Thin Mints, Oysters and a Taste for Books

Sugar, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, thiamine, enriched wheat flour, cocoa, glycerin. However detailed the list of ingredients, they simply do not add up to a Girl Scout Thin Mint. Step-by-step instructions on putting the ingredients together don’t re-create the cookie for me, either. To make it come alive in my mind, I need a less analytical, more imaginative description. I need something like what M.F.K. Fisher does with oysters: “Southern oysters are more like the Southern ladies than the brisk New Englanders. They are delicate and listless. Further north, men choose their oysters without sauce. They like them cold, straightforward, simple, capable of spirit but unadorned.” Fanciful? Maybe. But when pursuing a complex subject, a flight of fancy is sometimes necessary.

Like the taste of an oyster, literacy is difficult to describe without resort to metaphor. No sequence of lessons, however detailed, begins to describe the complex behavior involved when a child learns to read. There is the child’s relationship to the book to consider. Is this a familiar or an unfamiliar story? Are the events described in the book something the child can recognize? Does the young reader have a feeling for what kind of text this is--a fairy tale, a poem, an encyclopedia entry, a letter? What attitude toward books has he seen modeled by parents and friends? Does he want to know what is written in the book? The answers to these questions affect a child’s ability to read the text as much as his ability to sound out letters or recognize words.

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” Emily Dickinson wrote. She called reading a frugal chariot that bears the human soul. This metaphor for reading comes closer to describing literacy than any catalog of book titles or list of basic skills ever could. When my son mentioned that he wished time travel were possible, I saw no problem. I just brought home some science fiction titles. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card can take him lands away without his ever having to leave his bedroom. He won’t have to wait for Apollo 79, either.

Comparing literature with various means of transportation is a simile that works for me because I am convinced that children who don’t read face a dismal road. By the third grade, we can predict dropout rates and future socioeconomic status. Our prisons are full of grown men who are illiterate. Given the wealth of our society, it is inexcusable that even one child should not learn to read.

Acquiring reading skills can be difficult, however, unless a young reader simultaneously develops a reader’s habit of mind. Children need to learn about the adventure of reading as much as they need to learn their alphabet. Without the desire to figure out what is coded on the page, the child may not bother. Without a book he wants to read, the child may never try. Literacy is too slippery a concept to be pinned down in any how-to manual for teachers, though many have tried. Step one, teach the letter sounds; step two, show the child how these sounds form words; step three, link the words to make sentences. Voila! We have a reader. I wish it were that simple. Reading involves much more than decoding words. It is an act of creation. It is a miraculous process.