Learning to read

Introduction

I started this blog off by explaining how curiosity drives a large part of how I relate to the world. I also mentioned how serendipity has played a supporting role in what I’ve achieved. This first story is about the moment I learned to read.

The reading lesson

I still can picture the moment when I realized how to go about learning to read. I’m sure we had been learning phonics up to that point, although I think the teachers called it the alphabet in those days. We weren’t just learning the symbols for letters, but also how they sounded.

One-roomOne day Miss Eash came over and sat down by my desk. You know, the ones that fastened to runners in rows, each with an inkwell to dip your pen in. It was an iconic one-room schoolhouse. There was a coal stove in one corner, a school bell in the belfry, and real slate blackboards at the front of the classroom. My dad went to school there too.

Miss Eash picked out a story in the reader that we would be using and helped me pronounce some of the words. The first word wasn’t hard to figure out. She had me sound out “th” and then add an “e”. I saw it was the word “the” immediately.

The next word she pointed out started with an “a” plus an “n” — that’s pronounced “an”. Then add a “d” on the end. The word “and” jumped into focus. From that point on I knew I could figure out how to read on my own.

Of course, most words in that reader weren’t more than five or six letters. I worked my way through that story on my own over the next few days. That’s an early example of how knowing how something works (phonics in this case) enables me to figure out the rest that I need to know. In this case, it sure beat memorizing words.

My dad was the only person in our school district, other than my mom, who had a college degree. We had just moved back from Colorado to Kansas to start farming full time. Since he had also been a teacher,  he was soon drafted for the school board.

The previous teacher had gone, so my dad hired Miss Eash to teach the eight grades. I’m pretty sure she was a shirttail relative, but I didn’t know that at the time. I knew she was a highly regarded teacher. He probably convinced the County Superintendent of Schools, whom he knew before then, that Miss Eash was the one we ought to have.

I may write a story later on about our new schoolhouse. And a few things that happened there. We’ll see.