SNAPSHOT STRANGENESS STORY #1: A Curious Reading Wrinkle From The Past

Things Are Not What They Seem, Or So It Seems

The “Initial Teaching Alphabet.”

“After you’ve been a detective for some time, you realize that the problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four. But sometimes you get twenty-two.” ― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“You know something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” — Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” 

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This started as a looooong collection of assorted odd events, incidents and coincidences, full of compelling unsolved intrigue from throughout my six-plus decades on this planet, or whatever it is and wherever it is we are.

There’s no shortage of strange-but-true tales from Tom, both a blessing and a curse, as usual. But it also made this Substack ridiculously lengthy. So instead I’m going to dribble them out occasionally, especially when perhaps everybody would prefer a palate cleanser after a particularly damaging entry for my Personal Brand. Like yesterday’s precarious “damn the torpedos!” piece which has resulted in three people unfollowing my Substack (so far!) and about a dozen people dumping me on Facebook (ditto!), followed by my entire Facebook account not loading all night long, until I went to bed, resigned that my Zuckworld existence was kaput.

Then I woke up this morning and lo and behold it had returned. There’s a reason, out of all the technoligarchs, I talk very little shit about Zuck, but at least I’m transparent enough to admit it.

Ah well, O Hell. Here is the first of my attempts to plunk my way past the messy opposite of Writer’s Block, “Graphorrhea,” and the dozens of overlong, over-digressive and unfinished Substacks sitting in bottomless queue as The Narrative moves faster than my ability to keep up, which is surely the goal of a never-ending psyop running at, uh, Warp Speed. I hope you get something out of it.

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When still very young, I was an early and avid reader. I lived next door to my paternal grandparents, Dot & Pop Pop, in suburban Summit, NJ. It was an immense blessing. My grandmother read to me all the time and encouraged me to learn to read by the time I hit kindergarten. 

“The more you read, the smarter you will become than anyone else,” she used to say to me. “Reading will bring you pleasure and knowledge all your life. A book will always be waiting for you. A television program will not.” (little did she know!)

It was 1968-69 and I was far ahead of the vast majority of my tyke peers. The school, or someone, somewhere, noticed, and in first grade I was put in an accelerated class for reading with perhaps 10% of my grade school peers.

Except this “accelerated class” used a new kind of alphabet to read. The new alphabet integrated many different letters and symbols from the normal alphabet. Phonetic ones, letters that attempted to communicate the sound they made. I had to be re-educated to read all over again. I had to learn a new alphabet, one with 44 letters: “The Initial Teaching Alphabet,” or ITA, displayed atop this page.

Everything in this new alphabet was based on phonics, or the sound of the letters in language. For example, “Cat” would be spelled “Kat,” while “Circus” would become “Serkus.” My favorite new letter was two connected “E”s, which were used to signify the long “E” in words like “keep.” All the books I was given looked like this:

The ITA version of Snow White is to the English language as Rachel Zegler is to Natalie Wood.

There were 52% more phonetic letters in this new alphabet than in the one I’d already learned that had 26 letters. A lot of the new reading rules I was learning contradicted what my grandmother Dot had taught me. Dot didn’t like this new-fangled way of reading at all and thought it made no sense, and she tried to gently convince my mom to get me out of the program. But my mom thought Dot had good intentions but was old school. New & Better Ways were here! I was an “accelerated” student! This was flattering for our family! 

I was in that “accelerated class” with the new kind of alphabet and reading for my full first grade school year. I was given all kinds of new books to read with the phonetic alphabet and discouraged from reading ordinary library books. My “accelerated class” was given special spelling tests, where we had to use the ITA spellings, and some of those new letters were a pain in the ass to depict.

The school and my Summit, NJ, library had a few of the new phonetic alphabet books but not many, though there were promises that more would soon arrive. I read the same shallow pool of books over and and over and over and over (and over!). I started to forget the old alphabet, my old books, and my brain began to alter. My collection of reading material was shrinking, for sure, but I wanted to do the right thing and stick with the guidance of my “accelerated class,” so I just began watching more TV. For summer vacation, my parents graciously bought a box of books using the ITA reading system. 

In second grade, however, there was suddenly no “accelerated class” for exceptional readers. The ITA phonetic reading program was gone. I was shattered. I didn’t want to go back to my old alphabet — I had spent a year relearning it! I cried about it for days, both in school and at home; it wasn’t fair, I didn’t want to do the work, didn’t want to read anymore. They had told me I was special and now I was discovering that I was not.

Fortunately, I had no choice. I liked reading. I loved being told stories from the page. With my grandmother’s prodding — she presented it gently but also as non-negotiable — I finally reluctantly came around and in very short time was back to my old ways, tearing through books voraciously. 

My grandmother was right. Reading has been one of the greatest — if not THE greatest — continuing experiences of my life in the material world. 

Fade to black. Fade in.

