Sammy

Sammy was sixteen before he could decipher the meaning of words in a textbook. He says they looked like they were written in a foreign alphabet or something. He tells me about the whippings he received unless he stayed in his room and studied after school. He remembers hours spent staring at the pages of a book until they went white on him ..then he’d stare at the walls until images would appear from them. He considered a career in graphic design. Since then he has had to hustle to finish high school and the University. His field was anthropology instead of graphic arts because it was familiar to him from watching the National Geographic channel. I ask him if he can recognize most of the words he sees now. Only if they have a familiar pattern or shape to them, he says. Hopefully they’re keywords, he adds. I’m thinking about all the hurdles he’s had to jump to get through school. I also suspect he’s not suffering from a problem with his eyesight. “Where are you from originally ..?” I ask “Palm Springs” he says “Where are your parents from ..?” “Korea” “Can you read in Korean ..?” “No, never tried ..my parents didn’t want anything interfering with my education here” “What language was spoken in the home while you were growing up ..?” “Korean” That’s it, I tell him ..he probably would have learned to read in Korean just fine. He asks me how I know that. I tell him because he jumped from a verbal environment of spoken-Korean to an education of written-English. It happens all the time with kids from Spanish-speaking households around here. During infancy, our system gets tuned to receive the sounds our parents make, in his case ..Korean. The first step in learning to read is parsing the words you see, into the sounds that your system was tuned for. Since Spanish and Korean have fewer sounds than English ..parsing breaks down. On the other hand, reading by sight, or ‘pattern recognition’, is not a natural way to learn to read and takes a lot longer.