ABSTRACT
A teaching career provides opportunities to grow professionally. It is a career with lifelong learning at its heart. Some teachers are fortunate enough to have excellent training and mentoring from the start, whilst others are disadvantaged by being equipped with poor tools. Teachers at the beginning of their careers still have much to learn. All teachers were trained in analytic phonics and the reading intervention program was a mishmash of whole language techniques. Rigid Idealists are those who remain inflexible in their opinions despite evidence to the contrary and who stick doggedly to what they initially thought was correct. Robert Sweet gives probably the best example of a Rigid Idealist and the catastrophic consequences of such inflexibility. Robert was heavily involved in drafting US legislation to help improve how reading was taught in schools.
