"This Spells Trouble"

I came to Virginia Hills Elementary School in the fourth grade. Before that I had been in a different school every year or so. I was a little older than the average fourth grader because when my family moved from Arlington to Fairfax county I was required to repeat third grade. I was told that this was because of a bureaucratic technicality (having something to do with my date of birth); whether that was the whole truth or not I can't say.

In fourth grade I began to run into real trouble at school. I suspect it started around the time Miss Dovel began to teach us cursive handwriting. I hadn't had any special problem learning my letters or reading, but cursive was very different. In cursive each letter was linked to the next by the flow of the pen. The expected linkage varied depending on the letters in play, connecting f-a was different from connecting f-e. The connections were not entirely arbitrary but they seemed so to a fourth grader. Moreover, writing cursive well depended on having all the relevant letter-connection conventions at your fingertips so that the line of writing remains smooth and free of interruptions and false-starts. We practiced by copying texts out, often from the blackboard, but also from workbooks. As with all things schoolish, time mattered. Exercises might start slowly, but they inevitably grew faster and as they did my ability to keep up dropped off very sharply. To complete a word in cursive I would have to repeatedly check back and forth between the exemplar and my work, trying to make out what connection was appropriate next. Inevitably, I would fall behind and have to turn in incomplete and poorly executed worksheets. As soon as I was able I switched back to simple printing. I still write that way today.

Miss Dovel was not happy with my cursive, but she soon left it aside to concentrate on my spelling which she concluded was a far more acute and compelling problem. There was a spelling test each week and each test had about ten words. I often misspelled five or more each time I was tested. Miss Dovel was universally thought to be a mild and kindly women. Most kids got "Satisfactories" whatever their shortcomings, but she was so taken aback by my spelling that she gave me an "Unsatisfactory" on my first report card. To address the problem, she settled on rote homework. She explained to me that from now on whenever I failed a word on a weekly test, I would have to copy that word ten times and hand in those copies to her each morning. When the next spelling test rolled around, she would test me on the words I missed the previous week as well. Misspellings would cumulate.

This had repercussions. My mother got involved, coaching me for the tests. Due to the rote copying or to the my mother's tutoring, my spelling did improve, though not as much as Miss Dovel had hoped, and, gradually, as the year wore on, I fell back into making mistakes. Miss Dovel's instinctive kindness kept my grade "Satisfactory", but a close observer would have seen that exhaustion had set in. Fourth grade ended and I was passed, the next September, to Miss Fox and the fifth grade.

Miss Fox was no-nonsense and less inclined to let kindness guide her than Miss Dovel. Over the summer my spelling had been neglected and she got the full force of my inability all at once that September. Benefit of the doubt got me a "Little Progress" grade, but she doubled down on the homework. Instead of copy each misspelled word ten times, she upped it to twenty. That got me an "Unsatisfactory" grade on my next report card, so she upped it again to twenty-five, and then again to fifty. The misspelled words multiplied and pages of copied words got longer, and the time at home spent on rote copying took up more and more of my non-school hours. I grew increasingly weary and resentful and, privately, I was in tears or at their edge regularly. It was tedious; it was numbing; it was futile.

By the end of fourth grade, my mother was already tiring of the role of coach; as fifth grade started her coaching became decidedly erratic and soon evaporated altogether. I never got a grade better than "Little Progress" during the year and that only twice; otherwise I was a straight "Unsatisfactory" student in spelling. I suppose that was fair enough. I made too many careless mistakes and I was prone to lapse into inattention. Still I was, as best I could manage, trying. I wished I could do better and I tried to do better for all the good it did.

A few weeks after New Years Miss Fox was absent and we were given a substitute. He was a short young man with a buzz cut and a hint of military bearing; the other boys said he was just back from Korea. He was surprised by the bundles of copied words I handed him each morning. He looked at my last spelling tests and he asked me some general questions. Finally, he admonished me, "Stuart, you're a smart kid. If you try you'll pass these tests without any trouble. Start trying."

