Bring Me That Horizon

Sounds romantic, doesn't it. Sadly, I was heading the other direction. This was just one morning in a string of mornings (17 of them to be exact) when I started the day already behind.

That evening, passing the same spot, I was treated to this. There was live music, and it would have been lovely to stop and enjoy an alpine, maybe look up some friends....

But I had the next morning ahead of me, so it was home and into bed.

Our community literacy work is always harder - more demanding of time and effort and cash - than the adult literacy and GED prep work I do through the winter.

Partly that's because we lack the core funding that allows us to put and keep an infrastructure in place. This year, with the storytent program, we also have the challenge of working in four distinct neighbourhoods. That means figuring out the practical details of ensuring materials are stored on-site or near at hand. It also means building relationships with new families and partnering orgs. We also received some corporate sponsorship this year, which exacted its own toll in time, effort and expense as we went through a period of negotiations and then a staged media event. Then there's my adult learning group... slightly derailed by domestic violence (sigh).

Yeah.... Do bring me that horizon.... Or at least a day at the beach.

Literacy Networks (and program funding)

this just seems like a fairly simple way to talk to each other.

Maria, comment #4, Alphaplus podcasts

Yeah, so anyway, I'm done my regular classes; five mornings and afternoons, and two evenings.

The last two weeks were unusual for me in that I was substituting for another facilitator. I didn't like that as much - leaving learners after two weeks, I mean. It was the first time I'd quit a program while there were learners still working hard toward their goal. (I know I didn't really "quit" but it had that feel about it.)

On the other hand, my summer adult learning group will finally start this week. I have three folks from the neighbourhood who say they're coming, and one other has expressed an interest. The big challenge on my plate, right now, is building the space.



In other news, we were over to Dieppe (near Moncton) to do a Storytent orientation for two groups.




This year, there will be Storytents in Dieppe, Moncton, Campbellton, Edmunston, and St. Stephen, as well as ours in Saint John. In Saint John, we're running a reduced schedule (due to funding constraints) but a bigger program in the sense of supporting more families. We're running tents in three separate neighbourhoods (which has required a big shift in logistics), and maybe in a fourth as well. We're also scaffolding a group of students from UNB-SJ who are designing a similar program to help us fill a gap. (Heavy construction in one neighbourhood green space meant we couldn't run a tent there: the students are working with the resource centre to offer a reading program on a nearby veranda.) We're also working with someone who hopes to put together a West Side storytent program in 2010.

All the programs are a little bit different, individualized to suit their own neighbourhoods and sustained by different sorts of partnering arrangements, which is nice. I really like providing a model of cooperation and networking that doesn't presuppose standardization or some central authority.



Real networks are like that, you know.



They are not pyramids. Wisdom and permissions do not flow down from the top. No one person or group coordinates everybody else. Instead, people share ideas and stories, first or second or third hand.

Real networks are tidal - information and support comes and goes, moves back and forth, in a ferment of appropriation and accommodation.

Real networks are non-linear.

I was thinking that on the way home from Moncton. I was thinking that a part of what we'd said there came from our reading of and writing for Literacies. Too, I know that some of the things I said about family literacy work were shaped by discussions and ideas shared on the literacies café and Alphaplus blogsites. My colleague takes part in list-serve discussions and communicates regularly with practitioners further west. What the people at Moncton heard came from some of those discussions too.

Will any of the speech pathologists or librarians in Moncton ever listen to an Alpha-gang podcast or read a post from some BC literacy group? Probably not. But as long as they're talking to us, they'll hear echoes of all the conversations we're a part of. That's one way ideas flow - a network of indirect support.



Let me tell you two stories.

On the 1st of May this year, reporter Benjamin Shingler had an article on the front page of the Telegraph-Journal about funding troubles at the Knowledge Centre for Adult Learning, based at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Its share of the $85 million handed out to five groups back in 2004 was running out.


