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.

If you call someone “daddy,” it means you’re having sex and you consider them to be the dominant partner in the relationship (or are roleplaying that for sexual reasons). Your language partner is being a creep.

There is some very old slang, “daddy-o,” which isn’t sexual and would be used with a friend, but using it makes you sound like a jazz musician from the 1940s.