Words Come Alive: The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing

Presenter: Thomas Armstrong, Cloverdale, CA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Three

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Well, that was refreshing. Obviously reading and writing have high visual components. In order to be able to read and write, you have got to be able to see the words. So, one of the first points of contact, certainly from a sensory level, is the primary visual area in the back of the brain, the occipital cortex that processes. First, it has to look at the image and say, what is this? Is this a picture? Is this a picture of something? Is it a word? Where do I send it to, et cetera?

Then it gets sent on to the angular gyrus which, as I said earlier, is this wonderful multiple intelligences area of the brain where various kinds of meanings get attached. Also, Wernicke's area is associated with that, where sensory data gets kind of mingled together. And so we may get, okay, this is a word, and then, what is it a word of. We will get an image of the word. This kind of imagery thing is going on in the angular gyrus. And also probably in parts of the right hemisphere as well that are connected to it, although I have not seen really good brain research study on that yet.

So, it is a highly visual spatial activity. We know that writing began from pictures, from pictograms. We go way back and we see the cave drawings. That may the emergence of pictures into meaningful kind of language. Well, we get to the Egyptians and hieroglyphs and we start to get into picture phonics here. Because different pictures in the hieroglyphic alphabet had phonetic sounds that suggested that they were to be not what they looked like but what the sound represented. So, it was a combination of kind of pictures and sounds, sort of moving from the spatial into the linguistic.

In today's world we still see, for example, in Chinese or, in the kanji script in Japan, which was borrowed from the Chinese, we still see evidence of this close connection of pictures, but also the sounds and pictures coming together, the linguistic and the spatial.

In fact, there is one study I cite in the book where some educators had an easier time taking some kids who were born English speakers who were having difficulty learning how to read English and teaching them to read Chinese characters. These were kids who were more visually-spatially oriented in terms of their proclivities, and so it was easier for them to master a language that had more of its roots in the spatial parts of the brain even as they struggled with the English language. Which, actually, I might as well say it now, is one of the most horrible languages in the world to learn. How we all learned it is a great miracle and just a testimony to the incredible genius of young kids.

This is where we come to the point of that delicate contact between, is this a picture or is this a letter? Is this a sound or is this a picture? When I was a young kid I used to watch — this dates me a little bit, how many people — well, I won't ask for a show of hands; we do not have to date ourselves -- I used to watch this show called Pinky Lee. Pinky Lee, on every Wednesday, he would have his flipchart out there. And he would put one of the letters of the alphabet up and then he would start making it into a picture. I thought this was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen. Because what he was doing for me was he was taking me from my spatial world, where I saw the world in terms of pictures and images, and moving me into the world of linguistic intelligence.

Now, these days, we shove kids from that spatial world into the linguistic without any kind of transitional work whatsoever. We just expect them to do it automatically. So, we have got to come up with some strategies. And at the phoneme level, what we ought to do is create pictures for the phonemes. Now, again, even though I have sort of discredited him already, Rudolph Steiner was doing some of this stuff back in the 1920's, with Waldorf Education. And the way they would introduce sounds and symbol relationships was they would start with imagery.

They would tell a story about a snake, for example, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. They would put on a play about the snake. They would work with clay with the snake. Then, gradually, the teacher, on the blackboard, would show the shape of the snake approaching the letter S. And one of the wonderful things with this image is that the sound that a snake makes happens to be the sound that the S makes.

And what Steiner in fact recommended is that you not go to some book and look up all the symbols and pictures but you make up your own images. Because he says the creativity of the teacher is everything. When the teacher creates something, the child is deeply impressed. When the teacher gets something out of a book, the kid secretly thinks they do not really know and that is why they have to go to a book. It is an interesting concept, but I will let that go for now.

Words. Use visualization for spelling. This is something that we do. This is a very common strategy. Axolotl. I will just use this as an example. Axolotl. I used to read Mad magazine a lot when I was a kid. My father-in-law still reads it a lot now, which really worries me, because he is 83. But, at any rate, one of the things with axolotl, I used to see this word appearing in the margins of Mad magazine. And for years and years, they would never make any explanation about what it was. It would just appear. And finally, as an adult, I looked it up and discovered it was a greenish-blue, I think it was a certain kind of salamander actually. Well, that really I know excites all of us.

