Reconciling Words and Speech
I spent my formative linguistic years in a Midwestern grammatical wasteland, well, as far as everyone outside the south side of Chicago is concerned. I learned to speak and to write amongst an unusual people who pluralize “you” with an “s” (just in case context proves to be an insufficient indicator) and end as many sentences with prepositions as possible. They love “da Cubbies,” celebrate major events by cooking lengths of hand-made “poli-sahsage,” go places “wit” each other, shake their heads, smile and lament, “ain’t it?” when some east-coaster might say, “so true.” When you sneeze, they say, “gahbleshoo.” Their vowel sounds are long and harsh, their enunciation lacking, and familiarity with the rules of Standard English all but absent. They are not readers. They have not attended college. That I loved books was a delightful anomaly.
Their names are manipulated in unusual ways so that a list of the members of my family sounds rather like a cast of cartoon mob characters. Those with monosyllabic names get theirs duplicated. I do not have an uncle Joe and an aunt Lou; I have Joe-Joe and Lou-Lou. Amongst romantic partners, the name is extended with a “y” so that to her husband, Lou is Louey. I cannot account for the spelling- I only know that this is how it is done. Those with multisyllabic names are addressed in letters, so that Dolores is “D” and Eileen is “I.” They are a polite -if brash- and traditional people who will always inquire after your kids and delight at the reports that “s/he has done real well for her/himself.” And of course, they will never fail to ask, “how’s yer ma?”
Their names are manipulated in unusual ways so that a list of the members of my family sounds rather like a cast of cartoon mob characters. Those with monosyllabic names get theirs duplicated. I do not have an uncle Joe and an aunt Lou; I have Joe-Joe and Lou-Lou. Amongst romantic partners, the name is extended with a “y” so that to her husband, Lou is Louey. I cannot account for the spelling- I only know that this is how it is done. Those with multisyllabic names are addressed in letters, so that Dolores is “D” and Eileen is “I.” They are a polite -if brash- and traditional people who will always inquire after your kids and delight at the reports that “s/he has done real well for her/himself.” And of course, they will never fail to ask, “how’s yer ma?”
Angling Road
When I was nearly five years old, my mother moved us back to Michigan where I was born because the schools were better than those she had attended. I could read when I started kindergarten, but the rules of writing largely escaped me. In books, I could process the look of a word into its sound. I had substantial difficulty, however, embarking on the reverse process. I remember the first day of kindergarten, my mother snapping photos as I made my way into a large, intimidating, pristine brick building. We began to review the alphabet. Mrs. Terpstra directed the class to shout out in unison the sound of the letter “a.” While every other student bellowed resounding and accurate, “ahh,” I shouted my own mortifying, inaccurate, “aaaaah,” as in “apple.” I could not comprehend my wrongness. No one says, “ahpple,” so shouldn’t the letter sounds correspond in writing to the way we speak words? Mrs. Terpstra zeroed in on me. She was an intensely bubbly woman, though fierce and rigorous with a firm belief in eye-for-an-eye justice. When she craned her neck forward to demand, “Who said ‘aaaaah’?” I timidly raised my tiny hand, a part of me bent on defending my pronunciation, until our eyes met and my impudence waned. I then was forced to recite and write a number of words wherein the letter "a" makes an “ahh” sound.
As trivial as this event may be, it marked the beginning of my recognition that my peers were in many ways, not my peers at all. They had gone to preschool where I assumed they had been primed for this letter pronunciation drill. They could afford to live in the neighborhoods that fed this elementary school. They knew one address whereas I knew two; the one I was to claim at school, and the real one which was to be used in an emergency but never mentioned at school. The weight of my future rode on my ability to keep track of which address was to be shared with whom and under what circumstances. My mother and I did address recitation drills in the evenings. They went to lakes in the summer and some of their mothers did not have jobs. I went to visit my father’s family on Chicago’s south side in the summer and rode bikes through alleys with my cousin and our friend, ‘Cenzo who would go on to join a gang and then spend years in prison. It was a big deal when my father’s family moved from Morgan Park to the border between New City and West Englewood. My mother worked overtime and I spent many evenings in her office reading and playing with antiquated banking equipment. She read me stories every night before bed and spoke often of the importance of doing well in school. Education was to be my safeguard against returning to Morgan Park where children's future prospects were bleak, so I worked hard at mastering this bewildering set of linguistic rules.
While I struggled to reconcile the fact that conventional spelling did not necessarily coincide with the manner in which the adults who had taught me to speak pronounced the words I was now writing, I spent my free time reimagining written language into a series of secret codes. I kept a diary of fictional stories, major life events like the death of my maternal grandmother and carrying my guinea pig in my pocket to the candy shop, and made plans to go on safari in Africa where I assumed I would find baby cheetahs and rhinoceros in need of rescuing, all written in codes consisting of dots, dashes, numbers and letters. Its puffy pink, blue, and yellow plastic cover housed the progression of my early forays into the world of literacy. In the early pages, there was almost nothing of which an adult reader could make sense, but by the end of the diary, suddenly a world of well-reasoned sentences recording complex social events had emerged. "//.-1, . . 5, zpt--..| grnaC--/," had evolved into, "I drank tea with grandma Carroll."
