Learning to read

After writing these posts on books I began to think of the whole process of reading. There are times when I think that the kids I teach are in a post-literary state - no more reading books or anything longer than a short short story or a longish blog post. There is hope though - the Harry Potter craze! I love watching 11 year olds ripping through those 600 page tomes just as fast as they can. And it gives me something fun to talk about with my niece Mulan.

But how did I learn to read? As I remember it, when I was in kindergarten (only once a week because that was the one day my grandmother could take me to town), it began to dawn as I watched people read to me that they must be recognizing words from the neat little squiggles on the page. Then I thought that I would have to recognize each complicated little squiggle for each word. That would mean that I would have to memorize hundreds of different tiny characters (that simply being the biggest number I could conceive of). I was horrified. Think of the effort!

Then came the first day of reading in the first grade. The teacher wrote RED on the board and said that sign meant 'red.' Then BLUE, and said it meant 'blue.'

Oh no. It was true! I was going to have to memorize hundreds of signs. Maybe more! How many words did we speak, anyway? All I could see was years of mental drudgery.

Which was pretty much true. Even though we were drilled in something called 'Phonics' - which could have been Sanskrit grammer for all I could understand, I was still learning to recognize each word in its entirety, as if it were a Chinese character.