Tom Scocca at Slate has an post examining Tina Brown’s gift for stoking the ever-flickering terrors behind Rich People Problems:
Parents of small children! Is your preschooler able to read and write already? If you just nodded “yes,” with a little flicker of pride and satisfaction—well, Tina Brown’s Newsweek has a revelation for you. The April 18 issue presents an extract from a new memoir by Priscilla Gilman, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy. In the essay, Gilman shares the harrowing story of her son Benjamin, who learned to read too soon.
__
That’s right. At age 2 1/2, when he was able to spell words, recite poetry from memory, and put numbers in order, Benjamin flunked a preschool entrance exam—suffering, Gilman discovered, from the disorder called hyperlexia.
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It’s not enough to worry about dyslexia. What if your child has gone too far the other way, and is too good at reading?
[…] __
But hyperlexia turns out to be the rare prospective condition that gets less scary when you start looking it up on the Internet. Beyond being a symptom of (or trait associated with) serious cases of autism—where it goes along with the more familiar problems, as it did for Benjamin—”hyperlexia” can also be invoked when a child learns to read early, loves numbers, and is kind of standoffish and awkward and high-strung.
__
Early reading, that is, can also be a symptom that your child is part of the range of human variety that used to be known—back when it was stigmatized but not yet widely pathologized—as “nerdy.” Or, in an older term, “bookish.”
I have reason to remember an earlier wave of this particular childhood-development fad. At the end of the 1950s, a child who learned to read before reaching first grade was supposed to be hopelessly damaging its normal social development. So for the indeterminate-yet-endless period between my earliest conscious memories and my first day at parochial school, I was engaged in an ongoing battle with my extremely bookish, yet Dr.-Spock-obsessed mother: I thought I could read (not just picture books, but her collection of Andrew Lang fairy tales), and she insisted that I couldn’t (but had an amazing facility for “recognizing” text I’d never seen before). After my first day with Sister Jane Edwards — who, in retrospect, was far too busy dealing single-handedly with 54 five-to-seven-year-olds to worry about such refinements as social development — I came home, read the entire Dick and Jane pre-reader to my mother, and asked, “Now can I read?”
“Yes, of course! Now you are reading!”
(Shortly thereafter, I started reading my father’s sf paperbacks, starting with Groff Conklin short-story collections. But that’s another story.)
From everything I’ve experienced in the ensuing fifty years, I know I’m far from the only hyperlexia “victim” who went on to live a mostly harmless geeky but unremarkable life. And I believe we’re overrepresented here on the internets. Come of out the library closet, fellow hyperlexics…
Woodrowfan
My Mom was a 1st grade teacher so I learned to read pretty quickly. My clearest memory of reading in primary school was the teacher’s frustration when she called on me to read aloud because I had already read ahead to see how the story ended. and yeah, my Dad’s copies of Analog were a treasure trove for a geeky little boy who loved books…
and why am I not surprised that in the US being smart is increasingly seen as a disability?
Spaghetti Lee
The horror! The horror!
Kristine
::raises hand::
My Mom read to me from infancy until I started reading for myself. I don’t recall when I started picking out my own books, but by the time I was in grade school, I was hitting the adult section of the library. Mom and Dad both worked, so during the summer I spent the days with my grandparents. Grandma would pack me a lunch when I arrived, and Grandpa would drop me off at the public library, where I would spend the day.
Grew up to be a scientist/science fiction writer/nerd yeah OK fine.
Ruckus
Try having both hyperlexia and dyslexia
arguingwithsignposts
Tina Brown is an idiot. And Newsweek will soon die a deserved death as the pablum-spewing weekly newsmag crap that it is (wait, let me guess, there’s an illustration of Jeebus on the cover this week?)
And all my children were reading before pre-k, as was I.
CJ
I suffered so much as a child I would read in the bathroom. Such an afflicting condition.
peej
I knew how to read before I entered kindergarten. My older sister trotted me before her 3rd grade teacher who didn’t believe I could read…and I demonstrated my proficiency. Yeah, I grew up to be a nerd. But at least I’m a nerd on the correct side of the political spectrum!
PurpleGirl
I didn’t read early but once I did learn, I never stopped. I’m another SF geek/nerd somewhat social misfit. My earliest reading interest was Ancient Egypt and other cultures of the middle east, followed by history in general. I loved the “colored” fairy tale books. I discovered SF in 7th grade.
Ruckus
@Kristine:
Mom got pissed off because they would not give me an adult card at about ten because of some of the books I might read. I remember her comment: You have a kid who wants to read and learn and you tell him no? What the hell kind of people are you?
Got the card. And got to read stuff that I wouldn’t understand for a few years. But it sure didn’t seem to hurt me at all. Just had things stashed away that I got to figure out later.
AT
Bascially it goes, it’s hard having a child who’s so awesome and developed. Did i get that right?
http://twitter.com/#!/humblebrag
Martin
I went to a Waldorf school for a while after starting at a regular public school. Waldorf at the time (and I believe still do) recommend not learning to read until the 2nd grade. The thinking was that learning to read too early causes kids to become too structured in their thinking too early on.
Given the state of students getting handed off to college who are by and large quite strong academically, but who are increasingly horrible at critical and imaginative thinking, I’m more steadily coming of the opinion that Waldorf is correct in their goal, even as I’m completely uncertain of their method. It’s truly astonishing how unimaginative this generation is when it comes to problem solving. Maybe too much standardized testing, or standardized curriculum, but something needs to give.
PurpleGirl
FYWP… not letting me edit my comment….
ETA: I would spend most of Saturday at the library, reading there and also bringing home a stack of books. When I was old enough to travel to Manhattan — wow, museums and more libraries. Geek heaven
Corner Stone
I confidently predict this thread will not become a circle jerk of geeky self-congrats.
JGabriel
AnneLaurie @ Top:
Oh yeah. Reading by the age of 3, and I pretty much fit the rest of the description too, I suppose. Never heard it described as “hyperlexia” though.
.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I think you have it backwards. If you start reading early you get the chance to see a hell of a lot more info and ways of doing things. I think it challenges you to actually learn to think for yourself. Because the school would not teach me how to read I taught myself. Of course because I’m dyslexic that made things harder. But the school sure didn’t do any better with other dyslexic kids.
JGabriel
@Woodrowfan:
In the US, it kind of is.
.
Anne Laurie
@Ruckus:
You, too?
Fortunately, one advantage to reading early & often is that words can be memorized, eventually. Numbers, now — strings of numbers are my downfall. I hate ‘must include digits’ passwords with the passion of ten thousand Twihards!
Kristine
@Ruckus: Oh yeah. I read a lot of New Wave SF in the late 60s/early 70s that I didn’t have a hope in hell of understanding. Years later, I would recall a passage or story description and think “Oh–that’s what that meant.”
The only time I got in trouble for reading something gamy was when I tucked a book about psychiatric case studies–the cover was rather lurid–inside of another book. My mom caught me and said that I was to never sneak a book. I would read it openly or not at all.
