Potpourri

When my father was growing up, he was pretty severely dyslexic, and was unable to read far beyond what was normal. In addition, he was left-handed, and back in those days teachers forced kids to write with their right hand, so that just made things worse. By the time he was 10, he saw trying to read and reading in general as a humiliating and painful experience, and he doggedly refused to do it.

So then, my grand-mother came up with a pretty brilliant idea (she was a teacher). She figured that the only way he would be able to learn how to read was if he found something he enjoyed reading. So she started to buy every comic-book she could find (Batman, Daredevil, The Phantom, whatever), and every night, she’d sit with him, and she would spell through every word in every panel, while my dad looked at the pictures. And that was how he learned how to read.

When he grew up, he became a journalist. And a pretty good one at that, he actually won the Swedish equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for a series of investigative pieces he and his partner did.

There are two points to this story: the first is that parents should read, every night, to their kid until they are old enough to want to do it themselves. The second is that it doesn’t matter how a kid learns how to read, whether it’s fart jokes, comic books or Harry Potter. The important thing is that they learn.