A Safe Place for Joey

by Mary MacCracken

  “Now, Charlie, we need to get started. Do you know how many letters there are in the alphabet?”

  “Mmm … maybe about thirty-eight.”

  “How about vowels?”

  Charlie said he wasn’t exactly positive what I meant by a vowel.

  “Okay, Charlie,” I said. “In English eighty-five percent of the words are words that you can figure out and spell if you know the rules. The other fifteen percent you have to memorize. That will be easy for you because you have a good visual memory. In fact, that’s the way you do all your reading now – from having memorized the words or making a guess according to the meaning of the sentence. And that’s fine. Even unknown words that I teach you to figure out will become sight words after you’ve read them a few times.

  “We’ll do the easy part first.” I took out a red folder that contained graded lists of sight words, about four to six hundred words for each grade. I handed Charlie the first-grade list. “I think you know all these,” I said.

  He skimmed the pages quickly. “Yeah, I think I do,” he said slowly.

  “And most of these, too.” I handed him the second-grade words.

  Again Charlie looked over the words. “You’re right. I didn’t know I knew so much.”

  I put the third-grade list in front of him. The lists are labeled VT21 for first grade, VT22 for second grade. This one was VT23. I didn’t cover up the numbers, but I also didn’t stress the grades. “These are a little harder. Just read the first column out loud, and put a dot beside any word you don’t know.”

  Charlie had ten dots before he’d read twenty words. Together we copied the words he didn’t know onto separate index cards and went over them again. With just one review he knew seven of the ten words. I put an elastic band around the cards and put them in an envelope. “Review them at home with your mom and dad. If you forget, have them tell you the word. You’re not supposed to figure it out.” Charlie got out his assignment pad and carefully wrote, “1. Rid wrds.” He pushed it over to me. “See. Read words.”

  “Okay. Fine. Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to pretend that you’re Chinese and that you don’t know how to read English. I’m going to begin at the beginning. Okay?” I picked up a pack of white cards, each about the size of a regular playing card. “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet – I have a card for each one. Twenty-one of the letters are consonants; they always look the same, except when they’re written as capitals. And they almost always have the same sound. The other five are vowels – sometimes six, if you count y – and I’m going to take those out of the pack for now,” I said, lifting out the a, e, i, o, u cards.

  “What we’re going to do now may seem too easy, but remember, you’re Chinese. When I put a card in front of you, just tell me the sound of the letter and a word that begins with it. I’ll do it first.”

  Charlie knew the sounds of all the consonants except q, w, y, and x, and he reversed the d and gave the b sound. We separated those five from the pack and I wrote each one on a separate index card and Charlie traced it with a Magic Marker. We practiced those five again.

  “This time, Charlie, leave those five cards in front of you and I’ll make the sound, and you give me the letter that goes with the sound.”

  Charlie had it by the second try and put the index cards in another envelope in his backpack, dated his assignment pad, and made a note to study them: “2. Stude letrs.”

  Next I handed him lined paper and a pencil and asked him to write his name and the date. Charlie was right-handed (although he threw and batted like a lefty). He made his o from right to left and his d from the bottom up.

  “This time I’m going to dictate about fifty letter sounds to you. Just write the letter that goes with the sound you hear me say: m, h, b, s, b, t, m, b …”

  Charlie was struggling. He could easily point to the card representing the sound, but when it came to transcoding what he heard into written symbols, he had great difficulty.

  “Take your time. There’s no rush.” When we’d finished I put his paper in a folder in his bin. In a month or two we’d look back, and he’d be amazed that this had once seemed so difficult.

  He had his assignment book open. “What do I write?” he wanted to know.

  “Nothing. We’ll do that part here.” I certainly wasn’t going to set Charlie up for failure at home.

  I took out the five vowel cards. “These are the key cards. The vowels. And they’re also tricky. They can have several different sounds, and the position of a vowel in a word is of prime importance. You must notice this carefully in order to understand the code.

  “Now. This is important, Charlie. Every word must have at least one vowel, or it isn’t a word. So when you go to spell something, remember that it has to have at least one of these five letters.

  “Now, here’s another important thing. There are short words like ‘ran’ and long words like ‘transatlantic.’ The short word has one part, the long word has four parts. We call the parts syllables.”

  I wrote the vowels across the top of the page and the words “ran” and “transatlantic.” “Okay, there’s one vowel sound in ‘ran.’ I’ll mark the a and colour it yellow to make it stand out. Now here, you mark the vowels in ‘transatlantic,’ and tell me how many syllables.”

  Charlie got it right away. “Four,” he said. “Four silly bulls.”

  I hugged him. “You’re one terrific kid, you know that, Charlie? Four is exactly right.” I could explain about the silly bulls later.

  “Now, listen to this. Even when you can’t see the word and count the vowels, you can still tell how many syllables there are. I’ll show you how. What we’re really talking about are vowel sounds. I’ll explain more about that later.”

  I put my hand under my chin. “Cat,” I said. “I could feel my mouth open once. Now, catcher. It opened twice. That means it has two syllables. Try it.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said in surprise, imitating me. “You’re right. Give me some more.”

