Chapter 9: Conclusions

Reading is an act of interiority, pure and simple.  Its object is not the mere consumption of information….Rather, reading is the occasion of the encounter with the self….The book is the best think human beings have done yet.

­-James Carroll

               At this point in our blogging journey, I have reached the end of Maryanne Wolf’s study on the story and science of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, and subsequently, I have reached the end of my blogging experience…for now.  Who knows where this outlet for my thoughts may take me in the future, but for time being, I’m taking a break.

               Chapter 9 of the text is simply titled Conclusions and is Wolf’s way of wrapping up her thoughts.  The entirety of the chapter is her rehashing the main points presented earlier throughout the text and a plethora of hypothetical questions presented to the reader in an effort to spark critical thinking and discussions.  I will save you, the reader from going over the points that you have already been through before, and I would like to take the opportunity to address the text as I had experienced it.

               For me, Proust and the Squid has been an internal battle of Rachel vs. Jeremy.  During the highly scientific brain chapters, I could not determine what the most important information to include was.  This could have been largely due to the fact that it was during these chapters that I did not fully understand what was going on.  I was Jeremy.  In the chapters on the history of reading development and the alphabetic principle and Socrates, I felt as if everything was important.  I was Rachel.  So to you the reader of this blog, I apologize.  My thoughts came off sporadic at times without clear direction while I attempted to filter through the information.

               In the scope of this course, it makes sense to me now looking back on my struggles.  I had difficulty sending information through the secondary Discourse that I had created for this text into the secondary Discourse that was created many years ago as I learned to write to present information and to convey meaning.  I was waging a war with an inconsiderate text with whom I was trying to make meaning within the parameters of the course’s framing questions.  The information that I have retained from Proust and the Squid has already changed how I view my students as they progress through the beginning stages of reading.

               Will I remember a year from now what I read and reflected upon?  More than likely the answer is no.  What I will take away from this experience is a better understanding for how the brain compensates for what it lacks.  The connections the brain makes to complete a circuit so that we are able to read, is utterly mind blowing (pun intended?) when one looks at the fact that the human brain was never meant to read.

               On Monday of this week, the final week of summer school, we began a brief yet vital Science unit on Healthy Science.  During the anticipatory set, we sorted ourselves in ways that we were different, hair color, hair length, who could whistle, who couldn’t.  We then sorted ourselves into ways that we were similar, two eyes, two legs, ten fingers.  One classification we did not discuss was the one brain we carry in our heads.  We all have one.  It’s in the same place.  But everyone’s brain is as different as the noses on our faces.  Our connection speeds are different.  The areas of our brain that allow for successful reading are strengthened in different ways.  We decode at different speeds.  Passages ignite emotions in us in different ways.  As educators, we must always be acutely aware that our students are different in more ways than we can see.  It is our job to foster the strengths and support the weaknesses and always remember that each child needs us in a different way, every day.

               Thank you for taking the time to read through this blog.  It’s been real.  It’s been fun.  It’s been real fun.  Good luck in all your endeavors.

Until next time…

Chapter 8: Genes, Gifts and Dyslexia

If only we knew

As the carver knew, how the flaws

In the wood led his searching chisel to the very core.

-David Whyte

               At the end of Chapter 7, Maryanne Wolf again discussed her home life, in particular her son Ben, who we learned earlier in the chapter had been diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age.  In this particular anecdote, Wolf reveals that Ben would soon be attending Rhode Island School of Design, and was an accomplished artist as was revealed in an incredible drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  After a lengthy discussion about her work on Proust and the Squid with Ben, he asked, “So does this mean I’m more creative because I use this right hemisphere more than other people and my right pathways got strengthened that way?  Or does it mean that dyslexics are just born with more creative brains from the start?”  These questions are answered as this story leads into Chapter 8. Genes, Gifts and Dyslexia.

               Wolf begins by providing examples of some of the most famous dyslexics in recorded history.  Men such as Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vince and Albert Einstein all struggled in school and had difficulties acquiring their native languages.  Wolf is quick to point out that there are no specific ‘reading’ genes, so there is no pre-determination for dyslexia.  But what she does make clear is that there may be specific genes that cause weaknesses in some older regions of the brain.  These older regions are what form the reading brain.  As I discussed in the last blog entry, the brain is ever changing and compensates for where it lacks.  So in the dyslexic brain, where a student lacks in the reading connections on the left side of the brain, the right, creative, hemisphere strengthens itself to make up for the deficiency.

               Now does this mean that dyslexics are more creative than non-impaired readers?  Wolf cites the work of Norman Geschwind and Al Galaburda.  Over time at Beth Israel Hospital, they set up a brain bank, which became a place for the preservation of brains from dyslexic individuals for the use of study.  They found in most people, the planum temporale (PT) is larger on the left side than on the right.  In the dyslexic brain, the PT was larger than usual, which rather than overpowering the left, was symmetrical.  Due to his large size on the right hemisphere, the PT hinders communication between both hemispheres, thus allowing for more activity to occur on the right side of the brain.

               Through this study, and a study of twins and reading development by Dick Olson, the genes that can causes delays or problems along the reading circuitry could be inherited from both sides of the family.  Wolf strengthens this statement by once again referring to her family history as well as that of her husband’s.

               To revisit the question posed at the beginning of the previous paragraph, there is no clear indication that dyslexic brains allow for more creative processes than that of non-impaired readers.  What is important to consider is how these students are nurtured.  Wolf makes a very emphatic statement that we, as educators, do not miss the potential of any student, regardless of ability.