My Mom honestly was a prude, bless her soul. But she hated the idea of me hiding things from her more than she disliked me reading about sex. As for my Dad, nothing fazed him. He took me to the R-rated movies because he said those were the ones with the best plots. I saw a lot of war and gangster films as a young’un.
mcd410x
OMG … introverts … run!!
arguingwithsignposts
This is slightly OT, but perhaps the greatest band press release evah (NPR link, via The Somebody)
stuckinred
I was a swell reader and read stuff like “Street Rod” by Henry Gregor Felsen. Reading book about hot rods was a great way for a juvenile delinquent to hone his skills.
mcd410x
If you didn’t see it, here’s a great article on introverts. Every manager, teacher, etc., should read this.
Bill
I learned to read very very early, about 3yo, I think, and I do not suffer from a lack of imagination, nor do I lack problem-solving skills. Rather the opposite, actually.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
I have no memory of not being able to read. My mother says I walked into the kitchen and read out listings from TV Guide at the age of 3yo. Thanks, Sesame Street!
pragmatism
2 and a half. Family story is that I told someone I could read and he didn’t believe me so I picked up a magazine and it. High strungitude runs in my family.
Kristine
@mcd410x: Best article ever. I have it saved.
stuckinred
Cars and Death, the Novels of Henry Gregor Felsen.
Anne Laurie
@JGabriel:
It was a Proud Rallying Cry in sf fandom in the 1980s, percolating through IIRC from the Mensa people. Of course, some of those out’n’proud hyperlexics would probably be labelled as mildly Aspergers if they were in primary school today.
Emma
I drove my great-uncle bananas until he taught me to read. At two, give or take a couple of months. But since he hated children’s books, he taught me to read from the Odyssey. And the Martian Chronicles. According to my mother it was either teaching me to read, or strangling me.
jwb
@Corner Stone: Love the passive-aggressive hall monitor schtick!
Jager
The first day of first grade our teacher playfully asked, “can any of you write your name”? A bunch of kid’s could do that, then she asked “any other words you know and can spell”? Kids marched up to the board and scratched out, cat, dog, mommy, daddy, etc. I wrote “to be continued”.
Maude
@stuckinred:
Tell me you didn’t have a chemistry set.
There’s a move to get four year olds to read Stuart Litttle. They want to get rid of most picture books. Nasty creatures.
RossInDetroit
I started reading at a normal age and have read a great deal in 50 years. It helps to have basically ignored TV since 1975 and spent the time on books. Not all well spent. I read a lot of what I now see is trashy fiction and a waste of time.
I still can’t write for shit, though.
Kristine
@pragmatism: I couldn’t read at 2, but I could recite the alphabet. Again, my grandparents–same ones who took me to the library years later–took care of me while my folks worked. My grandfather would say that he was taking me for a ride. Instead, he took me to bars and bet his buddies that I could recite the alphabet. He drank for free for a while until my folks found out what was going on.
Martin
@Ruckus:
Maybe. But the problem is that it seems like they’ve seen too many ways of doing things. They’re so busy trying to work out how to fit the peg in the hole, working through all the ways that they’ve already seen, they can’t see that a solution is to make the hole bigger – something that they’ve not seen. They need imagination, not knowledge.
Omnes Omnibus
I started reading in school. My thing was that I preferred to have someone read to me because I could picture what was happening like a movie playing in my head and I couldn’t read fast enough to my own to have that happen. By third grade, my reading speed was such that I could get the movies on my own and I started simply devouring books. By the beginning of fourth grade, I had an 11th grade reading level. Things spiraled from there.
stuckinred
@Maude: No but we loved to go to TJ and buy real fireworks, M-80’s Silver Salutes and all kinds of ordinance. My old man never forgot the great sea battles in the Pacific and we would do our best to recreate them in the Puente Hills!
RossInDetroit
I can now admit that I read Sartor Resartus and it was years before I found out it’s not actually about clothes at all.
Tim F.
Hells yeah. My parents stopped reading to me when I got too persistent abot correcting them when they skipped a line. I more or less grew up in the Oakland and Squirrel Hill branches of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh.
And yeah, blogging does select for that kind of person.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
My sister and I both started reading between 3 and 4 years old, and my daughter was doing it before she was 5, and we’re all pretty well-adjusted people. Shit, give me a class full of those kids any time. I’d love to have them.
Litlebritdifrnt
I was blessed with a mother that surrounded herself with books, therefore I ate them up as a child. I was way ahead of my peers in my classes, and demanded as a stroppy five year old to be learning cursive when my classmates were learning their ABCs. I admit to a point blindness when it came to maths, ugh I hated numbers, but I absolutely adored words. I still do.
stuckinred
You can’t believe fireworks were so prevalent in the 50’s? Check this shot from Glendale (where’s Mildred)?
Oops, off topic!
abo gato
Yay for us! I don’t remember when I began to read, but read I did, and with a vengeance. I do have a vivid memory of going to the school library in second grade and taking H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” to the librarian to check out. She quizzed me about checking it out. I can remember how it looked too, a small, squat book that had a solid yellow cover and it was maybe 6 inches by 4 inches and at least 2 inches thick. I brought it back a couple of days later and she quizzed me again about what I read. She never gave me any shit again. And this was back in the same time frame that Anne Laurie is talking about.
And, like her, I also read all of my father’s SF…..he belonged to the SF book club and all those books showed up at our house. I read every one of them. I loved that era of SF. Those truly, were the days.
Woodrowfan
OK, now I gotta tell my wife what made me laugh on the computer..
Woodrowfan
I could read before I was born! Yep, my Mom had a reading womb! (rimshot)
RossInDetroit
Here’s a strange thing about reading. As an adult I had a bad concussion. For a while, I would look at a page and not recognize the words. The letters were a jumble of nonsense I couldn’t understand. But if I scanned the text I could kind of understand what it was about. Like listening to a radio broadcast in a foreign language and getting the gist of it while not knowing the words.
That seriously weirded me out. Then I got better.
Gozer
I’d say I’m fairly well-adjusted (though somewhat grammatically challenged sometimes) given that I was reading by age 3. I used to read my aunt’s college biology texts by 1st grade. That made religion class in Catholic School oh so much fun.
I think my favorite word is “demerit”.
MikeJ
@Martin:
Yeah, and how the on earth would you get that from a book?
boatboy_srq
Oh yeah, I’m in the club. Reading at 3ish, reading well above grade level by 6, doing math above grade level by 7 (earliest I remember). Consistently grasping literary and mathematical concepts ahead of the class. I think I turned out – well, maybe not “normal,” but certainly well-adjusted. I do have a relation or two that didn’t do so well with real life (being embedded in scholarship) but that’s an entirely different tale, involving many factors besides education.
In spite of all this, I got a real taste of international competition as an undergrad. I took a year overseas and, after two years’ work in my major, I was hard pressed to keep up with my classmates, who were fresh out of their secondary schools and starting their first year of university.
How can we POSSIBLY be having this debate alongside the argument that our students aren’t keeping up with the rest of the world? Is being more socialised of higher value than being sufficiently educated to compete in the global marketplace? I keep meeting members of the younger generation taught by adherents to educational principles at least similar to how Martin describes Waldorf, who after sixteen years of education are less literate, less numerate – and less capable – than many of my peers on graduating high school. I cannot blame that condition on starting young people on their educational paths too early. Woodrowfan is right: it’s unspeakable that the same nation that whines about the deficiencies of its school systems would treat intellectual precociousness as some sort of malaise.
