Author: Maryanne Wolf
Review by: Susie Sparks, Calgary Reads Volunteer Tutor
Human beings were never born to read….in order to learn to read we had to rearrange the very organization of our brains so significantly that we actually altered the intellectual evolution of our species.
Wolf opens with this very provocative statement and then expands her thesis with studies of brain science and with stories about emergent readers that all of us, as Calgary Reads staff and tutors, will recognize in the children we know. Every page offered me another aha! moment when I realized why some decoding strategies might work for one child but not another, and why some children – who are obviously brilliantly creative – have such struggles deciphering sounds and words.
She talks about the imagery that Proust used in his Remembrance of Things Past to illustrate how the brain stores and retrieves memories, and once again I saw how critically important it was for all of us to have had “beloved laps” that held us as we first heard nursery rhymes and learned children’s songs. Wolfe says that children who have the experience of beloved laps, where they first hear stories about fairy princesses and frightful dragons and wonderful adventures in far away places, will come to kindergarten with a rich repertoire of words and their contexts. Children who don’t have those experiences will come to kindergarten with a gap of about 32,000,000 spoken words that will distance them from their more linguistically advantaged school mates.
And finally, Wolf offers a cautionary discussion about the transition that all of us are having to make as we move from books to screens in this digital age. She says that Socrates was alarmed 2,000 years ago by the seeming permanence of written language, fearing that writing the language would discourage the search for truth beyond the word. She asks, will we lose the mysterious gift of time to think more deeply than the thoughts that came before? Will our reading brains, with all our capacity to be analytical, reflective, and inferential, be able to function effectively in the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the digital world? In other words, will we lose the ability to think critically?
Great questions to ask at your book club:
- What do you think of when you remember a beloved lap from your own childhood?
- Did that image change when you had your own children? How?
- Wolf talks about the 32 million spoken words that privileged children have heard by the time they enter kindergarten. They certainly didn’t all come from hearing bedtime stories, so how and where did those children pick them up?
- How do you think civilization changed after the development of reading?
- Why do think Socrates was reluctant to encourage students to read?
- Wolfe stresses the importance of metaphor. Why is metaphor important for a developing reader?
- Will we lose metaphor in the digital age? What could be the result of such a loss?
- Now that you understand dyslexia somewhat better, do you feel more or less confident about helping a dyslexic child learn to read?
- Is it immediately apparent to his teacher that a child might be dyslexic? What are the first signs in a young child and how early should there be intervention?
- Do you read material from the Internet differently than you do when you read a book? Why?
- Do you think civilization will change as a result of a transition to the digital era?