               In my own personal experience as a literacy teacher, I do not believe that there is enough done to support the struggling reader.  Year after year I see different strategies and curriculum thrown about hoping one will stick.  Reading intervention, in the time of standardized assessment, has become something to attempt to fix the surface problem.  This has come to mean that all students are looked at through one possible solution rather than looking at each child individual.  Disgusting.  No two children are alike, so therefore, no two instructional models should be the same.  I know full well as a teacher that tailoring instruction for each student is an almost impossibility, but I can dream, and I can try my hardest.

Until next time… 

Chapter 7: Dyslexia's Puzzle and the Brain's Design

I would rather clean the mold around the bathtub than read.

-A child with Dyslexia

               Throughout the text Proust and the Squid¸ Maryanne Wolf has opened up personally about her home life and why she chose to pursue this subject for the book.  She revealed her son Ben was diagnosed with Dyslexia at a young age and struggled with reading his whole life.  She gives personal insight into how children and adults are chastised throughout their lives for the inability to read.  They are teased, mocked, made fun of and even ‘made an example of’ by teachers who do not know that there is something deep within their brain that is preventing the acquisition of language.  The last part of the book, beginning with Chapter 7, looks into what happens when the brain can’t read.

               Like most people, I had a misunderstanding of what dyslexia was my whole life.  I believed that dyslexia was a mere reversal of letters within a word.  Then, in 2003 while working as a wilderness guide, I met a fellow guide, who would eventually become a groomsman in my wedding, who told me firsthand what it was like for him to be dyslexic.  He informed me that the words would float off the page and sometimes he would read left to right.  It was then that I realized that there is no clear definition of what dyslexia is.  It is not a particular problem with reading, but a term that covers a wide variety of neural issues.  As Maryanne Wolf states, through the words of Andrew Ellis, “...whatever dyslexia turns out to be, ‘it is not a reading disorder’. …the brain was never meant to read.”

               Wolf does present however, four possible sources, or principles, for dyslexia.  The first she titles: A Flaw in the Older Structures.  In the 1870s a German scholar named Adolph Kussmaul gave the term ‘word blindness’ to a patient of his who had suffered a series of strokes.  The result of which made him unable to read, nor recognize, letters, sounds or words that he had known since childhood.  Kussmaul found there were two problems with his patient’s brain.  The first was that he had suffered damage to his ‘older’ visual center, and secondly there was damage along the reading circuit. 

As history has progressed, similar findings have been found in children who cannot read.  In 1921, Lucy Fildes found that children with problems in reading were not able to form auditory images of sounds represented by letters.  But again, there is no clear definition, so there are other explanations as well.  Virginia Berninger found that some children’s reading problems stem from issues in executive processes such as attention in memory and have corresponding problems in reading and attention.

The second principle addressed for dyslexia is A Failure to Achieve Automaticity.  Throughout this blog, I have mentioned that automaticity is one of the largest deciding factors in achieving successful literacy.  In this portion of the text, Wolf mentions that a failure of automaticity, whether at the level of neurons or structural processes, does not allow enough time for comprehension.  There are many theories for what causes the problems with automaticity.  According to Zvia Breznitz, poor readers were characterized by slower processing, but had what appeared to be a ‘gap in time’, an asynchrony between their visual and auditory processes.    What is interesting though, is that Martha Bridge Denckla found is that, ‘readers with dyslexia can name colors perfectly well, but cannot do so rapidly.”  Upon reflecting on this, I believe that though a student make take a considerable amount of time decoding, it does not mean that they are unable to read with success, it just takes them a little while longer than others.

Throughout the course of the book, Wolf has made it explicit that there is no ‘reading center’ of the brain.  There are however, connections between portions of the brain that allow for reading to occur.  The third principle addressed is An Impediment in the Circuit Connections Among the Structures.  Wolf goes on to explain that the strongest most automatic connections are forged between the posterior region and frontal areas in the left hemisphere.  However, in dyslexia, the strongest connections appear between the left occipital-temporal area, mentioned above, and the right-hemisphere frontal areas.  Magnetic imaging by a group in Houston found that children with dyslexia use an altogether reading circuitry.  I believe that Maryanne Wolf misrepresented the title of this principle by stating there was impediment, when in fact it is a completely different circuitry altogether.

She instead gives this an altogether different principle called: A Different Circuit for Reading.  While reading this section, it became clear to me that the ‘deficit’ of dyslexia is not a deficit at all, just a different set of neurons and connections than that of non-impaired readers.  The left side of the brain developed to handle precision and timing to process human speech and written language.  The right side of the brain evolved to handle things such as creativity, patter deduction and contextual skills.  Children and adults with dyslexia use more of their right brain than there left, even in reading.  Therefore, the brain is compensating by using processes not typically used for reading to compensate for the problems in the connections of the reading circuit.

Wolf concludes with her final thoughts on dyslexia on what it is and isn’t.  She believes, and I agree whole heartedly, that more sub-classifications of the term dyslexia must be created so that there can be a clearer dissemination between structural and genetic data.  The genetic data is elaborated upon more in the next chapter.

Throughout this course, and this book in particular, I have looked at everything in the context of my own teaching and classroom.  I have found this chapter to be very difficult for me to view through those parameters.  Teaching in a community where 33% of the general population is identified as English Language Learners, though everyone speaks English, the children come to school with a limited school vocabulary, a flawed secondary Discourse, and little to no academic literacy.  Almost all of my children are slower than same-age peers in other communities.  If I were to look at their delays in reading as signs of dyslexia, I might be sending a majority of my students to be screened.  To break from my own secondary Discourse about my students and create a new one for this chapter proved to be frustrating.  When you spend 8-10 hours a day with a group of students, it’s hard not to see a little of them in everything you read.

