Learning to Read
May. 29th, 2006 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatIt seems so natural in retrospect, the skill - like breathing. You are taught to sound out each letter in your head, bit by bit, and connect them with what is on the page. Like many things in our society - sound plays an important roll. Learning a language is that way - you mimic how others sound out the words. My neice has a friend, who'll I call Penny, who is an excellent mimic. She can speak in whole sentences at the age of two, said the other day :" We have to plan the garden party tomorrow, because the dingbat can't make it." She has no clue what she said. She mimiced word by word her mother's friends.
One of my fondest memories is sitting on my father's lap as a child or next to him on a plane ride to some tropical local, usually Florida - we went there a lot when I was a small child, and listening to him read to me. The words turning into pictures inside my head. The musky smell of his sweater, a ratty mix of lambs wool and acrylic, soft and scratchy, smelling of pipe tobacco and pine. Sometimes he did not read at all, he'd just weave a story of his own devising. Storytelling comes naturally in my family, it's in our blood. And on my own, I'd tell my own stories, sometimes bouncing a ball to echo the rhythm of the words I stated out loud. If people saw me, they'd see a strange girl bouncing a ball and talking to herself, not a person telling a story. There were times, my brother would sit and listen, captivated and I'd tell it to him. And I had a best friend, Marcy, who would create stories with me.
But reading someone else's stories did not come as easily as weaving my own inside my head. And writing well, for a long time, did not come easily at all. The words that my father murmured made sense, but the words they phonetically sounded out in class and asked me to repeat did not. Worried my parents carted me off to numerous specialists and ear doctors. Nothing was found. Now, years later, I know why I had such difficulty, I simply cannot interpret certain sounds and have to figure them out via the context in which they are used. It took me several years to find a way of compensating for this problem. I do not have the abilities of a mimic. I can't copy the sounds I hear. They change and twist inside my head into something else. Specialists call this aphasia. Somewhere between the ears and brain, the sound gets muddled. Not all sounds, just certain ones.
I remember loving books, the smell of new books, the touch and taste of them. I'd often take them to bed with me. A pile, as if somehow by osmosis the stories inside them, that my father read aloud, would seep permanently in my brain and stay with me. I remember loving how the words sounded when my father read to me, even though I could not figure out how to mimic them, the unfolding of tales such as EB White's Stuart Little or Charlotte's Web or the Trumpter Swans. My favorite part of school was the occassions when the teachers read to us - either Charlie and The Chocolat Factory or the Laura Ingles Wilder novels. But for the life of me, I could not read them myself. I wish I could find the words to express how frustrating this was? Made doubly so by other students. I was teased. Told I was mentally deficient. And the teacher, overwhelmed with thirty kids, did not have the patience to figure out why I was struggling. Meanwhile my kid brother, who happened to be pretty good at mimicing adult behaviors, was reading all sorts of books and appeared to be two reading levels ahead of half the kids he associated with. It was not until the second grade that a teacher, Mrs. Viola, figured out why five of us, there were five of us, could not read like the other kids. She ditched the phonics and the sounding out the letters methodology, and dug up the old "Fun with Dick and Jane" books or sight and sound. She would say Jane and point at the picture. Say : "See Jane Run" and point at the picture of Jane running. And I began to get it. The words began to make sense to connect to something. Like the pictures my father created when he read to me as a small child, not the gobbley-gook that I heard when people said JAYYY-NNNE.
Now that I had the basics down, I wanted desperately to attack books, but it took a while. And to this day it takes me longer to read a book than most of the people I know. I used to envy my grandmother, who was able to read a book as long as Gone with The Wind in less than 13 hours. OR the people online who can read the Harry Potter novels in two hours flat, racing each other to the finish line. It usually takes me a week to get through the novels, three days if I do nothing else but read them. Part of it is deliberate, I like books to last and feel the need to read every word, sometimes twice to ensure I understood it. Part of it is not deliberate, sometimes the words blur and I have to peck at them to make sense of them. I also on occassion will read them aloud, or read with my mouth moving - because like I said, the word won't make sense, until I hear it outside the page. I have to wrestle it to the ground and take charge of it, tell it whose boss, I guess.
