Chapter Five - Reading Lessons

 

(MATILDA O'DONNELL MACELROY PERSONAL NOTE)
"I began the reading lessons with the first pages of a school book that had been used to teach pioneer children in the 1800s on the frontiers of America. It is called "McGuffey's Eclectic Reader, Primer Through Sixth". 40 (Footnote)


Since I am a nurse, and not a teacher, the language expert who gave me the books also gave me an extensive briefing - a course that took an entire day - on how to use the books to teach the alien. He said the reason he chose these particular books was because the original 1836 version of these books were used for three-quarters of a century to teach about four-fifths of all American school children how to read. No other books ever had so much influence over American children for so long.


McGuffey's educational course begins in "The Primer" by presenting the letters of the alphabet to be memorized, in sequence. Children were then taught, step by step, to use the building blocks of the language to form and pronounce words, using the phonics method 41 (Footnote) which involves teaching children to connect sounds with letters. Each lesson begins with a study of words used in the reading exercise and with markings to show the correct pronunciation for each word.


I discovered that the stories in the "First and Second Readers" picture children in their relationship with family members, teachers, friends, and animals. The "Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Readers" expanded on those ideas. One of the stories I remember was "The Widow and the Merchant".

 

It's kind of a morality tale about a merchant who befriends a widow in need. Later, when the widow proves herself to be honest, the merchant gives her a nice gift. The books do not necessarily teach you to believe that charity is expected only of wealthy people though. We all know that generosity is a virtue that should be practiced by everyone.


All of the stories were very wholesome and they gave very good explanations to illustrate virtues like honesty, charity, thrift, hard work, courage, patriotism, reverence for God, and respect for parents. Personally, I would recommend this book to anyone!


I also discovered that the vocabulary used in the book was very advanced compared to the relatively limited number of words people use commonly in our modern age. I think we have lost a lot of our own language since our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence over 200 years ago!


As instructed, I sat next to Airl in the interview room reading aloud to her from each successive book in the series of McGuffey's Readers. Each of the books had excellent, simple illustrations of the stories and subjects being taught, although they are very outdated by today's standards. Nonetheless, Airl seemed to understand and absorb every letter, sound, syllable and meaning as we progressed. We continued this process for 14 hours a day for 3 consecutive days without interruption, except for a few meals and rest breaks on my part.


Airl did not take breaks for anything. She did not sleep. Instead she remained sitting in the overstuffed chair in the interview room, reviewing the lessons we had already covered. When I returned each morning to begin where we'd left off, she had already memorized the previous lessons and was well into the next pages. This pattern continued to accelerate until it became pointless for me to continue reading to her.


Although Airl did not have a mouth to speak with, she was now able to "think" at me in English. At the end of these lessons, Airl was able to read and study by herself. I showed her how to use a dictionary to look up new words she encountered. Airl consulted the dictionary continually after that. From then on my job was acting as a courier for her, requesting that reference books be brought to her in a steady stream.


Next, Mr. Newble brought in a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 42 (Footnote) Airl especially enjoyed this because it had a lot of pictures. After that, she requested many more picture books and reference books with photographs and drawings because it was much easier to understand the meaning if she could see a picture of the thing she was studying.


Over the next six days books were brought in from libraries all over the country, I presume, because it wasn't more than a few more days before she had read through several hundred of them! She studied every subject I could imagine, and many other very technical things I never wanted to know anything about, like astronomy, metallurgy, engineering, mathematics, various technical manuals, and so forth.


Later she began to read fiction books, novels, poetry and the classics of literature. Airl also asked to read a great many books on subjects in the humanities, especially history. I think she must had read at least 50 books about human history and archaeology. Of course, I made sure that she received a copy of the Holy Bible also, which she read from cover to cover without comment or questions.


Although I continued to stay with Airl for 12 to 14 hours each day, most of that time during the following week had been spent without much communication between us, except for an occasional question she asked me. The questions were usually meant to give her a sense of context or to clarify something in the books she was reading.

