Overlearning

Several afternoons a week, I tutor struggling readers.

I’ve worked with one little boy for three years now – and in a progress that has been halting, and at times excruciatingly frustrating, he has slowly, slowly learned the alphabet and basic phonics and a small memory store of “sight” words. Just in the last month or so, he has come close to being able to string enough words together that it is almost reading. (Lots of qualifiers here, still.) Every week, his painful efforts force me to really notice and think about what a mysterious and huge undertaking it is to learn the English written language.

I can’t really remember that lightbulb moment when letters became sounds and sounds became words . . . because for such a very long time, reading has been as natural as breathing to me. And yet, when I am in the act of explaining reading strategies – and okay, that’s another word which doesn’t follow the rule or the pattern – I have to acknowledge that reading is nothing if not laboured.

For instance:

Ow sounds like mouse, but not like flow – which has the same spelling pattern.
Through sounds the same as threw and thru – but not a word like trough, which has the same spelling pattern, and hardly looks any different . . . especially for a little guy who likes to look at the first letter and then guess all of the rest (because the letters are dancing around).

For goodness sake, even the word READ has two different pronunciations. You’ve got to know the context first, but you can't rely on it entirely. (Isn’t that true of everything?)

Some of us learn to read quite easily, while others – more than you might think – have to overlearn every little thing to reach that magical mastery called automaticity. Automaticity: where there is no gap between the seeing/recognizing/processing/understanding/doing.

I’ve been thinking about overlearning a lot this week.

What have I had to learn, over and over again, and yet I still don’t have that absolute understanding – that mastery?  I keep coming up short, and making the same mistakes, time after time.

Here’s a few life lessons that come to mind:

Impatience never helps the process.


It is pointless to speculate too much about the future.


Procrastination rarely (if ever) makes the task easier.


It is fruitless to force a conversation with someone when you know he (mostly he) is not in the right frame-of-mind for the conversation.


Emails and phone calls that aren’t answered promptly will probably never be answered at all.


If you go to bed late you are going to be tired and grumpy the next day.


Too much sugar, especially in the form of raw cookie dough, is never a good idea.


It is not necessary to voice every thought that comes into your head.

JC likes cat faces

On Monday afternoons I tutor a little boy (initials JC -- there is no Jesus Christ reference here) whose unique character always delights me. He has been diagnosed as slightly autistic, but he doesn't really have the characteristics usually associated with it. For instance, he will make eye contact and he doesn't mind being touched -- which is fortunate, as I tend to be a very tactile person!

(By the way, if you haven't yet read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time you are missing a treat. The narrator, an autistic teenager, has the most beguiling mind.)

JC does, however, have a few unusual qualities: first and foremost, his obsession with cats. His conversation is 99% about cats. He carries a cat (Pippa; real name, as I don't think stuffed animals need blogonyms) around with him at all times. He will only read (or be read to, as the case is) books about cats. He begs me, over and over, to allow him to build a "cat house" in the backyard. What does this cat house look like in his imagination? I often wonder.

JC can recognize two words: his name and "cat." Sometimes he can recognize "and," but I am suspicious about this because if you ask him to identify "the" he will almost always reply, with much gusto, AND!

We have spent hours looking at "the." After all, "the" is all over the place. You can't avoid "the;" particularly in titles and opening sentences. We practice saying "the" and noticing how our lips vibrate when we hold our tongues between our teeth. (Just try it.) If you ask James which sound makes your lips vibrate he knows it straight away . . . he just can't recognize it on the page. We make lists of (short) words that start with "th." But still, if I point to "the" and ask James to identify it, he will invariably say "and!"

Unfortunately, "the" is on the basic sight word list at JC's school -- and until he can master it, he is pretty much stuck at the ground level.

How mysterious is the mind! For all I know about the reading process, how much still eludes me . . .

What synapses have to connect before a little boy can read "the?" My girls learned to read so effortlessly. Sound-letter correspondence was an easy code to crack, and away they flew through words, then sentences, then books entire.

Every Monday we make sentences with JC's "special" words -- what we call his "word collection." We write the words on index cards with fat blue ink, and he tries to link them together in short sentences. His name + likes + the ______. But the only word he is interested in liking is "cat." Today was a breakthrough of sorts, I guess. When I asked what ELSE he liked, he carefully pondered this question and then replied, most enthusiastically: cat FACES!