Learning to Read Made Me Hate Reading

It all started way back when I was a kid in kindergarten. I was 5 years old and learning that these things called letters actually stand for specific sounds. And some of them, the ones called vowels and others like “c” and “g” have more than one sound. There were only 26 of them though, so that was okay. But then it got hard because when you put some of these letters together, they make words. Plus you could put them together in what seemed like any combination you wanted to to make a few hundred thou…a mill,…well I don’t know how many exactly but there are lots and lots, and LOTS of words. Then just to make it even tougher you had to put a bunch of words together to make sentences. But then it got downright crazy! Why? Because with reading comes writing, and every kid’s worst enemy – grammar. Yup, not only are there LOTS of words, but every one of them had a part of speech associated with it and in order to make a sentence you had to follow the rules of grammar to put certain types of words in the right order. And if you wanted to write about something that already happened you had to change some of the words by adding “ed” to the end of them or use totally different words that supposedly mean the same thing or else it was wrong. That’s right, just because you can write “I eat apples” doesn’t mean that after you eat one you can write “I eated the apple.” Nope, you have to write “I ate the apple.” There were so many rules! And then there were words that didn’t follow the rules! Now come on, if some words didn’t have to follow the rules then why did I have to? 

But let’s get back to the subject of reading. Here I am in kindergarten learning how to read. You know how I was taught how to read? Probably the same way as you! First you start at the left side of the word. So say the word you are trying to read is “bat.” First you make the “b” sound, buh. Next is one of the “a” sounds, ah or ay. And last is the “t” sound tuh. Then you say them all together buh….ah….tuh, and then speed up until they sound like a word you’ve heard of before which is of course bat.

But what about words like “mom” and “dad,” they sound the same whether you read them from left to right or from right to left so why do you always have to read from left to right? And what about words like “cider” where the “c” sounds like an “s?” And what’s with “th,” “sh,” and “ch” sounding nothing like “t” and “h” or “s” and “h” or “c” and “h?” And then there’s these words with so-called silent letters like “sign.” It should be spelled like “sine” but that’s a whole different word even though it sounds exactly the same! Who came up with all these rules on how to spell anyway? I don’t think they were the sharpest pencil in the pack.