whence book-learning?

[jazzfish]

Inspired by a post by nineweaving sometime last week:

How did y'all learn to read? Did you teach yourselves, or learn in school, or what?

I don't know how I learned to read. My parents (mother?) must have read picture books to me. I know that one day when I was three or four, I picked up Go Dog Go in the store and said "I want this one!" My mother said "Are you going to read it yourself?" Her tone implied that if I said no I wasn't getting the book, so of course I said "Yes." And I took it home and laid down on the floor and read it, and didn't realise what I'd done until I was through.

From there the next things I can recall reading were the Mr Men / Little Miss books, and then a Hardy Boys book (The Mystery of the Chinese Junk) that my great-Aunt Celia sent me, and then some Greek and Norse myths out of a collection on the landing, and then Tolkien, over four or five years and three houses. There must have been other things I read on my own in there, but they didn't really make an impression. I distinctly recall the bookcase on the landing, and I *think* that means it was in the townhouse in Leavenworth (first grade) rather than the house in Fairfax (second thru fourth grades).

And after Tolkien came other brightly-spined Darrell-K-Sweet-covered Del Rey paperbacks, and Pop Shackelford's copy of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, leading in a more or less direct line to the well-adjusted young man I am today.

Comments

[okrablossom]

Oh, my, I was in Fairfax in the early 80s (all of elementary school); when were you there?

[jazzfish]

!! We lived in Kings Part West '83-86. I was at Laurel Ridge Elementary '83-84 for second grade, and then White Oaks Elementary for the GT program for third/fourth '84-86.

[okrablossom]

Hmm. I was at Jermantown. And like many elementary students, I suppose, I have no idea where your schools were :)

[jazzfish]

Ha, I know where Jermantown is, but only because I took Latin at a private school out there one summer. And also, you know, lived in the area while I was learning to drive. :)

(Fairfax, at least the part I was in, is a little ways south and very slightly east of Jermantown.)

[shanaqui]

I didn't learn to read properly until I was six or seven, despite my parents and the school's best efforts. The school were keen on teaching me to read phonetically, an approach that has never worked (I still can't work out how to pronounce a word by looking at it, even by assuming standard pronunciation rules). The books they used were uber simple, and they got simpler the more I seemed to struggle... but I complained to my mother that they "tasted" bad. I'm not sure why she didn't realise I had lexical->gustatory synaesthesia then, since she does too, but she didn't! She started using the whole word method with me, and actually interesting books, and regardless of how I was doing on my own reading, she'd read a book to me every night (following the words with a finger).

One evening, I just read the whole book to her... and the next, and the next, at which point she realised that at some point everything had finally assembled in my brain and I was reading. I read the rest of that series, ploughed through all the easy books school insisted on giving me, signed up at the library... Within maybe six months of learning to read, I read The Hobbit; within a year, I was reading my mother's books, digging into the adult shelves at the library, and fully capable of getting ten books out of the library and returning them the next day, completely read.

Related might be the fact that around that same age, people finally realised I was extremely short sighted, and I got glasses... On the other hand, my mother suspected I was simply bored by the books and refusing to read them. I don't remember well enough to say. I do remember reading Beatrix Potter one day before school while my mother was trying to plait my hair, and refusing to move until I finished the book; apart from that and a book about cats, I can't remember much else about my early reading!

[jazzfish]

Oh, neat! That kind of "click" is great. As is the "and then I tore through the library." :)

[wild_irises]

I was a very early reader; I think I just took to it easily and my parents encouraged it. Before I was in kindergarten, they would (not creepily, or at least it didn't feel like it) show me off to their friends reading stuff from that day's newspaper, struggling over the hard words.

When I started kindergarten (in my day there wasn't much, if any, preschool), my mother told the principal that I could read, and he pooh-poohed her: "All parents think their kids can read." He called her a few weeks later to tell her in astonished tones that her daughter could read.

To this day, I think it is the only activity aside from breathing that I have engaged in effectively every day of my life since I started more than 60 years ago.

[jazzfish]

It's interesting to compare your experience with Sherwood's (in comments on LJ). At least, interesting in a "here are two situations that are superficially similar but probably at root very dissimilar, that turned out in dissimilar ways."

To this day, I think it is the only activity aside from breathing that I have engaged in effectively every day of my life since I started more than 60 years ago.
*blink* For me as well. Certainly the only cognitive (as opposed to physical) activity. I hadn't thought about it like that, but yeah. The idea of not reading is ... kind of terrifying, actually.

[wild_irises]

I can't seem to get LJ to cough up a link to your journal, so I can't read Sherwood's response; will keep trying,

Back in perhaps the '90s, there was a (mostly non-internet) meme going around that was "would you rather give up reading or sex?" Now, I'm quite fond of sex, but I realized I could imagine giving it up, while like you, I am scared at the thought of not reading.

[jazzfish]

Hrm. Sorry about that! Try http://jazzfish.livejournal.com/582729.html

*nervous laugh* Exactly.

[wohali]

My memory of learning to speak and read is weird.

I know from family folklore and from an innate sense of truth that I didn't speak words much until I was able to speak in full sentences, and then once I could speak in full sentences, it was hard to shut me up. :)

Then came reading. I remember my father painted up large signs, bigger than 11x17, each with a red word on it in lowercase Helvetica. He'd stand across the room and hold them up over his head and I had to read the word. I then graduated to the McGuffey readers, which I worked through before even heading to nursery (aka pre-K). I was an accelerated student and ended up in grade 1 instead of kindergarten, and there the approach (mid-70s) was a combination of phonics and books. Favourites included the Velveteen Rabbit, Beatrix Potter, various Dr. Seuss titles, and Grimm's Fairy Tales. I would try to read on my own as much as I could, but reading a book at bedtime with my mother was a common practice. My parents quickly put a half-size bookshelf into my room so I'd have access to books any time I wanted.

