My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part Two.

Part One is here.

"What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds  that underlie the words.  Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished.  Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.  This is because meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed."

When Robert Frost talked about "the sound of sense," he meant that reading and writing, using language to transmit a thought, was a physical act.  We understand words by their sounds.  The sense of a poem is conveyed sensually.  We have to hear it to make sense of it.  If something doesn't sound right, it doesn't mean right---or mean anything.  You can't be a good poet or writer if you have a tin ear.

(The deaf have a different experience, but I would guess that they still feel words.  Maybe there's not  a sound of sense but a sensing of sense.  And Steve Kuusisto has an interesting post up at newcritics about how as a blind lover of literature he hears things in a poem sighted readers are, well, deaf to.  Walt Whitman, Steve says, had a lousy ear.)

We learn to use our language at the same time we are learning to sort out and make sense of the physical world we got dumped into without a manual or set of instructions.  Our first words are tied to the immediately physical, to things and actions, and are tools for helping us manipulate those things.  Talking is our first physical labor.  Naming things, saying them, is our way of taking hold of them.  The word and the object are physically connected by the sound.

Words that have no sound have no sense.  Make no sense.  My students who could not hear what they wrote and read were at a loss.  Words on a page did not connect to the real world or to themselves.

For most of my students, the ones who had been lucky enough to have had some one who read out loud to them when they were young and so helped connect spoken words to written words, the connection was severed just at the point when it should have been even more strongly reinforced.  Adults stopped reading out loud to them before they'd learned to really read and write.  Just about the time when they were ready to graduate from picture books to chapter books the grown-ups shut up their own copies and said, Now you are old enough to read it for yourself.  And when their teachers began to teach them to write sentences more complex than See Spot run, dealing with the written word became a more or less silent and private activity.  These children went off by themselves to read by themselves to themselves.   They sat at their desks and struggled, in silence, to turn out compositions that their teachers would read silently, later, and neither they nor the teacher would ever hear the sound of their words.  By the time they reached my class, words on a page barely whispered to them, if they made any noise in their heads at all.  All writing was something done instead of and apart from speaking.

If I'd been a true scholar I'd have studied this.  I'd have conducted surveys and researched current pedagogic theories and practices.  Maybe I'd have published a few papers, gotten a book out of it.  But I was a young teacher in a hurry and I saw this as a problem that needed to be dealt with right then and there and not as an opportunity to build an academic career on.  I was impatient and short-sighted is what I was.  I decided to try to fix things and set out to reconnect the sight of their written words with the sounds and I did this the only way I could think of because it is the only way to do it.  I had them reading out loud.

Whatever we studied or discussed, poems, passages from essay, their own work, we read it first.  I didn't ask for volunteers.  I just pointed.  If I asked a question and you answered it, you had to be ready to read to the class the paragraph or the verse you were talking about.  When they'd written their second drafts, I broke them up into small groups that I called editorial boards (each one organized around one of the better writers in the class, although I never pointed that out) and they helped each other with the next revision by reading over, out loud, what worked and what didn't.  My classrooms were pleasantly noisy places.  Colleagues who passed by the door would ask me later what was going on.  "It sounds like you're having a party in there."

I don't know how much good this approach did.  There were problems with it.  Not every student can read well out loud or wants to.  Telling students to write like they talked was all well and good, provided they thought first about what they were talking about, and just because they could talk about something better than they could write about it, that didn't mean they were all born orators and storytellers.  Without careful questioning and tactful prompting they could be just as vague and dull and grammatically- and lexiconally-challenged when they talked as when they wrote.  But it did some good.  It brought the language back to life for them.  It made them interested in the sound of their own voices.  It forced them to focus on specific examples when they set out to make a point.  It made class a lot more fun than it would have been if the only sound they heard was my voice droning on about grammar and usage.  And most of them left the class with at least one poem in their head and heart that had moved them in some way.

Whatever good it did them, it suited me and made teaching more enjoyable, and that fact has often made me wonder how much it really was the case that I was on to something useful and how much it was just the case that I was rationalizing my own fun and games.  Then the other day I was reading Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer and I came across something that made me hopeful that I hadn't been just fooling around.

Young Abe Lincoln, as we all know, loved learning and he loved books.  But out on the frontiers of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, where he grew up, books were scarce, and formal schooling a rare luxury.  Lincoln was in and out of schools, never completing a whole year at any one, and it's hard to say that when he was done he'd had even the equivalent of a fifth grade education.  Most of what Lincoln knew he taught himself, and that included how, beyond the basics, to read and write, and he taught himself how to do that by reciting.

And he often recited from memory.  One of the ways he made up for the lack of books he owned was to memorize the ones he could borrow.  He'd commit favorite passages, chapters, poems, speeches, entire essays to memory and when he needed to he'd recite, sometimes to himself, often to anyone he could make stand around an listen.  It was not an unusual sight, wherever his family happened to be living, to see the tall, gangly, squeaky-voiced boy, normally a shy and quiet and solitary type, standing on a stump or sitting on a fence and delivering a speech by his political idol Henry Clay or a soliloquy from Shakespeare to a crowd of playmates or curious and amused adults.

Around he time he turned fourteen, Lincoln immersed himself in a couple of anthologies he found among his step-mother's small but prized collection of books, Lindley Murray's The English Reader and William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, Or, a a Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Verse.  Kaplan writes:

Both equate, as William Scott does on his title page, "READING and SPEAKING."  Scott placed emphasis on reading aloud, a practice Lincoln had already adopted.  From the start, reading seemed to him an aspect of oral performance, the words enunciated in the theater of his own head or aloud to himself or to family and schoolmates.  Public recitation as a teaching device emphasized the connection.  The repetition that Lincoln believed facilitated comprehension also promoted memorization.  "Abe could Easily learn & long remember and when he did learn anything he learned it well and thoroughly," his stepmother recalled.  "What he learned he stowed away in his memory...repeated over & over & over again till it was...fixed firmly & permanently..."  He developed an anthology of the mind, independent of whether he had the actual book in hand.  "My mind is like a piece of steel," he later remarked, "very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible once you get it there to rub it out."