By first grade, I had a grasp on spelling that was comparable to my peers, and a terrifying teacher I sincerely believed to be a witch. Mrs. Loscalza was a behemoth. He hair was white and clipped close to her scalp, her eyes angry black beads in a wide, wrinkled face. Her bust was larger than anything I'd ever seen and it was often covered in turtlenecks and topped with necklaces of fabric, large beads, and small wooden dolls that seemed to rest atop a plateau, parallel to the ground that trembled as she stomped, ferocious, around the classroom. We made up stories to frighten one another detailing how bad students were turned into the wooden figurines on her folksy jewelry. Her voice was gnarled and strained- some combination of cigarette damage and intense anger. She based her instruction on a mass of photocopied worksheets, story time, and violent tantrums wherein it was not uncommon to see desks upended. Bad kids, she told us pointedly, spent hours in the storage room at the back of the class copying from the dictionary at an antique desk. My mother was outraged; this was precisely the sort of environment from which our move to Michigan was supposed to insulate me. Owing to the combination of Mrs. Loscalza's frightful pedagogy, my mother's willingness to keep me home from this educational nightmare-scape, and my many health-related absences, I have no recollection of learning in my first grade classroom. I do remember being outfitted with a few book series and stationary pads that my mother encouraged me to use while I recovered from chicken pox, ear infections, repeated incidents of strep throat, and an eventual tonsillectomy. They were creative days on the sofa where I positioned myself with simple amenities: books, popsicles, pencils, paper, and a mind roaring to create. My mother spent her days arranging to work from home, listening attentively to my literary creations, and fighting tooth and nail for my right to progress to the second grade, which I did despite Mrs. Loscalza's insistence that I was not ready.
Second and third grade were years of substantial writing practice. At the beginning of each day, a transparency was placed on the overhead for daily oral language (D.O.L.) exercise. We focused our efforts on correcting the sentences in our journals and after a few minutes of work time, could volunteer to make corrections on the overhead. Handled differently, this practice could easily devolve into embarrassment, but my teachers allowed any number of students to come up, making one correction, until the sentences had been fixed. The biggest problem was students zealously making unnecessary "corrections" because we were so eager for the chance to write with the teachers' markers on the overhead. We began each day with simple writing like this, and we wrote often in these classrooms. Each student wrote and published at least two books in each grade, practicing our writing with multiple drafts and assembling out finished products into bound hardcovers. Creating pieces of writing was a process in which we took immense pride and interest. Having a finished product in our hands, a real, "published" book as it were, was a simple, the materials commonplace, but it made us each an author which felt official and important.
In terms of pedagogy, my fifth grade classroom was the most progressive of my elementary schooling. Three men taught all of the fifth grade students, and they swapped the classes for lessons in their specialization. One focused most on science and we made operational lego cars, investigated the woods near the school, and studied weather patterns. The other two, as far as I can remember, shared emphasis on Social Studies and English. We drew enormous maps and fed mice to the school's pet boa constrictors. In my homeroom, Mr. Reece was at once structured and fluid in his instruction. Two practices stand out in my fuzzy memory. First, we kept classroom journals that we wrote in daily either in response to a prompt or on a topic of our own choosing. At the end of each week, we selected certain entries he could read, marked them and turned over our journals. The following week he would return our journals with simple, encouraging notes in the margins. Nothing was corrected, changed, or questioned; the comments he left were brief but positive. Second, we conducted our own conferences. In the weeks leading up to conferences, we assembled portfolios of our work with examples of our highest levels of achievement and areas for improvement. We created outlines and wrote our own comments about our own educational progress. When parents came for the meeting, Mr. Reece sat with us, providing prompts as needed, but taking a very hands-off approach. His presence was supportive but secondary - it was, after all, the students who had prepared the assessments, examples, and summaries of our learning to share with our parents. In that environment I was made accountable to myself and learned not only about writing, but about self-reflection. I have no recollection of any writing projects we did in class, but I began to keep my own journal outside of school, a habit I have (for the most part) maintained since then.
The purpose of writing changed in that classroom. In previous grades, even those little books in which I took such pride, writing had been an exercise in rule mastery. It was rather like all of those mastery skills were now being handed back to me; writing was now being put to use in an extremely personal way that I might better establish my own sense of self. In middle school that would change again.
