The Copula (Deadly!)
…is…are…was…were…am…
When a child comes into this world, he/she learns, as he must, tags to reference objects, people, operations…to gather facility in manipulating and controlling his environ . The child learns tags such as milk, Mama, Daddy, ball…etc. “This is a tree (tag)…That is Grandma (tag)…That was a bird (tag)…This is your nose…They are pelicans…Those were heavy…” and on and on.
So, tags…tags…tags…for things, aspects, characteristics, attributes… Question: What do all the tagged referents have in common?
Everything to which a child learns to apply a tag is a referenced denizen, inhabitant, entry within Einstein’s four dimensional universe. Each learned referent is subject to weight, dimensional attributes, gravity, electromagnetism, space, and time. Everything. Then along comes a teacher who flips the issue by saying, “This is a C (common tag?). This is an A (tag?). This is a T (tag?). [Put them all together and what do you get? The “Whole Word” scam and Fry’s list of common words, each as integral and “real” as the “real” letters comprising.] And two types of children thereafter emerge…
The first child (Johnny), stuck within classroom walls, controlled by authority (the teacher), embedded within a group of age-related peers (a behavior control), sits, and unable both through un-developed experiential expertise and fear of act unacceptable to either group or teacher, “buys in” as he must…or face potential exclusion. Johnny’s future? “This is a B [tag!], Johnny,” teacher says. “Say ‘bee’.” Johnny does…and, like Faustus, surrenders his soul.
Child number two, Alice, a learned skeptic, takes everything with a spoonful of salt. She “stores” what she hears but doesn’t bank it. Verification is required to reach assurance. Alice asks her parents. “Is this a C?” she asks. “Yes, Alice, but it’s just a form [the optimal answer]. You can draw it, erase it, throw it out, make it anyway you want….”. Relying on her parents, she parlays trust through them, and so assigns an empathic verisimilitude to the C, to the A, to the T…and similars in like manner.
The everlasting problem? Johnny didn’t shift and it’s Johnny with whom we’re concerned. Johnny took at face value exactly what the teacher said. “This is a C, Johnny. With an A and a T, C A T spells cat. Say cat, Johnny.” Johnny does, and gets admitted to the close administrative circle of “readers.” And is then tested. In third grade. And fails.
Was Johnny tested, as was my six year old grandson (or any other pre-third grader), for visual info process issues, visual motor integration, vestibular issues, coloboma, foveal hypoplasia, myopia, low vision, legal blindness, loss of stereo, convergence excess, convergence insufficiency, accommodative dysfunction, oculomotor dysfunction, esotropia, exotropia, nystagmus, or amblyopia? Or for simple dyslexia? No test? Yet graded for “Pass” or “Failure,” scarred for the duration and plunged into the “Failure” caste? And parents allow their children to undergo this social division into the “winners” or the “losers,” the “have’s” and “have not’s,” with variables reaching unto the stars, no proof of any kind that either the RT’s (Reading Teachers) or “testers” know what they’re doing? So early it begins.
Walk through halls of high schools as I have done so often, and observe classrooms of students huddled over remedial readers…students to your left…to your right…all day, every day, fingers moving left to right, down shift, left to right…again…again…trying to “find” the “things” to which the letters refer, each “legal,” each given “life” through teachers’ imprimaturs…that each “is.” Nothing within an educational institution can be so sad. Yes, the tears come…not unexpected considering the waste, and the shame.
A child is of all dimensions and possesses same. Letters possess none. One responds to gravity, time, space… electrons orbiting in locomotions…, the other static, lifeless, out-of-time and space, given credence due only to artifacts of chisel, pen, positioned pixels, sharpened Crayolas, or an RT’s say-so. No value within reality but for the mind of man carving forms within artifacts of imagination. And to reconcile the two? Impossible. One is. The other isn’t. No way out. Or is there…?
