IS
We have been over this. Daily. The fact that it’s not sinking in is a mystery as profound as the fact of Being itself. I point to the 2 letters and emphatically speak.
DAD: Is!
LUCY: Is!
DAD: Is!
LUCY: Is!
DAD: Is!
LUCY: Is!
She is now merely a parrot. I must distract her.
DAD: Let’s take a little break. GIRL! I am digging your hair. What is that? Lemons? Sunshine? Oh, I bet I know. Vinnie Van Gogh painted it when he was hearing the shiny yellow voices. Is Vinnie your stylist?
LUCY: No, it’s Mommy.
DAD: For serious? Mommy does your hair? Well, what does this word say?
She examines the word. She squints, trying to squeeze sound from letters. The word is an alien from some distant planet. A strange new being. No one before us has yet had the audacity to produce a word by joining these 2 letters. And yet it’s the same fucking word from 15 seconds ago.
LUCY: That’s an ‘I’. And an ‘S’.
In my mind I see Homer choking Bart. And then I hate Lucy’s Kindergarten teacher. YOU teach her how to spell 'IS', bitch. Then I think about strawberry licorice. That’s how I handle stress. We spend so much time teaching our kids individual letters and the sounds they make. It really is a huge leap, you know? Knowing 2 letters is one thing. But those 2 letters? How do they melt into a word?
Sex is a good metaphor. I am this ‘I’ and Jenna’s a curvy ‘S’. And then we fuck away our individuality until we’re this one big writhing IS. We is. But this is hardly age appropriate. And this is exactly why I’m not a Kindergarten teacher.
DAD: You’re right, honey. But this is ‘IS’. When ‘I’ and ‘S’ are together, they make ‘IS'. It’s like cake. You throw a bunch of eggs and milk and flour and sugar into a pan and that’s what they are. Eggs and milk and flour and sugar. But then after you bake them, they’re not eggs and milk and flour and sugar anymore. It’s cake. See? So after you bake ‘I’ and ‘S’, you get ‘IS’.
LUCY: But how’s all that stuff make cake?
And I don’t know. How the fuck do all those disparate ingredients form such a moist and delicious cake? I don’t know how letters join hands to make words. How did Jenna and I get our DNA all mixed up into this perplexing little girl? How does every single thing in the world fade into dusk and collapse in the dark?
Consider how effortlessly you’re reading this right now. It’s not like you’re sounding shit out. It’s just apprehended, all in one swooping flash. But how? Who knows? That’s just how it is. That’s the way everything is. You, your kitchen table, the tree in your front yard. The ‘I’ and the ‘S’ of what everything is just isses forth in all its issable issingenss.
DAD: I’m not a baker, sweetie. I don’t know how cake becomes cake. But I do know what this word IS. Do you know what this word IS?
She stares at it. I can tell she’s compelled to merely recite the letters again, but she doesn’t. She knows there’s something more. There’s something more but she doesn’t know what it is. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t either.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Reader Comments (31)
So...hi. Basically I'm intimidated by your coolness, but what the hell. Here goes.
I love this. I love that you thought of this while teaching your daughter to read, and I love that word you were struggling with was IS. Because IS? Held a lot of meaning here. (Much better than if the word was And or But or something.)
Laughing at the idea of you as a kindergarten teacher.
My hand to God "is" was a problem here too.
"What word IS this?"
"That... is... uh...uhm....uhh.."
"YOU JUST SAID IT!!"
"Whu?"
"IS!!!!!"
I had similar thoughts, the choking, how they learn, how this sight word business is supposed to help, I don't get it, but when he got it, when he got "is" I could have been the curvy S to anybodies I.
We is.
That's exactly what it's like. I can't believe I never saw the connection between sex and reading before.
I'd better get off the computer now or any chance of is with the hubby will becoma a was..
God, I remember this time when my youngest (who is now eight) was in kindergarten. I am a prolific reader and It just blew my mind when he just didn't get it. I think it was the word "has" that I repeated over and over like you did with "is." He eventually learned to sound out is and has but he still struggles with reading, and I'm told that "it" hasn't "clicked" yet. I, personally, think my son is an articulate genius who just happens to be illiterate.
My head is throbbing for you. I homeschool my kids (yes, I'm drinking wine every night now) so I get it. I GET IT. There are some fundamentals in our lives that we assume and cannot explain and yet? She'll get it. She will. Not without blood and sweat, for sure. But one day, I and S will simply become IS and you won't even realize it until it's too late.
Reading was so easy with my kids....they were each little linguists in their own right. It was the maths that sent us stumbling and drunken into thought-chaos. Making the leap between quarter as coinage and quarter as a unit of (many types of) measurement was hard at our house.