But one simple technique is to say to kids — in fact, you can actually make this into a sort of a subversive kind of thing, especially with your kids who have been labeled acting out, oppositionally defiant, et cetera, you say, okay, I can show you how to cheat without anybody ever catching. And you say, do you realize that you have a crib sheet in your mind that nobody can see? And then you help the kids create that. For some, it is going to be a blackboard or a flipchart or a movie screen, a wide screen TV, a video screen, or whatever it happens to be. You help them create that individually, and then you say, okay, put this word on your screen. Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine some kind of screen.

Some people say you can see the screen up in the upper left hand quadrant of your vision. I do not believe that, but if it is up there for you that is fine. Anywhere you find it is fine. And then, once you get your screen, open your eyes and look at this word and then put that word on your screen. And just keep going back and forth until you have a pretty good sense that you have got it on your screen.

And of course, we would work much more the child's imagery and practice a lot more. What I am going to say is now I am going to take this off the outer screen but I want you to keep in on your inner screen. Now, all I want you to do is copy it from your inner screen onto a piece of paper.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: And now you can check. Does the outer screen match your inner screen? That is all you have to do. And so this kind of strategy — and this is obviously very rushed, but it just indicates how something like this might go. Then you tell these kids labeled ODD and acting out and behaviorally disordered and whatever, ADHD, you say, okay, you can put any information on this screen that you like and sneak it into the test room and nobody will ever know. And you get kids kind of saying, nobody is going to find out that I have all this.

And you might say, well, we cannot do that. But can you really get fired for doing something like that because it is legal? It is a very important metaphor. It says they can strip everything else away from us, but they cannot take our minds away from us. It's the freedom of the mind. And that is a powerful metaphor, one of the most powerful in education that we can ever give our kids. So, underlying this simple strategy is a big philosophy.

Sentences. This is just a knock-off kind of strategy that I was fooling around with. Simply, when you are working with the parts of speech, give a graphic symbol to each part of speech. So, we have got one for pronouns. We have ran. That is a verb. So, you see the same one for bought and for — well, let's see, those are the only verbs.

Conjunction. I like my one for conjunction. Your adjectives, your nouns. For some reason, nouns seem boring to me, so I just had a black square. The check, the article, a. Just different things. Of, your prepositions, et cetera. So, anyway, just a way for kids who have pictures and image smarts. They are going to think, the parts of speech now I can get because I have got a picture for each kind of part of speech.

For text, help kids see the writer's imagery. Of course, this is what we do or we attempt to do, but I do not know. I see a lot of lip service given to visualization in different reading programs, but not a lot of practice. Marcel Proust, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Marcel Proust, as a child, he was criticized by his teachers for writing run-on sentences. And then he went on to write one of the greatest run-on sentences of Western civilizations: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Remembrances of Things Past.

Right now, I am half through it. It is about 4,000 pages long, so I have decided I am going to take a rest. But this is one of my favorite images as I was going along, "What, he cried with fury ..." That is Marcel Proust, by the way. That is not the face referred to in the text. "What, he cried with fury. And, indeed, his face, convulsed in white, differed as much from his ordinary face as does the sea, when on a morning of storm one finds, instead of its customary smiling surface, a thousand serpents writhing in spray and foam." Ah, what an image. What an image. That is also a kinesthetic image, by the way.

And another point I want to make is all great writers — and I repeat this — all great writers are multiple intelligences writers. All great writers use all of the intelligences. Now, every great writer has their own style, has their own unique spin. Some have the minimalist quality of a Hemingway. Some, like Proust, just go on and on and on. Some of his sentences last for a page or more. But this common quality of bringing together emotions and kinesthetic and visual/spatial and all kinds of things just really comes out.

So, there is a message here that when we use literature with kids that we provide them access to the best writers available. And I might have more to say about that later, but I do not want get off on that right now.