  “Christmas,” I said. “How many syllables?”

  “Two.”

  “Baseball.”

  “Two. Harder.”

  “Electric.”

  “Three.”

  “Blank.”

  “One.”

  “You’ve got it, Charlie. Okay. Your assignment is to think up two words of one syllable, two with two syllables, and so on. You don’t have to write them. Just know them and be able to tell me.”

  Charlie wrote in his assignment pad, “3. No sily bul – 1, 2, 3, 4.”

  I kept quiet. Charlie knew what it meant. That’s what assignment pads are for.

  “All right. Now one more thing. Tune in to me, Charlie. This is important.” I took the a card. “This letter, this vowel, can have several sounds. The sound I want you to learn now is called the short a sound.” I wrote a on an index card and drew an apple on the other side. “Like the sound that begins apple. Say it. Okay. Good. Now you can write Martian words.”

  “What do you mean, Martian?”

  “Come on, Charlie. You’re through being Chinese. You got to move a little. I’m just fooling around. This stuff can get enormously boring, you know.”

  Charlie bulged his eyes at me behind his glasses. “You’re telling me?” he asked incredulously.

  “So, okay,” I agreed. “As I was saying. Now that you know all the consonant sounds, the truth about syllables, and the short a, you can write Martian words.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Anything you say.”

  “Good. Write ‘zad.’”

  “Zad? What are you talking about? There’s no such word.”

  “That’s all you know. Martians say it when they’re surprised – like, if they step in a puddle they didn’t see. That’s what they say. ‘Zad!’”

  Charlie laughed in spite of himself. “That’s nuts.”

  “Don’t insult the teacher,” I replied. “Just write it. Think of the sound that you hear in the beginning, th
e sound in the middle, and the sound at the end.” I pushed the pad toward Charlie.

  “Zad,” he said to himself, “Z-z-z … okay.” And within a minute he’d written it exactly right.

  I gave him three more nonsense words to make sure he was writing out of his new understanding of sound-symbol relationships.

  “All right, now, this is the last one. ‘Zatbam.’ Now, think about it, say it to yourself. How many times did you open your mouth? How many syllables? Remember, a syllable is just a short word and it has to have a vowel. Okay, go ahead and write it.”

  Charlie worked industriously, saying it, hearing the sounds, writing them down.

  “One hundred percent right, Charlie. Pay yourself ten chips for each word and a bonus of fifty for ‘zatbam.’”

  I also gave Charlie two easy workbooks for homework – one math, one reading – with an assignment in each. He wrote the assignments in his own sweet style in his assignment book, counted his chips, bought a pack of sugarless gum, stuffed half the pack in his mouth, and at the door turned back. He shoved the gum to one bulging cheek and said, “Zatbam.”

  “Zatbam?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Zatbam. That’s how they say good-bye in Martian. Remember?”

  “How could I have forgotten? Zatbam to you, too, Charlie.”

  I loved working with Charlie. He was intelligent, gentle, and thoughtful, and he understood that continuing on to fourth grade at Chapel was going to require a lot of hard work on his part. I promised I wouldn’t ask him to do anything he didn’t understand, but he would have to practice what he did understand in order to improve. He wouldn’t have to do it alone; I’d be there and so would his family, but the major part of the work would be his.

  Charlie wasn’t turned off and he wasn’t hyperactive, but it was true that he did lie. The lies grew smaller, though. As his reading improved and he felt better about himself, the need to exaggerate diminished, and what was left I used in language experience stories. For a few minutes of each session I had him dictate a story to me – anything and everything was okay. No limits. I wrote down all Charlie’s thoughts; whatever he wanted to say was what I wrote. The resulting stories were an odd mixture of immaturity and sophistication, war and peace, but he loved it and so did I.

  By the fourth week in July, Charlie was able to decode and encode (read and write) all phonetically regular words of one or two syllables (including silent e words). He had learned and internalized another seventy third-grade sight vocabulary words. He had learned the days of the week, the months of the year, and the zero, one, two, and five times tables.

  During the last session before he left for a two-week vacation, Charlie asked, “Are you going to give me homework to take down to the shore?”

  “Do you want some?”

  “No-o! But Mom said you’d make me. Because there’s so much I have to learn.”

  “Your mom’s right, Charlie. You will remember the things you’ve learned better if you keep practicing every day. Like baseball players. The more they practice, the better they get. The more you work, the more you practice, the more you’ll remember. That is really true.

  “But, on the other hand, there are a lot more things to learn than arithmetic and reading. Things that are much more important.”

  Charlie looked straight at me, his eyes widening behind his glasses. “Like what?”

  “Like friends. Nothing’s more important than learning how to be a good friend. People sometimes give it fancy names, like they call it learning ‘socialization skills.’ But what it really means is learning how to have fun with other people, caring about them, helping them when they hurt, sharing things, telling the truth, brushing your teeth and changing your socks so you smell good, keeping your promise, showing up when you said you would. Things like that.”