Damn, Sam. That's what I call a fruitful articulation of the problem.
Considering my daughter spelled chocolate "clit", I now know there is no way I should be responsible for our nation's future.
This was by far the best post I've read all week! I can completely relate to your frustration-- thanks for the laugh!
With such an articulate dad it can't be long before long Miss Lucy will be reading circles around all of us!
Didn't we hear this same issue from a past president? What is "IS'? Could this mean that Lucy is destined for greatness? Or at least the highest leadership position in the country?
You should definately teach adult literacy. I'd go just for the metaphores.
It was 'the' in our house that made us mental. What is 'the' anyway?
Let's get IS on.
She needs to learn phonetics - so she's not so much naming the letters and translating as seeing the word and hearing it as sounds.
Maybe Lucy just wants to wait and read later. Like at the end of first grade. Maybe her little brain doesn't want to deal with your insistence that these random letters have to squish togehter to be words. Maybe she just needs some time.
You know what boggles my mind about kids and their learning? It's how they have to learn to pay attention to that which is right in front of them. Their eyes are always ALWAYS pointed in some other direction other than the one that their bodies are moving. It's amazing.
Dude. Clearly she knows.
So when my daughter had the same trouble with the word "the" I wrote it on notecards and stuck it up all over the house where she'd see it. On the bathroom mirror when she brushed her teeth, on her bedroom door, etc. It worked and it kept me from killing her! I feel your pain!
I'm so wrong about this stuff - I'm always repeating the bub's wrong words in the hope that I can hold on to "mirrior" or whatnot a little longer....he keeps sounding things out, correcting himself. Damn them and their fucking insistence on growing up.
We don't need to be hammers on their brains. Damn No Child Left Behind: it's leaving the kids completely out, is what it's doing. The motherfucking pressure we put on a kindergartner!
I think that we have learning inside out. We need to see from the point of view of patterns that the kid is constructing in her mind, instead of creating our own external must-do-this curriculum for her. Build on what she knows.
Marie Clay, Constance Weaver, Donald Graves and Ken Goodman understand how thoughtfully we should instruct kids in reading, and they understand exactly how the kids come to it, too. If you get too stuck, they'll help.
I'm kindergarten teacher...who, incidentally, had the line, "I'll stir fry you in my wok" by the Beastie Boys stuck in my head this morning.
Your poetry kills me dead all the time, by the way.
Also, I'm a kindergarten teacher. Maybe I need to sound out a again 50 times to learn it properly.
I'm not saying that you're the hammer. The school, the district, the standards are hammers sometimes. Sometimes not.
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"It’s not like you’re sounding shit out."
Funniest bit of the whole post, though the sex-to-reading program did get my interest...
Maybe, right now Lucy is an Isn't. Is comes later, after the Isn'tness has been determined. That how it works with all the greatest Isses.
'Twill all fall into place at some point, don't worry.
Sometimes telling people stuff just doesn't work til they're ready.
My guy is helpless when it comes to translating letters into sounds and putting sounds together into words, and stringing words together into meaning. yet he has a growiong vocabulary of sight words, and when he reads, he reads in a conversational flow.
I think some people learn by fusion, not be fission.
She knows...Little A is exactly like that. Smart, smart, smart, far smarter than us, for she has us completely fooled into her lack of knowledge while she then turns around 20 minutes later and releases such gems as, "what in tarnation?"
And she despises Mi Lo Ki Lhan (am sure I have massacred the name), but she watches it with an angry face each day for 1/2 hour.
Why do you watch this if you don't like her, Little A?
'Cause she is smarter 'dan me, K? And I's gonna be smarter 'dan her and 'dan I won't be watchin' her no more, k? Please leave mommy. You's boderin' me.
She knows.
i have come back and read this post at least ten times. and it hits me every time.
maybe it's because i'm a parent and i'm wondering how the hell i'm supposed to do this job without fucking it up and how do i explain the why of things and when am i supposed to understand what the hell i'm doing? i still feel like i'm being tested in home ec, except i knew i would pass that class and that it was all make believe.
We are going through the same thing with my kindergarten-aged daughter. When does it just "click"? I wish I knew! Great post!
Holy Jesus.
Yes!!!
Same thing with my son. He knows I. He knows S. He doesn't intuite IS.
Also, I have yet to figure out how a Y makes a "y" sound. I have no answer as to why a "Y" doesn't make a "w". When he asked me that, I realized that he is onto something. Y is w. Y. Is. W. It is. Only ... it's not. I can not tell him otherwise. And he looks at me and it's as though he feels sorry for me, for believing something not true and being too stupid to know that Y is really w.