Until next time…

Chapter 6: The Unending Story of Reading's Devleopment

I can take my own sweet time.

-Luke, age nine

               Fourth grade was hard.  I struggled more in that year of school than any other year than I can recall.  I am not sure if it was because I had four different teachers that year (I attended a small Catholic school in the city of Pittsburgh where your homeroom teacher taught it all), but something happened that year.  School was no longer fun.  I stopped caring about my work.  I made up stories about not having homework to my parents.  Twenty years later I am haunted by the memories of that particular school year.  As I went through my undergraduate studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I learned that I was not alone.  There is a phenomenon in the English speaking world called the fourth grade slump.  In fact, Maryanne Wolf offers the following statistic in her study of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, “30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fully fluent readers with adequate comprehension.”  Wolf states that one of the reasons behind this phenomenon is that textbooks, teachers, parents and schools have different expectations for students from fourth grade on.  Thankfully, I had a wonderful support system at home and one of the greatest teachers I have ever known in fifth grade, Mr. Bowen, so not reaching the next two stages of reading development were not an option for me.

               In the last blog entry, I had mentioned Wolf’s five stages of reading development and elaborated upon two.  In this entry I will cover the final two.  The fourth stage in Wolf’s development is the Fluent, Comprehending reader, or as I have come to refer to it as, the Maturation Stage.  As students enter this stage, the decoding and automaticity has been practice and achieved with great success.  The student can now read to find deeper meaning within a text.  They can go beyond what the author has written and find meaning that is relevant for them.  As the reading becomes more difficult, good reader’s awareness and knowledge of figurative language and irony helps them find those new meanings described above.

               Whether a student reaches this stage is heavily influenced by two factors according to educational psychologist, Michael Pressley, explicit instruction by teacher’s in major content areas, and the student’s own desire to read.  The later I have talked about numerous times before in this blog and the struggles to help foster a student’s desire to read.  The former is something that has been discussed in assignment submissions, Elluminate sessions, collaborative groups and also, here in this blog.  Explicit instruction is the running theme that has been elaborated upon in works by Gee, Lea & Street, and Keane and Zimmerman.

               The brain of the Fluent, Comprehending brain looks vastly different from that of the novice reader.  As David Rose, a translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, states, “The three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling.”  TheLimbic region helps us to prioritize and give value to what we are reading.  Our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred, or turned off at some level.  This is where a student’s motivation to read heavily influences these processes.  As Wolf states, “as children become more fluent, the young brain typically replaces bi-hemispheric activation with a more efficient system in the left hemisphere.”  The brain is streamlining itself to move into the next stage, The Expert Reader.

               Maryanne Wolf beings this section with a quote by Sir Edmund Huey who essentially states, “fully fluent, expert reading embodies all the cultural, biological, and intellectual transformations in the evolution of reading and all the cognitive, linguistic, and affective transformations in the reader’s own ‘natural history’”.

               At this stage, the automaticity that has been sought after has been achieved.  In fact, as Wolf states, one half second is all it takes the expert reader to read almost any word.  She elaborates in great detail what the brain does in those ‘500 milliseconds of Fame’.  What takes the brain half a second to do, Wolf elaborates for ten pages.  This was the hardest portion of the book for me thus far, so I will give you, the reader of this blog, the outline of what is happening and the illustration provided in the book.

·        0-100 Milliseconds: Turning Expert Attention to Letters

·        Between 50-150 Milliseconds: Recognizing a Letter and Changing a Brain

·        100-200 Milliseconds: Connecting Letters to Sounds and Orthography to Phonology

·        200-500 Milliseconds: Getting to All That We Know About a Word

·        Sometime after 200 Milliseconds: Syntactic and Morphological processes.

(Sorry about the formatting of the image, I couldn't get it to fit in the white portion of this page.)

What is startling and crushingly sad at the same time, is that most students don’t ever get to this stage, nor do they get to enjoy everything text has to offer them.  Many students arrive at the Decoding Stage and remain there.  As educators, we cannot make the brain, nor the child, do anything it cannot, or will not do.  We can only provide strategic, explicit instruction in how to ease the student into making the connections necessary themselves and ignite the desire to read through engaging, enlightening activities.

               Wolf concludes the chapter by once again discussing what I discussed in my discussion on the title of this book.  Who we are is heavily influenced by what we have read.  How many of us would still be scared of the dark if we hadn’t read Goosebumps?

               This chapter concluded Part II of the text, How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time.  The Final Three chapters of the book address issues that all literacy teachers face, When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read.

Until next time…

Chapter 5: The "Natural History" of Reading Development: Connecting the Parts of the Young Reading Brain

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,

make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history

or music, that we should begin

with the simple exercises first

and slowly go on trying

the hard ones, practicing till strength

and accuracy became one with the daring

to leap into transcendence…

-Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etude”

                As I’ve gone through reading, underlining and reflecting on Maryanne Wolf’s study of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, I have focused on the history of reading, both the history of the development of the reading brain and how each student’s individual history of exposure to text sets them up for reading success, or not.  Looking back at my own life, I cannot recall my own history.  I don’t remember the “aha!” moment when I was able to read with pride a passage placed before me.  What I do recall is being read to, spending summers in the local library reading in the big chairs (it also helped that our house wasn’t air conditioned, but the library was), and reading aloud in school with such pride that nothing could take my smile away.  Little did I know that I was going through a series of steps to make me the literate, fluent person that I have become today.