But I do want to say, as a general point for this last strategy, that if we simply would have our kids, after a brief period of reading or whatever, after a sustained silent reading, after anything we have had them read, close their eyes and picture what they have read. It's a simple thing. It does not require any money. It does not require any training. It is one of the simplest things that people can do. Close your eyes and picture what you have read. I would suggest that reading comprehension levels of a lot of our kids are going to go up, particularly in our kids who are picture and image thinkers, but also in our kids who may not visualize when they read and need practice.

As we know, some of our poorest comprehenders of text are kids that simply do not experience what they are reading. They do not see images. They are not getting into the kind of secondary world that whole language people talk about. And if we give them this kind of practice, there are a lot of good books on visualizing, helping kids visualize. One of my favorites is, Put Your Mother on the Ceiling, by Richard De Mille, Cecil B. De Mille's grandson, which you can do exercises with to help some kids get better at this.

Books. Some of the books that might apply here. I talked about pop-up books, 3-D books. This is a page from a book by Vicky Cobb, without the text. The text is on the other side. Vicky Cobb is a wonderful writer. I think she did Science Experiments You Can Eat, which is a classic. This one is called Skyscrapers Going Up, and it written I think at about a fourth-or fifth-grade level. As the skyscraper is going up and you are reading about the text, you are seeing the skyscraper starting to go up in the book. There is also a kinesthetic quality here. You pull the elevator up and down. And then, at the very end of the book, you open it up and the whole, huge skyscraper comes up.

Of course, there are lots of books now that you can actually take apart and put back together again. There is a coliseum and there is a rocket ship. And again, Klutz Press does these kinds of books and Workman Press is another press that I would recommend that I have also listed in your resources. Workman Press does tons of these kinds of books with attachments or books with some neat kind of intelligence connected to it.

Literacy style. Well, I have already talked about this, so I do not need to say anymore. But just help kids visualize. Let's ask them what they are visualizing when they are reading. It's a simple thing to do. Especially if we have a kid that is having trouble comprehending what they are reading, just ask them what is going through their head. Well, I am over at the beach. And I am at a monster truck rally. Well, but you are reading Stephen Vincent Benet. That has nothing to do with it. Well, then you start to make the connections between their imagery. Well, can you bring the monster truck rally into Benet's poetry, or something like that.

I think there is actually a gender thing going on. There is this book called The Alphabet and the Goddess that this guy wrote. I cannot remember his name. I am sorry. But it is The Alphabet And The Goddess, where he talks about how he believes that the linguistic is actually sort of like the patriarchy, the male-dominated society, and that it covers over what was originally there, the more matriarchal, spatial imagery kind of world.

So, there is kind of an interesting gender thing, how the linguistic male perspective, the one step at a time linear thing, squashing on top of the female spatial thing. I realize he is a guy. It would be a lot more credible if he was a woman. But it is sort of the idea that visualization at least is a part of our lives that we are cut off from, that certainly the schools are a lit bit afraid of in fact, and that we ought to realize that when we are cutting this off, we are cutting off a good portion of our kids' brains and access to their own information, their own way of processing.

Let's go to music smart. Again, I am going to give you some text. And what I would like you to do with this text is do what seems appropriate to the nature of this text. I want you to say the text, but I want you to say the text in such a way that it is appropriate to the particular text. I want you to sing it.

"Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.

AUDIENCE: "Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Beautiful. Wonderful.

Now, that is obviously a song, a song with lyrics. So, when I say words are musical, some of you might say, yes, when they are lyrics accompanied by music, by melody. But I want to suggest that all words, all language is musical.

"You can, see, from this, activity, that music and, words, are frequently, brought, together, all the time, in fact."

You see how weird this sounds when I punctuate it wrongly.

"You can see from this activity that music and words are frequently brought together, all the time in fact."

All of our language is floating on a sea of rhythm. There is research, in terms of kids who have been labeled dyslexic, that what they in part lack is this substratum of flow of language. One of their greatest difficulties are those tasks that require them to identify rhyming nonsense words, to hear the sort of musical qualities in words that do not have any semantic contact, no relationship with anything in the outside world.

