We had no books at home. No magazines or newspapers. Nothing to read, except maybe the words on a cereal box. This literacy lacuna was filled one afternoon in the most serendipitous way.
I was walking with my brothers and sisters through a small wood that was adjacent to our yard. We came upon a clearing, and in that clearing was a shack, a crude structure without doors or windows. No child can resist such an exotic attraction and neither could we. Though we never saw strangers in the woods around our property, still we knew these people existed, so we approached the mysterious shack cautiously.
Shack: Adapted from LIL Gallery Images
Credit @redheadpei, Building; @doriangel Forest Scene; @redheadpei Red Roof
Our reward was rich and immediate. Besides spiders, moss and mold we found a trove of comic books. Strewn about the floor in piles, the comic covers beckoned. There we found Superman, Archie, Spiderman. I'd never seen a comic book before. In short order we had collected the books that were not moldy and carried them back to our house.
It was the start of summer recess. For the rest of the summer I would spend nights and rainy days reading the comics. When I'd read them all I'd start over. My favorites were the Archie comics. Veronica, Jughead, Betty--these characters all came to life for me.
I had just finished the third grade. Reading was a new adventure. For the first and second grades reading skills had eluded me. When I entered the third grade, as my teacher wrote to my mother, I was 'doing poorly'.
That teacher was Mrs. Birdsall and she wrote the note in November. Mrs. Birdsall was a remarkable woman. I can see her now on the playground, with her skirt billowing about her tall, thin frame. I can see her in front of the blackboard, illustrating why some words take a double consonant when adding a suffix and some words don't.
"The short vowel is weak, and needs protection from the 'ing' monster, so it doubles the consonant. The long vowel is strong and can defend itself against the monster 'ing'."
To this day I remember the 'monster' lesson. Mrs. Birdsall used logic to reach her students. She taught me phonics. It was the first time anyone explained to me that words could be logical. Logic works really well with me. It's my language. It's the reason I would fall in love with geometry one day. It's the reason I excelled at sentence diagramming in middle school.
Mrs. Birdsall not only spoke my language, but she did so with empathy. Before I entered her class I had lost interest in school. It was a dark place I was forced to go each day, a kind of prison sentence. I didn't care what was going on most of the time.
When I graduated from Mrs. Birdsall's class, I was at the head of my grade. I remember walking into the classroom in June and interrupting the two first grade teachers as they reviewed the final reading scores. They both looked at me in amazement because I had tied with one other student for highest score.
But then I went home for the summer, with nothing to read, nothing to reinforce my new skill. This is why the shack was a miracle, the kind of miracle that influences the course of a life.
It's hard to say which was a more powerful factor in my academic progress--Mrs. Birdsall or the comics. Probably Mrs. Birdsall, but together these two elements set me on a path that led to success, to college scholarships, to a productive work life.
Would I even be on Hive, if I hadn't met Mrs. Birdsall and if I hadn't spent a whole summer reading? It's hard to see how that would have happened. It was a critical moment in my education.
Acquiring reading skill and reading fluency has discernible effects on the brain. It is associated with an increase in grey matter volume. It also correlates with enhanced development of areas critical to analysis and higher executive function.
There is no question that with my new skills, my performance in school overall improved dramatically. Was this because my brain was working better, or because I had more tools with which to tackle school work? Impossible to say. What is certain is that reading made the difference.
The prompt that inspired me to write this piece is 'influence'. Many events and people have positively influenced my life. My mother above all else, of course. My uncle John and Aunt Anna. My many dear cousins. My brothers and sisters. But it's hard to find one moment, one nexus upon which the rest of my life seemed to depend, except for that moment when I learned to read.
I thank Mrs. Birdsall for being a great teacher, and I thank whomever it was that left all those comics. Wherever you are, I hope your fortunes improved as mine did with your anonymous gift.
I thank the Inkwell staff for offering an evocative prompt. I also thank @redheadpei and @doriangel from the LMAC community for contributing the lovely pictures that went into making my shack illustration.
Finally, I'd like to acknowledge an article from National Institutes of Health from which I cited information about reading and brain development