Learning to Read

I remember when reading first clicked for me. Perhaps a lot of teaching came before and I actually LEARNED to read, but it felt to me like a switch just flipped one day. That day was a Sunday and Dad and I were sitting on the couch reading the Sunday comics. Well, HE was reading, I usually just looked at the pictures. But this day, I looked at the page and the letters made sense! I read the comics to Dad for the first time. I was so proud that I began driving my sisters crazy as I read everything out loud (not always pronouncing words correctly). I remember surprising my sister Sarah when I read "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear". She shouted "Mom! Laura read those words backwards" and mom nearly drove off the road "Sarah, don't shout in the car!"

Luke is learning to read as I read out loud to him. With Derek as a father you could have guessed he would have very intellectual taste. I love to read Dr. Seuss to him, but he won't have it! He thinks all that chatter is nonsense, "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." Yesterday he accused me of making up "one fish two fish" saying that nobody would bother writing such silly rhyme in a book! No, he much prefers the thick, much more scholarly language of Jacques Ellul, "It is not technique per se, that I despise, but the authoritarian power that the 'technicists' seek to exercise, as well as the fact that technique determines our lives without our being able to intervene or, as yet, to control it."

Today he dressed like a scholar in his penny loafers and striped polo shirt. He told me he figured Ellul didn't wear onesies so why should he? He wanted pants and shoes! I wiped the drool off his face, changed his diaper and acquiesced.