Reading is something I think many people take for granted. They may not even remember how or when they learned. It's like breathing. Just like learning a language is something that came easily to them, just a matter of mimicing sounds. Or walking. Or tying your shoe-laces - took me forever to learn to tye shoe-laces, I kept reversing the process in my head. Try tying your shoes while looking at them in the mirror sometime - it's like that for me, unless I concentrate. Writing is another thing we take for granted. As if we are born with the ability and I suppose some people are - publishing their first novel at 14 or 15 or 22. I had a friend in college - who could write without thinking about it.
My mother talks about her father, a man who ran his own trucking company and a succesful rancher. He left school in the eigth grade to work his father's land. And never really learned how to read, at least not well. But he was a whiz at math. She used to come home from school and throw big words at the man, showing off I expect. It annoyed him and upset him. Now years later, she tells me the story with tears of regret in her voice, that she'd been stupid to torment him in such a way. But she'd been angry at him and wanted his approval. Instead she only hurt him and got his anger and resentment. And I think of a conversation I had the other day with another friend, who asked how you motivate people, how do you make them value what they do? And I remember stating, that we need to get past the need to put others down to build ourselves up. But that's human and always been the case, she said, somewhat defensively, we can't get past that.
Learning how to read is a bit like learning how to drive a car or better yet learning how to make a piece of pottery on a wheel. You sit at the wheel for hours sometimes, the clay a mass of jello not molding to any set form. And you curse it in frustration. You just can't center it. While around you people are churning out bowls and mugs and pitchers and vases. Some just started yesterday while you've been at it a month or a year. But the potter tells us, who has been at it 30 years and struggled long and hard to learn how herself, everyone learns at their own pace, it takes time and practice, and is an individual thing. It is not a contest, it is not a race and don't let anyone make you feel otherwise. Learning to read is like that. A private thing. A personal thing. Between you and the words on the page. And like any thing that is important or holds resonance in our lives, it can be a painful thing, a hard thing.
One of my fondest memories is sitting on my father's lap as a child or next to him on a plane ride to some tropical local, usually Florida - we went there a lot when I was a small child, and listening to him read to me. The words turning into pictures inside my head. The musky smell of his sweater, a ratty mix of lambs wool and acrylic, soft and scratchy, smelling of pipe tobacco and pine. Sometimes he did not read at all, he'd just weave a story of his own devising. Storytelling comes naturally in my family, it's in our blood. And on my own, I'd tell my own stories, sometimes bouncing a ball to echo the rhythm of the words I stated out loud. If people saw me, they'd see a strange girl bouncing a ball and talking to herself, not a person telling a story. There were times, my brother would sit and listen, captivated and I'd tell it to him. And I had a best friend, Marcy, who would create stories with me.
But reading someone else's stories did not come as easily as weaving my own inside my head. And writing well, for a long time, did not come easily at all. The words that my father murmured made sense, but the words they phonetically sounded out in class and asked me to repeat did not. Worried my parents carted me off to numerous specialists and ear doctors. Nothing was found. Now, years later, I know why I had such difficulty, I simply cannot interpret certain sounds and have to figure them out via the context in which they are used. It took me several years to find a way of compensating for this problem. I do not have the abilities of a mimic. I can't copy the sounds I hear. They change and twist inside my head into something else. Specialists call this aphasia. Somewhere between the ears and brain, the sound gets muddled. Not all sounds, just certain ones.
