“I used to assign full books in literature courses, but I know most of my students can’t do that now.”

As a Senior Editor at BuzzFeed, I cover books and politics, and I also created the daily vocabulary-boosting word game SAT Scramble.

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to identify the sounds within an individual word. 

"Some just stop if they don't recognize a word, even if the very same passage is defining the word. Some are functionally illiterate; they can't read outside of a few memorized phrases, and they will take steps to avoid reading if there's another option available to them."

"The problem with whole language is that while it works for common, familiar words (like 'the' or 'cat'), it doesn't teach students how to decode unfamiliar or complex words. This leads to struggles with reading unfamiliar words and understanding complex texts."

"There's also an uptick in the inability to follow written instructions, and only in the past few years have students told me they don't know certain words in the instructions. Do they look them up? No, they don't. They just persist in not knowing that to do because they can't read the instructions."