Liturgy and Phonics - But Won't They Be Bored?

Note: I know some of my readers are not religious. In the beginning, this is going to seem like it is a post about religion, but it isn't. I just sometimes have insights from different parts of my life that relate to education, and this is one of those times.

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I have attended a liturgical church for two and a half years. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not I would do that, I would say, "I appreciate ceremony and tradition, but I don't think I want to go where they say the same things every week. That seems like it would get dry and boring." Well, I would have been wrong.

As it turns out, repeating the same thing every week makes it so firmly planted in long term memory that I don't have to think about remembering the next line and can truly focus on the meaning of the text. And depending on what is happening in my life on any given week, some part of the text might be more salient than others on that day. "Give this day our daily bread" is likely to stand out during times of financial stress, but "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" is likely to be more meaningful during a time of strained relationship. During the week of the Artemis II mission, "Creator of heave and earth, all that is - seen and unseen" jumped out of the creed in a different way, but in a different week, "He has spoken through the prophets" might take that spot.  

All of that is to say that what I thought might be boring before I experienced it was anything but once I was doing it on a regular basis.

Our brains crave two seemingly opposing things - novelty and familiarity. It's why we want new movies and tv shows, but we also seek out reruns, remakes, reboots, and sequels, particularly during stressful times.

When it comes to learning, we live in the tension of the new and the familiar as well. We can only learn new things in the context of their relationship to what we already know. And that's anything but boring. It is how the new knowledge attaches the old neural patterns, creating something psychology calls schema. 

"What does this have to do with phonics?" I hear you asking. I'm so glad you did. Before I address that, I do need to point out that I am not a reading teacher. I taught middle and high school students. But I have read a fair amount about the reading wars, have talked to elementary school teachers, and remember much about my own experience of learning to read. 

A big part of the push away from phonics and toward the whole language and 3-cueing models came about because adults thought kids would be bored by phonics. (They did the same thing, to everyone's detriment with math facts, but I'll leave that for another post.) 

This is not my memory at all. Phonics, like anything else, can be taught in a boring way. But it lends itself well to song and chants and hand motions and all the other ways we teach things to small children, none of which are boring. Phonics was tied to my existing schema with the "as in"chants you might remember (e.g. "A says aa-aa-aa as in apple. B says buh, buh, buh as in bell."). Those things help fulfill our craving for familiarity and allow the new knowledge to attach to something we know.

Chanting that would be boring to an adult because we are TOO familiar with it; we aren't attaching anything new, just repeating the old.  But to a child, this is the perfect blend of novelty and familiarity. 

It also opens the world of reading to them, which we have forgotten is magical. We have done it for so long that we see it only as a way of getting information, but for a child that is first learning to read, they now realize the world is bigger than they previously knew, and that could never be boring to them. It's been a while since I listened to the Sold a Story podcast, but there was a moment that stayed with me. I believe it is in the last episode, but I could be wrong about that. The daughter in the piece is finally able to decode words rather than faking herself out with cueing. The interviewer is talking to the dad, but you can hear the daughter in the background say, "WOW! This is amazing!" 

Now, I know from talking to elementary school teachers and from reading that there is more to reading that decoding. Of course there is. Because I am not a reading teacher, this post is not meant to address any of those things.  What I do know is that none of that stuff is possible if a child can't decode. 

My point is that an adult should not presume to know what a child will be bored by any more than I should have presumed that liturgy would be dry. Children aren't short adults; their minds work differently than ours do. It's important we remember that, or we will teach in ineffective ways without any good reason to do so.

Book Recommendation - Two Sides of The Moon

I haven't had nearly as much time to read this summer as I read last summer.  As I spent time writing a book for my physics class (more on that later), I realized it was taking a lot more time than I had planned, so I put my reading books to the side.  That said, I did complete a few other than my required reading for school, and I want to share one of them with you.

Two years ago, I read Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire because my students often ask whether he was upset that he didn't get to walk on the moon after traveling all the way there.  I had owned the book for several years in a set including books by Armstrong and Aldrin as well but had not yet read it, so I did.  (For the record, he doesn't seem to hold any resentment about being the guy to stay in the capsule even though he acknowledges that anyone would have liked to have been in the other position.)  This year, it occurred to me that other astronauts of that time had probably written books as well.

As all of my students know, my favorite astronaut is Dave Scott, so I began my search with his name.  I'm so glad that I did because Amazon returned with this little gem.  It is called Two Sides of the Moon.  If you are an average consumer of NASA history, these two names may not mean much to you.  Dave Scott was a Gemini astronaut; he and Neil Armstrong performed the first docking in space.  He was also the commander of Apollo 15, and by then America had become bored with the moon (I do not understand that at all).  Alexei Leonov was a Russian cosmonaut, and I'm not sure any American can name one of those (maybe, maybe Yuri Gagarin, but I doubt most would know him).

This book is written by both men separately.  It alternates back and forth from the child of Alexei to the childhood of Dave.  Then it tells about Alexei's pilot training days, then Dave's.  You get the idea.  What I found compelling was that these were just guys doing their jobs.  They weren't political figures engaged in a global chess match, and they didn't see themselves that way.  They were guys who found jobs that they loved and wanted to do them well.

In reading this book, I also learned a few things I didn't know before.  Alexei trained as an artist and wanted to pursue that as a career, but he couldn't afford the school he got into.  He never gave it up and took crayons with him into space because he knew there would be moments words could not capture.  I learned the Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash.  I learned the Dave Scott left a falcon feather, a clover, and Bible on the moon to represent the fauna, flora, and culture of Earth.  I learned that several American astronauts met and had drinks with several Russian cosmonauts on several occasions.  I knew already about the Apollo Soyuz joint mission, but I was delighted to learn the Deke Slayton actually finally got to fly on it.  (That will only matter to hard core space geeks; so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't feel bad.)

Both men write in the very straightforward style you might expect from military men telling a story.  They don't get flowery with vocabulary or make any attempt to present themselves as the final word on anything.  They touch on the politics of the Cold War, but they don't dwell on it.  Both speak with a lot of respect for the program in the other country and what they were able to accomplish.  They tell you what happened and what they thought about it.  That's it.

If you are a space nerd, like me, you should read this book.  If you like learning about history from a first person perspective, you should read this book.  If you want to know more about the Apollo program that we landed once (some of my students are surprised to learn we landed six times), you should read this book.  You will walk away with more respect for the people of the Russian program and may find the Dave Scott is also your favorite astronaut.