Learning to read.

So my son is learning to read. It's pretty amazing to see the change that's occurred since school began in late August. He knows all of his letters and can tell vowels from consonants -- or at least list out the vowels. That may not seem like a big deal, but to us it's incredible: he resisted reciting the alphabet for so long, even though he's been able to recognize the letters in his own name for some time.

Part of it must be peer pressure; some of his friends in school are already reading very well and have been since school began. However, the teachers are emphasizing reading skills and a reading specialist has been working with his class for the entire year, so they're obviously providing the tools he needs. DCPS needs more reading specialists -- I could go on forever by the way about what DCPS needs more of, but it would begin with instructional staff.

Watching a child learn to read is immensely beautiful. Most of us don't come into contact with illiteracy very often, so the process of becoming literate remains a distant thing to us, almost a pre-memory. In many ways, in fact, I'd submit that it is a pre-memory. Frederick Douglass says as much in his Narrative, claiming that literacy was the key to freedom:

It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. [Chapter
Six]

From that point on, Douglass finds his relationship to his existence rearranged: he develops an understanding of possibilities outside his present, and that leads to resentment of his condition and anger toward the slaveholders, as well as an incessant desire to be free.

The world of illiteracy, despite IKEA instructions, is incredibly limited. This morning we played a game before school. He had perhaps 18 words that he had been given to learn. They were simple words, the most difficult being "said." He recognized about five of them without any help, and with some prompting, he read most of them. Then I built a sentence from the words. He jumped in and built his own after me, reusing most of my words, but changing one or two.

Noam Chomsky argued 50 years ago that language is hard-wired in humans and that "deep structures" common to all languages provide for language acquisition. Children learn language despite the limited and incorrect examples given them in daily life (think TV shows, scattered conversation, broken sentences), and they learn the basic rules of language before they can read, before they are instructed that every sentence requires a verb...

I sat in his class for a few minutes today as they went over the word list. It was tremendous watching the children raise their hands to answer and the looks on their faces when they were right. It reminded me of why I became a teacher many years ago and why I hope to get back in the classroom soon.