god forbid you skip straight to silent e. Your reading will be permanently and irreparably damaged.
Good golly, how do they think anyone learned to read for the first 3,000 years of human literacy?
If I may go off on a tangent rant, I hate the way teacher training programs lead them to believe that they are experts. Example: developmental psychologists noticed that kids go through a stage of learning how to categorize (e.g. being able to sort toys by color, size, or type). Education people heard about this and decided that kids need to be *taught* how to categorize. After all, it's a neccessary stage! Reality: toss the kids into a room full of toys for a year, and they'll come out with exactly the same skills as the kids who were explicitly taught.
Teachers are not experts on how kids learn. They are just experts on particular "methods," of varying degrees of wackiness, depending on the teacher training program they attended.
End of rant.
