My favorite teacher in junior high school was Mr. B_______ . He was a tall, lean, austere-looking man who served in many ways as my role model. He was also head of the English department, and I’m pretty sure he made a major mistake in that role.

I remember him saying to the class one day, “People ask me why we don’t teach Phonics in our schools. My answer to that is that English is not a phonic language.”

Which turned out to be partly true but short-sighted. If he were still alive, I hope he’d have admitted that.

I was reading the latest issue of Thinking Minnesota, the magazine of the Center of the American Experiment, a local think tank. It featured an article about teaching literacy in schools, and sketched the history of the Phonics/Whole Language controversy. “Whole Language” was a theory that began to gain influence in the 1950s. It involved students recognizing words on sight, using flash cards, rather than through the words’ spelling. I was not taught to read under the Whole Language model, but I know a guy who attended the same schools, five years younger than me, who did. When he reads anything, he tells me, and comes to a word he doesn’t know, he just guesses its meaning and skips over it. He has no other tools. That’s what he was taught in school under Whole Language theory.

For my own part, I remember being taught to “sound out” words in my classes. That was Phonics training. They taught it in school, but I remember the day I actually “got” it, and that was at home.

It was summer vacation. Somebody (my grandfather, I think) had given me, as a Christmas present, a subscription to the summer edition of The Weekly Reader. The Weekly Reader was a thin magazine (it no longer exists) published for school children as an aid to reading education. I had just gotten my first copy, and had sat down to read it. But I hit a word I didn’t know, and went to Mom.

“You can sound it out yourself,” she told me. “Look at the letters. The first letter is ‘b.’ What sound does ‘b’ make?”

I said, “buh.”

“Right,” she said. “Now the next letter is ‘e.’ What sound does ‘e’ make?”

And she walked me through the word (it only had four letters), and when I had them all, I sounded it out “BE-AR.” Not exactly phonetic, of course; she had to explain that you sometimes have to search around a little, but by means of context and running through familiar words, you could generally work it out.

And soon I was tackling one word after another. I was genuinely thrilled. I’d found the key to literature! From then on, I lived more and more inside books.

I suppose a large percentage of our readers are younger than me, and therefore Whole Language-trained.

If you can’t “sound out” words, I promise you it’s not a complex art. I learned it before my brain was fully developed. I bet you could work it out in an afternoon. Simply vocalize your way through the letters.

Just a suggestion.