 

Oddly, Airl told me that her favorite books are "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" 43 (Footnote), "Don Quixote de la Mancha" 44 (Footnote) and "One Thousand and One Nights" 45 (Footnote). She said the authors of these stories showed that it is more important to have great spirit and imagination than great skill or power.


I could not answer a lot of her questions, so I consulted with the people in the outer room for answers. Most of these had to do with technical and scientific things. A few of her questions were about the humanities. The depth of complex understanding and subtlety of her questions showed that she had a very penetrating intellect.


Personally, I think she had already known a lot more about the culture and history of Earth than she was willing to admit when we started. I would soon discover how much more."

 

Footnotes

40 "...McGuffey's Eclectic Readers..."
"McGuffey's Eclectic Readers were written by William Holmes McGuffey who began teaching school at the age of 14. He was a professor of ancient languages at Miami University from 1826 until his resignation in 1836. He then served as president of Cincinnati College (1836-1839) and Ohio University (1839-1843). Returning to Cincinnati, McGuffey taught at Woodward College from 1843 until 1845, when he became a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1829.

 

It was during his years at Miami when McGuffey was approached to write a series of readers for school children. In addition to the work done on these by William Holmes McGuffey, he was assisted by his brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey, who also compiled a speller and had sole responsibility for the Fifth Reader. Alexander taught school while working on his law degree and opened a law office in Cincinnati in 1839. The McGuffey Readers sold over 125,000,000 copies.

 

McGuffey became a "roving" teacher at the age of 14, beginning with 48 students in a one room school in Calcutta, Ohio. The size of the class was just one of several challenges faced by the young McGuffey. In many one-teacher schools, children's ages varied from six to twenty-one. McGuffey often worked 11 hours a day, 6 days a week in a succession of frontier schools. He had a remarkable ability to memorize, and could commit to mind entire books of the Bible.


The first Reader taught reading by using the phonics method, the identification of letters and their arrangement into words, and aided with slate work. The second Reader came into play once the student could read, and helped them to understand the meaning of sentences while providing vivid stories which children could remember. The third Reader taught the definitions of words, and was written at a level equivalent to the modern 5th or 6th grade. The fourth Reader was written for the highest levels of ability on the grammar school level, which students completed with this book.
 

McGuffey's Readers were among the first textbooks in America that were designed to become progressively more challenging with each volume. They used word repetition in the text as a learning tool, which built strong reading skills through challenging reading. Sounding-out, enunciation and accents were emphasized. Colonial-era texts had offered dull lists of 20 to 100 new words per page for memorization. In contrast, McGuffey used new vocabulary words in the context of real literature, gradually introducing new words and carefully repeating the old.


McGuffey believed that teachers should study the lessons as well as their students and suggested they read aloud to their classes. He also listed questions after each story for he believed in order for a teacher to give instruction, one must ask questions. The Readers emphasized spelling, vocabulary, and formal public speaking, which, in 19th century America, was a more common requirement than today.


Henry Ford cited McGuffey's Readers as one of his most important childhood influences. He was an avid fan of McGuffey's Readers first editions, and claimed as an adult to be able to quote from McGuffey's by memory at great length. Ford republished all six Readers from the 1857 edition, and distributed complete sets of them, at his own expense, to schools across the United States.


McGuffey's Readers contain many derogatory references to ethnic and religious minorities. For example, Native Americans are referred to as "savages". There are those who regard the references in the book to the Jews and Judaism as anti-Semitic. For instance, in Neil Baldwin's Henry Ford and the Jews, the author makes the case that Henry Ford's self-avowed anti-Semitism originated with his study of McGuffey's as a schoolboy.

 

Baldwin cites numerous anti-semitic references to Shylock and to Jews attacking Jesus and Paul. He also quotes the Fourth Reader to the effect that "Jewish authors were incapable of the diction and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel." The readers further characterize Jews as "Christ killers" and labels their reverence of the Old Testament as "superstitious," and teach that Jews have been rejected by God for being "unfaithful"."


