That poll about reading two weeks ago [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

I'll get a quick status update out of the way first: Slept, woke, discovered that my VCR mysteriously stopped recording ten minutes into the show before Crossing Jordan on its recording schedule on Sunday[1], planned to pick up drugs and groceries after watching Everwood, developed severe headache, now waiting for pain meds to kick in so I can see whether I feel up to a midnight grocery run. Now on to what I fired up the editor for.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a poll about learning to read, and at the bottom I wrote, "I'll explain why I'm asking later." I'm finally getting around to that.

realinterrobang observed, "Boy, you have a bunch of early organic readers," at which point I realized that I'd only asked part of the question I really wanted to know the answer to. I got about four score sets of answers, containing part of the information I wanted, but what I'm lacking is any sense of how the ages at which this subset of my friends learned to read compares to the general population, except that the comment suggests that y'all are atypical in both timing and method. (I'll search for that info in a bit, but I've a hunch that I'll need to argue with Google for a while to close in on it.) I do know that I'm unusual for having started school at age three (this is not unusual for Montessori, but Montessori itself is somewhat unusual in the U.S.) but I have no idea how much most children pick up before they get to school.

What I did learn is that three fourths of you learned to read before you were five years old, two thirds of you don't remember not knowing how to read, and half of you don't remember learning to read.

Here's why I was wondering. midwinter asked for information about Montessori in response to a comment I left in her journal. While searching for web resources to point out, I ran across this statement:

"When the children come into the classroom at around three years of age, they are given in the simplest way possible the opportunity to enrich the language they have acquired during their small lifetime and to use it intelligently, with precision and beauty, becoming aware of its properties not by being taught, but by being allowed to discover and explore these properties themselves. If not harassed, they will learn to write, and as a natural consequence to read, never remembering the day they could not write or read in the same way that they do not remember that once upon a time they could not walk."

(emphasis added). So what I was wondering was:

Whether most people could remember not knowing how to read,
Whether not remembering not knowing how to read was really linked to the Montessori method,
Whether not remembering not knowing how to read was linked merely to the age at which one learned to read.

(I'm a major proponent of the Montessori method, by the way.)

Based on this possibly seriously skewed sample, here are my current hypotheses:

That not remembering not knowing how to read is linked mainly to the age at which one learned, or
That not remembering not knowing how to read is related to having learned "organically" (assuming realinterrobang means what I think she does by that), and
That if not remembering not knowing how to read is linked to the Montessori method, then it is because Montessori mimics the "organic learning" process (which would be consistent with what bits I've read of Dr. Montessori's own writings about her teaching method and child development, and therefore unsurprising).

So now the question is, can I find enough information online to test these hypotheses (and/or find papers by people who have already tested them)?

Thank you, to the folks who answered my poll. I got part of the answer to the question I was trying to find an answer to, and further insight into the nature of the question.

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What do you mean by "organic" in this sense?

I do think that children who learn to read at a very young age are more likely to come from a home where books are present and everyone reads, and not reading would be seen as very unusual; our house was full of bookshelves and books and always a lure to me even when my dad's heavy history books were far too complex (and dull!) for me.

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What she said.

For reference, never been to a Montessori school, though I think I would have benefited from it.

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I asked my female elders about it. I do remember not being able to read, and I remember faking not being able to read because I loved when Mom came to tuck me in and read me to sleep. Once I admitted to being able, I knew she'd make me read to her. She did. My first spelled word was "bank", from a very large sign we passed often. I can remember asking about it, and reciting "B.A.N.K. bank." Mom says I was 3 or 4. I knew the alphabet then. I'm guessing 4.

More alarming is what my Aunt had to say. Somewhere in 3-4 she taught me to count to 100. I followed her around my grandparents' house counting. I remember that. Then she blew me away by telling me I invented my own system for subtraction about then, by counting up and down, though I expect its range was low. It went something like taking 1 unit off at a time until I got to the right number. I'd fogotten it by 1st grade and had to learn it all over again with New Math.

So yes I guess it was all organic and due to having been raised by an English teacher, and spending time with an early programmer. This description didn't fit in the poll, and I didn't even know some of it.

I do not remember learning to read, I remember being able to read when I started first grade at age 5 which put me way ahead of my older (most were 6 or even 7 in first grade) peers. I did not go to kindergarten, many of them did. This was standard public school, not Montessori.
I do remember being terribly bored by the primary readers we had. "See Tag Run..."

I came from a household where neither parent finished school, (Mom left in 11th grade, Dad left school in 8th grade, both to work.) I don't recall there being alot of books around the house until I was a teen. We did make weekly trips to the children's library (I think I still have the "Certificate's of Achievement" I got every summer for reading 'X' number of books.)

I also don't remember my parents ever spending alot of time reading to me. I remember my mother giving me picture books as a kid and having me "read" her the story, by making it up based on the pictures.

