THE RETURN OF A, B, C

That is, I used to hope that they were returning. My neighbor's small son, Tony, aged six, needed them. He needed them to learn to read with. This was before I had any first-hand evidence about modern school methods. I saw school only through Tony.

Tony was able to read, “over to school,” such excerpts as the following: “The gingerbreadboy went clickety-clack down the road.” “Sail far, sail far, o'er the fabulous main!” “Consider, goat, consider!” “You have made a mistake, Mr. Alligator.” Just why, I reflected, should “Mr. Alligator” and “fabulous” be introduced to a pleasant child like Tony, who had not as yet been allowed to meet “cat,” “dog,” “hen,” “red,” “boy,” “bad,” and a great many other creatures really necessary to a little boy's existence?

His mother knew that Tony was not learning to read very fast. She argued with me a little on principle. She said that James Whitcomb Riley wrote “fabulous.” I reminded her in a neighborly way that Mr. Milton wrote the “Areopagitica,” thought by some to be a good sort, but that, until Tony knew his letters, the “Areopagitica” would be almost wasted on him. I would have stepped in at this point myself and ponied him a bit, for pure love, had it not been for the fact that I hated to have him get a sensible A, B, or C mixed up with such corrupting associates as a considering goat or a mistaken alligator. And he would certainly have mixed them up. He would never have been able in this world to decide in his little mind what relation “consider” had to A,B,C. And he would have been quite excusable.

I began to think that his mother was too optimistic. She was trying to console herself by the fact that, if she should die, Tony could at least order gingerbread off a menu card. But could he? The sad fact that my neighbor overlooked was that he didn't know “gingerbread” when he saw it, but just “gingerbreadboy”! Perhaps even at that, Tony might not have starved, for even gingerbreadboys are edible, if Tony really could have recognized that. But he couldn't. Not outside the confines of his “reading-book”—Heaven save the mark! A modern word-fiend tried to explain to me here, that, after having learned “gingerbreadboy,” a child comes naturally by three words (and even four if they allowed “gin” in the school curriculum)—namely, “ginger,” “bread,” and “boy.” But Tony didn't. I tried him. He looked upon “ginger” as an entire stranger, interesting in form, perhaps, but still foreign. Something, I was convinced, was wrong. And I attributed this state to the fact that Tony didn't know A, B, and C.

Just as I reached the high noon of this conviction, I was drawn by the most curious of circumstances into the business of teaching little children to read. I held the novel position of being besought to bring all my heresies and all my notions, and join the influenza-thinned ranks of the teaching profession. The Board of Education said that it was desperate. It must have been.

I suppose that no other power on earth could have converted me so quickly to the decried method, as my being forced, out of loyalty to my employers, to support it. I was plunged on the first day—not into “clickety-clack,” but “slippety-slip.” It was my first object lesson to hear the laughter of many little children, as the small gray cat swallowed slippety-slip in rapid succession the white goose, the cinnamon bear, the great, big pig, and others which have “slippety-slipped” my mind just now. It was easy to teach them which fantastic word said “slippety-slip.” It was very hard to teach them which plain-faced word said “and.” I was happy to find many fine old words ranging themselves in the same category as “slippety-slip.” “Goose” is intrinsically easier to learn than “duck”; “red” is a bagatelle beside “blue.” But the easiest word of all is “slippety-slip.”

I took notes of phenomena like these, for use later in dealing with critics who theorized as I had theorized on the day previous. I was not quite ready with any solution on this first day when a visiting mother assured me that she, when a girl, was wont to read much better when her book was open before her. Her son, on the contrary, read better, she told me, and with more interpretation and fine feeling, without his book. “People think,” said my visitor, “that when a child has his book open and says aloud the words printed on that page, that he is reading. He may be,” she added mildly, “and then again, of course, he mayn't.”

I determined that, when this logical lady should come again, her son should be reading. So I taught him to read. I taught him via the method I had disparaged; via “Mrs. Teapot,” “Goosey-Poosey-Loosey,” and the goat that would not go home, without once mentioning the names of A, B, or C. This boy is in the third grade now, skimming the “Literary Digest” for material for his oral language.

The second step in my conversion occurred when one of the overworked teachers showed me hastily how to teach Phonics. She drew a flight of stairs on the blackboard, and on each step she placed a letter of the alphabet. I did not find “A” among them, but I discerned both B and C. To my surprise, the little children knew these, but they called them (as nearly as the printed page can convey the sound) buh and kuh. They called “R” err, and “H” they called huh.

When I reached home, I looked up a few letters in the Dictionary, and received new light. Of what use is it, after all, to know that “W” is called “Double-you,” unless you know first the sound for which it stands? The Dictionary, in fact, explains that the proper sound of this letter is really a “half u” instead of a “double u.” Certainly “W” is a more helpful tool to a child when he has been taught to pucker up his lips like the howling wind when he sees this letter coming, than when he has been taught to get set for a “d” sound which is not there. Why confuse a child's mind at first with what a letter is arbitrarily called by some one else? Surely it is more sensible to show him what noise to make when he sees it.

But I found that some of the children did not connect the delightful game of the blackboard stairs with their reading at all. Tony was among this number. Right here I was electrified to find out the real trouble with Tony. I found that it had not occurred to him that the letter “g,” at the beginning of the word “good,” for instance, could have any part in distinguishing this word from the Little Red Hen. I found also that many of the children were recognizing “good-day to you” wholly by the quaint little dash in the middle of “good-day.” They shouted heartily “good-day to you” whenever I showed them any word containing a hyphen.

To remedy this difficulty, I abstracted Phonics bodily from my afternoon session, and inserted it directly before the reading period in the morning. In fact, I allowed a few Phonics to spill over into Reading, and commenced to read a little before the children were quite finished with the staircase. I can say that the greatest triumphal moment of my life was when an entire class saw, independently and suddenly and of themselves, that “ice-cream” could not possibly be “good-day to you.” And the fact that the children now knew these apart by a phonetic tool did not prevent them from saying “good-day to you” just as cordially and just as fast as before. Moreover, they had not compelled the school system to wait for them to spell out the words letter by letter.

This is the only stage in a modern phrase-and-sentence method which contains a pitfall. If this is solidly bridged, most children will learn to read more understandingly than we used to. They will read twice as well, and three times as fast.

At the end of the school year, after Tony had read nineteen books, I did throw in the alphabet itself as a classic. We even sang it to the good old-fashioned tune.

Tony will use A, B, and C, in the Second Grade to spell with, and in the Fourth Grade to look up words in the Dictionary with; but he did not need them, after all, in the First Grade, to learn to read with.