You may download text versions of the McGuffy's Reader from the following website: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14640
 

41 "... the phonics method ... "
"Phonics refers to an instructional method for teaching children to read English. Phonics involves teaching children to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters (e.g., that the sound /k/ can be represented by c, k, or ck spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words."

-- Reference: Wikipedia.org

 

42 "... brought in a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica..." "The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. The Britannica has a popular reputation for summarizing all of human knowledge. To further their education, many have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so. When Fat'h Ali became the Shah of Persia in 1797, he was given a complete set of the Britannica's 3rd edition, which he read completely; after this feat, he extended his royal title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica."

 

Writer George Bernard Shaw claimed to have read the complete 9th edition—except for the science articles—and Richard Evelyn Byrd took the Britannica as reading material for his five-month stay at the South Pole in 1934. The articles in the Britannica are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors. It is widely perceived as the most scholarly of encyclopaedias. Since the 3rd edition, the Britannica has enjoyed a popular and critical reputation for general excellence. On the release of the 14th edition, Time magazine dubbed the Britannica the "Patriarch of the Library".

 

In a related advertisement, naturalist William Beebe was quoted as saying that the Britannica was "beyond comparison because there is no competitor." References to the Britannica can be found throughout English literature, most notably in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Red-Headed League"."

-- Reference: Wikipedia.org

 

43 "...her favorite books were Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ..." "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a work of literary nonsense written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, considered a classic example of the genre and of English literature in general. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantastic realm populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures.

 

The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends (and enemies), and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The tale plays with logic in ways that have made the story of lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre."

-- Reference: Wikipedia.org

 

44 "...Don Quixote de la Mancha..." "An early novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story based upon a manuscript by the invented Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. The work was published in two volumes: the first in 1605, and the second in 1614.

The protagonist, Alonso Quixano, is a country gentleman who has read so many stories of chivalry that he descends into fantasy and becomes convinced he is a knight errant. Together with his earthy squire Sancho Panza, the self-styled "Don Quixote de la Mancha" sets out in search of adventure. The "lady" for whom Quixote seeks to toil is Dulcinea del Toboso, an imaginary object crafted from a neighboring farm girl (her real name is Aldonza Lorenzo) by the illusion-struck "knight" to be the object of his courtly love. "Dulcinea" is totally unaware of Quixote's feelings for her, nor does she actually appear in the novel.


Published in two volumes a decade apart, Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears at or near the top of lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published and is the best-selling non-religious, non-political work of fiction of all time."
-- Reference: Wikipedia.org
 

45 "...One Thousand and One Nights... "
"One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic:
كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة - kitab 'alf laylah wa-laylah; Persian: هزار و یک شب - ezar-o yak sab) is a collection of stories collected over thousands of years by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries. These collections of tales trace their roots back to ancient Arabia and Yemen, ancient India, ancient Persia (especially the Sassanid Hazar Afsan Persian: هزار افسان , lit. Thousand Tales), ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamian Mythology, ancient Syria, and medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Though an original manuscript has never been found several versions date the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.


The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon discovering his former wife's infidelity has her executed and then declares all women to be unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning. Eventually the vizier cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade tells the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) another. So it goes for 1,001 nights.
 

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques, various forms of erotica, and Muslim religious legends. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography; the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid is a common protagonist, as are his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas and his vizier, Ja'far al-Barmaki. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly-layered narrative texture.


The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.


The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life.


The Indian folklore is represented by certain animal stories, which reflect influence from ancient Sanskrit fables. The Jataka is a collection of 547 stories, which are for the most part moral stories with an ethical purpose. The Tale of the Bull and the Ass and the linked Tale of the Merchant and his Wife are found in the frame stories of both the Jataka and the Arabian Nights."
-- Reference: Wikipedia.org

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