A similar story ran on the front page of all the other Irving-owned papers in NB. Apparently, there was a real crisis happening for literacy workers. Shingler wrote that this Centre, which was losing its funding, "has for the past four years served as a headquarters for adult learning groups across Canada."

I guess that might be true, but they weren't my headquarters. Nor the headquarters for any literacy workers I know. Were they your headquarters?

Shingler also wrote, "The centre's co-ordinator, Kathleen Flanagan, said closing down would hamper attempts to improve adult literacy rates across the country and leave fewer learning opportunities for adults."

How so?

"In order for those people who deliver adult learning programs to be well-informed about promising practices and current research, they need to have access to information," she said. "The intention is to connect through the knowledge centre all the various stakeholders across Canada."

Ah. Well, okay. People are apt to say all sorts of silly things when their pay cheque is threatened.

I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but this Centre doesn't help me or the people I know working in the field - it doesn't even know me, much less the adults and families I work with. So for it to claim literacy funding on the strength of a supposed leadership or coordinating role....


Well, here's the other story. A month later, on June 1st, Tracey wrote on the Café blog:

Here in Toronto, literacy workers used to get together quite a bit. The Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy and the Festival of Literacies used to provide us with many opportunities to meet and share professional wisdom. Neither of these organizations have been able to continue this and for a while we just stopped meeting.

Guy Ewing and Joy Lehman asked why. They asked, "Do we really need funding to get together and learn from each other?" Of course, the answer was no. They started to convene literacy workers at Moveable Feasts.

You see? Networking and support happens on the ground. Sometimes even without funding. Of course none of that networking is useful unless there are actual programs for learners.

If the adult learning centre really wanted to help me - indirectly - they might stop holding large yearly conferences for politicians and business groups and put financial support into Literacies. I mean... $17 million over 4 or 5 years... That's a lot of money! That's, like, $3 or $4 million a year.

But, wait. Even Literacies, wonderful as it is, isn't a program. Imagine what you could do in your literacy program with even $1 million each year. Imagine how many classes and groups and drop-in centres you could organize. Imagine, and then go back and read that bit about hampering "attempts to improve adult literacy rates across the country" and leaving "fewer learning opportunities for adults."



How did that song go? "If I had a million dollars...." Anyway, my evening summer adult learning group is unfunded but it will happen.




The Crescent Valley Community Tenants Association are giving me the space (part of the housing unit space the provincial government supplies the CVCTA). My other earnings will pay for books and supplies. Neighbours provide the referrals and walk-ins.

And, I'll stay busy with Storytent. And, of course, the Bookwagon still runs every Saturday.

And I'll try to blog about all these more regularly now that I'm back into a routine. (I'm also gathering notes for a journal piece on the Bookwagon.) Reading and writing are important. Commenting and picture-posting and pod-casting are important. These things are how we network across a giant country like Canada.



She said, "In order for those people who deliver adult learning programs to be well-informed about promising practices and current research, they need to have access to information." That's true. But if she thinks UNB is the source of that information, she's a bit uninformed herself.

Sharing reflections on adult and family information is something practitioners do whenever they get in the same room. When they can't meet in person, they share through email and Facebook, through blogs and journals and list-serves. And books and articles - networking happens across time as well as space.

If only we all had the core funding we need to put all these ideas into practice.

Reading With Understanding

... it was impossible in the complicated situation for Grouchy to distinguish the essential.

Becke, p. 280

I'm giving up on Major A. F. Becke's 1939 study Napoleon and Waterloo: The Emperor's Campaign With The Armee Du Nord 1815. I'm reading it, but I'm not comprehending it.

I shouldn't like to say it's a poorly written history, but it isn't a history written for beginners.

For example, Becke assumes his readers know a good deal about how the armies of the early 1800s moved and fought, whereas I know only a little. Consequently, I miss the point with the author tries to explain the import of some tactical decision.