This wasn't that different from what other adults had been saying, but this time I started to wonder whether there might be a fundamental mistake. Perhaps I found it easier to doubt the substitute because he was male; I won't deny that I was inclined to accept female opinions at face value. Was he mislead by a spurious presumption leading to an erroneous conclusion? It certainly wasn't the first time I had noticed that adults sometimes believed things that just weren't true.

The evidence seemed pretty clear: I was failing the spelling tests, despite my efforts, why? Because I was not bright enough to do better. I gradually came to notice lots of other little things that appeared all of a piece with this conclusion. My arithmetic wasn't very good for one thing, and, if one looked closely, all my other work was full of mistakes as well. Moreover, the other kids in my class had noticed all the spelling homework and were quick to revel in an occasion for schadenfreude, which they expressed, naturally, in form of stinging schoolyard ridicule. They passed the spelling tests without noticeable difficulty; obviously I was constitutionally unable to keep up.

As time went by I grew more familiar with this interpretation and came to find it actually comforting. It didn't change much practically, but it did reduce the stress I had been laboring under and it licensed a useful indifference that would spread and long outlive the spelling tests.

Sixth grade eventually ended; I expected seventh grade to be more of the same as far as spelling went but I was wrong. As it happened, the new teacher, Miss Downs, had troubles far more immediate and pervasive than my spelling. To my surprise and relief she never once asked me to make copies of misspelled words. In fact, I doubt she ever noticed that my spelling was any worse than the other kids'. Miss Downs ran into trouble managing her class almost at once. She was unsuited for the role and, in her panic, tried to pretend there was nothing wrong. Her teaching grew increasingly erratic as the year went on. The children were unhappy and subtly frightened by Miss Down's unpredictability and kids who had been reasonably docile under previous teachers turned disruptive. It was, all in all, a chaotic and confusing experience for all; moreover, it lasted nearly two years, all of sixth and most of seventh grade. It was probably not the first time that mental illness had interceded to protect me, or at least, to divert me from one sort of problem into an entirely different sort of problem.

All this had a mixed impact on my situation. On the one hand, Miss Downs' inattention lent me an unexpected anonymity. I quickly discovered that anonymity was a welcome relief from the constant attention my spelling problem had called to me in the past. I learned that adults were frequently glad for an excuse to ignore children and, that being quiet, deferential, and polite would go a long way to priming adults to look the other way. Obviously adults were overburdened with too many children and especially too many demanding children. One might say that it was a lesson that taught one kindness: be kind to your teachers and, with some luck, they may return the favor by letting your inadequacies slide by quietly.

On the other hand, Miss Downs' classroom was no place for a student who had trouble keeping up. Subjects that had been scheduled more or less uniformly in previous years suddenly varied wildly: a social studies session might last twenty minutes on Tuesday, a hour on Thursday, and ten minutes on Friday. And there was no guarantee that a social studies session would happen at all. I was already far too inclined to rush through work and fall into inattention. So I struggled to keep up under normal circumstances and Miss Downs' capricious time-juggling made things worse.

I remember one afternoon when Miss Downs' was explaining English grammar, specifically "persons", as in "first person", "second person", etc. Her explanation was rushed and gone before I had properly understood what she was talking about. We were then given a short text and were told to identify examples of each "person" in the text. The text concerned two children, Tom and Susan, playing with a dog. It puzzled me. I wasted a lot of time trying to make out what was wanted and finally, realizing that time was rapidly running out, I decided that Tom must be the first person because his name came up first in the story. That made Susan the second person, and the dog third, although that didn't sound altogether plausible. I handed in my work and, as I had feared, my answers turned out to be symmetrically idiotic.

