By Kevin Brown
Because I teach both U.S. Literature and first-year writing classes, I have the chance almost every semester to teach one, if not two, writers who talk about learning how to read. In U.S. Literature, we read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative where he tells the story of how his owner’s wife first exposed him to the alphabet before the owner, Mr. Auld, chastises her, explaining how reading and writing would unfit Douglass for slavery. Douglass knows that anything Mr. Auld doesn’t want him to have is something he definitely desires, so he proceeds to teach himself how to read and write. He trades poor white children bread for their knowledge, and he even tricks some of them into teaching him letters. He bets them they can’t spell as well as he can, then, as he loses to them, he learns from them. Douglass ultimately learns to read and write, also learning that Mr. Auld is correct in that those skills unfit Douglass for enslavement, and, after he escapes, he uses his skills to become one of the best orators and writers of his day.
Similarly, in my first-year writing class, I teach a section of Malcolm X’s autobiography where he learns to read. He is in prison, and he meets people who have a clear command of the English language, using it to speak against injustice, especially racial inequality. Before he was in prison, Malcolm X believed he was a good speaker, but he meets people there who show him just how lacking in those skills he is. In order to improve, he uses the one commodity he has more that most people don’t in order to learn: time. He requests a pencil and paper, then proceeds to copy the dictionary, writing out the word and its definition. He begins using those words when he is debating other inmates, making them a part of his working vocabulary. When he gets out of prison, he uses those words to speak out against the injustice he sees, becoming one of the best orators of his day, just like Douglass.
Whenever we talk about either of these readings, I always ask students to talk about how they learned to read and write. We talk about learning to write on those pads of paper with the wide lines, dotted lines in the middle that make the paper look like the roads students ride on to get to school and that guide students in where to put the lower-case letters. A few students will talk about phonics or what books their parents read to them. Mostly, though, they don’t have much to say because they don’t remember how they learned to read or write. Not surprisingly, we talk about the privilege we all had—even those who didn’t come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds—which enables us to forget that process. Since it was built into our lives, we don’t have compelling stories of how we developed these skills.
While I don’t remember learning to read or write, my mother told me the story of my having learned to read so often, it’s become almost as real to me as any other memory. It seems I was a precocious child who started to read well before beginning school. I don’t say that as any kind of boast, as I didn’t have anything to do with it, as far as I can tell. Instead, it seems to have happened to me. As my mother tells the story, I was at the nursery school where I spent my days, and they called my mother to inform her that I could read. My mother, not showing a significant amount of confidence in this situation, replied that I couldn’t read; I simply memorized the books. For years, before I was around children at all (and I’m still not around them much, but enough to know a bit about how they behave), I believed I must have been a true genius of a child. I had the ability to memorize books wholesale, a gift that was greater than the ability to read, I thought. Of course, I found out that many children memorize books, often at an annoying level, as they then want that book read to them again and again, as they wait for the moment the reader tries to change the story when the child will gleefully correct them. It turns out, though, in my nursery school experience, the book was brand new; thus, I couldn’t have memorized it. I could, in fact, read.
Given that I was around three or four at this time, I’ve spent years trying to understand how I developed the ability to read. Since both my parents worked, they didn’t have swaths of time to sit with me and read to me to help me develop my reading skills. I had two older siblings who would have been around ten and twelve at this time, so my parents also had to manage them. My sister (the younger of the two and, thus, around ten) tells me that she read to me a bit, but not really enough to make much of a difference. I didn’t grow up in a house full of books, as we didn’t have much money when I was younger. I do recall a set of Disney books, as well as a set of encyclopedias, plus regular trips to the public library, but those came after I began school (and began reading), not before. Thus, one of the primary ways children learn to read doesn’t seem to be a factor in my story of learning to read. Instead, like many children of my generation, I spent a significant amount of time in front of the television.