Oh, and yes, I’m a product of the schools of the 70s and undergrad of the 80s.
Corner Stone
@jwb: I’ll take the hall monitor jab but you can long walk/short pier the schtick part.
Jager
@stuckinred: When I was a little grade school turd the boys next door were duck tailed hotrodders, they gave me all their old issues of Hot Rod, Custom Cars, Street Rod and all the rest. By the time I was in the 3rd grade I was convinced I could easily chop, channel and then drop a small block Chevy in a 32 Ford Coupe on my own. Too bad the old man didn’t agree!
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@jwb: Take it easy on Cornerstone. I have it on good authority he moves his lips when he reads. Even with the simplest text, like, say, Astros box scores (mostly zeroes).
Maude
@stuckinred:
Oh and wouldn’t that set off hissy fits now.
It’s a great picture.
OT.
Skepticat
I never knew it was a problem or that it had a name. I could read and write before I was three, though I didn’t realize it was unusual, and I suppose that has something to do with the fact that I made my living as a writer. And now I have an excuse for my standoffish, awkward personality too!
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
To this day numbers are not a problem, if I see them. If you tell me your phone number I will get it wrong by reversing at least 2 of the numerals. Twenty five years ago I could remember all the numbers from blueprints for 4-5 projects. Correctly. As long as I read them. I still have to read as I type otherwise I switch letters all the time. Autospell is my savior. And I have to write slower than I can move the pen as otherwise I will do the same thing.
boatboy_srq
@Martin:
I would suggest that the problem you’re describing is something instilled far later than preschool/primary/elementary education. What little exposure I have to modern middle/HS curricula (I have no children, but I know several teachers and have worked with a few school districts) points to a system disinterested in nurturing imagination and far too obsessed with grade point averages and the standardised test regimens we now employ. I’ve even heard from friends applying for graduate school that their (substantial and diverse) undergrad records are insignificant compared with their GREs when it comes to admissions. If we’re training our youth to be knowledgeable and not imaginative, it seems to me that we’re doing that a lot later in the process than preschool.
Rosali
The article doesn’t reference income levels. Did I miss the part that says that only rich people’s kids learn how to read at an early age?
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Those were my favorites too. Whoever he was, he had a knack for picking good ones.
stuckinred
@Jager: Great! Felsen’s books were really important to a certain subculture and, since I wrote the first post, I found his son’s site where he is selling reprints. Too cool. Thanks Anne, you sent me off on another trip.
boatboy_srq
@Anne Laurie: I’m with you there as well. I feel (never diagnosed) mildly dyscalcic: words are fine, but numbers get mixed up sometimes. And I work in I.T. If you think phone numbers are hard, try dealing with IP addresses all day long.
RobertB
I wouldn’t read (pun not intended) too much into the Slate article. It’s just their typical double-reverse Slate bullshit.
Comrade Javamanphil
My daughter went from 0-60 in about a week with reading just after her 5th birthday. She was into chapter books within a week and read the 2nd Harry Potter book in a day while in Kindergarten. In our rural town at the time it became a problem as the teachers ignored her and just let her free read during class time. We’ve move, skipped her a grade and things are much better. She’s in tenth grade now and devouring Les Mis.
Ruckus
@Martin:
And getting to read early and often helps grow that natural imagination. Stifling learning stifles imagination. It tells kids that want to learn that they are not smart enough to do so. When so many clearly are. And then in public school forced boredom sets in. And then despair at being forced to be in school to supposedly learn and then be told you are too stupid.
Martin
@MikeJ: Well, books are someone else’s imagination, not yours. And while they are appealing to imaginative people, I also serves to focus that imagination, not expand it.
@boatboy_srq: Could well be. I’m not blaming early reading, just noting that at least one school of thought is that early reading is detrimental in that way. It certainly could all be happening later, but I don’t doubt that it’s happening.
WereBear (itouch)
I was three.
I still remember my horror upon arriving in school and opening an officially issued book, and discovering IT HAD NO WORDS.
Ruckus
@RossInDetroit:
That’s actually how a lot of people read. They take in whole sections of text as a picture and break it down, sometimes throwing away the words like the, that, as, which frequently only add to the readability not the understandability.
Martin
@Ruckus: Reading is not a prerequisite to learning, BTW. In fact, reading is quite commonly used as a substitute for more experiential learning, which in many contexts (or for certain learning types) is more effective.
Anne Laurie
@Rosali:
Of course not (my parents were working class), but IMO only ‘Rich People’ have the spare time & money to
humble-bragworry about whether their kids are ‘too smart’. Of course those people are Tina Brown’s target demographic, which is why she slanted the original article the way she did.scav
And where’s the line for the real problem is trying to treat and teach all children the exact same way?
MikeJ
@Martin:
Not my experience at all. I grew up near the Mississippi river and reading Mark Twain gave me a lot more to imagine. Heck reading the Hardy boys made me wonder about the smugglers of pirates cove or the pirates of smugglers cove.
Jay C
Another veteran of the same era, A.L.; I also learned to read before going to first grade, and what you have tidily diagnosed
53 yearsquite a while later affected me in the same way. My folks decided that, me being literate already, wouldn’t be happy in public school (our town’s school system was nationally famous even then: it was, I guess the practice of the times to phase in the kids’ reading skills over several years) – and sent me to one of the weirder private schools in L.A. Which experience did change my life. To weird.Strange days…..
Jager
@stuckinred: Speaking of fireworks my best pal in grade school,John Gault(with a U asshole) and I used to tape small diameter copper tubes to the handle bars of our bikes, insert pop bottle rockets in the tubes, clench a punk in our teeth and ride off searching for targets…5th grade girls were very soft targets indeed. One night I hit a chubby kid in the middle of his back, it looked like the bombing of Dresden! It was very cool to save a supply of rockets for months after the 4th and then “raid” our part of town when most of the dweebs had forgotten what rotten little bastards we were. And no, I have never told my Grandsons this story and won’t.
jwb
@Anne Laurie: It certainly sounds like something that Bobo would worry about, although he would make such worry into a sign for why the rich deserve their place in society.
boatboy_srq
@Martin: Having a theory to explain a particular phenomenon does not necessarily impart accuracy to that theory. There is at least one school of thought that insists the earth is 6000 years old and flat as a pancake. They have numerous adherents and multiple published works supporting their theory. Does all that support and pseudoscholarship make them right?
Jay C
Add to # 71
But maybe I wasn’t strictly “hyperlexic” – no “skill with numbers” – I was virtually innumerate as a kid; and still am pretty much, without a calculator.
Couldn’t edit my comment. FYWPVM.
stuckinred
@Jager: Hell yes! One of the reasons I never had kids is so I never have to bullshit around!
Arundel
It really is a peril. I mostly taught myself to read by age 4, some sort of “jump” happened. Reading Ladybird children’s tales bought in Ireland. Yet I’m an unhappy loser today. Related? Whatever, I still love my books. Oh Tina, it’s hardly a problem.
