And Whether Pigs Have Wings

Senior Chronicle June 2024

Here is my June Senior Chronicle post: a reflection on the magic of learning to read and the enchanted worlds it opened—back in the days before there was endless competition for a child’s attention. If you’re looking for my short fiction, you’ll find it here, on the Short Reads tab. And if you’d like to customize the posts you receive from me, you can do that here.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.—Lemony Snicket

I didn’t know it, but I was a really lucky kid. I got Mrs. Johnson for first grade. She was an old-fashioned teacher who didn’t take sass and on rainy days marched us around the Lincoln School gym floor to the tune of Sousa marches. But most importantly, Mrs. Johnson was not a fan of Dick and Jane—not because they were sex-stereotyped and racially insensitive (which they were)—but because she thought they were too simple.

The Dick and Jane whole-word readers had taken elementary education by storm in the 1930s and were still around when my children started first grade in the 1960s. But Mrs. Johnson was a passionate believer in phonics, in hear-and-say. She taught us how to separate complicated words into syllables and “sound them out,” one by one, until the tentative sounds we were parsing from the printed text connected in our childish brains with words we’d heard spoken.

That simple instruction—“Sound it out, Susan, out loud”—meant that I didn’t have to carry my book to an adult who would peer at the page and tell me that a word was re-mark-a-ble or in-com-pre-hen-si-ble or even bril-lig in the sli-thy toves.  I might not know immediately what it meant, but I could say it. I hear it and taste it, turning it over in my mouth like peppermint candy, richly delicious, delectable, delightful. And in time, as it happens for word-learners in all languages, the meaning of words would begin to dawn on me, in all their marvelous and challenging multiplicity.