Brains are lazy. They are lazy for good reasons. They have a lot of work to do during a day and don't have the spare capacity to burn multiples of what they are already burning. They are already epic energy hogs in biological terms. Just telling them to "stop being so lazy!" doesn't work, and if you dig into it would probably be a bad idea if you could.

Consequently, one of the most dangerous ideas to feed a brain is one that works in the short term but fails in the long term. Once mired in the bad term idea, one must expend effort to switch to the better idea, and in the process, one might even go backwards temporarily, convincing the brain (quite rationally from a certain point of view) that this is a bad idea, thus making it even harder to convince the brain this switch is a good idea. (You have less control over this decision than you fancy.)

Without a lot of energy or help to get out, you can get stuck there permanently.

It's not just reading. Many skills have this pattern to them. I myself am stuck there with bowling. I have the classic "got decent at throwing the ball straight down the lane" failure. I know that I need to learn to curve the ball to get better, and I just don't care enough to do it. Given how rarely I play, my time of "getting worse before I get better" would probably be "every game I play for the rest of my life." But I am stuck in that hole. I've been there with some other skills, too; I'm not sure one can jump straight to ideal piano technique without going through this a few times.

But those are no big deal to me. Screwing up reading from the get-go is devastating.

That's precisely the problem. That describes tools good readers use to understand meaning across a text, but teaching it as a way to recognize words is problematic.

> Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

> But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

Later in the article, Cueing or MVS are shown to be actually harmful to reading. This is backed by extensive research, and the final section shows how bad of a researcher Goodman is, still to this day. He is quotes as saying "My science is different."