What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.