"the wine-dark ivy, / dense and dark"

 "Here, stranger,

here in the land where horses are a glory

you have reached the noblest home on earth

Colonus glistening, brilliant in the sun --

where the nightingale sings on,

her dying music rising clear,

hovering always, never leaving,

down the shadows deepening green

she haunts the glades, the wine-dark ivy,

dense and dark, the untrodden, sacred wood of god

rich with laurel and olives never touched by the sun

untouched by storms that blast from every quarter --

where the Reveler Dionysus strides the earth forever

where the wild nymphs are dancing round him

nymphs who nursed his life."

-- Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles

"likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words⁠"

I've been teaching for nearly 20 years now, albeit in some unconventional places and spaces, primarily 12 years teaching ESL in South Korea.  These days I'm a substitute teacher at all grade levels and many subjects (including P.E.!).  Anyhow, the debate over phonics or not-to-phonics kind of escaped me while I was living in South Korea, and this article (while seeming a bit biased) was fascinating to me:

"In first grade, these 'independent reading' hours were torture for my kids, who, I would eventually learn, were among the roughly half of all children who, research shows, will likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words⁠. My kids’ reactions to being expected to sit quietly each day pretending to read ran along stereotypical gender lines. My daughter silently berated herself for not being able to read; my son acted out, once attempting to push over a bookshelf."

The whole thing is downright amazing.  All I have to add is that graduate school education programs struggle to justify their own existence every ten years or so by developing entirely new paradigms and approaches, even when existing ones seem to work pretty well.  That's true for other departments as well, but only Ed Schools use children as guinea pigs.

Anyhow, I teach a fair amount of reading intervention classes and phonics and blending are definitely back.  I guess I didn't realize they'd ever gone away.

Really?

So the right-wing president of South Korea thought he could declare martial law and rally some support to a sinking presidency?

I emailed my former boss, a political moderate, and he told me Yoon "lost his mind."

South Korea?

What the hell is going on in South Korea?