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Minnesota lost one of its classic legislators last week with the passing of Doug Johnson this week ("A DFL giant and fighter for the Range," obituary, Nov. 11). As a newspaper editor in Hibbing, I covered Johnson for 20 years, and I never stopped being amazed at his genius.

His greatest gift, I think, was in getting diverse types of people to agree on things, especially those things that benefited his beloved Iron Range. He was at the core of keeping the powerful Iron Range delegation in harmony, no small feat considering the wildly different personalities that served the Range in those years.

Oh, he could be tough. There was a joke that after you shook hands with Dougie you'd better count your fingers. But mainly, his leadership derived from two aspects of his persona: He was the smartest person in the room — and also the most joyful.

Al Zdon, Mounds View

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From 1980 through 1982, when I worked for the Legislature, I got to know Sen. Johnson. In those years of special sessions, an employee strike and split control of state government, I saw him as a skilled politician and a devoted supporter of his beloved Iron Range, committed to fairness for all the citizens of the state.

In 1986, when I was in private practice, the senator asked me to help the Committee for an International Wolf Center lobby for state money to help build the center in Ely. He said the committee had little money. He was persuasive, and I agreed. By 1990, the money had long since run out and my law firm had continued the work pro bono, we received bonding money to help build the center, which is now a major tourist attraction in Ely. I remember the wee hours of the morning when the bonding conference committee was meeting; as the final decision approached, the door opened and Johnson slipped into the room and joined me at the witness table. As Chair Mike Freeman called for the vote, the committee responded by howling in the affirmative.

Months later at the groundbreaking, we all did a group wolf howl; as speeches resumed, we heard the howl of a wolf pack in the distance. The wolves were saying "thank you, Senator."

Johnson was unique. May his memory be a blessing.

Ellen Sampson, North Oaks

So I occasionally send a letter explaining my disagreement. Only fair, then, to send a message of praise for his Nov. 6 essay on "the sobering splendors of autumn." I traveled with him, this time, to his destination in the past to share his experience of watching a murmuration of blackbirds. I'll remember this essay, as I remember Robert Frost's poem about enchanted woods and Henry Beston's much-quoted passage from his "Outermost House" about the mystifying flocks of sea birds swooping and turning as if guided by one mind.

"By what wizardry," Tice marvels of his blackbirds, "they avoided collisions with one another and the tree branches I can't guess." At such times we feel the unbridged distance between us and what Beston called "other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." Other creatures so close we can see and hear and almost touch them — but not fathom them. Or, perhaps, save them.

In that way, Tice's blackbirds are as distant and awe-inspiring as the stars at night. Like Frost, he stared at a natural mystery both "dark and deep" and wondered.

On Monday morning, the little pond I dug outside my kitchen window, my substitute for a country retreat, was iced over — and I hadn't yet taken out the pump that runs the waterfall. I could almost feel the icy chill of that water on my arm when I reached for the submerged cylinder.

Time grows short, as D.J. notes. "Keep moving; get your work done." Nearing the end of an eighth decade on this planet, I get the message. We have promises to keep, after all — to the birds, the woods, the planet, and to one another. How to keep those promises may be as large a mystery as the gyrations of the blackbirds. If only we humans shared that one mind allowing us all to turn, as one, in the right direction.

Laura Yuen's Nov. 6 column ("We've been sold a story on reading") described how the science of reading has, for years, supported phonics over visual cues. But instead of sounding out words, some teach reading by encouraging students to guess words based on pictures. The article states: "[E]ven though the concepts behind cueing have been discredited by scientists for about 30 years, it's still being taught in our schools today." Even Lucy Calkins, who has supported cueing for decades and sold her curriculum to countless school districts, admits her method was wrong.

Perhaps no question is more important than why do schools continue to teach a flawed literacy method? This is especially true given the poor state of reading proficiency in Minnesota. It's easy to blame COVID, but reading proficiency has been trending downward for years well before the pandemic. Instead, we should hold professional educators and administrators accountable. It's their job to understand and implement proven literacy curriculum. Why aren't they? What has the Minnesota Department of Education done to ensure that school districts emphasize phonics in their elementary literacy instruction? These questions deserve answers. It's unconscionable to watch our elementary school children fall so far behind without looking inward for solutions.

Parents need to speak up as well. Too often, school board meetings devolve into political theater. Let's stay focused on our children. We can't waste any more time. Parents need to demand that schools teach reading using proven, science-based methods, not guesswork.

Dr. H. Zis Weisberg, Stillwater

The writer is an OB/GYN.

I can't believe that this "controversy" is still raging in 2022. I started school in 1945 in a small town that had no kindergarten or preschool. First grade had a workbook explicitly titled "Phonics," and we were taught to sound out the words based on the letter sounds.

I still remember how impressed the adults around me were once when I read to them something including the word "beautiful."

"How did you know that word?" they asked.

I said, "I just sounded it out."

The positive feedback from that and similar experiences has stuck with me for a lifetime. I can't imagine the frustration experienced by kids who are prompted to keep guessing based on cues they may find in the pictures and whatever else surrounds the text. When they finally succeed in guessing a "difficult" word, it's like winning the lottery: It doesn't yield any tools that will help them do it again. In contrast, we got the message that we can decode text by learning and using the rules for decoding text.