                Maryanne Wolf explains in this chapter, and the following, that there are five types of readers, Emerging Pre-Reader, Novice Reader, Decoding Reader, Fluent, Comprehending Reader and Expert Reader.  In this chapter, and subsequently this blog post, the first three readers were discussed and I will do so here.

                The emerging pre-reader was discussed at length, though not identified as ‘emerging pre-reader’ in the previous chapter and blog entry.  These readers are receiving their first exposures to sounds, words, concepts, images, stories, print, literacy materials, and just plain talk.  This stage lasts through the first five years of life.

                During the novice reader stage, each student is learning to decode print and to understand and develop meaning.  It is during this critical stage that the students learn and realized that every word on the page means something and that letters connect to the sounds of their language.  As we know, the smallest unit of sound in a word is called a phoneme.  During these years of development, the novice reader begins to identify these phonemes, identify onset and rime, and identify syllables.  A startling fact that I underlined, highlighted and dog-eared the page it was on hit me hard as a first grade teacher: “Not being able to decode well in grade 1 predicted 88 percent of the poor readers in grade 4.”  Talk about pressure.  The next morning during small group instruction, you can bet we went over every single phoneme in that day’s word list.

                Wolf elaborates upon one of the many reasons why English is so difficult for children, and non-native speakers, to learn, orthographic development.  Orthographic development consists of learning the entirety of visual conventions for depicting a particular language, with its repertoire of common letter patterns and of seeming irregular usages.  Most important, it involves the transformation of these visual patterns of letters and frequent letter combinations into representations that can become automatic.  For the perfect example of this development, please refer to this piece by Mark Twain.

                Thus far, the emphasis of the decoding reader has been the act of decoding itself.  However, Wolf warns of the pitfalls of ignoring comprehension.  She states that one of the biggest errors in reading instruction is the assumption that after a student finally decodes a word, they automatically know the meaning.  As we know this is pure malarkey.  A student may decode the word bug, but not know what meaning to apply to the word.  Is it a small insect, or is it something used to spy on another person.  As I have state before in relation to Gee, Lea & Street and Keane & Zimmerman, explicit instruction is necessary to ensure the desired results are met.  Novice readers need to learn much more than the surface meaning of a word.  They also need to be knowledgeable and flexible regarding a word’s multiple uses and functions in different contexts.

                The brain of a novice reader has quite a job to do.  When the reader looks at the word, it first must connect the visual and visual association areas to the portion of the brain, which appears on both hemispheres, or sides, that initiate the orthographic and semantic process.  The third area it connects to is in the frontal lobe and activates speech, memory and phonological and semantic processes.  The automaticity of skilled readers clearly cannot be obtained in this stage because the brain has so much to work through and process to read a single word.  I take this to mean that when a young child takes upwards of 30 seconds to decode and say a word, it does not necessarily mean that they are unable to read the word, they’re brains just need a little more time.

                The difference between a decoding reader and a novice reader can be ‘heard’ when a child reads.  The automaticity that has become the ultimate goal is beginning to take shape as the students are able to read more fluently both by decoding and recalling sight words.  As Wolf states, “readers need to add at least 3,000 words [during this stage] to what they can decode.  It is essential during this stage that readers acquire a good set of letter-pattern and vowel-pair “sight chunks” that make up words beyond the primer level.  To elaborate, Maryanne Wolf uses quite a macabre example, “The faster that a child can see that ‘beheaded’ is be + head + ed, the more likely it is that more fluent word identification [will occur].

                Fluent word recognition is significantly improved by both vocabulary and grammatical knowledge throughout the steps of this stage.  If I may clarify something here, as I have stated before in this blog and during Elluminate sessions, being a fluent reader does not always mean that comprehension will follow automatically.  As Wolf states, though comprehension becomes bound to the processes discussed above, students must be shown how to participate in “comprehension monitoring”.  As Maureen Lovett defines it, “…their ability to think about how well they are understanding what they read in a text.”

                As I concluded this chapter it appeared to me that the novice stage is where all of the workings of reading are learned, and the decoding stage is where everything is starting to be put together.  In the next chapter, Wolf elaborates on the ultimate prize as a literacy teacher, the Expert Reader.

Until next time...

Chapter 4: The Beginnings of Reading Development, or Not

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and that was the beginning of the fairies.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

 As I finished Part I of the Maryanne Wolf’s text Proust and the Squid, I felt a sigh of relief.  Though Part I was interesting and pertinent in its own right, I quickly realized that Part II would be more relevant to me as a teacher, and as a life-long learner.  Part II is entitled ‘How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time’.  I had chosen this book to gain an insight into how my students’ brain develops the necessary skills to become literate members of society.  This portion of the text starts with Chapter 4: The Beginning of Reading Development, or Not.

               As stated in an earlier blog post, I mentioned that I would be viewing this text through the lens of history.  Both the history of reading development and each student are personal reading history.  As I have mentioned before, a child’s first exposure to literacy, through the spoken word sets in motion a series of events that will determine how they will be as a reader.  As Wolf explains, even the first words a child hears after they are born create connections in the brain that will aid in language development, which then develops into reading development.  As a child grows older, the ability to pay attention increases and so does the infant’s knowledge of familiar visual images, and his or her curiosity about novel ones.  Over time, the child develops the neural connections that allow for them to become a, “linguistic genius”, a term coined by the Russian scholar Kornei Chukovsky.  To become a genius, the child must successfully master phonological development, the ability to hear, discriminate, segment, and manipulate the phonemes in words, semantic development, an understanding of the meanings of words, syntactic development, acquiring and using grammatical relationships, morphological development, the understanding and use of the smallest unit of meaning, and finally pragmatic development, a child’s ability to know and use social-cultural rules of language.

