There Are Many Ways to Skin A Cat
Lost Cats (courtesy of Liza Rahmat)
Teaching my Network Economy Class last Thursday night, I got an insight into how I might help my grandson Ben, who–although testing off the charts in math–is finding reading a real challenge. That night, we were discussing different approaches to the study of ‘economics,’ and what they might imply for policy making. I made the comparison between the neoclassical–or Walrasian– view, which equates the economy with the market, and conceives of economics as the means of optimizing outputs in the face of scarcity, and Karl Polanyi’s substantive view, which regards the economy as the entire realm of activity in which humans seek to meet their material needs. Whereas the neoclassical definition presumes that there is only one best way to optimize, Polanyi’s broad based definition suggests that there are, so to speak, many ways to skin a cat.
Tactile Art and Learning to Read (courtesy of Ann)
Of course, I thought to myself, so too there are many ways to learn to read!
So too there are many ways to learn to read!
Certainly, I am not new to reading issues. As my persistent poor spelling attests, I have always had a problem relating sounds to words. In fact, some say I write like I had a New Jersey accent. Fortunately for me, I went to grammar school in the forties, when sight reading was in vogue and Dick, Jane and Baby Sally were all the rage. Memorizing words by sight did not stifle my progress as many educators now claim. Whenever I encountered a word that I did not know, I took my father’s encouraging advice: “just substitute the world wheel barrel and move on,” he said.
Isn
It was not long before I advanced from Dick and Jane to the Nancy Drew series (much to my English teacher’s horror). By the age of 16, I was reading all the classics–Dickens, Austin, the Bronte sisters, etc. My biggest worry was not reading per se, but rather running out of books to read–a concern that continues to plague me, notwithstanding Amazon’s relentless suggestions.
Years later I discovered that my son Stephen (now a business consultant and PhD) was having problems similar to mine. Particularly troublesome to him were words containing the sounds th and wh. On the other hand, for him, words like just and next were easy to read. Pondering this curiosity, I realized that instead of relating sounds to words, Stephen was relating shapes to words. Unfortunately, however, the times had changed. Influenced by Rudolf Flesch‘s famous critique, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955), schools had eliminated sight reading in their curricula in favor of a pure phonics approach. Fearing that, if reading became especially difficult, Stephen might loose his enthusiasm for books, and all the pleasures they proffered, I tripled my efforts to read to him. So, we read wonderful books–books such as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s, The Black Arrow, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped ; Dicken’s David Cooperfield, and Great Expectations; as well as Lloyd Alexander’s series The Prydian Chronicle. The rewards were immense: several years later, my son call me from the University of Virginia to announce that he was majoring in English.
A few weeks before Christmas I called my daughter-in-law, Haley, to find out what kinds of presents my grandchildren, Ben and Sophie, might like. She casually mentioned that my grandson was struggling with phonics. In particular, he was having difficulty sounding out words that contained the consonants th and wh. My heart sank! As soon as I hung up the phone, I drove to our neighborhood bookstore, Politics and Prose in search of some good books. There were many to be sure, but my most successful purchase turned out to be a kit for reading and writing hieroglyphics.
Egyptian Hieroglyphics
This kit was a great hit at Christmas. More importantly, my grandson Ben used it to write his first letter to me. I can’t wait to get a kit of my own, and keep up the correspondence.
Reading and economics–it seems–have something in common: in both cases, there are many ways to skin a cat. As importantly, one size does not fit all.