Another day she posed a simple writing assignment. I no longer remember the details, but it entailed writing about a person who was fearful of others. I got as far as the word "shy" when I realized that I hadn't any idea of how to spell it. I started jotting down the word as it sounded to me, hoping that I would recognize the correct version once I saw it in black and white:

		S-H-I-E     S-H-Y    S-H-A-I
		C-H-A-Y   C-H-I-E    S-A-I-H

I ran into similar troubles with "long" and "short" vowels (which were different, but not in any discernable way relating to "length" as I understood it) and "hard" and "soft" consonants. I just could not make out why in the world one would call a sound hard or soft. In fact, the whole business sounded suspiciously arbitrary to me at the time.

There were lots and lots of these experiences. They didn't have much practical consequence at the time, but I didn't know then that these misunderstandings and errors were influencing me deeply. They made me subconsciously curious. Perhaps because I was not being singled out for attention, I began to privately store up things that I wanted to understand better. I noticed that a lot of the things teachers had told me about language appeared to be flimsy and pervicacious. Not just oversimplified, but almost willfully incoherent. I concluded that if I wanted to understand these things, it would have to be done where school couldn't muddle things with its pet confusions.

This was the beginning, I think, of discovering the magic and pleasures of overcompensation. Being bad a something can be a strong motivator. These early perplexities would stay with me and end up influencing my life repeatedly and in fundamental ways.

In the moment, though, I had problem. There was a boy in class named Schlesinger (all the boys called him Shitslinger). Schlesinger was an incidental bully, mainly concentrating on younger kids. One recess I was on the blacktop when Schlesinger and a couple of his apostles noticed me and instigated a squabble. A book of mine ended up muddied on the ground. Schlesinger was dismissive, "Hell, you can't even spell. I bet you can't really read it anyway."

Schlesinger had a point. Not the point he though he had, but a good one still. How was it I could read when I couldn't spell? It didn't seem sensible on its face. It took me a while to work out, not that I was ever able to satisfactorily explain the apparent contradiction. Perhaps I could read because I couldn't spell and my failure spelling led me to overcompensate which in turn equipped me to subconsciously retain knowledge I needed to read pleasurably. That's likely way too convoluted, circular, and speculative, but it was good enough for a twelve year old.

This explanation turns on a crucial difference between spelling and reading. Spelling is the decoding of symbols into words and vice versa, without reference to anything else. Reading is more like a one-sided conversation in which everything in the world is potentially relevant. Reading is listening made asynchronous. One practical consequence of this is that the more real world knowledge one has at one's disposal the easier it is to read successfully. This can be pretty obvious. For example, when we read the Great Gatsby in high school knowing about Arnold Rothstein and the Black Sox scandal helped one understand some parts of the story. But that's a trivial, wide-awake example. What's more interesting and important are the myriad occasions when the reader is helped by a stealthy learning that he never knowingly acquired. In Gatsby the ambivalent relationship between Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker is described in hints, innuendo, and implied attitudes. It's not at all surprising that young readers with little exposure to real world adult relationships should find it irritatingly obscure or even incomprehensible. But if the young reader has been eavesdropping for years furtively, but attentively, on adult conversations, they can understand more than one might anticipate.

Hidden knowledge is what separates engaged reading from nominal reading. In any case, reading gave me the sensation of being like Meno's slave boy; I knew and understood things but I couldn't explain how I came to know them.

This explanation also led me to another observation that would prove helpful in years to come. School, I noticed, very much liked to insist that children were uniformly empty vessels. The school would transfer learning in measured doses to the children. The children were then tested on that learning and were themselves measured and classified depending on their ability to flawlessly mimic the results the school fancied. But in a real classroom children often know things, sometimes inconvenient things, sometimes things that contradict what the school is teaching, but more often just things that interfere with the how the imagined transfer of learning is supposed to work. In fact, I reckon that a plurality of school house conflicts and trouble were, at bottom, caused by children's stubborn failure to actually be empty vessels.

These insights and attitudes would, for better or worse, stick with me. But the spelling tests did not. They stopped with Miss Downs. I suppose this is an example of good fortune making use of improbable allies. In any case, I was grateful and more than ready to move on. To paraphrase Marilynne Robinson's Ruthie Foster, "That was the end of spelling."

Stuart Spore 11/11/2022