I am also unused to the geography of north-west Europe in 1815. I can't picture the right maps in my head when the author talks about a line of retreat or the location of an army camp between two rivers. The same thing happens when I read about European battles fought during the Great War. If I'm not supplied with some very comprehensive maps, I lose the narrative among unfamiliar locales and landmarks.

I actually know many useless facts about the French revolution as well as the on-again off-again Franco-Prussian (becoming French-German) wars of the mid and late 1800s. But of Napoleon and Waterloo I know little.

So, Becke's book is, for me, difficult because I lack background knowledge.





Now, listen. The world is full of books I can't understand, and I mostly don't care about it. But I'm thinking about this right now because a few nights ago, at a community meeting, someone asked if I helped people with comprehension.

What do you mean? I asked.

Well, she said, sometimes I can read something - read the words - but I don't understand what I'm reading. Can you help me with that?

Maybe.

We set a time and place to talk about it. I'll take a range of reading materials (types and levels) and some informal assessment tools and we'll talk.

But, meantime, I'm thinking "not understanding" is a pretty complex state of affairs.

Let me give another example.

We started our summer Storytent program this week. At one tent I was happy to read a new (to me) book called The Great Paper Chase or something like that. It was about a bear and paper airplanes and missing branches. As I began reading the book to a child, a bit of noise called my attention to another part of the tent. Although I didn't stop reading aloud, I watched a situation a few feet away build toward conflict and then resolve itself. With that, my attention came back to the book, and I found myself reading the final page.

Now, here's the thing: I had no recollection of what was on the six or eight pages in the middle, despite having read them aloud just moments earlier.

I hadn't skipped these pages, you understand. I read each word, pausing at commas and periods. But I couldn't recall reading them. I had to look back and read them again before the story made sense to me.

Sometimes, apparently, reading is not a cognitive task. Sometimes, it is possible to read accurately and well without actually thinking about what's being read.

This, too, I assume, falls under the heading of reading without comprehension.

In both these cases - lacking background knowledge and reading while distracted - the reading level of the material is unimportant. At least, my assessed reading level would indicate that I ought to be able to read these two books with understanding.

As well, physical concerns like poor eyesight or malnutrition were not causes of difficulty.

In the latter case - the children’s story - my attention could have been further engaged in the story by a series of predictive questions. But, of course, that's a little beside the point since the predictive questions would probably have had no more command of my attention than the book itself. I really was interested in what was happening in the story. However, I was more interested in what was happening in the tent a few feet away.

In the former case - the history book - I was not the least distracted. I just didn't understand what was going on. Look at this bit:

General Monthyon was instructed to push out reconnaissances towards Wavre. But, as it was expected that only stragglers would be encountered, the reconnaissances were conducted conventionally and they were late in reporting their efforts.

I have no trouble with any of the words. The sentences are not long or tangled. My problem is I forget who Monthyon is. I have no mental picture of Wavre or the surrounding region. I don't know what a recon team looked like in 1815 (probably not 4 guys in a jeep or a 20 man squad), and I don't know what a "conventional" recon would be - nor what an unconventional one would look like. I don't know what it means to report "late" or early or on time.

In short, I don't get this paragraph. Moreover, I don't know a single reading strategy that would help me get it.

Yeah, "not understanding" is a pretty complex state of affairs. But not, I think, an uncommon one. It's often hard - in books or in life - to distinguish the essential.

At those moments I mostly just go read something else.

Adult Reading and Narrative Structure

So... I checked in today with my street-borrower / self-directed learner while we made our rounds with the bookwagon. She was shaking her head even before she opened the door.

"I didn't like those books you left me."

Were there too many big words like the names of people or places? Did you understand what you were reading? Did it not make sense?

"I just.... I didn't get them," she said. She explained that the books I'd left before were "stories" whereas these last ones, the biographies, "jumped all over the place."

Which is exactly right: these aren't straight narratives. They move back and forth in time; often starting near the end of someone's life (a medal presentation, a funeral), maybe shooting back to an early childhood, then ahead to the point of adulthood where they began doing whatever it was that made them famous.