Martin
@MikeJ: Actually, you’re proving my point. You’re expanding Twains imagination. Why were you wondering about the pirates of smugglers cove and not the four-headed aliens that live in the sun? Your imagination was being structured by what you read – narrowed. That’s not bad because you certainly do learn that way and it does feed an active imagination, but it doesn’t expand your imagination. How much truly ground breaking science fiction comes out vs. how much is old stories and concepts with a paint job? That’s imagination being narrowed, not expanded.
RossInDetroit
@Jay C:
I was insecure about how ‘behind’ I was in math so I forced myself to practice all the time. I probably shouldn’t have worried but I did come up with some useful ways to do algebra in my head.
Ruckus
@Martin: Of course it’s not a prereq to learning. You learn to read, you learn to think, you learn math(and if you are real good they will actually teach you to think in math), you learn to drive, you can learn to shoot, repair cars and other things, all without reading. But with reading you learn that people have imaginations and can use them for things besides daydreaming. You learn about other people. Without reading your circle of learning is rather small.
I’ll give you an example. Used to work with a black man who would be about 65-70 now. He grew up in Louisiana and had to drop out of school in the 4th grade to help support his family. At about 30 yrs old he could barely read, add and subtract. It took 2 of us about one month part time to teach him trig. The other guy never got better than a D in HS math but was a wiz with trig. This man was not stupid in any sense of the word, just under-educated. That’s what not teaching kids to read when they are ready is. It’s under-educating them. And if you look in other parts of the world it is so obvious as to be almost criminal that we do it the way we do. Notice no one here including you is saying don’t teach people to read. What we are saying is why the hell wait? We have just here on this blog much evidence that it is not necessary. Look around and see that exactly the opposite is our experience. There is much more evidence in the rest of the world.
Omnes Omnibus
@boatboy_srq:
@Martin:
You both appear to have ended up literate, so perhaps there isn’t a perfect age to learn to read. As I noted above, I did not start reading until school; my mother was a teacher and that was the fashion of the time. I was read to, a lot, and used my imagination to picture the stories. I also found that reading assignments in school were stultifying; my own books and those I picked out from the library were always more interesting.
Phoebe
@Martin: I think what they need is someone not telling them what to read, or what to think about what they’ve read. And, I venture, not telling them not to read.
I also can’t remember not reading (although I do remember not knowing how many sticks came out of a capital E, and just putting so many it looked like a comb, to be on the safe side), and while I can’t say what sort of imagination I’d have if that had been delayed, nobody has ever accused me of having no imagination, ever.
And of course reading is somebody else’s story. We’re all surrounded by somebody else’s story as soon as we pop out the womb. Books are just another form of it. And books — especially the fantasy ones like the Oz books did, for me — take you somewhere else and show you a possible other way of being/doing that has you question things when you’re done. And finding other ways to solve problems, as a result.
Corner Stone
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Hey! Uncool! We’re winning this one at The Mets!
Game over bitchez!!
Jager
@stuckinred: I remember reading Tom McCahill’s review of the original Chrysler 300 and the Mexican Lincolns in Popular Mechanics, liked old Tom much better than Floyd Clymer in Popular Science, when I was 9 and 10 I figured Tom and I could be pals.
Phoebe
@Martin:
What’s an alien? Oh yeah, that thing I saw in a movie. Look, your imagination, like your dreams, uses what it finds in the closet. Why does it matter how it got there?
Kristine
@Martin:
Boy, I don’t see it that way at all. In my experience, imagination doesn’t develop on its own. There are triggers. Sometimes it’s a personal experience, but other times it’s something you read or see, someone else’s construct that you build on or use as a starting point for your own ideas.
Reading stories written by others never locked me in. It opened doors, and sometimes blew out walls and windows.
MattR
@Corner Stone: You act as if that is an accomplishment.
Judas Escargot
Asperger(‘s):Hyperlexia :: Radiohead:Coldplay.
chris
@Kristine:
O/T but I had never heard of your series until right now. Just kindled Code of Conduct..I loved Cassandra Kresov? (Joel Shepherd) and scifi female protags in general. Looking forward to reading here in a few mins after I peruse the thread.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Corner Stone: My Pale Hose have dropped 7 in a row. Lashing out. Someone was gonna get cut.
Corner Stone
@MattR: Taking anything we can get yo. A 4 – 3 squeaker with Hunter Pence hitting a solo blast to go back ahead, then a failed bunt for a DP to wipe the Mets’ fastest guy off the bases…I’m fracking taking it.
RossInDetroit
Julian Jaynes wrote (approximately) that the sequential structure of language is the basis for logical thought, and not the other way around. I wonder if the logical faculties of people who aren’t trained from a young age to speak and read sequentially are different. I suppose there would be many other differences because of the lack of socialization due to not communicating.
I have an ad at the bottom of my page for a natural ADD/ADHD cure. How did they find us?
Ruckus
@Martin:
Do you think that human progress comes in bunches to a few people all of a sudden with no outside influence?
It does not.
It comes slowly building upon what has happened before. Science sometimes gets ahead of itself and something can’t be proved or disproved until others figure out a missing piece.
Engineering builds upon mistakes and leaning what has happened before.
Imagination builds upon what is in your brain already. If you don’t put things in you can’t develop new things.
And if you stifle reading you stifle the development of the tools in your brain to add to what is out there.
If none of the above is correct then the world would not have improvements. Is a car, plane, phone, computer, movies today better than 50yrs ago? These are arguable examples but I’ll bet that most would say they are. They come from imaginations that something could be made better. And they built upon what others have done.
I don’t get why you are arguing about this. I’m sure there are examples of people who were not ready to read or learn or drive a car or drink alcohol or whatever when the rest of the world was ready but at the same time there are many who are ready much earlier. But in this country we work to the lowest common denominator and it brings down the entire country. We do that so we won’t have class distinctions, everyone is equal. Of course it’s bullshit, everyone does not have even equal opportunity and we certainly have class distinctions here.
ruemara
I don’t get this article. Who couldn’t read at 3? This happens?
schrodinger's cat
I don’t remember when I started to read. I could read two and write in two languages by the time I was 6. I was reading Dickens and other classics by the time I was 10. I could speak 4 languages by the time I was 7, now I can only speak 2. I have actually regressed as I have grown older. I am not dyslexic but still confuse right and left and am notoriously bad at directions.
S. cerevisiae
I read pretty well for a one-celled organism.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Don’t forget to take the flowers to Algernon.
Arclite
@CJ:
My 3rd grade daughter reads a couple of novels a day. She reads at a 5th grade level, and yeah, she takes 20m in the bathroom each time she goes…
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
Martin
I’m not trying to pick on you, this has been a deal with me for over 50 yrs. I have taught many people many things, from programing machine tools in the early 70’s to novice motorcycle racing. One thing I discovered long ago was that without teaching the basic tools of whatever you are trying to teach, you will not progress very far or fast. I’m sure that imagination can be enhanced by instruction without reading. That sounds like what you received. Most of us did not get that nor was it in anyway available. We had to develop this on our own and the only way to do that involved reading. It’s a basic tool.
