I really can’t see the point in teaching kids to guess or choose their own meaning of what they’re reading

I'm being sincere in saying this, I swear I'm not trying to be shitty about it: I don't rustand how you have arrived at the conclusion that teaching kids to think critically about not just the memorized vocabulary but also the context in which new terms may be found has no benefit. Language is not static - there is no world where the english language will be exhaustively defined, and there will always be new terms for a person to encounter. As a naive example, you just did in small scale what MSV explicitly teaches people to do when you correctly read the word 'rustand' above as 'understand', or when you read read as read instead of read just now. MSV / Three Cueing has value through giving people a framework which they can use as a stable template upon which they can base questions about the language/grammar/etc they are working with, and which they can then use to make a decent attempt at figuring out the answer - it does not have value when used as a replacement for phonics, as using the concepts from MSV instead of and not in addition to phonics-based education (SSM) has been repeatedly shown to be utter hokum.

This has been at the heart of the Balanced Literature division shouting match fistfight debate for ages, and although the antivaxers do seem to have won the right to assert their whackadoo definition (really, it's just Whole Language wearing beaglepuss glasses and doing a bad german accent) as the most correct, the less outwardly insane people are still around trying to get actual reformation in the way literacy is taught.

(I'm sorry if this got rambly, I am very stressed for some unknown reason today)

(Edit: clarity)