I was away at writing camp when I thought my laptop was going to die. As I sat underneath the oak tree and typed away about theatre and the stage romance justification, my cursor began to "spaz out" across the screen––at least I thought it was my cursor. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a baby black ant. I watched as it crawled linearly down the edge of the screen, then zig-zagged and crawled over the edge so I could no longer see it.
"How cool it must be," I thought, "to crawl across words." He is only the size of a capital “I,” a lowercase “L.” How cool it must be to crawl and read. How frustrating, too. To be spoon-fed the letters and have to remember which one came before, and which one came before that. It was like the game my brother and I used to play, tracing letters on each other’s back to spell a word. I was never very good at it unless I had a pen and paper, but he said that was cheating.
Then I got to thinking: That must be like how it is learning to read, although of course I wouldn’t remember because it was so long ago. Children have to crawl over the letters with their eyes. When I have a child, I will make giant Scrabble tiles, and my baby will crawl over the letters, feel them with her feet and hands, until they are imprinted in her body, not just her brain. And when she gets to the end of the word, she will be tired. But she will remember it because of the hard work it took to get there. She will not be able to skim, like so many people have become accustomed to. She will know the language, feel the language. She will curve with the C’s, the D’s, the G’s, the J’s, the O’s, the P’s, the R’s, the S’s. She will raise her arms to the sky like the Y. She will open her legs wide and touch the floor with her hands, her tiny bum the top of the A. When she sits with her legs straight out in front, she will be the L’s.
For my second essay, I'm thinking about writing about how children learn to read and write. I was flipping through my kindergarten journal the other day, and I was appalled by the spelling. I also found the spelling rather priceless, though. It was fascinating to read the progression of the entries, as they advanced from one sentence entries that took up the whole page, to longer and more detailed entries with neater handwriting and better sentence structure. For my essay, I plan to analyze my own journal, as well as research the minds of children to learn about how and when reading and writing clicks for them. Additionally, I think it might be interesting to investigate the difference between children learning to read with electronic books versus physical books . Are there positive and/or negative consequences to learning to read with electronic books?
What I need to do is develop a unique question that makes my essay different from the countless articles and books there are out there about language, reading, and writing. Although I expect it will be a research-driven essay, I want to make sure it is not just a research paper. I need to bring myself into the essay.
If you have any prompting suggestions, I would love to hear them.
This is such a cool idea! To me, it's particularly interesting because I don't remember at all when I learned to read. I often hear people tell me that they began reading before kindergarden, which always gets me all self-conscious.
ReplyDeleteFor me personally, I think that learning how the letters of the alphabet sound and then sounding out words to spell them helped me a lot (it's something I still do!).
You only mentioned this briefly in your post, but I think looking at the difference between reading on paper vs. electronically is mega-cool. I'm someone who switched over to reading electronically when the first Kindle came out, and I love it. Last year, I read a book on paper for school for the first time since like eighth grade, and it was pretty surreal in a why-did-I-ever-do-this sense.
If you wanted to focus on education in reading and writing, there's a lot of stuff on that. The other day, a teacher explained to our class this whole new set up that MA has adopted, in which they're pushing a lot of topics down to younger kids. So, for example, what we learned in third grade a kid could be learning now in first grade. I know that there's some weird brain developmental crap going on when you're young, so it might be cool to research what the typical age is when a child can read and write and whatnot, and what happens if they're taught too early or too late.
Happy writing!