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Excerpted Inspirations #194

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 3 hours ago
  • 0 min read
[Christy Huddleston, the new schoolteacher at the mountain community of Cutter Cap, gives adult Fairlight Spencer her first reading lesson.] I had a box of materials ready and Fairlight was all eagerness to see what was in the box. From magazines I had cut out pictures of landscapes to use for background scenery; some pictures of men, women and children pasted onto cardboard bases so that they could be stood upright (as I used to do with my paper dolls when I was a very little girl); a copy of the alphabet printed in large clear letters from my first grade class; a Bible, a fresh ruled pad and some pencils. Since teaching an adult to read was a new experience for me, I was not sure how to begin. It would not do, I felt, to downgrade the dignity of a human being like Fairlight Spencer by using the primer books for six- and seven-year-olds: “The rat ran from the cat.” “Here the boy sat.” Then too I believed that Fairlight would learn more readily than the children, and I wanted to give her even in this first lesson the concept of words as ideas. And since I knew from seeing some of her quilt patterns and flower arrangements that she was a creative person, surely she would learn fastest if I could find an imaginative way to teach her. My problem was how to achieve this. I picked up the Bible. “There are lots and lots of words in this book.” “How soon will I be able to read it, Miz Christy?” “In no time! And I’ll tell you why. Every single word in this book and all the words together use only twenty-six English letters – these here. So after you’ve learned just twenty-six and know how to put the letters together to form different words, then you can read. Easy!” Her eyes shone. “I’d like that the best in the world.” Already she was concentrating on that alphabet. After we had read it aloud twice, she became so intent on learning it that she almost forgot I was there. So I sat back watching her, feeling instinctively that I should let her set the pace, even do most of the talking – if she would. At last she sighed and looked at me. “Think I’ve got it … A-B-C-D – on she went making only one mistake. Next we propped up a backdrop picture of a landscape drenched in sunlight. “Now, Fairlight, you pick out one of the paper people from this pile.” So she selected a dapper-looking man and stood him up before the landscape. We learned MAN and my eager pupil practiced saying it and forming the letters. Soon we went on to TREE, LIGHT, SUN, GRASS, SKY … It was at that point that Fairlight stumbled onto her own kind of phonetics – the relation between the way the word looked and how it sounded. She was as thrilled as if she had found a jewel in the dust. She rolled the word “sky” over and over her tongue, spelled it again and again. This went on until we had our first ten words. Then I opened the Bible to the first chapter of Genesis. “Now, Fairlight, look at this. The words on this page are just ideas marching. Like this one, ‘and God said, Let there be light –” “L-I-G-H-T! There it is! I see it.” Her slender forefinger was on the word. “Oh, I love the light! Don’t you? I hate the darkness.” Let there be light … I sat there thinking that I had never seen light dawn so quickly for any person as for this woman. What an alive mind she had! She scarcely needed instruction, only a chance to let the light come. Teaching Fairlight Spencer was going to be pure delight. Up to this point in her life, she had been like some outcast child staring through the iron railings of the tall fence around the great estate of knowledge, longing to romp with the other children on the clipped lawns inside, but always excluded. She saw learning to read and write the English language as the key to unlock those gates. For the first time that Saturday morning the hinges moved, the gates began to swing open. Catherine Marshall, Christy (1967), pp. 172-174

 
 
 
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