Omnes Omnibus
Interestingly, or not, everyone seems to be arguing in favor of learning to read at the age that they themselves learned to do it.
Kristine
@chris: Thanks for letting me know–I hope you enjoy Code.
I met Joel years ago at a Worldcon. He’s a nice guy.
Phoebe
@Ruckus: I agree with all that. I suspect that the Waldorf people have a point somewhere, but that Martin is leaving out some crucial stuff.
There are these two kids who live across the alley from me, little brothers of kids I know. I think they are 3 and 4. One of them barely talks, and his favorite thing to do is dig. He has a little trowel and he’s made a moonscape of his mom’s back yard. So he was over at mine the other day, and I snuck up behind him and heard him muttering nonstop as he put these pollen-covered knobs of something that came from a tree in a pile with his non-trowel hand, and I think he was doing something that I used to do, which is make up stories with sticks and rocks (an idea I stole from “Harriet the Spy”, ha ha) and he was completely immersed in this world.
His brother is very chatty but has this emotional fixation on the movie Spiderman 3 — I know, the lousy one, right? — to the point where if he goes too long between showings, he cries. And he doesn’t want to see any other movie. I know kids like repetition, and I also think it helps them learn, the repetition, but I definitely worry more about the Spiderman kid than I do about the digger, possibly for some Waldorf-related reason, or maybe because I just hated Spiderman 3.
But I do think the digger is interacting with the world and getting more out of it because of the interaction, even in a patch of dirt, than the kid who is watching the same exact movie again and again. I don’t know.
suzanne
I was reading “young adult” books by four and some adult novels by grade school. I read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in first grade.
Between that and the fact that I didn’t have younger family members, I had a very warped sense of what is normal. I didn’t realize my older daughter is in the 99th percentile for verbal proficiency because I thought it was normal for six-year-olds to read “Harry Potter”. I didn’t really, truly understand how gifted she is until I saw some of her dumbass (yeah, I said it) classmates.
Hilariously, she is now getting up from the dinner table to go read. She reads a lot of “Magic Treehouse” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and the like because the content is age-appropriate, even though the writing is beneath what she likes to read. She finishes the damn things in under an hour.
Arclite
@Martin:
I had a coworker who went only to Waldorf. He was exceptionally bright and so fast at figuring stuff out when presented with a technical problem. However, he was a terrible communicator, and couldn’t write at all in a coherent manner in a job that required it.
I think America has a better balance than, say, much of Asia with their almost total emphasis on placement tests dampens their creativity and inventiveness, but unfortunately, I see us moving in that direction.
Arclite
@PurpleGirl:
Right mouse click on “Click to Edit”, and select: Open link in new tab. Make your changes, save, and wait for the Successful message. Close the tab and refresh the original comment thread. That should work.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I thought Algernon would prefer cheese. Seriously though, I knew so many different languages when I was growing up because I grew up in India and most kids I grew up with bi or trilingual. Now I only speak English.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I see what you did there.
Actually I’m arguing that we should teach kids to read at the time they are ready. For many that is years before we start learning to read in school. And it’s because school says we are not ready or smart enough.
@scav:
And where’s the line for the real problem is trying to treat and teach all children the exact same way?
This is the real question.
Omnes Omnibus
@S. cerevisiae: I am most impressed by your typing skills.
Captain C
@Corner Stone: It doesn’t count unless you’re beating an actual Major League team.
Captain C, Mets fan
(Gonna be a long year…)
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Eh, my son and I did things at different times in our young lives. I don’t think of it as good or bad.
Corner Stone
@Captain C: Huh, long year. We’ve got a 2 and 1/2 man starting rotation and a 50 year old starting in Left Field. Our power hitter may get 30 HR’s this season.
If we get down by more than 2 runs in any game we can hang it up.
cckids
@Omnes Omnibus: I have to say, there is a difference between those who read early/young by themselves, and those who read early through some enforced method of teaching. If you just gotta read & teach yourself, that expands your imagination tremendously. If you are force-fed phonics, the alphabet, etc, it has a deadening effect on your imagination as well as your willingness to read.
I had a real battle with my son’s kindergarten teacher; she was way too pushy, especially for my little introvert/perfectionist. When he found a book he HAD to read, he took off & was reading at a 5th grade level within 2 months. (yes, since he’s 18 now, of course it was Harry Potter.)
My daughter, on the other hand, took after me, and was reading well before kindergarten. We both need to read like we need to breathe. Thank gods she’s older now, there’s nothing like a first grader reading at an 11th grade level to make you do a bit of censoring. Good books, even with some “inappropriate” themes? ok, fine. Trashy novels? No, you have plenty of time for those later.
MattR
@Corner Stone: Your strongest argument is that you were only able to score 4 runs against the Mets ;)
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: Whatever happened to the coffee we were supposed to have?
Omnes Omnibus
@cckids: I also think that there is a greater emphasis on early reading now than there was in the late 60s-early 70s when I, and I suspect Martin also, was starting school.
Mnemosyne
Am I the only one here who went to Montessori? I don’t think it had much to do with me being an early reader (as others have said, I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read) but it did encourage me to pursue it because I enjoyed it and didn’t cram me into a box.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
When I was three or four, I got hold of my mother’s guide to child psychology – and started displaying the symptoms of each disorder in alphabetical order as I worked through it. No, I’m not kidding.
Apparently the switch from the Oedipal Complex to Paranoia was particularly funny.
Gina
@Arclite: I’m not a fan of Waldorf at all, for many reasons. Google “anthroposophy”, that’s one aspect.
In my area, there’s a popular Waldorf private school, and many of the homeschoolers I know from co-ops I’ve been in were former Waldorf families. The anti-intellectualism coupled with the eurocentric fairytale nonsense and crappy handmade craft focus really leaves me cold. (I know, how would you ever guess from my description).
My oldest was recognizing symbols very early, by the time he was 15 months he made a game out of identifying various car makes and models when we were out driving. He was very exact, knew Honda from Toyota from Hyundai, and each model within the brand as well. He demanded, at age 4, that I teach him to read “everything”, and got frustrated at the slow pace of “Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons”. We bailed at 52. He was very motivated on his own, and I have tons of books at kid and adult levels. I also always have the television on using closed captioning – it was originally because the kid was so damned noisy I couldn’t understand TV without it, but later I noticed that he was picking up reading from it. He’s 12 now, and off the charts as far as reading ability since kindergarten.
The Waldorf-tards in our circle were uniformly negative about this, and expressed that this was vastly inferior to their method, predicting dire outcomes. I also got static for letting him wear black clothes, as the color is supposedly to harsh for children’s psyche or soul. Waldorf schools don’t like black crayons (seriously).
The particular school most of them are affiliated with has a noxious history of teachers being abusive, and a stinky little culture of bullying among the students. Given Steiner’s ideas about race, and ranking “brown” people as lower than Europeans, I am not impressed.
Omnes Omnibus
Okay, who read encyclopedias for fun? (If any of the sub-30 year olds makes a snide remark about google, etc., I will drive to your house and hurt you.)
