Slowly But Surely, You Will Learn to Read

“I have learned that my mother-inlaw pretty much conquers any game she plays on the first go.” —Jessica Solomon

the first thing they told us, at the special school for “languagebased learning differences,” was that we were never to interfere with their teaching process. They were adamant at Curriculum Night: The multisensory approach for teaching reading doesn’t resemble how we’d learned, so no matter how much we wanted to bust out the phonics flash cards, we mustn’t. We were not to help our son with homework, ever. We weren’t supposed to make him try to read anything, lest we unlay the carefully sequenced track they were working on. The first year, he didn’t appear to be a much better reader, but he no longer came home saying people thought he was stupid, which was more than we could say about his previous school experience. Trust, trust, trust, I repeated to myself, secretly wondering if we had signed him up for a cult.

Then, in the middle of his second year, the pandemic hit, and we were let into the lockbox of his education. Each morning, we work near one another. “Today is the 38th day of distance learning,” I hear the teachers say, and I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in 38 days as well.

During reading class, I hear the teacher take small groups of kids through threepart drills: visual, auditory, and my favorite, the “blending” drill, which will have real words like not, but sometimes nonsense words like fot that challenge the kids to understand vowel sounds they can’t know by memorizing. Every day, they repeat the structure of the lesson in almost exactly the same way.

The “red words” are the hardest. About 15 percent of our language isn’t phonetic. To learn one of these words, the kids spell them approximately 18 times. Tapping the syllables, writing them on paper, writing them in the air, till they move from page to neural connection, taking up permanent residence in his brain. “Consonant, vowel, consonant … short vowel sound … open syllable,” I hear him saying. The teachers were right; I would have been useless, even destructive, if I’d interfered.

In general-education kindergarten, the red words were the ones he couldn’t master, an early sign of his scrambled comprehension. In first grade, they called them “sight words,” because in order to read fluently, a person must be able to recognize them without thinking. My. You. Only. Once. From there, they get more complicated. Pretty. Laugh. Father. Mother. I am not sure why they are called “red words,” but I like thinking of them as angry, crimson, throbbing, because they frustrate our son so much.

I love knowing how it works, but the thing I’m ashamed to admit is that I find great relief in how much every child in his group struggles. There, where struggling is the norm, he fits right in. I always knew school was hard for him, but I had never had a chance to witness him excel.

We’ve not spent this much time together since he was a jovial, preverbal cuddlemonger in diapers. Now I know how hard he has to work just to achieve the kind of ease with words his siblings never struggled with at all. When I see the elaborate mimicry techniques he uses to mask his shame that he doesn’t read, using clever work-arounds like dictating text messages in order to avoid spelling or asking Siri to search the internet, I know that he will eventually work through it. Trust, trust, trust. Sometimes you have to say the same word many times before you truly comprehend it.