Some Read, Some Memorize Words
Let’s start with a couple of indisputable and opposite facts. There is literacy and illiteracy. This is an absolute law, just as the law of physics that states every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But unlike physics, the literacy/illiteracy law is not absolute. In fact, it’s more than a little messy.
Those of us who read…and generally read well…have a hard time understanding why so many can’t read all that well or can’t read at all. We also don’t comprehend why so many can’t comprehend what they read. After all, it isn’t all that difficult. Is it? Well, actually it is.
Part of the reason is due to the way reading is taught in what passes for schools these days. For example, there’s see-say, which is essentially word recognition/memorization. The disadvantage to that one? If you’ve never seen the word, you don’t have a clue what it is and can’t say (or pronounce) it. You also don’t have a clue as to what it means or how to use it in its proper context.
Even phonics, which is making a comeback in some areas, isn’t taught the way it should be. Take a look on the internet and you’ll find page after page of phonics programs for sale that purport to help the child learn to read. But every one of them, at least the sites I’ve looked at, overcomplicate the process. When you look at the price of the programs that they’re so anxious to sell you, it’s apparent why the overcomplication exists.
What people forget is that reading has always existed, whether pictographs or words and somehow they learned to read without the ‘benefits’ of an entire industry claiming to teach you to read but whose primary focus was your money. Illiteracy has never been as widespread as most think, nor has the lack of school attendance stood as proof positive that one cannot read or read well. And let’s not forget that books were among the most prized of trade goods in America’s old west.
Whiskey & Gunpowder’s own beloved Linda Brady Traynham has written an in-depth discussion of reading that I’m assuming has appeared before my own comments. If you haven’t read it yet, go back and do so before you go any farther in this one.
Simply put, and as Linda has so expertly explained it, teaching someone to read is not difficult, nor does it require multi-hundred dollar programs broken into multiple parts that keep you on the hook for ever more material. You simply learn the sounds of the letters, how they’re put together, certain basic rules and you’re done. But that’s the problem. It’s too easy. If there isn’t some way to develop a self-perpetuating industry on the subject that keeps the cash register ringing, it isn’t worth bothering with. What people can’t get thru their heads is that everything doesn’t have to take that approach.
Another part of the problem lands squarely at the feet of the parents. You’ve heard that before in relation to many different subjects, probably to the point of nausea, but it’s as true today as it has always been. For example, when I was growing up, my mother had a friend who did absolutely nothing to help her son prepare for first grade. Her attitude was that it was the school’s responsibility to teach him to read, learn to tell time, etc. Frankly, I’m surprised that he could tie his shoes before starting school! It got so bad that she would go on to work at the telephone company, leaving a six year old kid to wake up, dress himself, get his own breakfast and then to school on time. What was the end result of all this? He was in a lousy marriage and the last I heard of him he was in his 30s when he told my mother, “I hate my mother.”
On the flip side of the coin are those parents, mothers primarily but many fathers as well, who make every effort to encourage their children, help them succeed and supplement what they learn in school. And they don’t wait until they’re school age to begin teaching them.
Linda Brady Traynham and my own mother are excellent examples of what I’m talking about in different ways. Linda, as those of you who read her regularly know, has multiple college degrees and would generally be regarded as highly educated. My mother was a high school graduate in 1922 and spent 31 years working for AT&T as an operator. Retiring from AT&T because of my bad health during childhood, she spent the next 33 years working PBX boards at newspapers, hospitals and department stores. But she was ahead of her time in a lot of ways.
I literally have no knowledge of learning to read. In some respects I suppose I taught myself, but I’d suggest my mother laid the groundwork. She read to me constantly, encouraging me to read along and even read to her myself. I had alphabet blocks from infancy and she also taught me the alphabet using flash cards. What’s interesting is that she always argued that phonics didn’t teach children to read, not realizing that she was teaching me phonics! As she put it, “You don’t need phonics. All you need to do is teach them their A B C’s.” To the day she died, at the age of 97, I doubt she ever realized how smart she really was.
According to my mother, I was just short of three years old and we were living in Vallejo, California. One day I was lying on the living room floor looking at the front page of the paper. She glanced at me and thought I was just looking at the pictures. Then she looked a little closer and it became obvious to her that I was actually reading line by line. And I wasn’t using my finger as a pointer so that I could tell what word I was reading, either. From that point on, she kept buying books, each being a little more challenging than the preceding one while I read everything she handed me.
By the time I entered the first grade in Ft. Worth, Texas, as I mentioned in a previous post, I was reading officially on a sixth grade level and in reality reading anything you put in front of me. I also belonged to a children’s book club and not too much later would join a science-fiction book club. I’d already outgrown the Ft. Worth Public Library’s children’s section and was prevented from using the adult section because “…it was too advanced for me.” That problem was quickly solved by my selecting the books I wanted when my mother took me with her to the library, then she would check them out on her card.
Reading, today, is the key to knowledge. If you can’t read…or if your reading ability is limited to the words you can recognize or have memorized… you will have limited yourself to a very narrow world.
Illiteracy, whether total or functional, is a prison of the mind. Not only does it limit what the individual can do in life, it is all that is needed for a nation’s leaders…whether elected officials or dictators…to control every aspect of your life.
