cahn

Okay, well, there are a few different pieces at work here. One is how you start teaching a child to read words, and one is what they're doing at the advanced old age of 33. ;) And the key to reading any writing system is: how much correlation between graphemes and phonemes is there? How much can you predict the pronunciation from the writing?

For some language + writing system combos, it's 0%: you have to memorize everything. For others, it's near 100%: you can get the pronunciation totally from reading. For most, it's somewhere in between. English is notorious among European languages for having a relatively lower correlation between sound and spelling. It means you have to memorize more. But it also has an especially large lexicon, so you can't possibly predict everything. So you have to do some memorization of individual words, and learn some patterns.

I promise you, now that I've taught ESL, that I spend a lot of time looking up words I've only seen in writing, because I've made up a pronunciation in my head based on the spelling, but before I can tell anyone else how they're pronounced, I have to check. I'd say I'm right about half the time.

Now, when you're teaching children, you can start with phonics and correct them when it leads them astray on individual words, and trust their memory to collect examples of exceptions. Or you can start by having them memorize enough words to be able to read short texts, and trust them to notice patterns, and maybe explicitly teach some. Most books for beginning readers that I'm aware of make use of words that rhyme or are similar in some way.

I have an exceptionally good working memory *and* good pattern recognition skills (these stood me in good stead in formal linguistics, where the goal is to look at a set of data and deduce the underlying principles). I was started with memorizing whole words until I could read a book without knowing any of the letters, at which point I began to match up what I was saying to what I was seeing, but yeah, I definitely picked up patterns, some of which were pointed out to me explicitly and some of which I noticed on my own.

I absolutely would have loved learning proper linguistic terminology in second grade! As soon as I learned about place and manner of articulation and voicing, I was like, "Oh, THAT's what they should have been telling me, instead of all this hard and soft nonsense."

Re our discussion of Maybeth's learning difficulties, I was keeping it in mind while reading Seventeen, and these are the data points I found:

“Maybeth, you can remember recipes, can’t you?” “That’s different; it’s easy. It’s not just— words. I can remember music,” Maybeth explained, more relaxed now. “They tell you, if there’s something you’re good at then that’s a good way to work. But music is notes, and they’re easy to remember because you can hear them. And this is— just words.”

“[History tests are] all memory. And I can’t remember enough.”

Then, when they do a timeline in color the way Maybeth understands time:

“I can remember boxes,” Maybeth said, still staring at the paper. “I can understand colors.

Inconclusive, if you ask me. She can remember a lot of things that aren't words, but she can't handle words. Which points to something like dyslexia.

But then my mother, who is dyslexic, excelled in history in community college, as long as she wasn't asked to write about it or read out loud. Remembering facts and putting them together was the easy part; articulating her knowledge in well-written paragraphs on the spot was the hard part. She could do multiple choice easily, but whenever she knew the test would have an impromptu essay on one of, say, three topics, she would figure out which topic the teacher liked best, as that was the one they would most likely be wiling to read 50 essays on, write up the essay before hand, looking up every word in the dictionary, and then type and retype the essay until she had it memorized. Then she'd go in and regurgitate the memorized essay on the exam.

It usually got her an A, although she got caught once when she mis-guessed which question would be on the test. She *still* got the A, I believe, but I remember her saying the teacher said, "I see what you did there. Don't do it again." (I.e. study for all the essay topics.)

She never told anyone about her labor-intensive workaround for exams, so no one ever caught on to the fact that she was dyslexic. Everyone else just went in and wrote their essays cold based on what they remembered. She also could only do one class at a time like this.

I always found this fascinating; she has dyslexia and dyscalculia, but must have a pretty good working memory. Not quite as good as mine, but still pretty good.

So maybe Maybeth is dyslexic and dyscalculic and has an average working memory? Good enough for recipes and music and things that don't trigger her disability, but not good enough to compensate for her disability by sheer hard work?