My parents’ work schedule and load, coupled with their managing my two older siblings, meant that they often used the television (and my siblings; they didn’t just leave a two- and three-year-old alone in a room with a television going) as a babysitter. Experts on children spent reams and reams of paper, in addition to their radio and television appearances, criticizing parents for doing exactly what my parents did, what my parents had little choice but to do. I grew up in day care and in front of the television because my parents were trying to make enough money to provide us with a better life, to buy the clothes and school supplies we needed, not to mention the few extras, like a yearly vacation to the beach or Disney World or the ability to play baseball or basketball once I was older.
It was this reality that led to my spending so much time in front of the television, and it was spending all of that time with the television that I’m convinced taught me how to read. People criticize television for taking children away from books, and I certainly spent much more time with the television than with any kinds of books, at least until I started elementary school, but I spent that time with quality television that actually cared about trying to educate children. I was a child in the early 1970s, so we only had a handful of channels, one of which was WSJK, a public television station out of Sneedville, Tennessee. To this day, I can’t tell you where Sneedville is, but the good people there had a quality public television station that showed the typical children’s shows of that era, such as Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street. Much of the time I spent in front of the television, then was spent with shows like those.
Whenever I mention when I grew up and how I learned to read, people always focus on Sesame Street. It’s true that Sesame Street focused each episode on a single letter and number (the public television reference to advertising—“this episode brought to you by the letter B and the number 4”—is more fun now that I’m an adult), and I certainly learned those lessons there (I even wonder now if that’s where I learned about cities, given the setting of the show, which was very New York-centric, even including characters with pronounced accents, and real racial diversity, a contrast from the rural, almost all white area where I grew up). Sesame Street should get some of the credit, as I remember episodes where they would spend almost a full hour (a children’s show that lasted almost an hour!?!) repeating words that started with the same letter, which definitely helped me learn sounds and letters and how to put those together into words.
However, that’s not the show I remember most distinctly from my childhood. Instead, I think about the one that most people have either forgotten or never watched: The Electric Company. Unlike Sesame Street, The Electric Company only ran for six seasons from 1971 to 1977, but it had some actors who became much bigger names later in the careers, including Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Mel Brooks, Irene Cara, and Bill Cosby, and it featured guest stars, such as Carol Burnett, Walt Frazier, Lily Tomlin, Lorne Greene, and Mel Blanc. Like Sesame Street, The Electric Company focused on a single letter for an entire episode, using songs, sketches, and humor to try to teach children to read (introducing a “Best of” collection, Rita Moreno says quite clearly that they were purposefully trying to use television to teach children to read).
The sketch I remember more than any other was a Spider-Man series they did. It was a shortened, simplified version of the comic, usually lasting only a few minutes with a straightforward plot. The most interesting part for me, though, was that Spider-Man didn’t speak, only the other characters did. Instead of speaking, Spider-Man communicated through speech and thought bubbles, as in the comics. Thus, if you wanted to know what Spider-Man was saying, you had to be able to read. Granted, the characters or voice-over narration would almost always react to what he said in such a way that children could follow the story without reading, but the goal was clearly to encourage children to read what Spider-Man was saying. As a boy who loved superheroes, I definitely wanted to know what Spider-Man was talking about, which helped motivate me to want to learn to read.
Of course, there’s no way that I, unlike Douglass or Malcolm X, can point to one show or event to describe how I learned to read, as there are too many variables in my life, which had much more privilege than theirs did. However, there really aren’t any other explanations that make sense for how I learned to read than watching television, especially given the amount of time I spent with one.
If that’s the case, though, I’m right back to the nature vs. nurture debate that always drives any explanation for our adult behavior. I’ve always wondered why I, as opposed to so many of my friends, learned how to read at such an early age—at least two, if not three, years before I actually started school—when they watched the same shows I did, came from the same socio-economic background, had parents with similar educations, lived lives that were much the same. There’s no external reason I should have begun reading at such an early age, which only leaves some sort of genetic explanation. However, those who research how children learn how to read can’t seem to find any consistent explanation for how or why some children learn early or well as opposed to those who struggle. Fumiko Hoeft, Professor and Director of the Brain Imaging Research Center at the University of Connecticut, points to an amount of white matter in the brain, but she can’t explain if the children who have more of that white matter and learn to read easier or earlier develop that white matter, which leads to their reading ability, or if their reading ability leads them to have more white matter.