Remember this: Knowledge is power…but without the ability to read there is no knowledge.
Regards,
Richard Marmo
September 18, 2009
ShareThis
I was taught to read, at about age four, by my grandmother who had been a country school teacher. She used the same techniques you just described plus comic books. I decided that it was too important an function to leave to the schools and so my wife and I taught our son to read well before he started school.
Our oldest daughter came to my wife when she was two and asked my wife was sounds the letters made. By the time she was in kindergarten, she was reading at the fifth grade level, and when taking the ACT tests, she earned a perfect score of 36 on the English portion. All my wife and i did was answer her questions and read to her. We did that with each of our other three children with varying degrees of success (our youngest struggles with spelling but liked to read hours at a time when she was in high school).
Tfor he problem in the public schools (at least relative to the issue of reading) has been the shift to whole language. Both Ms. Traynhan and Mr. Marmo are correct; it does not take a village (or multi-hundred dollar curriculum) to teach a child to read. There are some whose learning styles (see Gardner’s eight learning styles for additional detail) make it more difficult to grasp the phonics system, but I, who am a global learner with auditory and visual propensities, came to love reading at a very young age and had ample books and not-so-ample distractions such that I am told that I used to read the encyclopedia and/or dictionary as a child. Go figure . . . .
TN and Oliver,
Many thanks for your comments and corroboration of the position that both Linda I have staked out relative to the literacy/illiteracy problem. All of us have been fortunate to have not only learned to read the right way, but have also acquired a love of reading along the way. I would also suggest that reading well in combination with a love of reading (most of the time the two go together) also cultivates an insatiable curiosity and drive to know, leading inevitably to life-long self-education.
Those who have ‘learned’ to read by any method other than phonics simply will never know what they have missed. Nor the richness that reading brings to their lives.
Richard Marmo
Dear TN: My compliments to you and your wife. There IS no greater luxury than a stay-at-hom mom. I would love to hear how old your son is and how well he is doing in life. ranchLT4@gmail.com
Dear Oliver:
Thanks for the great e-mail! There ARE different learning styles. I want hard copy, in my hands. My daughter learns at the speed of light if she HEARS the information. My son, the wretch, has an eidetic memory! You earned the equivalent of a “get out of jail free” card with me. If you want to discuss this further, please write me at ranchLT4@gmail.com. Regards, Linda Brady Traynham
Both our daughters were able to read before starting kindergarten at age 5. We took a direct interest in their education so they both excelled. We did spend some money on the Domen System which worked very well with our first but was of no interest to our second. Interestingly, three quarters of the way through her kindergarten year our oldest’s teacher took me aside when I went to pick her up from school one day and said in a low voice: “Did you know your child could read? I saw her do it when we took the class into the library today for the first time.”
It took that long for a TEACHER to find out what her students were capabile of! Then, at the end of the year she brought me in for a parent – teacher conference and told me she thought our daughter might not be ready for first grade. Why? Because during recess she preferred to play in the sand box building things instead of running around with the other children and “rough housing it”. Needless to say; when she saw the look on my face she backtracked and our daughter entered first grade and did superbly right on through college.
Our younger daughter had an excellent first grade teacher at the same school who was amazing with the students and taught them far more than they learned during the rest of their days in that elementary school. And yes, she was fired for not teaching to the study guide produced by the “Glass Palace” – the Broward County Florida School Board.
God Help Us!
I have the honor to be, respectfully yours.
Gus,
First, my compliments to you and your wife for being PARENTS. I’d also be willing to bet that you’ve been their friends from their earliest days.
As for the teachers you encountered, the one who tried to hold your daughter back is the one who should have been fired. Of course her simple lack of observation in taking 3/4 of the school year to figure out that you daughter could read should’ve gotten her fired in the first with her comment on your daughter’s refusal to “rough house it” with her peers being the cherry on the firing sundae!
On the other hand, the teacher who WAS fired for being exactly what a good teacher should be reminds me of my own first grade teacher. She was feared by almost every student and their parents (but not myself or my parents) because she actually taught. Worse than that, she demanded proper behaviour in the classroom. Her name was Belle Pearson and I was fortunate to have her the last year she taught before retirement.
It’s a pleasure to hear from you.
Richard Marmo
Dear Gus: The sad truth is that most teachers LOATHE bright kids, particularly bright, achieving children. My daughter qualifed for, and began, Kindergarten when she was four. Took a test for it. Never mind that she could read on a 6th grade level, her teacher whacked her for not being able to cut and paste to her standards. My son was doing even better (a more experienced mother) 7 years later, and his “master teacher” Wilkerson prophesied nastily that Andrew would come to a bad end because he wasn’t neat. What can you say? You can beat neatness into a kid, but you will destroy the spark when you do. They will get over being messy; they don’t get over being reduced to dull normal status. LBT I used Doman’s work with Andrew. Wow!
Rich, thanks to my mother I learned to read the same way by the age of 3, also. In first grade I already had a 6th grade reading level. I homeschooled most of my kids for about 8 years because public education is so bad. My 4 year old has recently expressed an interest in reading and in a just a few days of playing letter sound games ( what is the first sound in pig?, etc, first identify the sound then the corresponding letter) he has come a very long way. He now understands why c-a-t spells cat. It IS that easy but the parents have to be involved.
Anna