               Through these stages of development, the students are not only growing in reading ability, but they are beginning to develop a set of emotions.  As Wolf states quite boldly, “Young children learn to experience new feelings through exposure to reading, which, in turn prepares them to understand more complex emotion.”  Wolf elaborates that children learn one of the most valuable skills that the human race has developed: the ability to take on someone else’s perspective.  To interject my own personal belief here, I true believe that in almost all aspects of our culture, we have lost the ability to empathize with our fellow human being.  If reading will enable this feeling to return to our everyday lives, I will read to my budding students, I will read until I am blue in the face.  But I digress…

               In the most recent assignment that I submitted for this course, I started the piece by stating that ‘nothing happens in a vacuum’.   Every aspect of our lives is influenced by external forces, even if we decry this notion claiming nothing bothers us.  I am one of the later.  Maryanne Wolf echoes what Gee, Lea & Street, and Keane and Zimmerman have stated numerous times in numerous ways, reading acquisition and development is a social practice.  To ensure proper connections among the visual, auditory, processing and critical thinking portions of the brain, students must be exposed to text as early and as often as possible.  As students are struggling, corrective reinforcement must be employed to ensure the above mentioned connections are solidified in the correct way.  Wolf explains that, “the principal regions of the brain that underlie out ability to integrate visual, verbal, and auditory information rapidly are not fully myelinated in most humans until the age of five."  So why is there such an emphasis on reinforcing connections if they may not even exist until the student is ready to enter kindergarten?  Wolf concludes the chapter and backs up this thought with the war on “Word Poverty”.

               Maryanne Wolf cites a study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart that states, “by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle class child”.  Coming from the City of Pittsburgh, I know all too well how developmentally crippling this stat can be.  Many of my inner-city students came from homes where there is a lack of literature in the home.  Even many of their parents cannot read themselves.  These students lacked the exposure to language and print and were well beyond students of their own age in the surrounding suburbs. 

Three years removed from my hometown, I find similar struggles in my current school.  In our most recently published data, 33% of the entire population of our town is considered English Language Learner, though English is the language most dominantly spoken language in all of the homes.  To battle this ‘word poverty’ I hit all the yard sales and flea markets that I can and buy every children’s book I can get my hands on.  By sending them home with my students, I am at least trying to establish a community of reading where my students can be the ones that break the cycle, and create a culture of literacy.

Catherine Show of Harvard stated, “…one of the major contributors to late reading was simply the amount of time for ‘talk around dinner’”.  I think we’ll shut off the TV tonight during our evening meal.

Until next time…

Chapter 3 Continued

Happy Independence Day everyone!  I hope that you are enjoying a safe, enjoyable holiday with your friends and family.

I must start this post with an apology.  In the previous blog entry I entitled it, Chapter 3: The Birth of an Alphabet.  In actuality, the complete title is, The Birth of an Alphabet and Socrates’ Protests.  I chose to include the information about Socrates in a separate post because I believe it to be interesting and parallel some thinking in the 21^st Century, but aside from Socrates being Greek, I didn’t really see how it fit in with the information about the alphabets, hence the necessity to include it in its own entry.

Socrates is regarded as one of the most influential minds history has ever seen.  This is reflected by every college student who reads and reflects on excerpts from his many teachings and conversations.  The Socratic method of thinking is still referenced in almost all aspects of professional life from business to education.  But if he had his way, texts of his dialogues would not exist.  In fact, he spoke out against written text and worried that it would be the downfall of civilized life.

His concerns can be summarized into three objections.  The first was that Socrates believed that there was an inflexibility of the written word.  He believed that anything written can be taken for reality.  In the first entry for this blog, I elaborated on my concerns for the validity of information that can be posted on the internet.  Essentially, Socrates had the same argument, that false information can be printed and many people might take it as fact. 

At the time that Socrates educated the youth of Athens, the oral language was spoken in such a way that phrases, stories and lessons could be easily memorized and recalled with even greater ease.  Historians make note that this was accomplished by the language itself being constructed with rhythm and rhyme whenever possible.  Socrates believed that by turning oral traditions into written texts, the ability to recall information would be lost.  This was his second objection.  As will be described in later posts, not everyone is equipped with the capacity to remember and recall information as easily others.  Therefore, I believe that adapting oral tradition into a written form was necessary for the good of all mankind.  Thankfully, Socrates student Plato thought along those same lines and rebelled against his teacher and began writing everything down to preserve Socrates’ works.

The third objection that Socrates had to written text was that he believed that there would be a loss of control over language.  “Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it;…”  On this objection, I could not disagree with the man more.  Information, however it is presented, written, oral, spoken, or etched on stone tablets is the property of all who want to take part in the distribution of knowledge.  It should not be kept for a select few.  Maryanne Wolf goes on to defend this objection by saying that Socrates believed without proper context information can be dangerous.  However, hearing it from Wolf without any references to Socrates works, one is left to speculate if this is what Socrates meant, or this is Wolf’s interpretation.

We find ourselves in a time in our culture where we are faced with similar objections with regards to the technology available to us.  There are members of our society who believe, like Socrates, information sharing made as accessible as it is, will cause more problems than create opportunities for learning.  As Socrates said thousands of years ago, without context, information can be dangerous.  These same arguments are being made today.  However, as educators it is our job to explicitly teach our students how to find their own meaning in text.  It is our job to guide them to go beyond what is written, typed or said and realize that the only way to process information is to make it meaningful for themselves.