Decades later, when I lived in Baltimore, early ‘00s, there was the bluest of blue-collar guys who went to our church. About my age but time and employment necessities made him look older, a lot older, hard-bitten and brusque, weathered skin and calloused hands. He was a hard-working high school dropout, Bawlmer street smart and savvy but not formally well-educated. One of those good-men-but-not-nice guys who would always be there if you needed help moving, cleaning up, driving an elderly church-member somewhere; doing an upright deed while asking for no glory.

The 19th Century former Messiah English Lutheran Church on Canton Square in Baltimore, which I attended with my family in the early aughts. It’s now called The Church on the Square, “An open, creative refuge, respectful of all beliefs…addressing wellness and environmental issues; enriching our common life together through faith, spirituality and doubt…an inclusive home for you.” All 14 pages recounting the historical church’s honorable and noteworthy past that used to be found on the Baltimore Historical & Architectural Preservation website now return “Page not found.”

I remember one day we were talking about something, don’t recall what but probably sports, and I told him “Oh wow! I’ve got a great book about that, if you’re interested. I’m happy to lend it to you if you like,” because I enjoy sharing books I like with others, even though there’s a lot of them I’ve never gotten back.

But he responded: “I hate reading. It’s my least favorite thing to do. I never read.”

I was taken aback. I’d never heard anyone say that. “O wow! That surprises me. I love to read! Why do you feel that way?”

He shrugged, not ashamed but defiant. “It’s work. It’s too much work. When I was really young I loved to read, but then they put me in this special program where I had to learn to read all over again. I didn’t like that, but I did it. Then they tried to switch me back and I was sick of it. It all seemed so stupid to me. I quit reading then.” Not his exact words, of course, but appropriately paraphrased.

This jarred me. I still had a chip of resentment on my shoulder for that cursed ITA reading program. “Wait,” I interjected. “Did the reading program have a bunch of different letters, letters that matched their sound?”

He really wasn’t interested in this conversation. Shrugged again, looked past my shoulder. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Did it have connected ‘E’s for some words? Like a line through the “E” for words like ‘keep’?” Those damned double “E”s! They always stuck with me.

“I don’t remember,” he said, though his reply came so quick I could tell he simply didn’t want to think about it. “But it really made me hate reading.”

Okay. Baltimore flashback over. Now let’s turn to the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalyst and phonics and literacy specialist Caroline Vollans, writing in NurseryWorld, the U.K.’s leading magazine for early years education:

“Though the intention of the Initial Teaching Alphabet was to create a simplified version of the written word, making it easier and quicker for the child to read, it turned out in many ways to be the very opposite. ITA, in fact, added several complications to learning to read…

“Making the transition from using ITA reading skills to reading the standard English alphabet is something of a challenge. Learning to read text using one set of tools and rules, and then having to un-learn these in order to read using both a different script and a new set of tools, often proved too demanding for children…

“When the BBC surveyed those who had learnt to read using this system in 2005, the majority said they felt that it had hampered their reading and spelling…”

So here’s the thing: I entered the first grade way ahead of my peers in reading already. I knew all my letters, I was cruising through 4th grade books. ITA proved a setback that I was able to overcome, but a setback it was all the same. There are very likely a lot of people who were avid young readers who did not bounce back the way I did. Not everybody grows up next door to their grandmother; in fact, far too many do not.

Me in kindergarten.

Even if the ITA program truly had the best interests of students at heart and was intended to improve teaching kids how to read, why was it called an “accelerated program,” and why were I and other superior early readers in that class? Wouldn’t it have been better for kids who weren’t already skilled at reading? How was it determined that I was such a good fit for this “accelerated program,” if I had already accelerated past everybody else? It ended up nearly squelching my early passion for books!

Since I’m heading down this path anyway, let me add that I could be a stubborn little punk, constantly questioning and challenging authority even back then. I would dispute my teachers. I asked unanswerable questions about God, the devil and the Bible in Sunday school class. I would sit at the dinner table until bedtime because I refused to eat my peas and carrots.

Perhaps very early on, I had been recognized as a potential enemy of the status quo. Perhaps the date and time and location of my birth — 4:13 am on 4/13/62 in Overlook Hospital in Summit, NJ —set off some cosmic alarm. Maybe the government has been monitoring all of us very closely for far longer than we realize and the panopticon surveillance state masquerading as a free democracy isn’t a 21st Century thing, it’s just getting more digital and obvious to us non-NPCs.

Or perhaps not. Maybe this was a well-meaning thing and it simply broke bad. You know, like the Covid lockdowns, mRNA injections, “diversity & equity” programs, #MeToo, “fact checkers” and all those other “good for you” decisions made by our political leadership that simply turned out to be wrong-headed and haven’t worked out at all the way we were promised. Perhaps the government truly has our best interests at heart, they’re just incompetent. But that’s not what I think.

Maybe it’s all just a matter of perspective.