Also, though she didn't say this, these books call upon a degree of background knowledge. One of the reasons I like giving a learner the quartet Tubman, Hammer, Parks and King is that each book helps fill in the background story of the others - they are all about black Americans fighting for civil rights. But, normally, I'm there with the learner to answer questions or fill in some gaps. Left on her own, this learner may have found the gaps too great to bridge.

I noted somewhere, in an earlier post, that narrative (fiction or otherwise) is generally easier to read than most other types of writing. This may be even more true in the case of text written at a lower reading level. Looking for a discussion of this in my battered copy of Zakaluks and Samuels' Readability, I found Alice Davidson observing:

Texts are often edited to reduce their readability [sic] by simplifying vocabulary and shortening sentences. In the process comprehensibility is not improved, while explicit connections as well as expressive and interesting words are lost.

(Assigning Grade Levels without Formulas: Some Case Studies, 1988)

I don't agree with her notion of the cost of losing "expressive and interesting words" since these seem to me to be qualities readers bring to the text.

Consider her her phrase "reduce their readability" by which she means reduce their score on a measure of reading difficulty. I know that she is using readability as shorthand for "readability score" where a higher number means a harder text - thus, reducing the score means making something easier to read. But what about someone coming to this discussion for the first time? If they did not already have a lot of information to bring to the text, how would they know that readability did not mean "how readable something is" or some such thing? Words are only helpful when we know what they mean in context, and not just in the dictionary sense; expressive, interesting or otherwise.

Still, I generally agree with what she is saying. It seems commonsensical that complex stories or ideas don't get less complicated just because they are told in short sentences using a limited vocabulary.

So, for example, one of the books I had left told the story of The Famous Five, five Canadian women who worked together in the early 1900s to improve women's rights. This story is complex because it involves politics, economics and the law, the oddity of different jurisdictions and social assumptions, and the distance of history.


Explaining to someone not already familiar with Canadian politics and the culture of Alberta and Ottawa in the 1920s how it was that Emily Murphy could become a judge (really, a "police magistrate" for trials involving women) or Irene Parlby could be elected to government and become a "Minister without Portfolio", while neither was yet a "person under the law" - and how a petition to something called "the Privy Council" changed that - is not an easy thing to do.

At a reading level of 4 or 5 it may be impossible.

Moreover - to get back to the learner's original complaint - this book begins with a tea party Murphy arranges to deal with the lack of rights for women. Then, it works backward to explore the various ways women were unequal to men in the eyes of Canadian judges. Mind you, I'm not complaining. I don't know how the author, Terry Barber, could have done it better. Still, it's not a simple, predictable storybook structure.

A great aid in comprehension, we're always hearing, is predictability. Again, this is something I have mixed feelings about. But I understand that predictability is why Bill Martin Jr's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See and Sandra Boynton's Blue Hat Green Hat are such hits with the storytent kids who hunger to become readers. Just a few pages in, the kids start knowing what to expect: they understand the structure and so can more quickly identify what upcoming sentences are saying.

The same holds true for narrative and adult books. Even non-readers have seen enough television shows to understand the idea of beginning, then middle, then end; and maybe even introduction of characters, then the crisis, then the solution and wrap-up. It doesn't matter whether or not they know all that English Literature terminology. Television viewers are used to a host of standard scenarios - the love triangle, the alien invasion, the innocent person framed and then cleared, someone leaving home only to find out they love it, why people in horror stories shouldn't wander off alone saying "I'll just be a minute"....

All these well-worn plot lines help readers keep track of what's going on in a scene or a paragraph. This frees them up to deal with, say, a challenging figure of speech or a new place name. Familiar forms help us deal with unfamiliar words and ideas.

Here's Ms. Davidson again, reporting on what researchers were hearing from "reviewers" including teachers, librarians and children:

In general, children like very clear organization, with the episodes following a normal sequence of time or progression of ideas from simple to more complex. The characters in a story also influence children's responses, since children tend to identify with protagonists of their own age or slightly older.

