“What are Little boys Made of?”
- Author:
Ellen M. Jarden,
University of Pennsijlvania. I never asked Herbert that question, but had I done so, I feel sure that he would have slid down in his clothes till his collar crawled up over his ears like a snail’s shell, then violently shaken his head. He always did this if he did not want to bother to think of an answer. When he realty did not know the answer, and knew he had the right not to know it, he gave me a straight “Dunno.” But if he thought it was a question to which I would say, “Oh, Herbert, you surely know that!” Or if I in any way appealed to his sense of humor, ho turned himself into a shell fish. And I would be forced to hold his shell open with more words and explanations, until he could come out again and decide that he did know that “y” went down and “h” went up. It was not that Herbert, aged thirteen and in the fourth grade, seriously had to consider the relative positions of the parts that extend from these two letters. No, the problem was a weightier one than that. The point that troubled him was whether he was going to initiate me into his secrets, and let me know that he was aware of such a slight and insignificant matter. For Herbert considered reading an art too trivial for his attention.
And why should Herbert want to read, when the world is so full of other things for him to do? But Herbert did not care for the other things either.
“But,” I said to him, “you want to read the titles when you go to the movies.”
Herbert shook his head. “I don’t go very often.” Under ordinary circumstances I would have congratulated myself on discovering one of a species I thought extinct. But as it was I was forced to discard what had promised to be a potent goad. “Do you like baseball stories, Herbert?”
“Some.” “Do you want to be a carpenter like your father?” “Not much.” There was but one question remaining, “What do you like?” Herbert shifted as if I had pointed a gun at him. “Aw?I like mechanics.” At last, one shot had gone home. “Then wouldn’t you like to read about engines, and learn how to build them?” (138) “WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS MADE OF?” 139 “Not as mucli as I’d like to drive a car.” I realized I was defeated. Nothing in Herbert’s life seemed to be touched by literature. But even though I had found no break in his defence, I had discovered two things “boys are made of.” One is reticence about themselves and what they know. Another is an ambition, foreign to us, perhaps, but strong in them, and this ambition they follow blindly.
In these, and in other respects of appearance and character, Herbert was plain boy. His clothes did not indicate that he came from a poor family. They were ordinary in color, and clean. On the contrary, his hands were unnatural in color, and dirty. His face, at times, was distinguished by gashes and cuts. Otherwise it was so sunburned I could not tell whether the complexion was healthy or sickly. His cap shaded his features almost entirely, even when he stuffed it with paper to keep it off his nose. He once showed me a silver pencil he had found on the street. Of this he seemed to be very proud. When I had assigned him a lesson he pulled a paper, greatly crumpled, from his pocket. Nothing else came out with it, but I could imagine grime and bacon fat dripping from it. He had an amiable disposition; I never saw him aroused by anything. But he occasionally evidenced a sense of humor. One day we sounded “skinny.” It took us almost half an hour. To my surprise, when the word in all its beauty and significance burst upon Herbert, he did not frown at me, nor hasten on, but laughed. He almost giggled, and repeated the word again and again. It served as a humorous touchstone for the rest of the lesson. One quality in Herbert seemed typical. He slouched, physically and mentally. He did not brace his shoulders and meet the world, but slid around the corners of life. He did not do anything vigorously, but ate a bit and played in the dirt a bit, “a little scrubbed boy.”
However, this was only part of a clue why Herbert could not? or did a still small voice whisper “would not”?read. I turned to the tests and the examination for assistance. Herbert is the oldest of five children. A brother and sister, respective^ one and two years younger, are in the Fourth Grade with Herbert. Billy, aged six, is in the Second Grade. Herbert has been through a fairly complete roll of diseases and fractures, which may account for his repeating the third and fourth years in school. Up to this year he attended a parochial school. His mother thought he did not learn because the school was overcrowded, so this year he was sent to the public school. The report is he is doing better. However, the change had been too recent at the time of the examination to tell whether the difficulty was in the instruction or inherent in the boy.
He told me that he liked the performance tests, and he did well in them. He did the Witmer Formboard in 34, 21, and 14 seconds, in the respective trials. The comment is “Good discrimination.” This is particularly significant. In his reading I had found it greatly otherwise. Now it became fairly evident it was a matter of interest. In the cylinders, completed in 97 and 41 seconds, he made two errors the first time, but corrected them. Healy B was solved in 58 seconds the first time, but the time was reduced to 25 seconds on the second trial. There were two things in the tests that were suggestive of a possible imagery defect. He needed three exposures for the double chevron, and took 60 seconds to do the Healy A the second trial, although he had done it in 56 at first. Two months later I followed this up, and tested Herbert on the stripe and double stripe. Before he did these, he made the double chevron for me from memory, and his time in my two tests was 35 and 50 seconds. I concluded therefore, that the difficulty was in poor attention, of which Herbert was at times guilty.