Corner Stone
@schrodinger’s cat: Yes, I had some SOB’s from Hong Kong come in and really wreck my plans for a while. Actually, they were pretty nice people so it wasn’t so bad.
I’m totally down for it. Somewhere I can fly non-stop from Hobby or IAH?
Gina
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: My only question is “are there any home movies of this period?”
Corner Stone
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
You went from thinking your dad was trying to kill you to thinking everyone was trying to kill you?
Darkrose
I learned to read when I was around two. Aside from the part where I wanted to read rather than do anything else, it never caused a problem. My parents loved it, because books were easy to get and in the ’70’s and early ’80’s, they were cheap.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Preparation for the real world.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i’m 4 1/2 years old, does being able to read the comments on balloon juice qualify me for hyperlexia, or not?
Don K
I was reading pretty well by the time I got to kindergarten (fall of ’59). Don’t know how I did it; I think maybe when my parents were reading to me I asked what that word is, and that one, and that one, and figured things out. I’m told school officials in my town didn’t quite know what to do with me, because I wasn’t supposed to know how to read; teaching me that was their job. I guess they were offended that a kid could learn stuff without their help.
I remember I was asked to read stories to the class by first grade (a story book of “101 Dalmatians” was a particular favorite because it allowed me to release my inner proto-gay by crooning a song that was embedded in the story). I also remember being really, really, bored as some of the other kids struggled through “Dick, Jane, and Spot” (“S-s-s-s-s-see D-d-d-d-d-d-dick r-r-r-r-r-r-r-un. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-run D-d-d-d-d-d-d-ick r-r-r-r-r-r-r-un”). It was awful, because you were supposed to be prepared to pick up where the story was when you were called on, and I just couldn’t read that slow.
Okay, I turned out pretty nerdy, but so the fuck what? I refuse to agree that reading too early is a disability. It’s what allows a kid to find out about the wider world (or even that there is a wider world).
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Corner Stone:
Mum was divorced. It went from rather clingy declarations of eternal love to mutterings about people wanting to kill me.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: I did, but I don’t remember anything about it except that I had a classmate who used to torment me by pulling my hair.
@Omnes Omnibus: I did, I actually preferred dictionaries, especially my great grandfather’s dictionary which he had got as a prize as a school boy and which my grandfather had given me. It was from the early 20th century. It had lovely illustrations.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Omnes Omnibus:
been there done that, then when i was 8, i stole a book about the various forms of birth control(it seemed interesting, albeit entirely academic at that point)i was quite the little expert, if only someone had thought to ask.
PurpleGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I do, I do. I still have a set of the Book of Knowledge, circa 1943, that I received as a gift from a cousin (second hand). I love the sepia-toned photographs very much.
schrodinger's cat
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: Are you able to time travel too? Since you just said you were 4 1/2.
TooManyJens
I think there’s a lot to be said for not pushing kids to read early, but damned if I’m going to tell my four-year-old “Sorry, sweetie, I know you’re really excited about stories and letters and words, but you shouldn’t learn to read yet.”
Omnes Omnibus
@PurpleGirl: My parents had(have) a 11th Ed. Encyclo Brit. I picked up a lot of turn of the last century knowledge as a kid.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Can read well, but hasn’t learned math yet.
ruemara
@Omnes Omnibus:
I used to. I just don’t have any encyclopedias in my library now. But I do still have my dictionaries.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh noes I think the Atlantic Economics Editor has competition!
suzanne
@RossInDetroit:
According to my husband, who is a speech/language pathologist for children, if a child doesn’t isn’t exposed to language from a very young age, (s)he never will never learn any language correctly. Apparently the mind has “windows” for learning this stuff, and once they close, the brain will never make those neural connections. Those horror stories about children locked in dungeons who aren’t found until their teens… yeah, those kids usually do nothing but grunt for the rest of their lives.
Kristine
@Omnes Omnibus: Dictionaries, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: For a moment there, I thought you meant me and I was prepared to challenge you to a duel.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me, too. I started with the set of kids’ encyclopedias that my parents bought me and then worked up to sitting in the library paging through the Britannica.
schrodinger's cat
@suzanne: So true, I was able to pick up different languages just by being exposed to them when I was a child. But trying to formally learn a new language (German) in college was way harder.
David Brooks (not that one)
In England, in Reception class (i.e. kindergarten) we were shown flashcards. “Boat” said the other children. “Yacht”, rhyming with latched, said I. I had read the unfamiliar word under the picture, phonetically. My parents had simply not tried to stop me from keeping up when they read to me, and I could read pretty fluently.
I was promptly promoted two grades. At 5, I had to compete with 7-year-olds. Academically it was a cinch. Socially it was gruesome. I can’t remember, but my parents could, standing in the doorway of the Reception class crying while looking at the playthings: the miniature slide in particular.
They kept me in the top class, for 11-year-olds, for two years and some heroic teachers managed to keep me and two similarly-situated girls engaged and learning. And off to an academically selected secondary school, when I was finally among peers.
But my constantly lagging social develoment throughout elementary school still lives with me at 61 years old.
suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I used to. Starting when I was about eight, I began to read floorplans for fun. (I reaiize that this is a different kind of “reading”, but I am still stunned that most people can’t do it.)
calling all toasters
Hate to be a wet blanket, but:
1) Being able to read at 4 is not hyperlexia. Some hyperlexics can read at 12 months. But I am very happy for all of you early readers.
2) Actual hyperlexia is definitely a strong warning sign for either an autistic spectrum disorder or a language disorder, both of which can be significantly remediated with early intervention. So…
3) The original article is on target.
jh46inaz
When I was young (no kindergarten in my day), about 4-5 yrs old, they were teaching reading by the Dick and Jane reader. My father was a firm believer in phonetics, so he taught both my brother and me to read before we went to grade school. We both skipped 1st grade, which, in retrospect wasn’t the best idea. For me, anyway, it caused some serious maturational issues in junior high and high school. Let’s just say being a nerd, one year younger than everyone else in your class, overweight and having mandatory PE with showers made one the butt of many jokes and bullying incidents. Made it through, however, and I can still spell and write a better sentence than the vast majority of my peers . . .
Harold
I can’t let that pass about Waldorf. My daughter went to Waldorf through 12th grade and got a perfect score on her English SAT and very high math scores and is now majoring in classical studies at a very selective University. She feels that Waldorf was a very good preparation and she is often astounded at the gaps in knowledge she finds among her college friends. In addition, she made very good friends at Waldorf, of all ethnic and religious backgrounds — contrary to what is implied above — and would not hesitate to send her own children there. The curriculum is mostly Western Civ. with an emphasis on comparative religion and mythology, including Native American, and African. This means they read the Egyptian book of the Dead, Gilgamesh, and learn about Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the Old Testament (parts of which they recited in Hebrew). In high school, trained theologians came from a nearby college for a semester on the New Testament and some weeks of Islam. This is in addition to biology, American history (including Locke and the Federalist papers), Economics, English, gym, etc.
