2 . The “reading wars,” one of the most confusing and disabling conflicts in the history of education, went on heatedly in the 1980s and then peace came. Advocates of phonics (learning by being taught the sound of each letter group) seemed to defeat advocates of whole language (learning by using cues like context and being exposed to much good literature).

Recent events suggest the conflict of complicated concepts is far from over. Teachers, parents and experts appear to agree that phonics is crucial, but what is going on in classrooms is not in agreement with what research studies say is required, which has aroused a national debate over the meaning of the word “phonics.”

Lucy M. Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a much-respected expert on how to teach reading, has drawn attention with an eight-page essay. Here is part of her argument: “The important thing is to teach kids that they needn’t freeze when they come to a hard word, nor skip past it. The important thing is to teach them that they have resources to draw upon, and to use those resources to develop endurance.”

To Calkins’s critics, it is cruel and wasteful to encourage 6-year-olds to look for clues if they don’t immediately know the correct sounds. They should work on decoding — knowing the pronunciation of every letter group — until they master it, say the critics, backed by much research.

Calkins’s approach “is a slow, unreliable way to read words and an inefficient way to develop word recognition skill,” Mark S. Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, said in a blog post. “Dr. Calkins treats word recognition as a reasoning problem — like solving a puzzle. She is committed to the educational principle that children learn best by discovering how systems work rather than being told.”

Many others share his view. “Children should learn to decode — i.e., go from print on the page to words in the mind — not by clever guesswork and inference, but by learning to decode,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. He said the inferences Calkins applauds are “cognitively (认知地) demanding, and readers don’t have much endurance for it. … It disturbs the flow of what you’re reading, and doing a lot of it gets frustrating.”

Yet a recent survey found that only 22 percent of 670 early-reading teachers are using the approach of phonics and what they mean by phonics is often no more than marking up a worksheet.

Both sides agree that children need to acquire the vocabulary and background information that gives meaning to words. But first, they have to pronounce them correctly to connect the words they have learned to speak.

Calkins said in her essay: “Much of what the phonics people are saying is praiseworthy,” but it would be a mistake to teach phonics “at the expense of reading and writing.”

The two sides appear to agree with her on that.

3 . Jobs that use both technical and creative thinking are among the fastest-growing and highest-paying ones, according to a new report from Burning Glass Technologies, a job market analytics (分析) company in Boston.

It studied millions of job postings to better understand the skills companies require. What they discovered was that many want workers with experience in such new abilities as big-data (数据) gathering and analytics, or design using digital technology.

Burning Glass came up with the term “hybrid jobs” to describe these kinds of positions, which require skills not normally found together. For example, these hybrid jobs might require people with skills in data science and advertising, or engineering and sales. “The jobs of the future don’t involve just one skill,” says Matt Sigelman, chief manager of Burning Glass.

The company expects general job growth of about 10% between 2018 and 2028, but the hybrid jobs by 21%. What’s more, hybrid jobs pay more than positions that call for a traditional set of skills. For example, a marketing manager mastering a database program gets paid 41% more than a traditional one, with an average yearly salary of $100, 000. Moreover, an engineer who improves her sales skills and becomes a consulting engineer for a software company can more than double her pay from $180, 000 to $400, 000.

While data shows that workers who fail to update their skills will be able to find fewer jobs, people in hybrid jobs are less likely to become out of date, with only 12% possibility of being replaced by machine, compared with 42% for general jobs, says Burning Glass. Hybrid jobs are mostly not beginner roles, so they mainly go to workers with years of experience and, most importantly, more training after leaving college. That means workers, bosses and educators will have to think about how to better prepare people for these roles.

4 . Beating Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in the New Year

This year has continued to bring many of us closer to the pain, suffering and exhaustion of those experiencing burnout and compassion fatigue (疲倦). There is no doubt that 2021 has been filled with additional challenges.     1    

The data is clearly showing that our workforce shares feelings of burnout. A recent Gallup report indicated that 67% of us feel burned out either some or most of the time. At an organizational level, Hogan reports that burned out employees are 18% less productive and 2.6 times more likely to be actively seeking a different job.

Fatigue and burnout arise not when we fail to get sufficient rest but when we fail to appreciate the moments of purpose and joy in our lives.

There are a few myths around burnout and compassion fatigue:

Myth 1: Burnout is an individual's problem.

Many people believe that burnout is about an individual who needs to “figure it out”.     2     Team structure offers critical support and leaders should create environment where team burnout is addressed.

Myth 2:     3    

Surprisingly, the individuals most likely to experience burnout are committed employees and leaders who love their job and are highly engaged. These top performers are the people you are most likely to lose.

Myth 3: People who experience burnout are just less resilient.

Research shows a correlation between higher levels of resilience (复原力) and lower levels of burnout.     4     But resilience looks very different now from five years ago, and my guess is that it will continue to shift.

If 2021 has taught us anything, it is that we cannot separate burnout from our emotions, whether they may be fear, anger, shame or guilt.     5    

7 . Some documents have been making the rounds lately — where people who work various positions in different industries share how much they’re paid.

Bravo! It’s about time we blew up that old belief that salaries have to stay secret. This is not just a matter of curiosity. Having information about salaries can help narrow the gender wage gap, which has barely changed for more than a decade. Recently released date from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, women working full time still are paid only 82 cents for every dollar paid to a man. And the gap is even wider for many women of color: Black women make 62 cents, and Latinas just 54 cents. What’s more, the pay gap even extends into her retirement. Because she earned less and therefore paid less to the social security system, she receives less in social security benefits.

Having greater access to salary information is helping to speed things up. A new research report by the American Association of University Women shows that the wage gap tends to be smaller in job sectors where pay transparency (透明) is a must. For example, among federal government workers, there’s just a 13 percent pay difference between men and women, and in state government, the gap is about 17 percent. But in private, for-profit companies, where salaries are generally kept under wraps, the gender wage gap jumps to 29 percent.

Fortunately, salary information is increasingly available on some websites. Certain companies and many human resources departments are pushing ahead with this practice. Of course, it’s going to take more than salary transparency to equalize earnings between women and men. But sharing salaries can and must be part of the solution. The more information women have about how jobs are valued — and what different people earn — the better they will understand their value in the labor market and be able to push for the pay they deserve.