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…