I absolutely couldn’t wait to start grade one. I didn’t care about Science or Geography or Math. The only question on my mind (and expressed to my mother) was, “Will they teach me to read?”
I tried Kindergarten for a few weeks, but it was mostly a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds running around and hitting each other with toys (when they weren’t stealing the toys from each other). We didn’t even get a “Story Time”.
So one year later, as grade one approached, all I could ask was, “will they teach me to read in grade one?”
So I marched off to grade one, which was at the school just around the corner, in the hopes I would FINALLY be able to read all those many words in all those books that I had been seeing. I figured it would be a massive job to learn to read because I had seen a LOT of books and I would have to know each word in each one of them. But I was determined to get the job done. I loved words that much. I loved the look of them. The mystery of wondering what they meant. To look at them all neatly lined up in a row. My desire to read was what gave me the power to face my fears and go to my first day of school.
At my first day of school I was introduced to someone that would be my friend for the remainder of my life: “The Alphabet.”
When I got home that day, I was fairly bouncing off the walls with excitement. I could barely wait to tell Mom the amazing things I had learned.
After I changed into my “play clothes” and drank my milk and cookies, I became to unfold the events of my day.
“Mom? Did you know that all the words in all the books in the world are made up of only 26 letters. And that you can make all those different words just by jumbling the letters around in different orders?” (From her expression I could tell Mom was as excited about the whole concept as I was)
Every day at school, several times a day, we would go through the letters of the alphabet, which were hanging along the top of our classroom. We would recite each letter, followed by the sound or sounds that the letter made.
I loved learning to read, but I was still the petrified, little girl that I’ve been confessing about lately. So I never asked a question the entire first week of school, even though I was bursting to.
By the second week, I could stand it no longer. I put up my hand for the first time and asked the question,
“Why is ‘C’ in the alphabet?”
My teacher, Mrs. Long, looked puzzled for a moment. “What do you mean, Dear?”
“Well. The letter ‘C’ makes the sounds “ka” and “ssss”. But so do the letters ‘K’ and ‘S’. So why do we need the letter ‘C’ when we already have the letters ‘K’ and ‘S’?”
My seat was near the back of the class and it’s at that moment that I noticed that everyone, including Mrs. Long, was staring at me. I thought I must have asked a really stupid thing and that’s why everyone was looking at me. Then suddenly, everyone turned back around to look at Mrs. Long, for the answer.
She turned to look at the letters arranged in order at the top of the blackboard and said, “Well. [pause] Well, it’s because, … [pause], … it’s because. To tell you the truth, I’ve never really thought about it. I’ve been teaching grade one for almost 20 years and you’re the first one to ever ask me that.”
She promised to “look into it" and “get back to me”, but I still had more questions about the alphabet, so I put my hand up again.
“Yes, Laura-Lee?”
“While you’re looking up the question about the letter ‘C’, maybe you could see about doubling up the letters.”
She asked me again, what did I mean.
I responded, “I noticed that some letters have more than one sound. Like the letter ‘A’. It can sound like it does in ‘cake’ or like in the word ‘cat’. But there are other letters like, ‘D’ that only have one sound. So maybe we could take some of the letters that have only one sound, like ‘D’, ‘M’, ‘P’ and those kind and give them more than one sound. That way we wouldn’t have to have so many letters in the Alphabet and we could read and write faster.”
Mrs. Long just stood there and looked at me for a minute, sort of blinking her eyes. Then she said, “I’ll talk to the Alphabet people and see what I can do.”
Now some people say that I had those silly ideas about the alphabet because I was just a little child. But I still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer as to why we can’t get rid of the ‘C’ and double up on some of the other letters. Especially the consonants.
Plus, so often I’m trying to find the absolute perfect word to describe something and it just doesn’t exist in English. Maybe if we made some extra room with fewer letters, then we could create extra words, so we can communicate closer to what we exactly mean. You must admit that most fights and wars are started due to misunderstandings and miscommunications. My “Alphabet-Ideas” would stop that.
Just a suggestion. … by Laura-Lee