No surprise there. And though I'm personally a little iffy on how we toss around that ill-defined "identify with" phrase, the same could be said of adults. All readers appreciate clear organization, event sequences they can follow easily, and characters they can understand and whose lives they find interesting.*

Adult readers don't always like to read about strangers from history past, or from different cultures or countries, whose stories are told dramatically out of order. Sometimes that kind of thing makes hard reading harder.

So, I'll find my learner some more conventional adult narratives with straightforward themes - maybe Janet Whatshername's romance series or the Jack Sloan westerns - or else I'll write some at a difficulty level of 3 or 4. And when she's reading independently at a higher level (at 6 or more) or when she and I can spend some time together.... Well, the biographies will still be there.



~~~~~

* The exception here might be children who are read to a great deal, and who, from a very early age, become familiar with non-linear plots lines or a wider vocabulary of geography and history, of place and event. These children may be more at ease with the unexpected. In any case, although the simple and familiar are good places for children or adults to begin their own reading, there is no reason not to allow them to listen to or drowse or play through unconventional plot-lines and devices.

Independent Learners

I try to not tell people what to do. I don't offer anyone their education. I'm not much use to people who want to be students; who ask "What do you want me to do now?" All I can answer is, "What do you want to do?"

Oh, sure: I can give people some options. I can point out, for example, that some people think fractions are easier to understand once division makes sense. But, if someone wants to skip division and start adding fourths, I'm okay with that too. I'm not the boss of you, and if it's really important I know we'll get around to it in time.

Not everyone appreciates this 'Choice Theory', somewhat liberal view of adult learning. Some people really do want to go to a school where they can be instructed and tested and rewarded with stars and blue check-marks. Fair enough. That's just not what I do.

This isn't just personal: I was trained to avoid that sort of stuff and to force allow learners to take responsibility for their own learning. Though the climate has changed, and top-down schooling is much more in fashion these days, my bosses haven't yet thrown me out. Until they do, I'll continue to offer choice, not instruction.

I saw a minor success today - or something Good, anyway.

A learner finished hand-writing a short piece about her dream home and decided to post it on her blog. I was called out of class just as she sat down to type it into Word. (We often type things into Word before posting to take advantage of the spell- and grammar-check tools.) By the time I returned, she was done - posting, picture and all.

"That's great," I said. "I'll take a look at it on my laptop."

I called her blog site up, and there was the post. Some of the spelling choices won't make the purists happy, but it wasn't a central concern for her, so I only pointed out the one spot where a spelling error changed the meaning of what she wanted to say.

There was also a bit of formatting trouble. She had cut and paste directly out of Word and into blogger. This meant the insertion of incompatible background code and a bit of jumbling. She asked how to get the letters the same size. I showed her how to fix that by copying the full text into Notepad, then copying the Notepad text back into the post, and re-posting. That extra step removes unneeded code and makes for a cleaner post.

(I actually write most of my posts directly in Notepad because I find it's scarceness helps me focus on word choice rather than formatting tricks.)

The independence she showed makes me hopeful that blogging might be a tool she can use on her own for learning and expression. I don't mean to suggest blogging is something people ought to do or anything like that. I mean, if this was a kind of reading/writing she chose to pursue on her own, I'd feel good about having helped her a little at the start.

As a literacy worker, I'm always pleased when people who haven't done a lot of reading or writing start doing more on their own and for their own reasons. Whatever the value in that "life-long learning" slogan, my learners can't spend their lives with me. I'm just here to help them get started, or get started again. If they are going to be healthy, self-reliant, citizens, they have to be willing and able to read and write and network independent of me. In other words, they have to take charge of their own learning.

A learner who posts on a blog - or picks up a novel, or figures out a tape-measure - when I'm out of the classroom is likely to do it again when they are out of the classroom.

And that independence and self-direction is a Good Thing. That's the Goal.