And as an aside, My sister, who is five years younger than me, still could not read beyond about third grade level when she graduated high school. She can read enough to get by, but she would never be able to pick up and read an entire novel. It wasn't until she was an adult that it was discovered that she is dyslexic and has learned to compensate.
So I can guess it has nothing to do with genetics.

But, because we were raised in the same household, doing the same things (going to the library etc.), going to the same public schools and in some cases even being taught by the same teachers, it's even hard to argue that it's environment.

It's definately an interesting topic, I would be interested to hear what you can discover.

...it's even hard to argue that it's environment.

It is a slightly different environment. I was the first child in my family and my parents had time to spend with me to read to me & teach me to read. They had less time to spend with the second child since they then had two kids to take care of. I helped teach the third and fourth kids to read.

I don't remember learning how to read, but I know I was ahead of my first-grade classmates in public school. I remember learning compound words, and confusing "dairy" and "diary" and was terribly embarrassed when my teacher had to correct me on that.

After I read most of the kids' section in the public library, I remember sneaking into the adults' section. I did sneak, too, because I thought I wasn't allowed in there. There was a sign that said "Adults"!

I remember learning how to read (from a how-to-read book, probably around age five), but I don't remember not knowing how to read.

Do people who remember not knowing how to read remember what text that they couldn't read looked like to them?

It was first strings of shapes that Mom turned into words somehow. Then it was the alphabet. Then it coalesced into phonemes, then words all of a sudden. And I agree with Donnad that Dick, Jane and Spot were awful bores.

I'm trying to imagine what a how-to-read book would look like. Wouldn't learning to read from a book require some level of reading ability?

It had rhyming words next to pictures. "This is a cat." "This is a bat." I'm not sure how I managed the non-nouns, but my mother's confirmed that I learned reading on my own.

1. Maria Montessori was not a native English speaker. Some languages are far easier to learn to read than English. I'm sure her methods can be applied across many languages, but because her methods are about process, it may be a factor to include in any thought experiment.
2. We, the readers of your LJ, are not a good test population. I'm dead certain you can figure out why :)
3. Based on watching my own 3 kids learn to read, I wonder how accurate any memories of learning to read are. It has been different for all 3 and it occurs over time so it is hard to tell when it "happens."
4. Despite my mom telling me that I couldn't read before I went to school (because she "wouldn't let me") I find it hard to believe that I could go from "not reading" to reading all the readers in the classroom in a matter of weeks (I know that part is true. I remember the problems it caused.)
5. All my kids have pretended to read at very early ages. I know they were pretending because they all had the newspapers upside down!

Okay. I didn't get to 1st grade 'til I was nigh 7, because the stupid system said that if I wasn't 5 by December 1st, I couldn't start kindergarten for another year. They paid for that.

I agree that memories of learning to read are hazy. That's why I asked people who were grownups when I was a kidlet. They are admittedly fond elders, but since I don't remember it, I just have to trust them.

I knew I was supposed to read by 5. Not letting a child read when she's ready should be a felony. So should pressuring her to. I wasn't pressured, but knew what was wanted, and didn't want to do it. I knew when I had a good deal.

Pretty sure I cut my eyeteeth on Dr. Seuss and Little Golden Books. I still have the poetry one. Not newspapers except the funnies page. And as I said, I didn't want to be seen reading. But upside down? Oh, my. They must've still been in the strings of shapes phase. Their ambition is admirable, though.

And no, Dearlove, the hardcore readers of your journal cannot be considered an average sort of sample. We're a fair assortment of freaks, though. In the best sense of the word. Would you like us to be normal? (shudder) ;-)

"Not letting a child read when she's ready should be a felony. So should pressuring her to."

One of the cool features of Montessori is that each child learns at his or her own pace. And somehow everyone seems to get around to everything.

"the hardcore readers of your journal cannot be considered an average sort of sample"

Yeah, but since y'all are representative of the kinds of people I associate with in general, it's easy to forget that you're not representative of the gen.pop. once in a while even though I know better. (I made the same mistake when rating my own skills in high school -- I was comparing myself to my classmates because that was my only frame of reference, and they too were a skewed sample.)

Definitely not asking for normal.

(I made the same mistake when rating my own skills in high school -- I was comparing myself to my classmates because that was my only frame of reference, and they too were a skewed sample.)

This is similar in some ways to what happened to me in grade school. I grew up fairly far out in the country [northeastern MD] and from K-7th went to what I would term a "non-denominational private school" [i.e., non-religious, though many of the kids did go on to Catholic high schools for religious and/or educational reasons]. My parents selected it initially because when I was 5 Maryland did not yet have public kindergarten.

So, since my 24 grademates were almost my only frame of reference as far as childhood intelligence went, I mostly compared myself to them... as in, I thought I was dead average, in a school with a lot of slightly slower kids.