I remember huge fights with my mother over the Scholastic book orders that came through the school. She felt the books weren't up to literary standards and often prevented me from ordering books on those grounds. I countered with the lie that our teacher "ordered" us to order 2 books from each order form and was grading us on reading them completely. She eventually caught on, but I managed to get a half-dozen or so books that way.

[jazzfish]

I can certainly understand not wanting to speak until you can actually communicate. :)

O yes, definitely Beatrix Potter and Grimm's and Seuss (et al), and Winnie-the-Pooh as well. But I associate those all with having them read *to* me, somehow, or maybe reading them along with my mother.

Book orders! On super-flimsy paper where if you decided you wanted to change your mind and get something else, you had to be VERY CAREFUL with erasing the "1" in the quantity column or you'd tear the whole thing apart. I remember those, very clearly. That must have been when I started reading Ruth Chew, as well.

[wohali]

Nearly all of my Scholastic book orders would have been either Choose Your Own Adventure books, or things like Basic Fun.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Relatives bought my brother Hardy Boys books and while he didn't touch them, I devoured them.

[jazzfish]

That seems fair. Although I agree with the prevailing sentiment that Nancy Drew books were better. Her friends were certainly more interesting.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but those I had to borrow from a friend at school, as the relatives knew I was a reader, and to a lot of them Girls Reading was not nearly as important as Boys Reading.

[jazzfish]

... every so often I am reminded that the future really *is* a better place than the past. I'm glad you had access to the Hardys!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I can't remember not being able to read. I CAN remember not being able to WRITE, and being SO FRUSTRATED. Because I'd TRY to write something, and then I'd try to read what I wrote, and it wouldn't be words, and I couldn't figure out why.

My father says that I learned to read partially on the Chronicles of Narnia, that he'd read me a chapter at night, and I got to do the one-letter words, "I" and "a", and then I got to do two-letter words. And then he'd just fall asleep at interesting parts and I'd have to read it myself if I wanted to keep going.

He clarifies that that last part wasn't on purpose. It was just that he'd fall asleep. But it worked anyway.

[jazzfish]

I have literally no memory of learning to write. I mean, other than painful recollections of handwriting homework in early elementary school. I was learning to type (not in a Mavis-Beacon way, just as a result of having a computer in the house and playing Adventure) pretty soon after I learned to read, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Ha! That's a pretty great way to learn / teach yourself to read.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I'm another one who doesn't remember not knowing how to read. If you look up "hyperlexia", some of that (not all) describes me when I was very young. According to my parents, I was actually reading before I was fully talking: they were a bit concerned about me not talking, so they took me to a child psychology center at a local college, where I was observed over a period of some weeks. During that time I started talking, and it also came out that I had started reading.

After that, the usual things: The Hobbit at five, The Lord of the Rings read and re-read a bunch of times immediately after....

[jazzfish]

Neat!

[reedrover]

Interesting! I remember a lot of Mrs. PiggleWiggle and Amelia Bedilia, then Encyclopedia Brown and Little Women/Men/Boys.

I don't remember not being able to read. I have been told numerous times by my family that I was reading at four years old. I had memorized Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now both forward and backward by the middle of kindergarten. Likewise, I don't remember not being able to write. I remember learning cursive very early on in my elementary school years because I wanted to sign my name like Dad did. So my early handwriting looked textbook straight up and down until it came to my name, which was slanty and precisely-loopy like Dad's.

[jazzfish]

At this point I can come up with things that I must have read... but many of then are obviously things from fourth grade or later. Memory like a steel whatchamacallit.

And I don't remember not being able to read, either. I do remember being taught letters in kindergarten (the inflatable Mr. R had a hole) and some reading-aloud in I guess first or second grade, and thinking that these were kind of weird things since I was already past them but maybe there was some secret knowledge I was missing. (Spoiler: there wasn't, except for the knowledge that being ahead of the class doesn't mean you learn any more, it just means you'll get in trouble for being bored. NOT THAT I'M AT ALL BITTER.)

[reedrover]

I know you know this already: I grew up in a different reality. When our half-day kindergarten teacher realized a bunch of us could read, she volunteered to teach for another two hours for just the readers. My parents enthusiastically encouraged reading. Etc.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My wife was also an early reader; Sesame Street may have helped, and she was watching that at six months. As in, as soon as she could crawl, she would crawl to the TV if she heard the theme song.

My in-laws were one of a very small number of Jewish families in Dubuque, Iowa. The neighbors, who were, like four-fifths of Dubuque, Catholic, had a huge family, and were the go-to babysitters for Lis, because they felt that the difference between eleven kids and twelve kids was trivial, so she spent a fair bit of time there when her parents were working.

And they didn't really believe that she ACTUALLY could read, rather than just memorizing the words in the book (which, to be fair, is a perfectly legitimate step on the road to reading). So they tried her on the book which they absolutely KNEW she wouldn't have seen before: the New Testament.

She had trouble with some of the big words, like "heaven", "hallowed", and "daily", and "trespasses" was a complete non-starter, but she got "our Father who art in" and "bread" just fine.

[jazzfish]

*laugh*

[selki.livejournal.com]

I think my big brother and sisters read to me, mostly (mom pretty busy with all the kids). I remember my cousin reading Go Dogs, Go! to me when we visited one time. I'm pretty sure I learned to write in school.