacherous. Why is mentally torturing kids okay? Dyk research in 2003 estimated the English spelling system delays the reading acquisition of all anglophones by 2.5 years & has always: scribd.com/document/19249268…. Let's have trials to assess how phonics perform & whole-word strategies do against these languages that have systematic, transparent spelling systems (that cause Grade 1 FULL decoding of all words by virtually all students) like Spanish & Finnish. Tbf, there are some who can learn to read a bit faster by going to church, for one. There are also linguistically privileged parents giving an edge to their kids, all IQ being equal: educationnext.org/dont-dismi… . They can guess better at those weird spellings bc they have a bigger, passive vocabulary. Others look & sound dumb. Is this when & where racist beliefs starts? This could be tested too. Anyway, imagine if kids could be independent learners by Grade 1 not 6 or later (not learn to be submissive & not need to learn nonsense that harmed our eyes & ears). (All Spanish & Finnish kids can decode all their words by Grade 1. Their system is systematic.) Teachers could be guiding, not shoving down the throat tens of thousands of weird "awes" & "ewes". The French fixed their UNsystematic system a bit lately and, game-changer, did NOT force current users to relearn or use the new spellings. 0nly new generations were taught the new spellings. No shoving down the throat to ALL. Longest answer with more proof & link: xitter.cf/PeterDMayr/status/1766… (1) telelib.com/authors/O/Orwell…

It's still too early for most to understand but I'll say it anyway: education is a subfield of engineering.

Children are not refusing to read. They are refusing the books they are being handed. When researchers asked disengaged readers in Scotland what would make them read more, the answer was not more phonics lessons. Not more reading tests. Not more reading records sent home. Books linked to their interests. Books they actually chose. Books that looked worth opening. If you're not in Scotland, is this the same conversation happening in your country? Source: National Literacy Trust 2025 Annual Literacy Survey

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.