Looking Back to the Future (Part One)
How can children studying the history of writing open up possibilities for their futures?
When I teach my second grade class called Figures of Grammar, what I do in the first class of the year is tell the students that I am going to write their names on the board. I proceed to write each of their names but with one letter on top of the next until there is a mess of undecipherable lines and curves. Most children laugh and then cry out in indignation, insisting that there is a better way to write their names. “The letters have to be spread out!” And so I write their names stretching around the walls of the room. In Goldilocks-like protest they now convince me that the letters are too spread out. At last, through a dialogue of seven-year old negotiations, we agree upon a spacing that seems reasonable to all.
This is the first lesson in an ongoing study of legibility. The act of writing is almost always an act that anticipates reading. So much of this work is designed in activities and games that allow children to make up their own minds about legibility and its stakes. Throughout the year they dictate to me the rules of writing as we explore features of our own systems of language and other systems of language or communication. Everything is up for debate: orientation in writing, size and proportion of lettering, punctuation, and so on. Young children can become more careful writers when they learn to think as readers.
Teaching students about the history of language and of writing can be helpful in this as well. It is liberating to a child to discover that some of what they are being taught as readers and writers is arbitrary. The idea of correct spelling is merely a premise of language—an axiom of quite recent invention—rather than an abiding truth. Studying homographs is a perfect way to reveal that orthography and sound are not always linked. The fact that the tear that rolls down one’s cheek is spelled the same way as a tear in their paper is enough to send any sane person reeling. We can have fun banding together in protest against the tyranny of English spelling. Examining Jane Austen’s rather liberal spelling often delights them. Their own idiosyncrasies as spellers cease to be threatening indicators of intelligence or capacity as readers or as writers.
In another activity, I spend time with the students playing a game in which I am a master printer from the Renaissance, and they are my printers’ devils. Through this they learn that upper-case and lower-case letters literally came from the upper and lower cases in a printer’s shop. The goal I have is to reveal that most modern conventions of writing are just that—systems that have evolved in service of reading rather than objective categories of language.
Simultaneous with these lessons on the history of writing, I introduce the students to a host of Indo-European roots and the words that come from them. A root like BHEL/BHLEU brings us into contact with a wonderful list of words that young students can define: ball, bulge, bowl, belly, billow, balloon, bell, and on and on. Through our deliberate work at defining these words, I ask them to look for commonalities of meaning to solve the mystery of what this original ancestral root might have meant. They often start to piece together some version of its meaning which is to swell. Now, when we look at a word like bold, there is a very different sense of its original meaning. Understanding how bold might somehow be inflected with the meaning of swell enriches a student’s sense of the range of meanings and analogic capacities for a word. This aspect of close reading is important because, as Samuel Johnson points out in the preface to his dictionary, “The original sense of words is often driven out of use by their metaphorical acceptations.”
Children are often attuned to these originating points in language far more than adults are. A second grader in my class recently defined dreary as “heavy and annoying,” without knowing in any active sense that it comes from the same Indo-European root that words like droop and drop come from. This is a wonderful example of the ways in which reading can be a form of intimacy rather than a kind of clinical precision. She did not give me the dictionary definition of the word (she is seven after all), but her shoulders and back slumped as she said the word dreary. Even though we almost exclusively use this word to give quality to something relatively abstract like weather, she felt the ways in which the word had something to do with bodies giving into gravity.
My belief is that these kinds of detailed explorations of the English language allow children an intimacy that is not valuable for its own sake alone (though there is a joy in that too), but also valuable for the fact that such an intimacy for them translates to a confidence that language is something they can use both purposefully and playfully. My other hope through this course and the ones to follow is to broaden their conception of what grammar is such that it covers most of the tools needed to make close reading meaningful. I take the broad strokes for curriculum from the work of the seventh century bishop, Isidore or Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies:
“Some people count thirty divisions of grammar: the eight parts of speech, the articulate voice, the letter, the syllable, metrical feet, accent, punctuation marks, abbreviations, orthography, analogy, etymology, glosses, synonyms, barbarisms, solecisms, grammatical mistakes, metaplasms, rhetorical figures, tropes, prose, meters, fables, and histories.”
I hope that over the course of subsequent years of reading and writing courses, my students encounter and give consideration to these elements of reading time and again.