Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss like you’ve never heard him before. This came from an interview published in an Arizona magazine in June 1981:
…They think I did it in twenty minutes. That d — ned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you’re reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway, they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can learn so many words in a week and that’s all. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme that’ll be the title of my book. (That’s genius at work.) I found “cat” and “hat” and I said, “The title will be The Cat in the Hat.”
excerpt from Samuel Blumenfeld’s Dyslexia: Man-Made Disease
ht to my friend Jenny B.
Just for the record, we have and love several Dr. Seuss books. We also have and love several thousand other books. This article doesn’t make me ready to pitch the easy readers, but maybe it does help explain a parent’s natural reluctance to read the same book 18,000 times in a row. Variety is good. Phonics is good.
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Thanks for sharing that…. I loved it!
Hm…I taught myself to read before starting school (I am 49 years old so that was quite some time ago!) I never developed any sort of dyslexia and in fact was generally if not always the best reader in the class throughout elementary school. I don’t ever remember not realizing that letters stood for sounds…I’t like to see more research on this.
I this in a “forward” e-mail message not to long ago:
Since many (most?) of us sight read you can probably figure this out. (If not see my post). I think this study might actually show that we can do this fun little trick because we were taught to read the word as a whole, not just that’s what the mind does. But maybe they were finding what they were looking for. (Yeah, I love those kind of studies.) Still, this is interesting, and makes a lot of sense. The mind is fascinating. I’d like to learn more.
I have been loving Dr. Seuss lately; my son is just getting old enough to love Hop on Pop and some others. I read only a few of his books when I was young, but I am branching out a bit more now, and I am amazed! His ABC book has such wonderful alliteration not only at the beginnings of words but also in the middles (”Barber baby bubbles and a bumblebee”). I was up for hours a few nights ago just thinking of his genius. The rhythm is superb too. I love reading something to my son that’s actually intelligent. I can’t handle some of the inane doggerel that we get from the dollar store for Christmas!
Kathryn,
It’s like the old saying: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime. Nobody argues that the man shouldn’t eat fish. The man might prefer that you hand him a fish so he can eat sooner. But the time spent in teaching him to fish is time well spent.
The point isn’t that we should never sight read; it’s that we should learn phonics first. Sight reading will naturally follow as our minds memorize the words, but it is important to be able to sound out and spell new words as we come across them.
Phonics might even take longer in the beginning, but so does fishing for your own food. ‘In all labor there is profit” (Proverbs 14:23).
We can give a child a word and she’ll read a page, or we can give her phonics and she’ll read anything at all.
Mrs. Mordecai,
I agree. I think that the Dr. Seuss books (at least, some of them) are well done and worth keeping. I just want to be careful not to allow affection for a particular book to lead to sight reading *instead* of phonics, and that seems to be a particular danger with Seuss books since they were crafted for that very purpose.
We’ll keep reading and loving The Cat in the Hat, The Foot Book, One Fish Two Fish, and others. And I’ll keep having my beginning readers sound out some of the words as we go.