Everything changes, especially with information and education.  As the means of distributing and receiving information changes, what makes a person literate in any society or culture doesn’t.  As long as that person can successfully manipulate the socialization processes to fit it within their own lives, they will become fluent in any Discourse or academic literacy presented to them making them successful, literacy minded members of society.

Chapter 3: The Birth of an Alphabet

Those who can read see twice as well.

-Meander (Fourth Century BCE)

               In my last blog entry, I discussed the first two breakthroughs in the earliest forms of writing.  The first being symbolic representation, where symbols and drawings stood for something, goods, animals, people, etc., or even something more abstract, such as a number.  The second breakthrough came when cultures such as the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians used these symbols to communicate sounds.  Chapter three begins with what Maryanne Wolf, in her text on the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, considers to be the most significant breakthrough, the sound-symbol representation.  To establish the importance of this representation, Wolf delves into the development of early alphabets and their importance to the development of reading.

Wolf cites Eric Havelock’s three criteria for what constitutes an alphabet: a limited number of letters or characters, a comprehensive set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language [phonemes], and a complete correspondence between each phoneme in each language and each visual sign or letter.  For many classicists, the Greek system is the first to satisfy all of the above requirements.

The origins of the Greek alphabet has been widely disputed for thousands of years, with some saying it is a version of an earlier, Phonecian system, though it uses this system as a base, while others say it stems from Egyptian consonant-based characters.  What is known is that it was designed and disseminated to trading colonies in Crete, Thira, El Minya, and Rhodes somewhere between 800-750 BCE.  This alphabet used the Phonecian consonant-based system as a base, as was alluded to above, and incorporated an invented system for vowels perfectly aligning the letters with all known sounds.

Getting back to the overall purpose of the book about the reading brain, Wolf makes three claims as to how alphabets build a reading capable brain.  The first claim is that the alphabet is more efficient than all other writing systems.  For a brain to allow for efficient reading, speed and automaticity must be a key factor.  In addition to speed, comprehension must play a significant role.  The alphabet, with its limited number of characters allows for such rapid fire recognition and comprehension.  This is done primarily in the back of the left hemisphere, a visual portion of the brain.

The second claim is that the alphabet stimulates novel thought.  For thousands of years prior to the creation of the alphabet, members of an educated culture had to rely on memorization and other strategies to preserve collective knowledge.  If information was not set to successful rhythm, formulas and strategies, the information would be lost.  By creating an automaticity that was described above, the alphabet removed those constraints and allowed for a greater acceptance of what could be thought of and written by the people of any culture.  It should be noted that though the alphabet did not create ‘novel thought’, it did improve the efficiency that it was utilized.

The third claim is that the alphabet facilitates reading acquisition through enhanced awareness of speech.  The Greek culture responsible for this breakthrough in reading discovered that all oral speech could be broken down into individual sounds.  My understanding of this claim that even by being aware of the phonetic capabilities of letters, the ability to read is increased dramatically.  Maryanne Wolf points out through these three claims that the alphabet does not create a better brain, as some scholars argue, but it builds a more capable reading brain read for the phonemic awareness necessary, that is described later in the book.

At the conclusion of this chapter, I conducted an experiment in my first grade summer school classroom.  At the conclusion of the “Morning Meeting”, I gathered the students at the reading center like I do every morning.  I asked the students if they could tell me what the alphabet was.  Almost immediately as if it were rehearsed, 20 little voices began singing, “A! B! C! D!...”  To my students, the alphabet was not a set of fixed symbols whose individual symbols stood for a very precise set of sounds, it was a song that was taught early in life that they took with them every year from classroom to classroom.  They are showing signs if difficulty breaking through what they’ve always known, their Primary Discourses, and accepting something new and necessary, a secondary school Discourse.  Since the culmination of this chapter, I have stressed the importance, and even struggled with, showing my students how each letter, though individual on its own, is part of a larger system that is more than just a song.

Until next time…

Chapter 2: How the Brain Adapted Itself to Read: The First Writing Systems

The invention of writing, which occurred independently in distant parts of the word at many times, even occasionally in the modern era, must rank among mankind’s highest intellectual achievements.  Without writing, human culture as we know it today is inconceivable.

-O. Tzeng and W. Wang

               When I first began reading Maryanne Wolf’s study on how the brain learns to read, or how it doesn’t, I was shocked at how wrong my preconceived notions about reading were.  I always believed that everyone was born with the ability to read at some level.  For those students, and adults, who have difficulties reading, there was a ‘misfire’ occurring somewhere that prevented successful manipulations of text.  However, Wolf presents and explains in great detail about how the human brain is not built to read.  Over time, humans have developed systems that allowed for such connections to occur.  In Chapter two, Wolf presents the earliest known writing systems that started this process in motion.

               Maryanne Wolf explains that writing began with three breakthroughs in early cultures.  First, a new form of symbolic representation was created, more so than drawings on the wall of a cave.  An example of this was an Incan Quipu, a series of ‘talking knots’.  These knots can represent either something concrete things in the world around them such as goods to be traded, or something abstract as a number.  The second breakthrough was that these symbols can be used to communicate an idea.  The third breakthrough did not happen in all cultures, but was certainly one of the most profound human developments was sound-symbol correspondences.  Wolf describes this stunning realization that, “all words are composed of tiny individual sounds and that symbols can physically signify each of these sounds for every word…” was truly the beginning of written language in the culture of human beings.

