Chasing Silly Bulls in the Stream of Speech

I have to work on not being snarky. My jokes are unfiltered and sometimes incomprehensibly twisted. As I say to my wife, who is very tolerant, this is how I came out of the factory, mostly deplorable with a sprinkle of elite.

When my blood starts to boil as it does after I listen to one or another particularly fragrant YouTube captured at the Temple of SoR ©️, sermons urging teachers to send children on a search for silly bulls and continents, I find myself reverting to childhood. “Please just let me miscue,” I would have said to my teacher if I’d only known somewhere around 1959. “I’ll self-correct when I need to! I promise! Please teach me some knowledge!”

It hadn’t been but a few years since Rudolph Flesch spilled the beans: Johnny Can’t Read! Rudolph Revere here to save the day! “Hey, I’m not Johnny,” I might have said. I should check with Emily Hanford to see if she’s interested in my phonics story. I learned every phonics rule known to human kind and some less well known. I rolled vowels up like burritos in a tortilla made of refried plosives and lip smackers. Sputnik, too, changed the nature of reading instruction in the tiny rural town in which I touched down in a holler by a creek. It’s a boring story compared to Emily’s standard fare. My math story is a bit more interesting, at least to me looking backwards.

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In 1963 when I was in fourth grade, I had three solid good classroom friends, Stanley, Deborah, and Pete. We were together in the earlier grades, each of us chasing those silly bulls and word parts like crazy little kids do. Stanley and Deborah were twins, Pete a farm boy.

We became academic competitors, collaborating to practice for spelling bees, aiming to win on the day of the event. We generally had more freedom in the classroom than other kids. Our reward for being smart was getting to erase the blackboard in the afternoon and then beat the hell out of the erasers on the playground.

For the math hour teacher sent the four of us to the library. Teacher discovered early that we caught on to the worksheets and textbook exercises pretty quickly. “What’s next?” we would ask. I’m pretty sure she had talked to the third grade teacher. She had a plan for us if needed. She would send us to the library when math period rolled around.

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It was my first sustained experience studying in a library. I remember it as a stately room with massive windows and a high ceiling, filled with wooden tables and chairs, books arranged in perfect order on perfect shelves, dust motes in the sun streaming through the windows.

There was a stately pedestal with a dictionary always open atop it and a varnished card catalog, twin compasses guiding children through the shelves. This library fostered an unquenchable desire in me to be in libraries, and in fifth grade I began to spend my hours after school in the public library on North Main Street near the bank. I remember walking back to the ravine in the evening afterwards, a measured mile, my head crocheting partly understood meanings like my Mother’s doilies.

My fourth grade teacher was not being neglectful by sending us out for math. True, we didn’t work under the direct guidance of a teacher. But she supplied us with textbooks and went a step further: She gave us a copy of the teacher’s manual, sacred text of the American classroom.

As the weeks passed, we made our way through lesson after lesson, exercise after exercise, playfully competing to get the right answers, asking the teacher when we couldn’t agree with the textbook, occasionally stumbling onto misprints in the teacher’s manual. One thing I learned for sure: Don’t expect teachers’s manuals to be right all the time.

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Later in my life, after driving a VW bug across the Rockies and transplanting myself to California in the late 1970s, I saw the dark side of neglect. Teaching at a community college, I found out about a local adult literacy program. By then I’d had experience tutoring children in a private commercial reading clinic. I’d also taught English Composition under contract with the community college in a maximum security state prison. Educational neglect took on a whole new meaning, and I realized the risks of chasing silly bulls and continents in primary grade classrooms.

Here are two posts from a while ago that capture what I learned later.