  “Could you say that over again?”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie. I think I kind of got carried away.”

  “No. I liked it, but I just can’t remember it. Could you make a list?”

  I studied Charlie. He was obviously entirely serious. “I can certainly try.”

  After I’d written down as much as I could remember, with Charlie reminding me about the socks, he went over each item carefully.

  “I’m pretty good at most of those. Like with Sam – you know, he lives across the street – I share and keep my promises and stuff. But I don’t know if he’s my friend. Dad says he’s only six. That’s why he puts up with me.” How many times can a child be hurt and stay intact, whether the hurt is intentional or not? How many walking wounded kids are out there aching, hurting, feeling inadequate, with nobody to talk to? Where’s the immunization for interior pain? Where’s the pill for loss of confidence? “Well, I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t think it matters how old somebody is if you enjoy doing things together. It’s the liking each other that counts.

  “Anyway, down at the shore, you’ll be fishing or out on the beach, and even though it’s early, there’ll be other kids around. It would probably be a pretty good place to work on making a friend.”

  Charlie sat without speaking and then finally said, without looking up, “I can’t work on that. See, working on something is like practicing it, right? Practice is when you know what to do, but need to get better at it. But I don’t even know how to start. Making a friend, I mean.”

  Charlie was right. He needed someone to show him what to do, not just tell him. I searched for some practical advice.

  “All right, let’s see. The first thing is just to look around. You don’t have to say anything. You just look at the other kids on the beach, and you look for somebody who is doing the kind of thing you like to do.

  “Say you like to fish or collect shells. Look and see if there’s anybody else doing that. Just keep on walking and looking around, and if after a while the person seems nice, then go over and do your fishing or collecting somewhere near him. See, first you sort of do it near each other. Each of you doing your own thing. And then after a while you get so you do it together.

  “Anyway, Charlie, have fun, and I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  On the second Thursday in August, Charlie arrived at the office sunburned, nose peeling, but grinning from ear to ear. He put a shoebox in front of me.

  “It’s a present,” he said.

  Inside the box was a slightly fishy-smelling double length of green yarn about two feet long with shells glued or tied to it at even intervals.

  “One for each day I was there,” Charlie said. “See, this is a horseshoe crab. This one is called a double sunrise. They’re some of my best ones.”

  I stood on a stool to hang the shell-studded yarn in a swag across the wall and then stepped down and back to admire it. “I love it, Charlie. It’s just exactly what this office needed. Thank you.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, admiring it too. “And I made a friend. I mean a real friend, and I made him on purpose.

  “He’s nine and he’s going in fourth – just like me. He lives down there at the shore all year long, and he knows everything there is to know about that ole beach.

  “I saw him out there the first day, walking along picking up shells. Most of them he put back, but he’d keep one or two. I mean, he wasn’t just grabbing any ole thing. He knew what he was doing.

  “So the next day I did like you said. I sort of started picking up shells further down the beach, and then after a while he got down to where I was and we were both doing it. Then he showed me a sand dollar he’d found, and before he went home he gave me a snail shell, a good one, ’cause he already had a lot of them.

  “Then the next day we did it again, and then he said whyn’t we go over to his house so he could show me the rest of his shells. He came back to Gram’s house with me so I could ask if I could go, and it turned out she knew his mom from church and right where his street was.

  “His name’s Eddie, and I’ll see him again when we go down Labor Day weekend. He said he’d write, but I don’t know about that part of it. M
ost people can’t read my letters so good.”

  “Charlie, that’s terrific. Of course you can write to him. Anybody who can make a friend that fast can write a letter. Just make a one-line note every night in your notebook of something that happened that day – like it rained, or your teacher got sick and you had a substitute, or you watched your favourite TV show, or your fish died. Then after a couple of weeks you can put the lines together, add a couple of words here and there – I’ll help with the spelling – and you’ll have a great letter.”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe,” Charlie said. “There’s only one trouble.”

  “I don’t have a fish,” we said in unison.

  Charlie had a very concrete approach to life.

  We admired the swag of shells one last time, and then I said, “Okay, Charlie. Time to get back to work.”

  After five or ten minutes of review, it became obvious that Charlie had forgotten at least 25 percent of the sight words he had learned. Multiplication was shaky, too. He mixed up 2 x 7 and 2 x 8 and got lost somewhere in the middle of the five times table. I wasn’t particularly concerned. Kids with learning disabilities are notorious for knowing it one day and not the next, so it wasn’t surprising that Charlie had forgotten some things during the two weeks he’d been away. What he’d learned was far more important.

  But not to Charlie.

  Gone was the sunny, confident boy who had walked in less than a half hour ago. Now his arms were on the desk, his head on his arms.

  “See, I am stupid. I’ll never be able to do it. I can’t remember anything. My brain’s like a sieve. Everything falls right out of it.”

  “I know,” I said. “It feels that way sometimes, but it will come back. I promise you. And learning how to make a friend is one hundred percent more important than two times seven. But I know it’s frightening when you try to remember something you knew just a few days ago and you can’t think of it at all.”