               To revisit the first breakthrough, symbolic representation, was the first to emerge.  When a symbol is given meaning, our brain connects visual areas to both the language system and the conceptual systems in the brain.  This symbolization,” exploits and expands our capacity for specialization and our capacity for making new connections among association areas.”  As Wolf explains, these associations are what separate us from other primates.

               The earliest known use of the second breakthrough, symbols used for communicating, can be found in Sumerian cuneiform.  Cuneiform refers to the wedge-like appearance of early script that was likely etched using a nail, hence the name ‘cuneiform’, which is derived from the Latin word cuneus, or ‘nail’.  The early characters were easily recognized by the visual system, and required only a further match to a name in spoken language.  In creating such a system, the Sumerians created a logographic writing system where the symbols stood for concepts in the language rather than sounds within the words.

An example of Sumerian Cuneiform 

               At this point in the text, Wolf departs from discussing how the brain reads to discuss how the early Sumerians instructed their youth to read.  Novice readers learned lists of words based on one of several particular linguistic principles.  Some groups were meaning based, and some lists shared similar pronunciations.  Requiring the students to learn semantically and phonetically related words, helped them recall the words more efficiently, increased their vocabulary, and increased conceptual knowledge.  Thousands of years before Gee expressed his theory of explicit instruction among Discourses, the Sumerians saw the importance of providing explicit instruction in more than one aspect of writing and reading.  What I found interesting and of value in this portion of the text is that today, in the 21^st century, educators are still debating what is more important, phonics or meaning, and the Sumerians were incorporating both in their instruction thousands of years ago!

               The Sumerian writing system was so valuable an effective that fifteen peoples, including the early Persians and Hittites adopted their cuneiform, long after the language disappeared, roughly around 600 BCE.  Though influential and one of the earliest, Sumerian may not be the ‘first’.  It is heavily debated among scholars that the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing may have come earlier.

               Similar to the Sumerian system, the Egyptian Hieroglyphic system, over time, employed a rebus principle, where a symbol represents not its meaning by rather its sounds.  In doing so, the Egyptians essentially discovered the phoneme.  This new group of symbols would become the third cognitive breakthrough, which is discussed in greater detail in chapter 3.

               Through both systems described above, the human brain began evolving, making connections with symbols and language.  These connections have set the stage for the brain to decode, find meaning and truly read.  In the next blog entry, I will discuss chapter 3 where Wolf elaborates on the third breakthrough, sound-symbol correspondences, through alphabetic principles.

Until next time…

What's in a name?

Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.

-Terrence Deacon

              I chose the above quote to set the stage for this post.  In my last entry into the blog, I reviewed Chapter 1 of Maryanne Wolf’s study on the story and science of the reading brain entitled Proust and the Squid.  At the conclusion of the review, I mentioned that I would dedicate an entry blog entry to the title itself.

               They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there’s no harm in being motivated by a title, is there?  Upon receiving the book list for this course, my eyes were drawn to this particular title.  Perhaps it was the ‘Oceans’ unit we were wrapping up in our classroom, or the years of French that I took in elementary and high schools that drew my attention to the title.  Upon conducting further research I was intrigued to learn a new aspect of reading.  Throughout my undergraduate work at Indiana University of Pennsylvania I was instructed on how to teach students how to read.  This included how to create fun and engaging activities to isolate phonemes, to identifying difficulties that students may have and how to adapt the lessons to their needs.  But I never learned how the brain learned.  As a student who was always weak in math and science growing up, I tended to shy away from these courses.  After teaching for three years I realize that if I am to provide to most valuable instruction possible to my students, I must attempt to learn all that I can about their learning.  So the decision was made that I would read, review and apply the information found in Proust in the Squid.

               As a teacher of reading, I am always asking my students to look for deeper meaning in what they are reading.  I model how to look beyond what the author is saying to show the students that sometimes a rose can be so much more than a rose.  It can be symbol of love, life, or even fleeting beauty.  However, sometimes a rose is just a rose.  There is no deeper meaning to be found.

               In the previous entry into this blog, I established a theme for my reading of this text, history.  Everything we learn, every new experience we encounter, is based upon something that we have done in our past.  In reading, we only learn new words, make new connections and establish a deeper sense of cognition because we have something to build upon.  We are always scaffolding new information.  In Chapter 1 of this book, Wolf provides a beautiful excerpt from Marcel Proust’s work entitled On Reading.  In this section, Proust elaborately paints a picture of a child experiencing the joy of reading and the every experience that goes along with it from the bee buzzing overhead to the feel of the bench below them.  He establishes the idea that these experiences are what will determine how we engage in reading later in life.  Wolf concludes that section on Proust with the following quote from On Reading:

“…if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.”

When I first read this section, I was blown away.  For years, as I read books from my youth to the students I was teaching, I was transported to my bedroom listening to my mother tell me the story of a giant jam sandwich, or to my father describing another home-run sailing over the fence in a Matt Christopher novel.  Before I read Proust words, I was well aware of how reading can transcend time and space and unlock memories long forgotten in our grown up minds.  Reading is an invaluable part of our lives that establishes who we will be later in life.  I now understood why Wolf chose to use Proust as a starting point for her study on the brain.  The squid…not so much…

               For one paragraph on page 6, Maryanne Wolf reveals how the squid plays into her title.  She states that in the 1950s, scientists likened the long central axon of a squid’s brain to a human brain and how neurons fire and communicate with one another.  This is the only mention of the squid throughout the remainder of the text.  At first I was hoping there was deeper meaning behind this, some deeper symbolism that I wasn’t seeing.  Conducting research proved to be fruitless effort, so I went to the foremost authority on the brain that I know…my sister.  During her time at Carnegie Mellon University she took a number of biology of the brain courses and might know a little more about this.  She informed me that yes such a study was conducted in the 50s, but the motivation behind it was unethical to study a human brain, so they went with a cheaper alternative than that of a primate.