In the Binet tests he did not do so well. This was to be expected, for here language is needed rather than intelligence. His basal age was ten. He fell down on vocabulary and failed the dissected sentences, which he could not read. Altogether he made 11, and an I. Q. of 83.5. This is not so significant when it is considered that he only has Fourth Grade school proficiency, which means that his language ability does not exceed that of a modal nine year old. His mother had brought him to the clinic, and was designated on our record “housewife.” So I went to see what influence she had on Herbert. I ploughed across a muddy stretch, where they were cutting a road, and came to Herbert’s street. Two-story brick houses marched neatly down each side. Herbert’s house was one of those that had glass porches. After I rang the bell some moving about took place inside. During this time I observed the untidy porch, where a broken kiddy car held the center of the stage. At length a little girl opened the door. Pier hair was uncombed. She had almost scuffed her shoes to shreds. Her dress was both ragged and dirty. However, she gave me a friendly smile when I asked for her mother, and showed me into the sitting-room. From the parts of the rug that still bordered the holes, I could guess it had been rather gaudy than rich. Almost all the varnish had rubbed off the floor. The furniture split and gaped. Yet around the room stood various ornaments and pictures more or less expensive, while in the dining-room beyond I could see a beautiful fern.
“WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS MADE OF?” 141 The mother came in and greeted me. She held a pair of trousers which she was mending in one hand, and a sticky baby clung to the other. When she heard who I was she called Herbert. He clattered down stairs, gave me an embarrassed grin and sank into the nearest chair, which gave a doleful squeak. His mother corrected him for this at intervals during her conversation with me. She opened her heart to me.
“I don’t see why Herbert can’t read. The other children can. I thought it was his school. It was so crowded. The day I was there I just seen he couldn’t learn anything. But when I took him away he told me it was his own fault he didn’t learn. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘it isn’t sister’s fault. She was all right. I just wouldn’t learn myself.’ (Have you had your breakfast, Charles?) Well, anyway he’s working harder now. He wants to get a nine this month. He likes his teacher too.”
Here I managed to insert a question as to why Herbert had been absent several weeks.
“Oh, Herbert felt so bad about that. It was my fault. You see, I was making a coat for Sarah here, and my sister had promised to help me. So I went out there the day Herbert was to go back to the clinic, and I forgot to remind him. lhen he was scared to go back. Don’t do that, son.”
The chair had protested again.
At this point Sarah, who had left the room, re-entered with the coat in question, and also a hat and dress. When she had put the outer garments on I was amazed at the transformation. I could not ask for a brighter, more attractive looking child. She was almost a fairy-tale princess in the slovenly room. When I had sufficiently admired the clothes, and she had departed to put them away, I asked the mother how she helped Herbert with his reading. She told me that she had him read aloud to her, much as he disliked it. She then enlarged on Herbert’s ability to fix locks and the vacuum sweeper. Herbert accompanied these tales with fidgetings and broad grins. When I left I decided that although Herbert’s home conditions were not ideal, they were encouraging. His mother was evidently doing her best to help him, even though she lacked all notions of pedagogy.
However, this defect in his mother was, I think, a drawback to Herbert’s progress. I tried to tell her what elements she should remind him of, and what errors she should guard against, but I lound it was, to her, so much “buzz.” This was rather serious, if Herbert practiced wrong reading with her. He had not learned thoroughly, and his mixed elements enabled him to read some hard “words and stumble over easy ones. If he saw a word he knew in combination, it meant nothing to him. He knew words, yet had 3io idea how or why he knew them. He frequently got words by spelling them, when he did not recognize them as they stood. Phonics seemed almost impossible for him. When he came to a new word he sounded it according to the na?nes of the letters. He was unable to transfer the same construction from one word to another, or the same sound from one group of letters to another. It took him almost an hour to learn that wood and would were alike, in pronunciation. His memory was retentive when properly motivated, but his attention was so poor and mechanical that it was difficult at times to tell whether he understood or was merely a well-behaved parrot. When he read without supervision he slipped over words and was very inaccurate. This was where I doubted the wisdom of his mother’s assistance. When he read in school he was watched. But at home he could read anything, and pile more bad habits on top of the ones that had already proved his undoing.
I had almost decided to abandon the phonic method with Herbert when he suddenly showed improvement. He had not seemed to understand the idea at all. Then he began to be able to build words from sounds. He worked hard for several lessons, and when he left me, although he was not proficient, he knew what to do. He had particular difficulty with w, which he called d, and y which he called w. This, it seemed to me, pointed very definitely to early lack of training. When will schools and parents learn that first observations and earliest teachings are of paramount importance, and not accept the common fallacy: “This school is good enough while he is young. We will send him to a better one later!” I could not but enjoy the subtlety of Herbert’s method in approaching his task. He never read beyond the first letter of a word until his imagination was exhausted. If he had only acquired a vocabulary, he could have discarded reading entirely. His peculiar ability lay in inventing different meanings for the same sentence. His sentences were always meaningful, and he usually comprehended what he read. To be sure, when I held him strictly to all errors, we might have stood for a scene in Shakespeare:
Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words.
But when he tripped it on the fantastic toe of his own interpretation, he leaped from a hawk to a handsaw, with scarcely a period between.
“WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS MADE OFi” 143
When I told Herbert that he had improved so much he would not have to come any more, he did not seem overjoyed. I enlarged upon his good work, and assured him if he kept it up he would soon be reading well.
Herbert stuck out his chin: “Nobody can’t teach me to read, because I don’t want to learn.”
Ah, Herbert, you have diagnosed the case. It is useless to explain that the reason you do not like it is because your training formed wrong habits, which are harder to break every year. The trouble is with us now, and explanations do not help. The solution lies in Herbert’s own will to forge ahead, until the day when he wakes up to the world that reading opens to him.
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