I remember loving books, the smell of new books, the touch and taste of them. I'd often take them to bed with me. A pile, as if somehow by osmosis the stories inside them, that my father read aloud, would seep permanently in my brain and stay with me. I remember loving how the words sounded when my father read to me, even though I could not figure out how to mimic them, the unfolding of tales such as EB White's Stuart Little or Charlotte's Web or the Trumpter Swans. My favorite part of school was the occassions when the teachers read to us - either Charlie and The Chocolat Factory or the Laura Ingles Wilder novels. But for the life of me, I could not read them myself. I wish I could find the words to express how frustrating this was? Made doubly so by other students. I was teased. Told I was mentally deficient. And the teacher, overwhelmed with thirty kids, did not have the patience to figure out why I was struggling. Meanwhile my kid brother, who happened to be pretty good at mimicing adult behaviors, was reading all sorts of books and appeared to be two reading levels ahead of half the kids he associated with. It was not until the second grade that a teacher, Mrs. Viola, figured out why five of us, there were five of us, could not read like the other kids. She ditched the phonics and the sounding out the letters methodology, and dug up the old "Fun with Dick and Jane" books or sight and sound. She would say Jane and point at the picture. Say : "See Jane Run" and point at the picture of Jane running. And I began to get it. The words began to make sense to connect to something. Like the pictures my father created when he read to me as a small child, not the gobbley-gook that I heard when people said JAYYY-NNNE.
Now that I had the basics down, I wanted desperately to attack books, but it took a while. And to this day it takes me longer to read a book than most of the people I know. I used to envy my grandmother, who was able to read a book as long as Gone with The Wind in less than 13 hours. OR the people online who can read the Harry Potter novels in two hours flat, racing each other to the finish line. It usually takes me a week to get through the novels, three days if I do nothing else but read them. Part of it is deliberate, I like books to last and feel the need to read every word, sometimes twice to ensure I understood it. Part of it is not deliberate, sometimes the words blur and I have to peck at them to make sense of them. I also on occassion will read them aloud, or read with my mouth moving - because like I said, the word won't make sense, until I hear it outside the page. I have to wrestle it to the ground and take charge of it, tell it whose boss, I guess.
Reading is something I think many people take for granted. They may not even remember how or when they learned. It's like breathing. Just like learning a language is something that came easily to them, just a matter of mimicing sounds. Or walking. Or tying your shoe-laces - took me forever to learn to tye shoe-laces, I kept reversing the process in my head. Try tying your shoes while looking at them in the mirror sometime - it's like that for me, unless I concentrate. Writing is another thing we take for granted. As if we are born with the ability and I suppose some people are - publishing their first novel at 14 or 15 or 22. I had a friend in college - who could write without thinking about it.
My mother talks about her father, a man who ran his own trucking company and a succesful rancher. He left school in the eigth grade to work his father's land. And never really learned how to read, at least not well. But he was a whiz at math. She used to come home from school and throw big words at the man, showing off I expect. It annoyed him and upset him. Now years later, she tells me the story with tears of regret in her voice, that she'd been stupid to torment him in such a way. But she'd been angry at him and wanted his approval. Instead she only hurt him and got his anger and resentment. And I think of a conversation I had the other day with another friend, who asked how you motivate people, how do you make them value what they do? And I remember stating, that we need to get past the need to put others down to build ourselves up. But that's human and always been the case, she said, somewhat defensively, we can't get past that.
Learning how to read is a bit like learning how to drive a car or better yet learning how to make a piece of pottery on a wheel. You sit at the wheel for hours sometimes, the clay a mass of jello not molding to any set form. And you curse it in frustration. You just can't center it. While around you people are churning out bowls and mugs and pitchers and vases. Some just started yesterday while you've been at it a month or a year. But the potter tells us, who has been at it 30 years and struggled long and hard to learn how herself, everyone learns at their own pace, it takes time and practice, and is an individual thing. It is not a contest, it is not a race and don't let anyone make you feel otherwise. Learning to read is like that. A private thing. A personal thing. Between you and the words on the page. And like any thing that is important or holds resonance in our lives, it can be a painful thing, a hard thing.