Taken Literally

Learning can be effortless, continual, permanent – and also pleasant. . .  We can learn without effort if we are interested in what we are doing (or in what someone else is doing), free from confusion, and given assistance when we seek it.

Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting

We are halfway through Year Three. Sirius black is on the loose, Dementors are terrorizing the countryside, and Crookshanks has it in for Scabbers. In a parallel universe, Bug’s Halloween costume is already assembled. About once a week, he pulls the cloak from its hanger and tries on his glasses, just to make sure everything still fits.

In the evenings, my mother and I bustle around the kitchen preparing dinner while Bug snaps Legos into intricate models at the table. Chattering about the latest excitement at Hogwarts usually compels my boy to spare some focus for the conversation. In the middle of a recent re-cap of the previous night’s chapter, mother asks, “I just wonder when he is going to start reading.”

“But he is reading,” I say. Isn’t he? In bed every night, Bug sits in rapt silence while the story unfolds via his mommy’s repertoire of butchered British accents.  After songs and a kisses, he stretches out with a heap of picture books by his side and kills the next hour in the company of a few dozen authors.  He may not be sounding out each letter into a word and each word into a sentence, but he is immersed in language and story.

“I just keep thinking that he’s so close,” she says to me, shaking her head. “Why can’t he crack the code?”

Wow. My five-year-old dives daily into books for the sheer pleasure of the swim, and his grandmother is worried that he’s behind? “Wherever we think he should be,” I say, “he is already there.”

The official theory of learning undoubtedly draws a different conclusion. Identify the skill, test it and assign a rating to it. Cross over the line and you’ve got a pass.  Linger on this side? Well, the kid needs remediation.  The scorekeepers may give what he’s doing some sanitized name like “literacy preparedness,” but only when a person makes the grade can he be said to be a reader. By this measure, Bug is not yet reading, because he still needs to be read to.

Once my boy walks into his kindergarten classroom next year, a sheaf of rubrics will appear in his file. Data on his abilities and his pace will be available to the Commonwealth and his grandmother alike. I’m sure I will join the ranks of parents worried (against our own common sense) about our children’s aptitudes as measured against a field of yardsticks. These indicators of learning share the limitation of indices everywhere: they are over-simplified stand-ins for complex phenomena. We use them in the absence of comprehensive explanations in order to make quick sense of things, but it is dangerous to assume they are accurate representations of what is truly going on.

My mother and I may be mistaken in assuming a shared definition of one deceptive little word. What is reading, after all? Is it the ability to comprehend the meaning of every word on the page? If that is true, then I am not reading yet, because I encounter unfamiliar vocabulary daily. Perhaps reading is being able to correlate a string of letters into an accurate representation of what the writer intends. If so, then scholars all over the world are not reading, because each text they face offers up concepts beyond their reach.

My mother and I are not alone in oversimplifying the idea of reading. Letters make up words, certainly. Then what happens? Inside the brain of the reader, a transformation takes place. Words may become pictures to enjoy, or mysteries to be solved, or conversations to engage in. Sometimes readers surrender to a text and sometimes they scrap with it. Reading is woven into the rich fabric of experience, and it cannot be separated from speech, pleasure, challenge, play, and curiosity. As much as it is an activity, reading is a habit of mind.

Bug is not studying in preparation to be literate. He is already a full member of the Literati, just by seeking entertainment and explanations between the covers of books. “We don’t have to be skilled readers to join the literacy club nor need we know very much about writing,” Smith suggests. “Quite the contrary. It is not until we are members of the literacy club that we can learn to read and write. Literacy doesn’t come as the climax of a sustained regime of reading and writing instruction to which we and our teachers have diligently applied ourselves. Reading and writing should come as effortlessly as the understanding and mastery of speech. Everything else – all the more prominent exercises, drills, corrections, and tests – are distractions and sometimes insuperable obstacles on the way to literacy.”

Last night, I had to roll Bug over in order to un-stick his face and belly from the covers of Peter Rabbit and Little Critter. Who but a reader would drag himself across a field of pages night after night to make his way to sleep? Tonight, a new chapter of The Prisoner of Azkaban will invite us in. Bug will lift his wand with Harry, tap it on an unremarkable stone, and watch as a doorway into a secret passage appears. Like that young wizard, my boy has cracked the only code that matters. He knows he possesses the magic. And because he wants to walk through walls, mastery will be a breeze.

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Smith, Frank. The Book of Learning and Forgetting. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998.