“Dozens of cities and states across America are overhauling the way their schools teach reading — attempting to close gaps exacerbated by the pandemic”: Axios surveys states’ approaches to reading.
On striking detail: Mississippi, next to last in fourth-grade reading proficiency in 2013, rose to twenty-first in 2022: “State legislators and educators tried a number of strategies, including screening kids for literacy, hiring literacy coaches for teachers, and emphasizing phonics.” Hmm, phonics.
Here in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that in spring 2023, nearly 35% of third through eleventh graders were reading at grade level. “This is a great sign for the state of Illinois that we are really back on track,” the state's superintendent of education said. He wasn’t joking: in 2021 and 2022, 30% of students were reading at grade level. Maybe it’s time for phonics.
In Berkeley, California, where only 26% of Black students are proficient in reading, schools are still using Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study (EdSource ).
Thanks, Joe, for pointing me to the Axios article.
Related reading
All OCA posts about teaching reading (Pinboard)
Monday, January 29, 2024
The states of reading
Sunday, January 28, 2024
The Grennie Pharmacy
Staten Island, like Upper Manhattan, is a mystery to me. Wanting to post a WPA tax photograph to give the borough at least some slight representation in these pages, I thought of New Dorp, the Staten Island neighborhood whose high school was the setting for Peg Tyre’s celebrated 2012 Atlantic article, “The Writing Revolution.” So off I went, to New Dorp.
[The Grennie Pharmacy, 253 New Dorp Lane, New Dorp, Staten Island, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
If the building looks newish, that’s because it was. The NYC Archives date it to 1958 (!), but the more likely date is 1939. I was drawn to the Grennie Pharmacy by the glossy black (glass? granite?) and the elegant capital R.
[Click for a slightly larger view.]
Frank L. Grennie (1896–1969) had a distinguished career as a pharmacist: a page at Find a Grave will give you an idea. An entry in a 1930 compendium of Staten Island lives has more. A prescription box from the Grennie Pharmacy, dated 1942, is for sale at eBay.
What I didn’t expect to find when searching for grennie new dorp : Frank Grennie’s son Richard. He was born in 1924 and enlisted in the Army in 1943. He died in St. Lo, France, on July 13, 1944, in the aftermath of D-Day. The Kells-Grennie American Legion post on Staten Island bears his name.
Today no. 253, still standing, houses a shoe-repair shop, a nail salon, a driving school, and a car service.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, constructing as Lester Ruff. So often I find a Les Ruff puzzle more challenging than perhaps it’s meant to be. This one went quickly at first, with 19-A, three letters, “Work with kimono costuming” and 32-A, six letters, “Farrow's musician spouse after Sinatra,” which together gave me 1-D, nine letters, “Potable portmanteau.” But elsewhere I found more difficulty, and the upper right corner proved really Ruff.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
9-D, eight letters, “Birthplace of Tom Cruise or Archimedes.” Improbable and amusing.
11-D, four letters, “Regular guy.” From the upper right corner.
14-D, five letters, “It’s slashed for everyone.” No, not really, not everyone.
15-A, nine letters, “Irrigation system feature.” I knew only one meaning for this answer, and now I know another.
21-A, seven letters, “Dramatist whose name looks like a Scrabble rack.” Novel, irreverent, and funny.
23-A, four letters, “Small six-footers.” A value-added clue.
49-D, six letters, “Take an angular course.” Huh. I should know this word.
57-A, seven letters, “A WHO Essential
Medicine.” Sobering to realize it.
69-A, nine letters, “Anagram of A REM THING.” Another value-added clue. Not difficult to see, but fun.
My favorite in this puzzle, from the upper right corner: 13-D, five letters, “Amount to.” Nicely Stumpery, a plain answer at least semi-fiendishly clued.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Bill Griffith, notebook user
From a Connecticut Examiner interview with Bill Griffith, cartoonist:
I have a notebook that I always keep in my pocket, because I never know when an idea will come up, a punchline, an idea. I try to never censor myself. I write it down immediately in my notebook. I sometimes wake up in a twilight zone between sleeping and waking and have an idea. I write it down. Once in a while, I’ll think of an entire strip of panels that way. It’ll happen all of a sudden. Mostly it isn’t good, but every once in a while, it is good, and I can use it. If I don’t write it down right in the moment, it disappears.Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
PBS NewsHour , salt, and tea
From the PBS NewsHour: “American chemist causes stir in Britain by suggesting salt can improve cup of tea.” And an interview with that chemist, Michelle Francl, the Frank B. Mallory professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr College: “How to spot the chemistry in your cup of tea.”
I have no plans to add salt to tea. I like my tannins.
Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)
Friday, January 26, 2024
$83,300,000
From The New York Times:
A Manhattan jury on Friday ordered former President Donald J. Trump to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her in social media posts, news conferences and even on the campaign trail ever since she first accused him in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.
The award included $65 million in punitive damages, which the nine-member jury assessed after finding Mr. Trump, 77, had acted maliciously after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers pointed to Mr. Trump’s persisting attacks on her, both from the White House and after leaving office.
Greta Gerwig’s luxury item(s)
On BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Lauren Laverne asks her guest to choose a luxury item to take with them to their desert island. Here’s Greta Gerwig’s answer:
“I just know I would go absolutely bananas if I didn’t have something to write with. Anything, any pen and paper is fine; I will write on anything. But there’s a brand called National Brand that has green paper, which apparently is good for your eyes — I don’t know if that’s true — and it has really narrow rule pages. And then I love Smythson paper, that thin blue paper, and that is a true luxury item. And then pens, I like the Micron pens, those are good. Zero-point-one is the thickness I like.”[My transcription. National Brand (singular, corrected from Gerwig’s plural) does make spiffy notebooks. If the company has a website, I can’t find it.]
[Some cross-talk follows: Laverne says she didn’t expect such detail, and Gerwig apologizes. Laverne reassures her: “You can’t get too granular for me. I’m loving it.”]
“And then if I could pick ‘typewriter,’ it would be an IBM Selectric II, but I don’t know if I can plug anything in. It’s like the typewriter of offices in the ’80s, and when you plug it in and then you turn it on, it sounds like the Death Star, it’s like [makes a noise]. And it’s a sound that makes me feel like, okay, good, now it’s time to write. And I feel like I like switching between writing by hand and writing on a typewriter, because I can type faster than I can write by hand.”
An EXchange name sighting
[From Backfire (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). Click for a larger view.]
The Glendale address appears to be fictional, but SYcamore was indeed a Los Angeles EXchange name. The business card filling the screen is what I call a low-grade reality effect. Without the close-up, a skeptical viewer might think that a character had been handed nothing but a blank bit of cardstock.
Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, January 25, 2024
“Flatteringly, like the dentist”
Sonie Marburg — who’s never, so far as we know, read Proust — drops into the Proustian “we.”
Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).
“Madam had been playing”: the harpsichord.
Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga
