When I was in infant school they taught us to read. The phonetic method was used (I see in hindsight), so “can” is “c” for cat, “a” for apple, and “n” for night, and there you have it. It doesn’t work very well, but it’s a good start.
There we were, two dozen or so, and we are reading Janet and John out loud. “L-o-o-k J-a-n-e-t s-a-y-s J-o-h-n”. It doesn’t totally work but if you listen to yourself, you can work out most words. The story helps a lot of course.
Our teacher offered a gold star to the first person in the class who could read silently. I’m not a gold star person personally, and I was bored by it all. So to pass the time I stopped speaking and just pretended to be reading.
Wow big mistake! Up comes Teacher who says “Oh look class, Richard can read silently”. On the spot or what? From that time I couldn’t read out loud without being exposed as a fraud, and I more or less instantly found out I’d been able to read silently all along.
When we were very young
There we were, two dozen or so, and we are reading Janet and John out loud. “L-o-o-k J-a-n-e-t s-a-y-s J-o-h-n”. It doesn’t totally work but if you listen to yourself, you can work out most words. The story helps a lot of course.
Our teacher offered a gold star to the first person in the class who could read silently. I’m not a gold star person personally, and I was bored by it all. So to pass the time I stopped speaking and just pretended to be reading.
Wow big mistake! Up comes Teacher who says “Oh look class, Richard can read silently”. On the spot or what? From that time I couldn’t read out loud without being exposed as a fraud, and I more or less instantly found out I’d been able to read silently all along.
I’ve no idea what reminded me of this.