They also did folk dancing, gardening, cooking, knitting, theater, mountain climbing, and calligraphy. My one beef was that their Latin teacher, a former parochial school teacher (who was also their math teacher) used Church pronunciation instead of the modern German pronunciation. Also, the German and French curriculums were a little thin considering how long they studied it. Still, many schools do not offer these at all. All in all I am quite satisfied with the education she got at Waldorf and I will go further, I think it benefited our whole family.
I don’t believe R. Steiner was racist, though I do agree a lot of anthroposophical beliefs are silly. Some of the Waldorf parents were anti-intellectual and had strange beliefs but most were more broad minded than usual. There was a significant contingent of Israeli Jews and also devoutly religious Catholics, Muslims, and one Bahai family. Frankly, I don’t think the problem of anti-intellectualism is unique to Waldorf schools in our country. My daughter has met people in Waldorf schools from all over. She says they vary and there are drug problems in some of them. Hers was excellent, however.
My mother could have been termed “hyerplexic” — she entered first grade having read Huxley’s “Brave New World” and in second grade went through a complete set of Dickens novel while convalescing from Scarlet Fever. She could do math problems in her head while my father and his mathematician friends were still getting their slide rules to work. I think having been very precocious made her isolated and unhappy as an adult, more and more as she ceased being a “wunderkind”. I wanted my own children to have a more rounded background in preparation for life, in case by any change they turned out to be precocious as she had been.
boatboy_srq
@Omnes Omnibus: The part of this whole debate that bothers me most is not whether there is an ideal time to begin learning, but that idiots like Brown insist that early education is somehow a mistake and those young people who are encouraged to begin their education ahead of some artificial curve are in some peculiar way damaged by doing so. I am particularly horrified at this idea in the light of how spectacularly poorly the US education system appears to do in comparison to other nations where such naive hypersensitivity and misplaced concern for youth is not so prevalent. WHEN one begins to learn should be dictated by when one shows an interest: applying an artificial, fixed, delayed starting point for fear of causing an overdramatised and easily disputed medical/psychological condition does far more harm than good.
scav
The original original might very well be correct but that means nothing to what Tina’s made of it.
calling all toasters
@scav: It’s a book excerpt, and there’s still nothing wrong with it.
If people want to look for actual ridiculous worries of the too-wealthy, they should look at failed attempts to jump-start very early reading, like Baby Einstein.
asiangrrlMN
Wait, what the, huh? My mom tells the oh-so-charming story of me “reading” the paper at age twe–upside down. I taught myself around age four, was in a reading class with one other kid in first grade, and we read around eighth-grade material, and, on my own, I tackled War and Peace and The Scarlet Letter when I was ten or eleven. Now, full disclosure, I gave up on W&P halfway through because I had NO clue who was doing what with whom, but I read 500 pages of that sucker before admitting defeat.
Aren’t there enough things for parents to worry about when it comes to their kids that we don’t have to throw in this shiitake, too?
schrodinger's cat
@asiangrrlMN:
We must be sisters, that was my exact experience with W&P
except I was 12 instead of 11.
Arclite
@Gina: One of the positives he mentioned was that he always had the same classmates for 12 whole years, and they are still some of his best friends 10 years past graduation.
But yeah, a lack of emphasis on hard learning kind of left me cold.
Chad N Freude
@Omnes Omnibus: I did.
[begin self-promotion]
I don’t remember at what age I began reading, but my grammar school had me skip first grade and enter second grade at age 6, where I was sent to a fourth grade class during “reading period” (that’s what they called it) every day. When I was nine (or maybe ten), I had read every book in the children’s section of the local public library that was remotely interesting to me, and my mother, who was nothing if not assertive, browbeat the librarians into allowing me to violate library policy and check out books from the adult section.
[end self-promotion]
Martin, if you’re still reading this, reading
is just wrong. Someone else’s imagination provides new stimuli to your imagination just as any real-life experience does. It introduces you to new ideas that serve as the basis of imaginative thoughts and ideas that you would never have had otherwise.
fraught
Noone ever read a book in my house so I was illiterate when I went to kindergarten. I don’t remember learning to read but I remember having to sit and listen to other first graders learn to read. So boring. So it seems to me I must have learned in a few weeks after having been given my first books. This was in about 1945. My father hated the idea of me wanting to read books instead of playing ball “like the other boys.”
Now if I’m reading in the afternoon around 5:30. I still feel a vague fear and guilt that someone’s going to find me reading and angrily tell me to go out and play. Who said that old habits don’t die hard?
licensed to kill time
I remember the exact moment I learned to read. I had a lot of books memorized, and I would ‘read’ them aloud with my older sister. One day the letters just kind of came into focus and from that point on I was really reading. It was just like a switch had been flipped. When I entered first grade they figured out that I was beyond Dick and Jane and moved me up a grade.
I was reading at grade four level though, so I was allowed to go to the new books room and pick out whatever I wanted. I can still remember how those fresh new books smelled and how thrilling it was to have that room all to myself.
I don’t remember any kind of stigma about being able to read before I got to school, unless they were hiding it well and secretly pitying me behind my back for the poor social misfit I was destined to become, haha. I also give very little credence to these new theories about kids that pop up every few years.
Plus the very idea of preschool entrance exams makes me vaguely ill. Sheesh. Liked the post though, Anne Laurie, and will now read the comments…with my premature reading skillz!
Ruckus
One of the things that is apparent is that some schools allowed learning at whatever pace the child could handle. And others frowned or worse at the idea that anyone could learn at any pace other than the one presented. What a waste. A child’s mind for conformity and control.
Harold
Not only Waldorf but Finland and other nordic countries delay reading until second grade. However, they don’t allow children to run wild. There is a lot children can learn without reading, such as cooperative play, games, singing, conversation, courtesy, and exploring their neighborhood, town, natural environment, and the jobs people do. This is all money in the bank of learning, as it were, that will pay off later.
I myself went to a school that delayed reading and then in the middle of first grade we moved to a school where they were already reading and I was not. I was very motivated to learn to read quickly believe me. My teacher would threaten to omit my daily twenty-minute reading session with her if I misbehaved. I quickly caught up. and learned to read without incident or difficulty. I remember in third grade having to push myself to keep up with my cousin who was a year older and a great reader, but by fourth grade I too had graduated to “adult” novels, though I read everything indiscriminately, including children’s books, Scientific American, Pogo, and a poultry magazine (there were stacks of them in the attic of our rented house and I fantasized about having a farm. ) By sixth grade I was reading Moby Dick, Sallinger, Gullivers’ Travels, Isaac Singer, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, garden books and on and on. By eighth grade, Bertrand Russell, Isaac Azimov, and Marx and Engels, science fiction, you name it. In short, I don’t think it matters much when you learn to read, but there are other things you should learn when a child, such as sports, dancing, swimming, playing an instrument, and foreign languages, that it would be a pity to miss out on.
R-Jud
@suzanne:
This is how my parents realized I could read when I was 21 months old: Dad brought home floor plans for his work as a contractor. I would sit there and announce the names of the rooms. When I started rattling off measurements and saying things like “south elevation”, it dawned on them that I wasn’t pretending.
@Harold:
Completely agree. During the short time that I taught first grade, I tried very hard to impress on parents of the kids who were slow to read that their child would likely be caught up to everyone else by the time he was eight or nine, IF we worked together to help the kid not hate school in the meantime.