Re music...I could definitely memorize a sequence of key presses, but you'd have to signal me visually somehow *when* to do the key presses. Because I was doing them in the right order, but because I had to laboriously think through each step (and I still don't know how anyone else can do it any other way), it was really slow and sounded nothing like music. Presumably, with enough muscle memory, I'd get faster, but I'm still unconvinced that it would come out with the right rhythm, mostly because when I try to sing in my head, I can never get the timing to sound anything like music. I'm not so tone-deaf I can't hear the difference? So I suppose there's hope? But it would be a very labor-intensive process.

I'm also not great at distinguishing notes--my wife, who is extremely musical and could have been a professional musician with some encouragement and a less fucked-up childhood, did some experiments pressing keys on the keyboard and asking me which were which, and was constantly having to say, "NO, those are DIFFERENT notes. NO, this is the SAME note." I could tell some apart, but there were a lot of false positives and false negatives. She was pretty impressed at how bad I was. Like everyone else who ever sat with me at a piano.

So no, I don't think I'd like to learn an instrument using the workaround. ;)

Now, some random thoughts on Seventeen:

I just finished rereading it. Still boring. Rather less so, now that I know who Cisco is. But still.

The most interesting thoughts I had were about Dicey and role reversal. How she offers Cisco what she does in part because she remembers what it was like.

Maybe he was hungry, Dicey thought. His face didn’t look hungry, but there was hunger mixed in with laughter in his eyes, so maybe he was too proud to ask. “Sure, okay,” she said.

She also knew what it was like to need shelter and to have only the one chance for it. One chance on a good day, she remembered; there had been days when they had no chance.

So now Dicey's in a position to pay it forward. BUT, what I now realize is that she's paying it forward to the same man who contributed to her being in that position in the first place. She's reaching out, but she's reaching out to the wrong person?

Because he sure as hell doesn't learn anything from it. Unlike Gram, who's also in a way responsible--if her daughter couldn't take care of her kids, it was in part because of all that childhood abuse. Gram gets a redemption arc. Cisco seems uninterested in redemption; he knows damn well who Dicey is, when he asks her all those questions about her siblings and her grandmother and her...huh. Her mother. He never even asks about her father. I think I had missed that because of the societal expectation that mothers take care of their children, fathers are optional (Solitary Blue, says otherwise). But both Jeff and Mina ask “Where are their parents?”

Cisco knows damn well there's no father in the picture, and that's why he never asks, and Dicey missed it and I missed it until just now.

Anyway, Cisco is not above anything stealing from his own daughter. However, before that, he makes it pretty clear he thinks he should be paid for the work he's doing, and Dicey agrees, and yet she never tells him. His theft at the end was unjustified and totally in character, but she didn't know that he was going to steal from her or that he was the father who abandoned her, so I can only judge her actions by the knowledge she had at the time.

It's consistent with the way she takes Jeff for granted, and keeps telling herself she'll call him and doesn't. She does a lot of not reaching out in this book.

So I'm left wondering if we're meant to conclude that she should have reached out to Cisco, and she didn't.

I'm not convinced that it would have prevented the theft, much less that he would have been responsible with the money she gave him (hello, Atlantic City), but it is interesting to think about. Wanting to surprise someone with cash is not the way to do business, not the way to treat someone who's clearly hungry and homeless and has been hinting that he wants money for the work he's doing, and certainly not what I'd expect from someone who's *been* hungry and homeless. Someone who'd earn money by showing up, doing the work, and proving she was worth the keep. If nothing else, this is a guy who comes and goes--you might well never see him again before you have a chance to give him the money you're planning to give him.

Speaking of theft and role reversal, I thought of Sammy and James in Homecoming, and Dicey's reaction.

“And Sammy didn’t take money, he took food. And Sammy didn’t take it from someone who’d helped us. Even you can see the difference.”

And Cisco, of course, takes money from someone who'd helped him.