FIVE PILLARS
The decoding of words set on page (or screen) is perhaps the most difficult
widespread codified behavior we have taken on in the modern era.
James Patterson Time Oct. 24, 2016
The Five Pillars below must become a foundation for any attempt to
entice a child (or anyone else) to read. We must understand that…
One…Every letter in any written language (there’s about 94 languages with alphabets) is artificial, man-made, man-inscribed, man-developed, and each letter (ideograph, cuneiform, glyphs of any type…) is derivative from some inception perhaps several thousand years ago. The “English” alphabet, as an example, is derivative from the Carthaginian/Phoenician era around 3K years ago.
Two…We live in an Einsteinian universe consisting of physical, operational laws which are permanent unto our existence. Space, time, electromagnetism, quarks, atoms, gravity… Further, each of us lives within the fishbowl of time. No escape. Consider then any alphabetic letter…out-of-time without dependence upon any law of physics, electricity, gravity, or time. Beyond the pale. (I could write on a sticky-note a message, leave it within a vacuumed enclosed lead container and it would last, probably, until the sun morphed into a gargoyle.)
Three…Any alphabetic letter is form only. Form without substance. You could carve out wood sections to form, in bas-relief, an alphabetic letter as is done with the alphabet blocks children use.
You could carve marble to leave, as “absent residue,” forms in a tombstone, an obelisk, in a pyramid or on the façade of a U.S. Senate building. You could equally use native colors to imprint the outlines of a hand, birds, or buffalo as found in numerous caves and rock surfaces around the globe… Forms, outside of time, thousands of years old, form-less residue of in-time 4D brains, etching still.
Four…Every child is four-dimensional, lives in time, is perpetually subject to gravity, electricity, the operational laws of nature and of this universe and has no natural connectivity whatsoever to any static, time-less “existence” of any substance-less form, alphabetic or not. Further, any child has the potential of a one trillion neuronal connections in his/her brain…one billion extant, each one with connectivity to a thousand others. And to a printed “letter”?
Five…Misuse of the copula is the primary “sin” of RT’s (Reading Teachers). The copula is a linking verb (is, are, was, were, be…) that links/connects a tag (“word”) to a referent. To understand the deleterious, abusive misuse of the copula within standard instructional protocol, a separate section is so devoted.