Wendy May

K-8 Educator, M.Ed•Writing Project TC•Responsible For Inquisitive Minds•Inspired by Those Making A Difference~

[Parents for Reading Justice @Parents4RJ]

SLPs are evidence-based, near-medical in their training, and when I see one in an IEP I know my kid has a shot.

Meanwhile Colleges of Ed are still teaching Balanced Literacy.

Teaching needs to be professionalized like SLP training is.

Shoutout to @EvidenceAdvocacy 🙌

We need an SLP in every classroom.
#ScienceOfReading #IEP #LiteracyJustice

@ASHAWeb @NBASLH

[Ms. Benison- @BenisonMrs]

This is why schools that don’t invest heavily in making sure their children are reading at grade level expectations by the time they exit 1st grade and instead pour their resources in later grades in an attempt to catch them up are not wisely investing their time, money or personnel and worst they are in fact hurting kids.

It is true that when it comes to reading support it is better late than never, but when it comes to reading, we need to stop putting all our focus on remediation and actively engage in prevention.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Parents for Reading Justice @Parents4RJ]

🔥The Fordham report just dropped — and we support it 100%.

No surprise to parents who’ve been on the ground demanding their kids’ right to READ.
Here’s what they’re calling for — and we’re PUSHING in state governments nationwide:
1️⃣ Teacher prep programs MUST teach the Science of Reading
2️⃣ Licensure exams MUST test real reading science knowledge
3️⃣ Every K–3 teacher gets SOR training in their first 2–3 years
4️⃣ Districts MUST choose from state-approved, science-aligned curriculum.

This isn’t a wish list. This is the roadmap.
Parents started this movement.
And parents will FINISH it. 💪
@Fordham @EdWeek @ExcelinEd @dyslexiaIDA

[George Couros @gcouros]

"Having gratitude matters most when you feel you’ve lost something, not when everything is going your way."

When You Feel Lost, Gratitude Helps You Find Your Way https://t.co/EtZN1aGDEh

[TeacherGoals @teachergoals]

So important. 🧡

[LitWorld @litworldsays]

Introducing The Memory Keeper's Project - a LitWorld initiative to nurture resilience and empathy through intergenerational storytelling. 📖

[National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) @ncte]

#NationalPoetryMonth begins next week!

It's the perfect time to explore NCTE's classroom activities, lesson plans, and inspiration for reading and writing poetry—whether with your students or for your personal enjoyment and practice: https://t.co/Y0RZ1vfud3

[Parents for Reading Justice @Parents4RJ]

The author of the Reading Rope, Dr. Hollis Scarborough, reminds us: oral language is foundational to reading success.

If we identify language struggles earlier, we can intervene earlier.

Earlier support = fewer children experiencing the devastating effects of reading failure.

This is how we protect our kids. This is how we change trajectories. 📚🧠

#AIMSymposium2026 @AIMtoLearn

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is the only way to stop civilizational suicide.

It is critical that we take these steps to avoid annihilation.

[TeacherGoals @teachergoals]

What we do matters. 🧡

[Wendy May @IBeMsMay]

@ImMeme0 That’s why I refuse paying dues to CTA-No one is going to take my money and put it towards political views I disagree with and I’m ashamed they use Ts to be a voice for the union’s corruption-follow the money. Can you imagine what $50 million could do for schools?

[MAGA Voice @MAGAVoice]

HOLY SH*T 🚨 Arnold Schwarzenegger is going VIRAL for demonstrating how to save Democracy:

1) Make Election Day a federal holiday
2) Fair redistricting in all 50 states
3) Voter ID in all 50 States

WE NEED TO STOP THE FUTURE STEAL

[Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

Victor Davis Hanson on the:

⚡️TRUMP COUNTERREVOLUTION ⚡️

You’ll want to bookmark this and share.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

HISTORIC MOMENT.

President Donald J. Trump, alongside the leaders of Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, signs the Gaza Peace Plan for peace in the Middle East.

[@Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 @Chicago1Ray]

WOW 🚨

Did you know, there's more Republicans in (CA) than in any other state

That has Benny Johnson leading an effort to get Voter ID on the ballot for (2026)

(875K) signatures needed, we did it in (WI) & Trump won it

Hit that like button if you want Voter ID nationwide 👍