The man who wrote, and said:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Was the boy who amused himself as he did his chores by reciting:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
  And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Lincoln was Lincoln, and what worked for a self-taught genius may not have any application for us ordinary mortals, but one of Kaplan's points is that Lincoln made himself Lincoln through his reading and writing, through his love for and careful use of the English language, and for Lincoln words were physical things, they had a sound, and through their sounds they made sense, they were meant to be heard.

I don't know if there was a Lincoln among my students.  If there turns out to have been, I'm not going to take credit for her success.  All I'm hoping is that somewhere out there are some people who love the sounds of words and appreciate the connection between the sounds they make and sense they convey and, if they are teachers, they're passing that along to their students, and if they're not teaching they're making use of it in courtrooms and newsrooms and town meetings or in the theaters of their own minds, and that all of them are reading out loud to their kids.

__________________________

The other President from Illinois:  I suppose I should write "one of the other Presidents from Illinois" since, technically, Ronald Reagan counts.  In fact, he was born there and Lincoln and Obama weren't.  But you know what I mean.

President Obama clearly relishes the connection between the spoken word and the written one.  So I hope there'll be a lot of reading out loud in this new course at Ohio State, Barack Obama and/as Literature.  The reading list is made up of some of the President's favorite books and includes, naturally, a collection of the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln.

Hat-tip to Gabrielle David at Rabble Rouser's Forum.

Comments

[policomic]

Lance:

As a college teacher--currently teaching freshman comp. at a community college--I want to thank you for providing some much-needed inspiration. I too have observed the strange disconnection between my students' ability to speak and their inability to write clearly. I constantly urge them to read their own work out loud, but it's hard for me to get them to take that advice seriously. You've reinforced the importance of the connection between oral and written language, and give me some ideas about how to push my students to see it, too.

[Ken Muldrew]

Lance wrote, "Whatever good it did them, it suited me and made teaching more enjoyable, and that fact has often made me wonder how much it really was the case that I was on to something useful and how much it was just the case that I was rationalizing my own fun and games."

That is how it is supposed to work! Follow your curiosity wherever it leads and you will find something worthwhile. Altruistic academics who put in 15 hours of hard labor each day trying to do good for society are all very honorable and virtuous, but they are not creative. They are god's own chosen ones, but they are not the folks to look to for the creation of knowledge and understanding. But the people having fun, now there are some people with interesting ideas!

[Nancy Nall]

Nicely stated, Lance. I shall aloud read to my child this very evening.

[gray lensman]

I was born in 12/1941 and my mother read to me and my father from many books and the newspaper in the 40's and fifties. I would sit in her lap and follow along so avidly that I was reading the easier Sunday comics by the age of three and a half. We moved a lot in those early years (five first grades) and my early reading skills made up for always being the "new kid on the block". I also listened to the kids' programs on radio and that sharpened my ear for language. I still prefer radio and reading. My wife and I haven't watched teevee at all for more than seventeen years. We often read to each other from many kinds of books. I heartily agree with President Obama's mantra "turn off the television".

[Linkmeister]

This made me think of Mayor LaGuardia reading the funnies to the children of NYC during a newspaper strike in the 1940s.

[Lance]

policomic, I'm glad to have helped out. Good luck, and let me know how it goes. And I heartily recommend Kaplan's book, for your own pleasure and inspiration.

Nance, your kid will still sit still to listen to you read? Lucky. I miss reading to our guys. They love listening to recorded books, though.

[Kevin Wolf]

I'm glad someone made the connection to radio; I was thinking along the same lines.

Lance (and gray lensman), I don't know if this was a generational shift that happened across the board, but my Dad had to memorize certain poems and other literature when in school, and he can still recite a lot of it (In Flanders Field; the start of The Canterbury Tales, in olde English) while I never had to memorize anything beyond the multiplication tables and certain dates in history class. I can see that perhaps this change was not beneficial.

[Ronzoni Rigatoni]

Heinrich Schleimann, the discoverer of Troy, claimed that the gajillion languages he knew he learned by reading them aloud. Took him six months, it was claimed.

I, too, was fortunate that, as a toddler, everybody read aloud to me, and, yep, I was reading the funnies myself by 3 1/2. A great way to go as the language inflections were illustrated along with the dialogue (BAM! Ka-POW!) making it easier to detect the tone of voice.

I was required to memorize many pomes, but only one stuck, called "Ain't Nature Grand", written sometime in the 1920's by a mere High School student IIRC:

'Twas an autumn day in springtime.
The rain was snowing down.
The noise was very quiet
In the wheatfields of the town.

A Turtle in the treetops
Was warbling loud and clear,
While the butterflies were singing
In the Pretty river near.

The ladybugs were playing tag
Beneath the sunny shade,
While the squirrels were squeezing oranges
To make some lemonade.

The daffodills and hyacinths
Were running to and fro.
This may not sound like logic,
But it isn't, 'cause it's so.

Wish I knew the real source of this. It doesn't seem possible that a mere HS student could write it, much less one who knew what "logic" was LOL.

[Rana]

We had to memorize a poem in high school (I chose one by Walter de la Mare) and I remember memorizing The Darkling Thrush and Jabberwocky in college after our Russian teacher expressed her shock and horror that none of us could recite anything in English (let alone in Russian). The Darkling Thrush maps quite nicely onto the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," it turns out.