There’s more than one way to learn to read.  Actually what I mean is that there’s more than one way to read.  I think we’re pretty clear that there’s more than one way to learn.  But people actually read differently.  Some never get the hang of sounding out, for example.  Sylvia Ashton-Warner built a whole system of literacy teaching around choice and recognition of words.  Here’s a link to a post with an excerpt from her book Teacher as well as a lengthy bio.  The book is worth reading for anyone interested in learning of any kind for any reason.  Another related resource is Katie Johnson’s book Doing Words which describes the method she developed based on Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s work.

From Teacher: “Organic reading for beginners is not new; it’s our rejection of it that’s new.”

…makes the heart grow fonder, or so they say.  It can also make the plants seem like they’re growing faster, if you leave at the right time of year and the weather cooperates.

. … and 11 days later…   

Things can happen when/because you’re not micromanaging them.  My elation at the size of the plants upon my recent reminded me of that, along with something I heard on Radiolab some time ago.  The episode was about sleep, and in one of the segments,  Guilio Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Madison, talks about practicing and practicing and practicing a piece of music and never quite getting it right, until enlisting sleep as a learning tool, or maybe a learning catalyst.  He wakes up and the music is there, ready to play flawlessly.

It’s worth remembering, I think, that sometimes things happen when one is not hard at work at something. The brain’s working all the time, fussing around with what we’ve been doing, what we are doing, what we’re about to do, and it’s a lot easier to think that learning something is a simple cause and effect process that happens predictably and reliably with time and effort commensurate with the time spent.  It’s so much more complicated.  What might the implications be?

Have a listen to the Radiolab episode if you’re interested in the sleep stuff, and/or how it helps with learning.

I was trying out a typing program the other day and noticed that I had a lot of trouble typing series of letters that didn’t fit the patterns of English. I could fairly easily type something like daf, which followed an expectable consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, but I had trouble with the likes of fja. I’d consistently hit the a first, even when I knew perfectly well it was time for the j.  My left pinky was heading for it before I had a conscious opportunity to hold it back until I’d make it to the j.

I know perfectly well that the brain is capable of this sort of thing, but it never ceases to amaze me.

Yet another suggestion that things are not always as they seem. This reminds me of how many folks I’ve heard say that they can only focus on what someone’s saying if they don’t make eye contact, though we tend to assume it’s the opposite. Take a look at this summary of a study (published earlier this year in Applied Cognitive Psychology) about the effect of doodling on recall.