Why is there a blog on a Reading Specialist Directory? I have a few reasons for including a blog.
First, I want to help reading specialists learn more about reading, reading difficulties, and other relevant education topics. Of course, reading specialists are already experts in their piece of the educational pie, and most of them love to learn about other slices of the pie. However, a lot of educators are very busy already and don’t have time to look up everything about everything themselves. I hope that this blog offers reading specialists a way to learn in a way that’s accessible and fits nicely into a full work, family, and social life.
Second, I want to help families and other adults learn more about the world of education, starting with reading and branching out from there. Like many professional fields, education has its own set of jargon and (sorry!) a multitude of acronyms: IEPs, 504s, RTI, MTTS, CCSS, SEL, ESSA, ESL, LEA, PBIS… The blog entries here will clarify jargon and acronyms without condescending and will give non-educators a peek into the world of reading specialists, teachers, school administrators, and others. Especially for parents supporting children with reading difficulties, knowledge about education is power! Education changes a lot—new trends, new policies, new curriculum—and the blog can help everyone keep up with the changes.
Third, a well-written, informative, ad-free blog will help to build the Reading Specialist Directory into a top-notch professional site that attracts lots of families who are looking for a reading specialist and lots of reading specialists who want to connect with families.
And finally, the blog gives me an opportunity to write about education to people who care, which is deeply satisfying to me! Writing requires me to learn: first, I take a deep dive into the topic I’m writing about, and second, I do the kind of learning that comes from forming ideas into sentences and paragraphs that I hope will be sensible to other people. Dr. Stephen Krashen, an education researcher I admire, says that writing makes us smarter. And I believe that.
I promise that every blog entry on this site will be written by a human (me or a human guest writer) and not by an AI bot. I’ll use online sources, of course, and sometimes I’ll ask a convenient bot for an answer to a quick question (For instance, who said, “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark”?). But I will not ask an AI bot to write a blog post for me. The internet does not need any more AI slop! Besides, whoever does the thinking does the learning.