learning to read

learning to read

a kata for Janet B.

How does anyone learn to read English? this impossible mess of five different tongues: Anglo-Saxon, French, Danish, Gaelic, with some German thrown in for good measure. You layer these one on the other through consolidation and invasion like some linguistic pastry. Oh yes, then throw in a huge vowel shift in the middle of the 14th century CE and you get the beginning of English. Once folks start to write this madness, then we get to duke out the spelling. Kit Marlowe, Will Shakespeare and their fellow Elizabethan poets and playwrights just made words up. They spelt stuff the way words sounded when spoken. By the tine God’s Secretaries put their glorious minds to translating the Bible for James the First, agreed-upon spelling for English had calmed down a little. But grammar had not. Hell, we didn’t get a dictionary until Sam Johnson in the mid 18th century and the Oxford English Dictionary is still a work in progress,

So, considering all of this, how does anyone manage to learn to read this mad amalgam? To be very simple and rather cruel, by putting our heads down and learning by rote. There is no rule of spelling or grammar or syntax that is not changed or outright broken. There are so many diphthongs that phonics is a bad joke. (Just look at that word, diphthong. It comes from the Greek and means “two sounds or tones.” Yes, a Greek word in English. And how are we supposed to know how to spell the damn thing?) I came up in the transition between whole language to phonics. I didn’t read with any facility until I was in third grade and still read rather slowly.

But there is a key to these many locks and it is human speech. Talk to the baby, the toddler and all the other small people. When you are putting up your coat when you come home, tell them what you are doing and how your day was. When you are making supper, put an apron on them, stand them on the kitchen stool and tell them what you are doing and why. (If they are really little, put their bouncy seat on the counter.) When they are sitting in your lap, read to them, read to them, read to them. And here is the the dark secret, it really does matter what you read to them. The more different words they hear the better they will read.

Years ago I have said in this space, “Don’t ask two-year-olds which book they want.” You don’t ask them if they want a sweater because you are the parent and you know how cool it is outside, and that children would run around buck nekkid if they were left to their druthers. I repeat myself but it seems necessary. The first thing they want is the sound of your voice; and the second is content. They are bringing you the Barbie or a Thomas Golden book because that is what they know. But you know so much more than you think, read them what you want. Read up! and up must include poetry. Rhyme is the servant of memory, speak the rhyme and they will remember. It starts with the divine Sandra Boynton, “One hippo all alone, calls two hippos on the phone;” and then moves on to A. A. Milne, “George found a pen but I think it was the wrong one. And James sat down on a brick.” With Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses we get into wonderful story telling and vivid word painting: “Dark brown is the river, golden is the sand. It flows along forever, with trees on either hand.” These worthies and their co-conspirators will teach English to your child and keep your brain from rotting. (Don’t forget Jack Prelutsky’s The Dragons are Ssinging Tonight.)

But one does not learn to read on poetry alone. So what prose does the proper parent read to the perfect child? Again, don’t read down. Save your sanity. Read old stuff. Read Edward Eager, E. Nesbitt and, I’m really not kidding, read Rudyard Kipling. Yes, he has a bad name because folks my age think of Kipling only as an imperialist. I fought with my father over Kipling when I was in high school. (By the mercy of Christ I was able to tell him that I finally knew better before he died.) The Kipling to read to young children is Just So Stories. These are animal creation myths and the language is a rolling river. How did the leopard get his spots? How did the rhinoceros get his wrinkled skin? And how did the kangaroo get his back legs? “Not always, oh best beloved, was the kangaroo as we now behold him. But a different animal entirely.” This language is as rich and complex as dark chocolate and it will prepare those young minds for what is to come.

I can hear you right now: “But they don’t like that old fashioned stuff.” They don’t know what they like and cannot like what they don’t know. It breaks my heart to see a lovely 11 year old boy, smart in so many ways, who doesn’t want to read anything more demanding than Wimpy Kid and Big Nate. That boy should be reading Asimov, Heinlein, Conan Doyle and so many others. But no one read him anything real and he was never asked to read anything real. He should have read Treasure Island and Haroun and the Sea of Stories in fourth grade so he will be ready to read Shakespeare in high school. “As long as he’s reading” simply doesn't work. It doesn’t turn him into a reader; it turns him into someone who can take the damn test without knowing the glories of his mother tongue. It is bad enough that all the girls in his class read faster and more deeply than he does. 

So read to him, read to her and read good stuff, real stuff. We have saddled these beautiful young minds with the most difficult language to learn. It doesn’t make sense, it breaks every rule it makes. But oh my dears, English is a thing of surpassing beauty and, with it’s vast vocabulary, it can describe the width and depth of the human imagination.

“Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention”

Henry V: Act 1, Prolougue.