Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States. Consider our eyes.  Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant?  This is often a matter of life and death.  How do eyes do their job? Eyes twitch, jerk, and flick rapidly from detail to detail in order to identify an object.  There are no built-in sequences, no shortcuts.  The eyes must twitch – perhaps dozens of times – until a positive identification is made.  The technical term for these twitches is a saccade (which rhymes with façade). Many such eye movements occur every time you see a car, painting, building, celebrity, insect, etc.  Your eyes flick top-to-bottom, side-to-side, point-to-point, finding more and more details until the brain is certain.  Scientists can track these eye movements.  It's remarkable how much...(Read Full Article)