A lesson from my early years

Robert Louis Stevenson

Day 5 of my 50 day blog post challenge and gosh, am I already running out of things to say! It is really hard to know what will be of interest.  I guess the point of doing this was to give people some insight into my life and who I am after 50 years on the earth.  50 is a big milestone by any stretch of imagination - so what have I done for the last 50 years.  Perhaps I should start with that today.

From the top, aged 0-5: I cannot really recall anything about my life 0-5.  I learned to walk and talk.  I didn't learn to read.  I went to live in Kent. That about sums up my first five years.  I marvel at people who can remember their early life, the older I get, the more I seem to forget what happened previously.  What is your earliest memory?

Moving on, aged 5-10:  Not significantly more detail!  I still hadn't learned to read properly. I could do maths. I witnessed my older sister die in a horrific accident.  I had to do a lot of household chores because my father was away studying and mum had to work and rear four children alone. I can't say I enjoyed the chores. Indeed I hated them, what child wouldn't?   Given the choice between playing and working, if you are a kid (and I suspect the same is true for a great deal of adults) you are going to pick playing every time!

I can recall having to stay home from school one day because mum was ill and I had to look after her.  I resented that so much. I thought it was a colossal injustice and in that moment I hated her.  With hindsight I recognise the huge sacrifices she made for us.  Most of what I remember is the fun times we had growning up in Peckham.  And like everyone else I remember the weather as being always sunny during the summer!

Aged 10 – 15: finally learn to read properly! When I was 10.5 it was discovered that my reading was really very weak.  I think it was because I was allowed to do what I liked in school (some new age educational philosophy prevailing at the time which championed the rights of the child to self-determination in education, i.e. allowing the child to choose when and what they learned) and I liked artistic things, like painting and junk modelling, and maths.  Although I didn't like reading and writing as much as maths, because I was the best in the class at maths, I also wanted to be the best in the class at English (a born high achiever lol).

I noticed that the best readers read book 12a.  So I selected book 12a (or was it 12c) and told my teacher that it was the book I was on.  Now I couldn't actually read book 12a because I didn't have the basic reading skills/building bricks in place to be able to read it.  I hadn't gone through books 3 to 12a, which would have built my reading ability systematically- I had just leap frogged over the earlier levels, expecting to know what was at the end, without picking up the pieces along the way. 

Now sometimes in life this strategy actually works. There are times when it is possible to blag it - but this was not one of those occasions.  No foundation - no results! However being a creative solution focused strategist (I didn't think of myself as a creative solution focused strategist at age 10, I just knew how to wing it), I decided that the best strategy would be to watch and listen to other people reading book 12a and do as they did.  I learnt the first three pages of the book by heart simply by hearing others reading it and remembering the words.  Just why it didn't occur to me to simply go and learn to read properly I don't know.  Then again, I was 10. 

When it was my turn to read to the teacher, I would go and get my book and then she'd asked me what page I was on and I would turn to the pages that I had remembered and read or more accurately recite it!  The page I liked best was a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson and it was about a train travelling through the countryside.  What fascinated me most about it was the rhythm of the poem, which was written so that it mimicked the sound of old locomotive train, chuck-a-chuck chuck-a-chuck.  I think the old trains made this noise because of the motion of the steel bar which joined the wheels. I had memorised this poem so well that I could get through the whole page from memory.  Now either my teacher was very busy or very incompetent, because each time it was my turn to read to her, I would turn up with the same page and she never questioned why I had not made any progress.  Let's be kind and say she was busy, after all she had 30 pupils to hear read and we each got about 2 min once a month. (The education system has come a long way since those days...)

Luckily for me, my comeuppance was on the horizon.  There was a government literacy project, which was assessing children's reading ability and running summer school for children that were unable to read/poor readers so they could catch up. You couldn't fool them because they didn't get you to turn up with the book you wanted to read.  They gave you a standard reading test! Which, I obviously failed!  Or rather, I should say, that they assessed my reading age as that of a 6 year old.  Four years younger than my chronological age. 

I was sent to summer school where I learnt to read properly.  So jumping to the end without taking the steps in the middle can potentially be disastrous.  At some point I'm sure I would have learnt to read if I had not been discovered, however, the longer it went on unresolved the worse it would have been for me.

I would be lying if I said that this experience taught me the importance of always doing the groundwork before rushing to the end.  More accurately, I think I learnt that sometimes you can get away with skipping some of the steps and other times you can't.  The trick is, at the outset, to make a correct assessment of when you have to do all the work and when there's an effective shortcut.

What do you remember from your childhood and are there any lessons that you learnt that can be applied today?

Do you have a favourite piece of poetry?  I would love to read about it.

From a Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle All through the meadows the horses and cattle: All of the sights of the hill and the plain Fly as thick as driving rain; And ever again, in the wink of an eye, Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles, All by himself and gathering brambles; Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; And here is the green for stringing the daisies! Here is a cart runaway in the road Lumping along with man and load; And here is a mill, and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever!