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INTRODUCTION
Our single
greatest concern about the process of learning to read is
what it tacitly teaches our children about themselves, about
their own minds.
For the
most part, up until the time children learn to read, their
natural ‘compass’ for learning is oriented to following
their own inner revelations. Everything they do undulates with feelings of ambivalence and
their remarkable learning power comes from their growing
ability to swim in the stream of it – from their ability
to disambiguate their differentiations in the flow of their
experiencing. Children
learn to walk by moving towards reducing the ambivalence
they feel in their sense of falling. The same process of
processing orients their learning in all real-time,
all-at-once, ‘natural’ situations.
When
children begin to learn to read they encounter a radically
different environment than their many
millions-of-years-in-the-evolving organisms ever evolved to
learn in. Here, their compass is not equipped to guide them
and, as they have no other choice, they learn to subordinate
their inside-out compass for the outside-in evaluations of
an external authority.
In itself this isn’t a problem. What is a problem
is that in the case of reading, the external authority is
overwhelmingly ambiguous.
As you must
have gleaned from reading the contents of this site, our
learning to read process is seriously complicated by the
highly ambiguous code the children must learn to read with.
For the majority of our children, struggling with the
ambiguity in the code not only impedes their learning to
read it becomes an environment in which they are susceptible
to becoming ashamed of their own minds – of feeling
‘bad’ about themselves because they can’t read well
enough. As with all human beings, children tend to shrink
back from things that make them feel bad about themselves.
To continue to allow children to develop such
feelings, because they have trouble relating to this messy
code, an unnatural human artifact is nothing less than gross
negligence.
It is our
view that concurrent to the process of learning to read
children should learn how to ‘relate’ to the whole
learning to read process.
With
fable-like storytelling, we should help children understand
that learning to read is like driving a car or running a
dishwasher, its about learning to use a human invented
machine - it is not a natural process. A cartoonish history of writing is helpful, one in which cave
men learn to make scratches on sticks to make ‘receipts’
– where clay pots hold tokens of agreements and later
flatten to have little word-pictures scratched into them –
where paper and pen take over for clay and scratching sticks
and where the pictures become symbols of the sounds of words
rather than simply images of the things words refer to.
Along the
storyline we should help children understand what a
‘code’ is, how our machines are run by codes, how spies
use secret codes, how our bodies depend on biological codes
and that reading is a process of learning to ‘decode’ a
code. Most importantly, we should help children realize that
this code of ours is confusing, that way back in the days
before Robin Hood a way of talking and a way of writing were
forced to fit together.
That, there were many mistakes in the way they were
put together – mistakes that make learning to read
unnaturally difficult.
All this may seem too much for little children but its not. By helping them have a sense of what it is they are learning to do, especially in understanding that if it’s hard for them it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them, we provide them a way to ‘contextualize’ their frustrations in learning to read where they belong. Rather than blaming themselves for their frustrations they can attribute their struggle to the somewhat ‘messed up code’.
At work here
Technology
& props...
ABC
blocks with alternate letter sounds on the blocks
Visual
Phonic Scrabble
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