Everything else is just institutional humbug and job security posing as a helping hand.

(Informal, Functional) Distance Learning

Email provides a venue for informal, functional distance learning. Take a look at this exchange between me and a learner who is waiting for class to resume:

June 8, 2009
i miss going to school i can not wait to start going again... went is the store teent start and went are you going to be starting over this way or are you let me know alright talk to you later.


Jun 8, 2009
We will be doing a storytent... across the street from you.... Our first tent will be June 20th.


June 8, 2009
so are you still going to have school at 57 maclaren or not let me kown alright i hope to see you soon talk to you later

Obviously, these are only parts of each email, but maybe you can see that the learner wrote a first email asking two questions: when will Storytent start, and when will our adult learning group start?

My reply answered only one of those questions. Mind you, I went on and on about my week-long vacation, but that wasn't what they wanted to hear about. So, within a couple of hours another email came back, clarifying - was I going to get that adult group going or what?!?

In sum, the learner wrote asking purposeful questions, read the response with the same purpose, and then re-wrote a perfectly fine clarifying question.

Yes, the spelling is a bit off, and the conventions of written English aren't followed exactly, but that doesn't matter much. This learner reads independently at about a high four or low five, so I'm comfortable with their rate of writing improvement. I'm thrilled that they are writing at all - much less applying critical (i.e. "question-asking-answering-thinking") reading and writing skills.

But the point I wanted to make is this: all this writing and reading is happening during a period when, ostensibly, there's no class happening.

But "no class" does not equal "no learning" and it does not equal "no support." This is a little bit like the point I tried to make in my previous post. I can still - I should still, if I'm a serious community literacy facilitator - encourage and scaffold learning in a variety of informal, functional ways whatever the availability of institutional supports.

I don't think of myself as someone who does eLearning. Well, I do my own eLearning, but I don't feel as though I facilitate it for others. Maybe that's because, four or five years ago, eLearning became associated in my mind with a top-down curriculum delivered via point and click websites.

But whatever it is I do when I send emails to facilitate reading and writing, I feel like its useful.

And, ummm... well, that's it, I guess.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to send an email.

:)

Building Community vs Community Buildings

Above is a picture of the community centre, quite thrashed. I don't know which is more disturbing - that someone smashed all those windows, or that more than a week later they sit unrepaired. There are obviously problems of several sorts here. Maybe I should leave it at that, adding only that, having closed up the unfruitful Reading Room, I'm setting up shop in another building nearby.

Of course, some work happens with no buildings at all. Or, rather, with a different kind of building. In our work, we build positive relationships.

Well, of course we do. Everyone does, right? It's a given.

But, no, it's not a given. Doing it takes care and hard work and trust. And, at the risk of sounding all Yoda, it is something you do or not do - talking about it, writing about it, putting it in your mission statement are all beside the point.

It's about trust. Service and trust.

We caught up with our curbside adult learner (story here) the other day during our bookwagon run. She traded in the PRACE books and some other resources for five books from the Grass Roots Press series of biographies. I offered her ones I thought she might find familiar or interesting. I saw that I was missing Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, the two books that I've had the best response to (in part because of the familiarity of the over-all history and theme).

It occurred to me that I don't really know this lady's reading level, and so I'm operating in the dark, a little forced to trust her self assessment.

Is she making progress? I don't know. Does that matter? Or, better, Is it any of my business?

I can ask if she's like to be tested - that's the word, "tested" and not "assessed" - just so she knows that is an option. Maybe in a couple of weeks. But I can't impose it on her. I can't take the initiative and responsibility away from her. That would be....

Well, it would be a lousy thing to do, is all. And it wouldn't be building relationship.

Later that day we got hailed down by a past reader looking for a copy of Twilight. We carried the enticingly named Adult & Youth 12+ book-box over, leaving the wagon unattended. Some children gathered about it, scooting away when we returned; hiding, badly, behind a car.