While I struggled to reconcile the fact that conventional spelling did not necessarily coincide with the manner in which the adults who had taught me to speak pronounced the words I was now writing, I spent my free time reimagining written language into a series of secret codes. I kept a diary of fictional stories, major life events like the death of my maternal grandmother and carrying my guinea pig in my pocket to the candy shop, and made plans to go on safari in Africa where I assumed I would find baby cheetahs and rhinoceros in need of rescuing, all written in codes consisting of dots, dashes, numbers and letters. Its puffy pink, blue, and yellow plastic cover housed the progression of my early forays into the world of literacy. In the early pages, there was almost nothing of which an adult reader could make sense, but by the end of the diary, suddenly a world of well-reasoned sentences recording complex social events had emerged. "//.-1, . . 5, zpt--..| grnaC--/," had evolved into, "I drank tea with grandma Carroll."
By first grade, I had a grasp on spelling that was comparable to my peers, and a terrifying teacher I sincerely believed to be a witch. Mrs. Loscalza was a behemoth. He hair was white and clipped close to her scalp, her eyes angry black beads in a wide, wrinkled face. Her bust was larger than anything I'd ever seen and it was often covered in turtlenecks and topped with necklaces of fabric, large beads, and small wooden dolls that seemed to rest atop a plateau, parallel to the ground that trembled as she stomped, ferocious, around the classroom. We made up stories to frighten one another detailing how bad students were turned into the wooden figurines on her folksy jewelry. Her voice was gnarled and strained- some combination of cigarette damage and intense anger. She based her instruction on a mass of photocopied worksheets, story time, and violent tantrums wherein it was not uncommon to see desks upended. Bad kids, she told us pointedly, spent hours in the storage room at the back of the class copying from the dictionary at an antique desk. My mother was outraged; this was precisely the sort of environment from which our move to Michigan was supposed to insulate me. Owing to the combination of Mrs. Loscalza's frightful pedagogy, my mother's willingness to keep me home from this educational nightmare-scape, and my many health-related absences, I have no recollection of learning in my first grade classroom. I do remember being outfitted with a few book series and stationary pads that my mother encouraged me to use while I recovered from chicken pox, ear infections, repeated incidents of strep throat, and an eventual tonsillectomy. They were creative days on the sofa where I positioned myself with simple amenities: books, popsicles, pencils, paper, and a mind roaring to create. My mother spent her days arranging to work from home, listening attentively to my literary creations, and fighting tooth and nail for my right to progress to the second grade, which I did despite Mrs. Loscalza's insistence that I was not ready.
Second and third grade were years of substantial writing practice. At the beginning of each day, a transparency was placed on the overhead for daily oral language (D.O.L.) exercise. We focused our efforts on correcting the sentences in our journals and after a few minutes of work time, could volunteer to make corrections on the overhead. Handled differently, this practice could easily devolve into embarrassment, but my teachers allowed any number of students to come up, making one correction, until the sentences had been fixed. The biggest problem was students zealously making unnecessary "corrections" because we were so eager for the chance to write with the teachers' markers on the overhead. We began each day with simple writing like this, and we wrote often in these classrooms. Each student wrote and published at least two books in each grade, practicing our writing with multiple drafts and assembling out finished products into bound hardcovers. Creating pieces of writing was a process in which we took immense pride and interest. Having a finished product in our hands, a real, "published" book as it were, was a simple, the materials commonplace, but it made us each an author which felt official and important.
In terms of pedagogy, my fifth grade classroom was the most progressive of my elementary schooling. Three men taught all of the fifth grade students, and they swapped the classes for lessons in their specialization. One focused most on science and we made operational lego cars, investigated the woods near the school, and studied weather patterns. The other two, as far as I can remember, shared emphasis on Social Studies and English. We drew enormous maps and fed mice to the school's pet boa constrictors. In my homeroom, Mr. Reece was at once structured and fluid in his instruction. Two practices stand out in my fuzzy memory. First, we kept classroom journals that we wrote in daily either in response to a prompt or on a topic of our own choosing. At the end of each week, we selected certain entries he could read, marked them and turned over our journals. The following week he would return our journals with simple, encouraging notes in the margins. Nothing was corrected, changed, or questioned; the comments he left were brief but positive. Second, we conducted our own conferences. In the weeks leading up to conferences, we assembled portfolios of our work with examples of our highest levels of achievement and areas for improvement. We created outlines and wrote our own comments about our own educational progress. When parents came for the meeting, Mr. Reece sat with us, providing prompts as needed, but taking a very hands-off approach. His presence was supportive but secondary - it was, after all, the students who had prepared the assessments, examples, and summaries of our learning to share with our parents. In that environment I was made accountable to myself and learned not only about writing, but about self-reflection. I have no recollection of any writing projects we did in class, but I began to keep my own journal outside of school, a habit I have (for the most part) maintained since then.
The purpose of writing changed in that classroom. In previous grades, even those little books in which I took such pride, writing had been an exercise in rule mastery. It was rather like all of those mastery skills were now being handed back to me; writing was now being put to use in an extremely personal way that I might better establish my own sense of self. In middle school that would change again.