Literacy Narrative
...posed to do that? “But I’m only a fifth grader!” I almost shouted. My mind paused as I began to remember when I had been in a situation like this. Then it hit me. I mean, it really hit me. A semi-truck of thought smashed into my brain. I have played imaginary school with my cousins for, well, forever. That was my foundation: just pretend. I decided to find out how much she could read, if any. It was much like those painstaking tests each elementary student must endure at the beginning of every year to find out if we are really ready for the next grade or if it was just a fluke that we passed. The flashcards were pretty pink and almost glowed in the dimmed room as I held them in my hand as I slowly began to gain confidence. As my Irish green eyes glanced up at Maria to see if she was ready, I found hers staring a hole into my hand and the glow slowly began to fade from those pale pink cards. “Okay Maria-hon, we’re going to start by going through the flashcards to make piles of what you can read well, what you can almost read, and what you haven’t quite mastered yet.” Her response was a blank stare. I held up the first card. The blank expression changed to an eager one that knew her reading buddy’s card. “Cat”, she said, spitting the word out triumphantly. I let out a sigh of relief. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad. We foraged on. Those pink cards help a great power to them as I soon realized by young Maria’s thrill at being able to read them. After four or so cards, all correct, the room began to glow, but this time, not from the flashcards. The smile on the first grader’s beaming face was more than enough to fill the room. Soon, the cards began to get more difficult and Maria’s light began to fade. Mine preserved. I knew that she was not dumb, not by any means. She knew basic words and needed help with others. This wasn’t her first language. I was proud of her. I knew that if I could learn to read and write English (regardless of the fact that English is my first language), that I could help her figure it out. The flashcard flashed its word brilliantly: “through”. Maria was stuck. This was a much larger word than she was accustomed to dealing with. It was seven letters! I gently asked the girl to sound it out. “Th-rug-ooh-guh-huh”, she said shakily. I began to explain to her that letter combinations like “gh” were silent. I tried to think of other examples. “Ghost… No, wait. That doesn’t work. Um… Well, you don’t really have to know what other words are like that”, I covered, “All you have to know is that when you see a ‘gh’ together, usually at the end of the word, it will be silent, which means that you won’t say it when you read it or sound it out.” It made perfect sense to me. I knew how to read. I knew that every time I encountered a letter phrase like that, that is would, in fact, be completely and utterly silent and therefore free from my speech. “Why?” questioned Maria. SMASH. That semi-truck struck again and in less than 15 minutes. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What did she mean, “why?” The thought had never occurred to me. Why didn’t I know why we used the letters like that? Why didn’t I ever question the reason why we had extra letters in our words which serve no purpose? Why did this mean? What would become of me in my duty as a reading buddy if I didn’t answer her question? Why would become of this child who desperately needed to know the answer in order to understand? What was to become of English if we begun asking questions like this? I was wholly taken back. All I had were more questions and none of them answered little Maria’s. How could I, Fiance Faith Wells, not know the answer to this simple question? I did not by any mean think that I should know the answer because I was overly intelligent for my age because I was not. I just thought that being able to read, and as far as my memory serves, always being able to read, ought to count for something. My only option: continue to fake being a teacher. We all know what teachers do when the answer is vague or too complex to be understood at that moment, they say, “That is just the way it is”, which is exactly what I told her. Maria’s response was a rather confused, “Oh”. However, being the young and impressionable first grade student that she was, she immediately dismissed the fact that a fifth grader could be wrong or not know what she was talking about. Then there was a second huge sigh of relief from me. I checked the clock and noticed that it had been about half an hour, and was time for us to pack up our game of pupil and teacher and go back to our regular lives, except this was real life. And now I had all these questions of why I was stupid to the point of not being able to answer a first grader’s question of “why?” Fortunately, being the young and impressionable fifth grader that I was, I immediately dismissed all thought of these uncertainties and went back to class. Throughout the years I have, at times, had trouble finding out the proper way to pronounce words which I have only read and it always beings me back to thinking about that little Hispanic girl with the gorgeous brown eyes with that ultra-red ribbon in her hair. When I was in elementary school, California had just adopted a new method of learning to read and to, thus, write. They dubbed it “Whole Language”. I call it, “Learning through Osmosis”. The entire idea behind Whole Language is that one can learn the English language well enough to be able to read and write, both fully and properly, through a teacher continually reading out-loud to the class while the students follow along. Whole Language promotes writing via knowing how to speak. W...