"Hey! Did you guys want to borrow a book?" Cheryl asked.

Silly question. Of course they did. Who wouldn't want to borrow a book on a fine, sunny Saturday morning?





Some Saturdays are like that. Yes, funding is disappearing or being diverted. Yes, the testing and streaming craze is making us all a little crazy. Yes, business groups parachuting staff into communities are stomping about making as many enemies as friends. (They have the windows to prove it.)

But, meanwhile, adults are improving their literacy levels in gentle, non-threatening ways, and children are happily moving classics like Where's Spot? from our wagon...

... to theirs.




Have a great day! :)

English - It was like that when I got here

But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out on the sea.

J.R.R. Tolkien

From time to time, it is suggested to me that I go into business as a private ESL (English as a second language) tutor, and, at last, make a year-round, living income. I find it easy to resist this suggestion for a couple of reasons.

One is a bit daft, I suppose. I have no desire to work for anyone who can afford me. Queerer still, I can't help but feel that abandoning the poorest or most marginalized among us will somehow cost me my soul. I know we burn for only a short while, however brightly, in the midst of a great, enduring darkness. It matters to me how I live - I cannot put it more plainly than that.

The other reason is this: I do not know how to explain the art and beauty of English to non-native speakers. Our language is a construct that does not make any mechanical sense, and I do not want to be its ambassador.

"English spelling is notoriously difficult, and foreigners learning English are bewildered by the lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation," writes G.L. Brooks in A History of the English Language, one volume of the Andre Deutsch The Language Library series. He reminds us that "for the last three centuries or so" [i.e., since the proliferation of the printing press and mass copies mechanically reproduced] "spelling has changed little whereas pronunciation is constantly changing." Indeed, in any given moment, there are a multitude of common words being pronounced differently depending on who is reading them. Just yesterday, listening to an audio book read by a citizen of the U.K., I heard "gaseous" (which I would pronounce Gass-See-us) pronounced Gay-See-us. And don't even get me started on that whole about - aboot thing, or the way they talk in New Joys-See.

But it's more than phonics that vexes people.

I grew up an Anglophone, speaking English, in the shadow of a Church of England building called St. Mark's Anglican Church. Though a Canadian by birth, I read the literature and history of England (as Britain came to be called after it became the land of the Angles) and took it all for granted. But just look at it! Engles and Angles, Englophone and Anglophone, Englican and Anglican, Angland and England: all this confusion caused by the apparently random use of "a" or "e" as a first letter! How do I explain this nonsense?

Then there are the confoundations of usage. One learner wanted to know the difference between "was awoken" and "was awakened." Another asked me to explain the difference between "further" and "farther." I have been asked about the distinction in meaning between "will" and "shall." Someone wanted to know when to use "I saw," and when to write "I had seen," or "I have seen." Each time, I needed to explain these things in simple English, to people uncomfortable with English.

Then, there's the notorious single-word dilemma. (Well, it ought to be notorious - whatever them reading experts say.) Even among native English speakers there are apt to be confusions when words appear outside of their natural context.

Consider b-a-s-s. Is it BAse, the musical instrument, or bASS, the fish? And does b-o-w mean a stick and taut string drawn across a bass fiddle (bOwe), or the fore of a boat or ship (Bow)? Is l-e-a-d an action performed by an orchestra conductor (leed), or is it a weight attached to a fishing line (led)? Well, tell me if we're in a performance hall or out on a lake, and I'll answer those questions. But without knowing the context, there is no way to know; just as there is no way to know if the sentence "I read the book" is set in the present or the past.

No, I do not enjoy explaining English to folks from away.

Mind you, I understand the cause of all this. Our English is built of one or several languages spoken somewhere in Europe before the written word. Wherever it was, we think they had honey and pine forests, snow and wolves and the bear. We think, at first, it was not near the sea. But that's all we know. Everything else is a mystery, or historians making stuff up.