Usually this was done by sitting down with the kid and showing him (they were almost always “him”s) evidence of his progress in reading, even if small, and by praising talent in another area, like art or mathematics.
Lysana
Hi!
Started to read before I was two years old. Nobody’s sure how. Based on the family tale, I was able to read cursive at the time. But my math skills are weird. I can handle trigonometry and somewhat abstract functions, but it took me the longest time to understand stuff like how to carry the one. Not to mention alphabetical order.
(ETA: I tend to credit PBS with the reading thing, especially when talking to someone who thinks TV has no redeeming qualities. It hurts their heads in a way I love to watch.)
RossInDetroit
My contribution to education for the day will be to scare the living wits out of 200 little kids. I have to run a surprise fire drill in a preschool. If this isn’t the worst thing that happens to all of us today I may quit my job. I can already hear the weeping :-(
Hunter
Gads! Groff Conklin — the first book I ever bought with my own money was Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction. I think I was in fourth grade.
My mom taught me to read when I was two — well, I forced the issue, because I hate being read to, and apparently always have. I turned out somewhat retiring, but socially adept and, oddly enough, got popular once I graduated from high school. Might be interesting to see if there’s a correlation between early reading and introversion — I really enjoy being alone.
The evils of hyperlexia are, I suspect, somewhat overstated.
twiffer
my parents tell my i was reading when i was 2, so i guess i fall into the hyperlexia type 1 range.
now, i work in IT! see! it does doom you to a life of…being rather smart and somewhat introverted (and a bit shy) in certain social situations. the horror…
my son is 3 1/2 and certainly recognizes and understands some words. is he reading? not really. but, i don’t think he really wants to either. he likes being read to and enjoys word games (though he often gets answers wrong on purpose, cause he thinks it’s funny). but, if he suddenly decided he was ready to read on his own tonight (which, honestly, wouldn’t really suprise me), i’d just think he was smart. not that he had some social disorder.
Original Lee
@JGabriel: This.
Original Lee
There’s a huge difference between reading early because you are motivated and reading early because your parents have bought an early reading system. But I also think that hyperlexia is one of those things that *can be* an indicator of an autism-spectrum disorder. It’s like OCD that way – there are some indicators, but just because you have one indicator does not mean you have the disorder.
I started reading just before I turned two. I was in bed with (I think) the flu, and my grandfather came over to read to me every day for about a week, and by the end of the week, I was reading on my own. I don’t remember this, but my mother says that apparently because Grandpa had exhausted my book collection by reading me the same 10-15 books multiple times, I decided I needed something different and managed to find her stash of Agatha Christie. She had to explain to me that “mon cher” was French for “my friend who is a boy”, though of course it took her a while to understand that was what I meant, as I was pronouncing it “mawn chair”.
matryoshka
@RossInDetroit: That happened to me after a trauma, too, but after a year, it abated. It was disconcerting.
Oh, and I could read when I was a fetus. My mom still bitches about all the stretch marks from my library and my little horn rims.
twiffer
@Omnes Omnibus: i did.
twiffer
@Harold: curious:
what does one have to do with the other? i don’t recall anyone arguing that learning to read precluded or prevented learning anything else. though, i will admit, i never learned to dance as a child.
i was certainly a bookish child. actually, i was the picture of a stereotypical nerd: short, rail thin and thickly spectacled. to this day, nothing will captivate me like a good book. yet i still managed to swim, explore backyards and woods, play little league (albeit poorly), ride a bike and experience all the other adventures of childhood. this, despite playing video games and D&D.
Zaftig Amazon
Original Lee is absolutely right. Forcing a kid to read before he or she is ready is a PRIMO way to ensure that a kid hates reading,and by extension, hates school. The best way to encourage reading is to read to children. One of the most damaging aspects to No Child Left Behind legislation is that many K-6 teachers are no longer afforded the time to read to their classes.
gelfling545
@Omnes Omnibus: OMG I so did that – starting with the Golden Book Encyclopedias my mom bought in the supermarket when I was about 4 & later moving on to the Britanica.I owe my bottomless well of trivia to that habit.
isildur
This thread is long enough that I’m probably pissing into the wind, but:
Hyperlexia is a real thing. My kid was just diagnosed with it. It’s not ‘reading too early’. It’s a kind of autism.
Robin (my son) can read pretty much any text you put in front of him. He’s 3y6mo. He can’t put on his own clothes, he’s still in diapers, he can’t hold even a short conversation, he doesn’t understand most spoken instructions or questions, and he treats other children like furniture. In pretty much every area he’s significantly behind other kids his age; his closest peers are almost 2 years younger than him.
But Robin can read at what’s probably a 4th grade level, fluently and without stumbling, whether he’s seen the words before or not.
Now, I’m sure there are plenty of people who are grabbing for the hyperlexia diagnosis because they want to be able to put a label on their weird child and make the weirdness into a disorder. But the foibles of neurotic parents don’t invalidate a very real (and unpleasant) variant of autism.
kestral
I was on a first-name basis with the librarian by the time I hit second grade. (My first-grade teacher apparently had it in for me, as I wound up spending most of the grade sitting in the hallway because I read farther than the other kids. Didn’t stop me from becoming a major literature nerd, though.)
E-text is all well and good, but nothing beats that old book smell, you know?
scarshapedstar
Yes, that describes me to a T. Reading at 2 and a half, and later I had to fight the librarian to check out books that she insisted I couldn’t read because I was only in kindergarten. I read damn near every book in there, and I was like a human encyclopedia; my parents still remind me of the way I’d rattle off animal trivia. Loved arithmetic, too, and I couldn’t comprehend why other kids had trouble learning anything. Didn’t have too many friends, needed glasses when I was 7, but I went to all the summer ‘gifted’ camps and eventually got an 800 verbal SAT.
I started struggling academically late in high school because I’d finally reached a point where I had to actually think instead of absorb, and in all that time I’d never learned to study because I never needed to. That, and calculus just wasn’t really my strong suit. But I learned it anyway, got accepted as a computer engineer at Georgia Tech, and felt more invincible than ever… until I had to take differential equations and hit the brick wall. I was cripplingly depressed by some family troubles at the same time, but it turned into an academic Saints-Seahawks moment. The magic had just plain run out.
Anyway, I switched to biology, hopefully starting med school this year, things are great. I’ll always wonder if life would have been different if I’d been more ‘normal’; I think that my ‘hyperlexia’ was a net positive but I do feel like it led to some deficiencies in other parts of my brain that were painful to overcome. (And some deficiencies are still with me, but I don’t know whose fault they are…) I hate when people who knew me back then call me a genius because I was more like a savant.
Maybe someone can do a twin study on this. I think it’s a real phenomenon, but I think it also requires a certain genetic predisposition — most kids don’t WANT to read at two and a half, do they?
scarshapedstar
Oh, and I refer to my ‘hyperlexia’ in the past tense because I really don’t feel that way anymore. I mean, I was a speed reader back then, with an endless attention span and great reading comprehension. Now I’m decidedly average. I feel like I changed a lot after I hit puberty. (insert “no shit” variant here)