Thus it was a bit of a shock when I got an offer from my parents to get the heck out of there [I spent most of 5th-7th grades begging to go anywhere else because of issues with a particular classmate]: if I could do a year's worth of algebra over the summer, I could skip 8th grade and go to the big public high school -- where with 762 other people in my graduating class, as opposed to 24, there had to be somewhere for me to fit in, someone for me to be friends with.

Silly, naive, oblivious me, thinking everyone could do stuff like that... :)

I knew Dr. Montessori wasn't a native English speaker but had managed to overlook the effects of the differences between Italian and English on this question. Thank you for pointing that out.

Hmm. I know very little about Italian. (I never did the Rome semester while I was at UD.)

I thought of your posting when I read an article yesterday in the Washington Post about the mysterious bottles in Clopper Lake.

The person who admits to making the bottles, who goes by the name Hobby Horse, wrote in an email to the reporter:

"When I started the work I did not try to make sense of it. But after a month or so I began to recall one of my earliest memories -- learning how to read. I know that I actually learned how to read at school but what I remember is learning how to read at church...."

I don't remember not knowing how to read, or learning to read. I do remember going to a Montessori school before starting "regular" school (which wound up bumping me to second grade at entry).

The amusing part of all of this is that there is only one time in my life where I experienced the feeling of being unable to read, and that was a visit to Tokyo. It's very weird to suddenly become illiterate for the first time at 31.

Periodically I reteach myself Hebrew. Sounding out the words gets interesting. And I usually don't know what they mean.

I do feel the frustration of not knowing, and it's a really neat feeling if I'm with someone who'll point to where we are in the book...to be able to match the words to the sounds I already know.

I had a book that transliterated English words into Hebrew letters. Listening to someone sounding out English and mixing up T/S/M and D/R and Z/V sounds very odd.

I like the idea of English words in Hebrew letters, at least for reading practice. Tav, Samech and Mem don't throw me as much as remembering which one is Bet and which Vet, or which is Pe and which Fe, and don't get me started on the vowels. I'm Canadian, so I have very unusual ideas about which English letters make which vowel sounds.

I meant "organic" in the sense that for most of us it seemed to be a natural, holistic process. Many of us weren't taught to read. I most certainly did not do Montessori anything; I just had Chomsky's Codex alive, awake and aware in my brain earlier than normal -- probably because while other kids were learning to walk, I was unable, so I had to have something to do. Incidentally, I do not remember a time when I couldn't read, but I do remember learning to walk. That's because I, uh, got things a little backwards and learned to walk around age 3 as well.

It was a very cool book; wish I could remember the title /author, as I'd give up and just buy myself a new copy. I know it's British.

Thing is, usually when someone's trying to learn to read they've got some idea of context and they've got some idea of what real words sound like. By doing this transliteration, the book preserves that and makes it so you're only learning to read and not also trying to do it in a new language where nothing is familiar.

Yeah, I'd agree - the whole teaching-to-read thing seems to be something that happens if the kid hasn't already figured it out on his own before age 4 or 5.

Wow. Were you crawling until age 3?

Brain fuzzy, so I don't have any detailed thoughts about the subject at the moment, but it is a very interesting subject and with your permission I'll link both to the original poll and to this.

Also, I might write a (short) piece about remembering learning how to read, but not remembering not being able to read. It is probably midway related to age, in my case, but not fully, because I can remember some of the learning process itself...

"with your permission"

Of course. (I figure if I post something out in the open, folks don't need my permission to link to it. Though if a stranger does so in a place I'm not likely to stumble across on my own, I appreciate (but don't expect or demand) a note saying they've done so -- a case that obviously doesn't apply to you.)

Popped over here from silmaril's journal, hope you don't mind.

Fascinating subject! I'm trying to recall how it was for myself; I remember having trouble with specific words, but I can't ever recall all words just being gibberish.

I was definitely reading by age four, but I suspect I was at least recognizing words far earlier than that. I don't know if there is a correlation, but I also started talking ridiculously early - apparently on average kids don't start stringing words together until they're 1-2 years old, or something like that, but Mother tells me I was asking "Whazzat?" and correctly repeating the answers back to her at 6 months, and talking in complete sentences by the time I was a year old. I don't think she's making that up...

Anyway, I also remember I was always bored spitless by Reading lessons in school (not surprising since I was (covertly) reading Stephen King while most of my classmates were still struggling with Beverly Cleary) and was constantly getting in trouble for reading ahead in our readers. I had one teacher (I think it was first grade) who told me if I didn't stop skipping ahead she was going to tape the forward pages of my book shut.

That still pisses me off when I think about it.

Aaaand now I'll shut up.

Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

That poll about reading two weeks ago

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Reading

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Just a few points to make here.....

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Whatever we are, seems normal to us, right?

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That's funny...

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