In time, a form of this pre-English was rebuilt into the various languages of the Jutes, Saxons and Angles who lived on the lowland coasts of present day Holland and Germany. They brought this ancient English with them when they invaded the island of Britain about 400 AD. Though a few habits of expression were added on - borrowings from Scot-Celtic and Welsh, or from Latin - the language was relatively stable. Historians call the language of this period "Old English."

Under assault from the Danes (Vikings), from whom it borrowed other terms, and the Norman French, who added as many as 1000 new words, Old English became “Middle English." This rich, wordy English was very complex and confused even by our standards. But it was the foundation of the "Modern English" of the 1500s and 1600s, of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. "Modern”, but not yet standardized: that would not happen until the dictionaries and grammar books of the 1800s began imposing rules as part of a larger project of acculturating the children of non-English speaking immigrants. (Throw in the invention of the classroom blackboard, and modern schooling was born.)

Well, yes. A fun bit of history to be sure. But reciting it is of no use to the poor learner who only wants to know how to find order amidst the chaos. "Why?" they ask. "Because," I answer, "that's how English is." "It doesn't follow its own rules!" they complain. "I know," I say. "Maybe you could learn French."

Listen, it’s not my fault. It was like that when I got here.

And, you know, it's really not such a bad language. I know it’s a jumble of archaic and ill-matched bits descended from who knows where.

But there is a story Tolkien tells (a little differently than this), of a man who owned a field wherein lay stones of some long tumbled-down building. In fact, some of those stones had been used several times in ancient castles and keeps. Picking out the best, discarding any too badly worn or cracked, and fitting them together as best he could, the man built a tower. When he had passed on, his relatives came and saw the tower. They saw that the stones rarely matched, that the wind and rain passed through, that the walls were crooked and unsure, and decided the best thing to do was knock this unsightly tower down.

For unsightly it was. And yet, from that tower the man had been able to look upon the sea.

I love English. I have loved this crooked and unsightly language all my life.

But I don't love explaining it to people who come new to the language expecting, understandably, something much more modern, well-constructed and snug.

Writing Is Important

"How do you spell.... Nevermind."

That made me look up. I'd been reading John Holt - one of his early books on schooling, written when he still thought it could be reformed (*). Now I watched her for a few minutes. She was using the chat or instant message service on her Facebook account, managing several conversations at once.

Long ago, a graveyard's time ago, when I was being trained, it was stressed that writing should be part of every class because it is important to literacy improvement. When people were unable to write, dictation and copying-over were the next best things. In any case, it was said, one key to adult literacy development was the purposeful use of written language. Encourage them to write, I was told, and you will help them learn to write more and better. We learn by doing.

I agreed, and still do. But, then, they went on to teach me the time honored way to encourage them to write. Put one or two journal topics up on the board, they said. Make sure everyone - me included - wrote or dictated their thoughts. Read back these writings. Share.

I'm probably giving the whole journal thing a short shrift (is that a word?). But it felt phony and schoolish and... imposed.

My first departure was offering caption writing as an alternative. We had a stack of old National Geographic that provided interesting and mysterious images. We tried our hand at making our own Christmas cards and such. Soon enough we were writing movie or game reviews, or comics and short stories for our own amusement. Later came the newsletter phase. Now we blog or chat, or send emails to each other and our families and friends.

Sometimes, stories still get written. Sometimes, birthday cards still get made. I mean, we're not complete geeks. Sometimes people just want to do some pen and paper writing - it's all good. If they want help deciding what to write about, I have a list of 251 writing ideas.

It didn't happen painlessly. Some people I nagged to write: that's a stupid and ineffective thing to do, but I did it, uselessly, for months at a time. I hardly ever do that now. There were a couple of awkward meetings where supervisors tried to bring me back to the daily journal fold. (More ineffective nagging.) But I... persevered, or something.

And, tonight, I looked up to see a lower-level learner running multiple online conversations, writing for meaning, solving her own spelling problems. There was no nagging involved. Want to know why?

Because writing is only important when it is important to us.

We learn by doing. We learn what we want. Everything else is school.