               In the case of the title of this book, a rose is just a rose.  Wolf was searching for a witty metaphor for the reading brain and created one using a wonderful example of the role scaffolding plays in reading, and a sea animal whose brain is similar to ours in biology alone.  In the next entry, I will discuss the first writing systems that Wolf has described as vital to the development of reading.

Until next time…

Chapter 1 - Reading Lessons from Proust and the Squid

     Good evening everyone!  If the following reads as if I am in a jovial mood, it's because we just received rain for the first time in months.  Everything's cooled off and feels so new.  It's the perfect time for me to reflect and write about Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

     At the start of each chapter, Wolf begins with a quote to set the tone for the forthcoming information.  I see great value in this and will provide one of the quotes in this and each entry that follows.

I believe that reading in its original essence, [is] that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
-Marcel Proust

     Chapter one starts like almost all texts do, establishing a rhetoric for what the reader will be engaging in over the following few hundred pages.  Wolf begins by addressing three areas of knowledge that she will touch upon.

• The early history of how humans learned to read.
• The developmental cycle of humans and how they've (we've) learned to read in more sophisticated ways.
• The story and science of what happens when the brain can't read.

As an early-childhood teacher, my interest was piqued in the benefits I could gain through the second two points.  But alas, those points would be addressed later in the book.

     As the chapter progressed, Wolf provided a number of excellent quotes that express what reading has become and it's value in our society.  Enter any coffee shop on any given day and you will find a number of people deeply engrossed in text from a wide range of media, from books to magazines, from the internet to (unfortunately) smartphones.  More than enjoying what they are reading, I believe that these folks are engaged in creating and maintaining an identity for themselves.  Reading the news to become more informed about the world around them.  Reading fantasy novels to tap into the creative portion of their brains.  We read because we like to, and it shows that we are more evolved than other species.  As Joseph Eptstein is quoted as saying, "A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read."

     Within the first five pages, Wolf set the tone for my critique and understanding of her work.  History.  The history of how text has evolved from colored trinkets, (discussed in chapter 2) to the variable treasure trove of information that has been made available through the internet and other forms of mass media.  The history of how each individual person learns to read.  From the moment we are born our brains begin working to become a literary muscle, ever flexing, ever bulking up.  Wolf explains that our brains are an example of 'open architecture', that, "we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it".

    To quote Wolf herself, "Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story.  How often this happens, or fails to happen in the first years of childhood turns out to be the best predictors of later reading."  Lucky for me, I get to work with students within that range, or at least one year outside of it, so I am able to do my best to influence their later successes.

     The remainder of the chapter previews the rest of the book, and as I will be addressing those points in later blog entries, I will omit them at this time.

     Thanks for taking the time to read this.   Remember, comments and questions are always welcome.

     In the next entry, I'll go into greater detail about what the title of the book, Proust and the Squid, means and how it relates to the overall theme of the book.

Until next time...

The Art of Blogging About Blogging

For years, I have been a frequent, almost daily visitor to a variety of blogs on a number of varying topics.  The site that I visit most frequently is a hockey blog called, emptynetters.  From there I launch into the blogosphere and catch up on what is going on with my favorite videogame series, The Legend of Zelda, through zeldauniverse.  Lastly, as I reach for my first cup of morning coffee, I click on to dailyshotofcoffee to see various reviews, interesting tidbits and insights into new brewing methods for my morning pick-me-up. 

What draws me to this format can be expressed in a number of variations of one word, ease.  Blogging allows anyone who has an interest in something to easily put their thoughts out there and likeminded people can read and discuss the information.  In his discussion on Distributed Knowledge, Dave Marvett marveled at how easy it has become for us to share information as a culture, in particular through technology.  It seems that there is a blog about anything and everything.

However, this format of information sharing does come with its flaws.  Unfortunately, the ease which with anyone can publish their thoughts, there is also a chance that false, or misinformation can be construed as fact.  This is the biggest challenge that educators face when turning their students loose on the internet to gather information is distinguishing fact from fiction on blogs and wikis.  As Eric Raymond stated in his Linus’ Law, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (with enough people looking at something the flaws can be identified and fixed).  I believe that the opposite can be considered as well.  That if enough people read something, it just may become truth.  As educators we must model for our students how to determine what is “accurate information” and what isn’t, as well as the ability to recognize when something might not “sound right”.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been a long time reader of blogs, but this is my first foray into this medium.  My own personal history of writing has mainly been limited to university assignments and newsletters for my first grade class.  Even rarer than my writing has become of late, is the fact that I have hardly ever composed anything to be read by fellow students.  It may take a few attempts, but I believe that with some practice, I can provide an in-depth look at my chosen book as it pertains to this course.

I have chosen Maryanne Wolf’s look into the human brain and how over time it has changed to become the reading, or non-reading, brain that it is today.  The book is entitled Proust and the Squid and reads a lot easier than I expected.  I went into this endeavor expecting a plethora of science terms and information that I would have to sift through to gain an understanding of the material.  However, much to my surprise I am grateful for the fact that this book is written in such a way that my non-scientific reading brain can grasp what Wolf is trying to convey.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and please leave comments regarding questions, clarifications or if something just doesn’t “sound right”.

Until next time…