More American children suffer long-term life-harm as a
consequence of reading difficulties than from parental abuse(1),
accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders
combined. In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties
cost more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs
combined.
"Some
people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of
learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort
that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. - John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize Winning Author
"We're
saying that its a miracle that it ever happens.
Its very unsurprising that many people
struggle with it." -
Dr. Michael Merzenich, Keck
Center for Integrative Neurosciences, University of California at
San Francisco
Why is learning to
read so difficult?The root cause
of reading difficulties (in most children) can be understood in
terms of the complex interplay between:
"So
the sobering message here is that if children don't have the right
experiences during these sensitive periods for the development of a
variety of skills, including many cognitive and language capacities,
that's a burden that those kids are going to carry; the sensitive
period is over, and it's going to be harder for them."
-
Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Chair,
National Scientific Council on the Developing Child
"...children who have trouble with oral
language generally will go on to have difficulty with written
language..."
-
Dr. Paula Tallal,
Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience,
Rutgers
Children's early life learning
trajectories determine their level of readiness for the challenges involved in learning to read.
Understanding these trajectories involves understanding:
how children's
trajectories through all the above result in
meaningful differencesthat
profoundly affect the difficulty they have learning to read
"...Children of professional parents -- I
mean, talkative families and college educated -- heard forty-eight
million words addressed to them by the time they're four. Children
in welfare families who were taciturn heard thirteen million words
addressed to them by the time they were four."
-
Dr. Todd Risley,
co-author "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences
of Young American Children"
"I always tell people that from the moment a
kid gets up in the morning until he goes to sleep at night, the
central mission of the day is to avoid humiliation at all costs."
-
Dr. Mel Levine,
Professor of Pediatrics at the
University of North Carolina Medical School and co-founder of All
Kinds of Minds
Building on 'CHILD'S
FAULT' from 'Causes
and Contributing Factors',
this module's first segment provides the starting point for
appreciating the
SHAME
that struggling readers experience. Next, The
Power of Shame discusses shame's painful life-long
and often life-distorting effects. The next three segments explore
the Public
Shame of the classroom; the Fear
of Shame felt by children as they anticipate being
asked to read out loud in classrooms, and how both drive the Secret
Shame that causes children to hide their reading
difficulties from parents, teachers, and peers. Emotionally
Learning Disabling and Avoidance
build on the previous segments and show how powerfully
behavior-determining and learning-disabling shame avoidance can be.
Finally, Cognitively
Learning Disabling begins our discussion of the
downward spiral of shame (another future module) and describes
how shame disrupts, distracts, and chokes the cognitive processing
that is necessary for learning to read in the first place.
"The big step
between civilization and more primitive forms of human society is
written language."
Dr. John Searle,
Professor of the Philosophy of
Mind and Language at U.C. Berkeley
"We have all become children of the code"
-
Dr. Malcolm Richardson,
Chair, Department of English, LSU
"Once we start
writing, we are able to then reflect back upon what we have written,
and we enter into this kind of recursive relation to our own written
signs. And, so, only then, a certain degree or experience of
self-reflection that we now sort of take for granted, comes into
being." David Abram,
Philosopher and Ecologist, Author: The Spell of the Sensuous.
Understanding
the code and and its history is essential to understanding the
"CONFUSION'
involved in learning to read it today. The "Power
of Writing" begins our journey into the profound
cognitive and institutional consequences of becoming code users
(writers and readers).
Next, "The
Alphabet's Big Bang" and "Grecian
Formulas" explore the origin of the Alphabet and
it's unparalleled effects on the minds and institutions that gave
rise to western civilization (future
segments will address oral cultures and pre-alphabetic writing
systems).
In "Lend
Me Your Ears" we introduce the initial
relationships between letters and sounds
(critical background for future segments on how the code became so
complex).
And, in the "Code
of da Vinci" we present the code as both the
'DNA of science' and the 'media that enabled the Renaissance'.
Finally, we review the "Spread,
Rise, and Fall of Literacy" which sets the stage
for "A Brief History of the Code - Part 2: Ye First
Millennium Bug".
"I
think it was much easier to learn how to read in the 8th
century B.C. than it is today."
-
Dr. Frank Moore Cross
Professor Emeritus of Ancient Languages, Harvard University
...In Greek, or Latin, for example, once you could view the letters,
you could read... there was almost a perfect match...
Dr. Guy Deutscher,
Author: The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's
Greatest Invention
...[in
English] "we have fifty some sounds and only twenty-six letters. So
we have to adopt a whole variety of mechanisms to close the gap." -
Dr. Richard Venezky,Author:
The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of
American English Orthography
"We are always compromised in certain areas by having to represent
sounds with symbols that weren't designed to suit those sounds."
-
Dr. Johanna Drucker, Author:
The Alphabetic Labyrinth
"it's easy to forget that the system we have
learned is a system that is based on a series of accidents that
result in layers of complexity"-
Dr. Thomas Cable,
Co-author: A History of the English Language
Though
readinessand
readiness differentiated instruction
reduce the difficulty, working through the code's confusing
letter-sound relationships is what most challenges the
brains of most struggling readers. There is a direct and
causal relationship between the confusion in the code and the
'stutters' heard in the voice of a struggling reader. Obviously,
understanding this confusion is critical to understanding the
challenges involved in learning to read. As importantly,
understanding how the code became so confused is critical to
reframing the experience of struggling readers. The more we
understand the accidents and negligence that led to the confusion in
the English code the more it becomes obvious that it is absurdly
negligent to
blame
and
shamechildren for their struggle with it.
Latin Roots The clergy begin to write
English using the letters/sounds of Latin
French Rules French displaces English
as the official language of England
Casting Spells
- The printing press standardizes the unstable writing system
..."the accident of the printing press, which
in England served to freeze spelling in the fifteenth century so you
have these bizarre spellings" -
Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair,
Department of English, LSU
For more information about Children of the Code events please click here or call:502-290-2526
SAMPLE/PREVIEWS
FROM UPCOMING CHAPTERS (the previews are provided to convey a glimpse of the scope
of the series - the clips available do not reflect
a chapter's most interesting or important segments - not all chapters
are listed below)
Copyright
statement: Copyright (c) 2009, the
Children of the Code Project, Learning Stewards,
andImplicity,
All Rights
Reserved. Permission to use, copy, and distribute these materials
for not-for-profit educational purposes, without fee and without
a signed licensing agreement, is hereby granted, provided that "Children of
the Code -
www.childrenofthecode.org"
(with a functioning hyperlink when online) be cited as the source and appear in all
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