This is taken from the NY Times, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011:
In talking about reading in the previous blog entry, about how it should be an unconscious process, it also occured to me how it should be an emotionally enjoyable, even sensual, experience, not unlike eating something really tasty. This made me think of this article by Philip Schultz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the author of the forthcoming memoir, “My Dyslexia.”
The author spoke about how he was well into middle age before he realized, due to his child being diagnosed with dyslexia, that he had given up on himself because he also was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age.
After talking about the multiple daily heartbreaks of this condition as he grew up, with little hope for his life, especially in schools where he was basically told he could not learn, he got serious, tying all kinds of things together in his mind in a great stories of human achievement in the face of overwhelmingly negative odds (largely school related). He said:
“… this summer’s news that research is increasingly tying dyslexia not just to reading, but also to the way the brain processes spoken language, was no surprise to me. I found may ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse befor reading anything aloud, to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words. And because learning a foreign language is sheer torture to dyslexics (even though it is a requirement in many schools) to this day I can’t attend a High Holy Day service at my synagogue without feeling that I don’t belong there, because I can’t speak Hebrew and must pretend to read my prayer book.
“When I did finally learn to read, my teachers didn’t have much to do with it. I was 11, and even my school appointed tutors had given up on me. My mother read the only thing I would listen to – Blackhawk comics – over and over again, hoping against hope that by some leap of faith or by chance I would start to identify letters and then learn to arrange them into words and sentences, and begin the intuitive, often magical, process of turning written language into spoken language.
“One night, lying in bed as she read to me, I realized that if I was ever going to learn to read I would have to teach myself. The moon glowing outside my window, I remember, seemed especially interested in my predicament, perhaps attempting its own kind of encouragement. Was it a dummy, too? I wondered. If only I could be another boy, a boy my age who could sound out words and read and write like every other kid I knew.
“I willed myself into being him. I invented a character who could read and write. Starting that night, I’d lie in bed silently inmitating the words my mother read, imagining the taste, heft and ring of each sound as if were coming out of my mouth. I imagined being able to sound out the words by putting the letters together into units of rhythmic sound and the words into sentences that made sense. I imagined the words and their sounds being a kind of key with which I would open an invisible door to a world previously denied me.”
[ed. note: this last paragraph blew me away. In the bold part – bolding mine – I saw what our challenge is in teaching the output skill in languages called speaking. If our kids don’t want to speak, if they don’t really want to taste words, if their motivations is a grade or to placate a threatening – to them – teacher, they won’t speak. If they don’t find it fun, they won’t do it. Their education in a second or third language will have gone for not and they will joing the ranks of the 96%ers. Mr. Schultz in the paragraph above singlehandedly shoots down every single speaking drill ever invented to learn a language, and he does it with just a few words.]
The article continues:
“And suddenly I was reading. I didn’t know then that I was beginning a life long love affair with the first person voice and that I would spend most of my life inventing characters to say all the things I wanted to say. I didn’t know that I was to become a poet, that in many ways the very thing that caused me so much confusion and frustration, my belabored relationship with words, had created in me a deep appreciation of language and its music, that the same mind that prevented me from reading had invented a new way of reading, a method that I now use to teach others how to overcome their own difficulties in order to write fiction and poetry. (It’s perhaps not surprising that many famous writers are said to have struggled with dyslexia, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and W.B. Yeats.)
“We know now that dyslexia is about so much more than just mixing up letters – that many dyslexics have difficulty with rhythm and meter and word retrieval, that they struggle to recognize voices and sounds. It’s my profound hope that our schools can use findings like these to better teach children who struggle to read, to help them overcome their limitations and to help them underand that it’s not their fault. [bolding mine]
“We knew so much less when I was a child. Then, all I wanted and needed, when I learned so painstakingly to read and then to write, was to find a way to be less alone. Which is, of course, what spoken and written language is really all about.
“But poetry should be a matter of passion, not survival.”
That last sentence describes a key difference in those who use comprehension based methods to try to reach kids, and those who see their jobs as teachers driven less by passion and more by survival, by having a job. The startling power of stories to reach others, especially children as they struggle to make sense out of their worlds, is the subject of this blog post from 2010:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/02/12/story-proof-the-science-behind-the-starling-power-of-stories/