Pre-Treating Clothes: A Necessary Step or a Waste of Time?

I know this is supposed to be about Shanahan's article on Pre-Reading and the possible banning of such.  However, let's take a stroll down memory lane and look in at the home of Beaver Cleaver.....

Mother is preparing to do the weekly laundry.  She notices that once again Wally has grass stains on his baseball pants, Beaver has a nasty ring around the collar on his Sunday shirt and Father has been walking around the house again in his athletic socks.  What's a laundress to do?

While these items will require some extra attention, the rest of the whites are in decent condition.  She whips out her bottle of pre-treatment and goes to work on the offensive stains.  While the remaining laundry will not need this extra attention, these items do.

The other pieces of laundry will not suffer as a result of the pre-treatment--they may even benefit a bit.  But those three (or rather four since there is a pair of socks) items need this extra care.

So what does this have to do with Shanahan?  I agree with him that there are some teachers who misuse the pre-reading activity.  At the same time, there are those who do a pretty sorry job in general--but why throw out the baby with the bathwater?  I feel confident that he will come up with some brilliant suggestions on how to use pre-reading in the classroom and the opposition (David and Sue) will sigh with relief and adopt them as their own.

That won't make the sorry teachers teach any better because if rules were all it took, we would be doing just fine.  We could just tell teachers to spend time doing outside reading and research and hone their teaching skills.

So, in answer to my original question (which you can see was an analogy to Shanahan's own topic), yes, pre-treating the problem is a necessary step.