What complicates the situation for me even more is what happened when I began school. I went to a poor county school system, so there weren’t any significant programs for what we would have called gifted children. I was, however, pulled out of my regular first grade class and put with a handful of other students who could read above their grade level. Thus, by the end of that first-grade year, we were reading on a fourth-grade level. That trend continued until I was in sixth grade, as I was always tracked with the stronger readers. In seventh grade, though, I became like every other student. I will still in the track for the smarter students, but I wasn’t reading above my grade level any longer, and I effectively quit reading outside of school assignments (and I wasn’t reading those on a regular basis).
One of the most obvious arguments for this change goes back to external factors, as I was now in middle school. As such, my life and body were going through significant changes, and middle school isn’t an easy time for almost anyone. I was more interested in sports, though I wasn’t particularly gifted in that area, so I was more likely to spend an afternoon with my friends from the neighborhood playing basketball or football or baseball. Video games were on the rise, as the Atari system had become more popular, so we also might spend part of our day playing video games, especially if the weather was too bad for outside sports. Television also took up much of our time, as the number of channels and shows were growing exponentially in the early 1980s. I lost interest in almost all academic interests I had had until that point, though my interest in math (my strongest subject, actually) stayed the same. I would say that interest remained because I was good at math, but I had also been good at reading, and that stopped, so my ability level had little connection to my interest, it seems. It would also be easy to argue that I remained interested in math, and I was a boy, so the gender stereotypes society has for boys and girls’ academic interests simply reinforced my interest; however, my family, teachers, and peers supported my abilities in English rather than denigrated it, so I can’t point to any pressure to move from English to math or even give up an interest in reading.
However, there were plenty of people around me who continued to read and took up hobbies that more closely related to reading or academics, and I could have spent my time with them. While many of my friends in our neighborhood did play sports, a number of them were into Dungeons and Dragons or reading Tolkien or C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia, not his more adult, theological works). I had friends who played board games or who just stayed in their rooms and read books for fun. My cousin was into comics, attending the conventions well before they became the cultural touchstones they are today, and he continually pushed those on me, even encouraging me to attend conventions with him (which I never did). I could have been much more like them, spent more time hanging out with them rather than the ones who played sports. At some point, in some way, I chose to stop reading and to stop being interested in reading. While being a middle school boy might have had something to do with it, there were plenty of middle school boys I knew who didn’t follow the path I did.
When people hear that I’m an English professor and that I spent much of my free time reading for pleasure, they assume I’ve always been that way. They assume I grew up in a house full of books, not one where the television was on most of the time, certainly not one where television might have taught me to read. They don’t know that English was my worst subject from seventh grade until my junior year of college and that I changed my major because of a professor, not because of what I was supposed to be reading (but clearly wasn’t).
We want our stories to be linear and sensible. When we hear of somebody who loves reading and writing, we want a straight line from a childhood full of books to an adulthood driven by reading. Most of us, though, don’t follow any type of clear progression to end up where we are. Frederick Douglass’s path to become one of the best orators of his time (if not the best) starts with his being forbidden to read and write. Malcolm X doesn’t become the writer and speaker he does without his time in prison. My reading life started in front of a television, as far as I can tell, then a detour of years without books playing any significant role in my life, going to college as a math major, but walking out as somebody who spends as much time with texts as I do people. Perhaps even I am looking too diligently for an explanation of why I am the way I am. Perhaps television had nothing to do with my learning to read, that it comes from a genetic glitch, that I just picked it up because I could, like people who remember every minute of every day of their lives, even though they don’t want to.
But we want our stories about Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. We even want stories like mine. We want to believe that if children or even adults just want to learn badly enough, they will. We want to believe that desire trumps backgrounds, that work ethic always wins, that pulling oneself up by bootstraps actually occurs. We want to believe that a boy in a house without books learns to read because public television taught him. It’s a good story, even if that’s not what happened.
Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.