Narrative My Relationship With Reading

¶ … Narrative

My Relationship with Reading and Writing

It's spring of my kindergarten year. Everyone else knows all of their ABCs; many of my classmates were reading rudimentary picture books on their own and a few could even read some more advanced books. I was happy, well adjusted, and as far as anyone knew I still couldn't read a word. At least, that's how the story's told; I don't really remember. I was too young to be entirely aware of how I measured up against the other five- and six-year-olds in my class academically. I had friends, and I didn't feel stupid ("we never thought you were stupid!," I can hear my mother exclaiming in the back of my head), but thee I was, not reading when everyone else was. My parents had a meeting with my principal and my teacher to discuss the possibility of having me repeat kindergarten, not simply because of my apparent lack of reading skills but because I just didn't seem to be keeping pace with everyone else academically over all. They all thought it might be best for me to wait another year and catch up.

Jump to that fall. My parents decided that it would be harder for me to be a year older than all of my classmates as I went through school than it would be for me to spend first grade struggling a little behind everyone else. I would not be repeating kindergarten, they had decided early that summer. I would go to first grade with everyone else, and I would catch up to tem all eventually, they were certain. My kindergarten teacher agreed. The principal didn't, but she didn't have a whole lot of say in the matter -- it's not like there's a minimum standard for graduation from kindergarten. My new teacher would simply be made aware of the situation and life would continue normally. I, of course, had no idea that any of this was going on, and as it turned out all of the meetings and worry among the adults didn't really matter.

By the time I entered the first grade, I was one of the top readers in the class. I loved reading out loud, and almost never made a mistake or had to struggle to sound out a word. All of the letters and sounds that had seemed to give me so much trouble just three months earlier had now coalesced into meaningful units and phonemes to the point that I could sight read pretty much any word that appeared in our first grade reading material, and I could even read most tings meant for third graders (I borrowed some of my brother's books to find this out). My kindergarten teacher, who had become friends with my mother over the course of the previous school year, was astounded to hear of my progress. The first grade teacher was merely impressed with my reading skills, and somewhat disappointed that I didn't exhibit the same level of aptitude in math (yet). My parents, needless to say, were overjoyed with my newfound love for reading and the fact that I excelled at a skill that I had previously been so deficient in.

You may well be wondering what had changed over the summer; what new reading theory or instructional video I had been given to help me catch up to and even surpass my peers. Perhaps, you might be thinking to yourself, some incredibly gifted tutor had been employed by my parents for some personal instruction in order to bring me into the world of reading, writing and literature. Possibly my parents had taken extra care to read with me for at least half-an-hour everyday, helping me to sound out words and going over the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they made time and time again. The truth is, you would be incorrect in your assumptions.

I didn't talk until I was almost two years old. That was the first time my parents worried that I might have some sort of developmental problem; all of their other children (I have several older siblings) had started talking much earlier, first in the typical baby gibberish, then in words that approximated the actual English pronunciation of names and objects -- sounds that were barely intelligible to family members at first and were completely indecipherable to strangers. I made standard cooing and crying noises as the situation warranted, but I never even appeared to be trying to sound out words even under encouragement (again, I have to take the word of my parents and siblings on this, as I was far too young to remember any of it). Urgings of "Say Mommy!" were rewarded, I am told, with smiles and coos, but no apparent understanding of what was being asked of me or any indication that I knew how to consciously produce sounds vocally that had any meaning to anyone else.

Then, pretty much overnight (as my mother tells it), I began speaking in complete sentences. I went from appearing developmentally challenged to speaking as well as or better than an average toddler without really going through any of the preliminary steps. One day, I couldn't be pressed into saying "mama," and the next I was lucidly and coherently asking her for a bottle when I was hungry, and for a changing when I was...well, you know. She thought the whole things was a little disconcerting, but kind of funny: here she had been, worrying that I would have some real developmental problems that might follow me for the rest of my life, and had asked my pediatrician if there was anything noticeably wrong with me (and of course there wasn't), and suddenly I was speaking not just clear and perfectly understandable words, but had apparently grasped the rudiments of grammar and syntax as well and was able to construct very basic but almost entirely correct sentences to express my desires and reactions.