And so the connections between music and reading and writing, certainly they have been mentioned. They have been used a lot actually. What strikes me is all of language has this musical quality. It may be that the poets are the only ones who fully realize it, who are fully aware of it, and the musicians perhaps. I think of Dr. Seuss, who said that he came up with his books and the particular rhythm — "to think that I saw it on Mulberry street" — this particular rhythm as he was riding on a train one day, and he was hearing the clickety-clack of the train, and that became the rhythm of his words. The poet, the writer, is always attending to the musical qualities.

But somehow, in reading instruction, a lot of the time we cut it off. We will sing some songs, sure, but we will not treat the words and the music as sort of integral parts of each other in the rest of the reading curriculum — and we ought to.

Looking, again, in terms of reading in the brain, we are looking at this angular gyrus. We are looking at Wernicke's area. We are looking at the auditory cortex, which is the temporal lobe, the left temporal lobe, but also probably the right temporal lobe. This area here processes both musical experience and there are some areas that process only music experience and some process music and linguistic experience, where the musical and the linguistic come together. Consequently, again, this is something that gets glossed over when we look at areas of the brain that process linguistic information. The musical is brought in along the way.

Charles Darwin recognized this. In fact, he made a suggestion that music originally was our means of communication. For example, a bird song was sort of a mating ritual, and that the more effective singers were the ones who made it, who passed their genes long, who survived, who brought that music along through evolution. That's a very interesting idea that still is getting scrutiny and interest from evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists.

We look back at our own cultural history and we see how much of linguistic knowledge has been transmitted musically, through chanting, through rhythmic play. We look at The Iliad and The Odyssey, they were originally songs. We look at large portions of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, they were originally songs. Of course, the songs would be the most obvious example. But those intimate examples are very important.

I like to look back at the history of the English language. Look back at early English, for example, at Beowulf. I have an old friend I hadn't seen for 30 years. He is a poet. He went to Yale. Robert Penn Ward was his teacher. He just translated Beowulf into a modern version. It was wonderful visiting him in Fargo, North Dakota, of all places, where I come from. And he just went on for a few minutes just reciting the Old English of Beowulf. And I felt like I was just like back in the old, early Medieval times. Here is just an example [Old English], Grendel walking, he bore God's anger.

A lot of alliteration in early English, especially internal alliteration, where you have the gung and gyres. You find that kind of thing in the middle of where two phrases come together, the middle parts of those phrases having alliterative qualities. That's a very different kind of rhyme from the sort of end rhyme that we think of today in poetry.

And I also love Shakespeare. So much of Shakespeare is musical. Shakespeare is all music. It is all different kinds of music. It is all different kinds of meters. He uses different kinds of meters for different social levels. People at the higher social levels talk in iambic pentameter. People who are in lower social levels speak in clunkier kinds of rhythms. So, this is his comment on the sort of the social hierarchy.

This is an interesting thing. This is just kind of a little crazy example of what he will do. As I said, iambic pentameter is da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da. I wish somebody would have explained that to me in high school. I went to high school and iambic pentameter, what the hell is it? Da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-duh. If somebody would have just said that musically, I would have understood.

So, that is what he is doing here. He is using iambic pentameter, but he does something interesting. Whenever the moon is mentioned, in — I do not know if I would say in all of Shakespeare but at least in A Midsummer Night's Dream, whenever the moon is mentioned, there is an interruption in the rhythm, because that is what the moon does. It interrupts. It creates lunatics of us. It creates mental and emotional instability. So, he creates a brief moment of instability in the rhythm of the line.

"That very time I saw but thou couldst not flying between the ‘cold moon’ and the earth". I emphasized it, but if I just say "That very time I saw but thou couldst not flying between the cold moon and the earth", you can hear how that cold moon thing is like a big clunker right in the middle of the phrase. And he does that intentionally because the moon has that kind of bewitching effect even on the rhythms of his lines.

That's the musical level at which he is writing. I would suggest that he is the highest example of literacy that we have in the English language. We ought to take a cue from him that the key to being literate is including the musical dimension in our reading and writing activities.

So, what would be some strategies? Well, of course, something that the whole language people and even a lot of phonemic awareness programs do is use songs. And this is one of my favorites that I actually learned in camp and not in school. This is a sort of a call back thing, so I will say to you, I want to eat," and you come back, "I want to eat."

"I want to eat."

AUDIENCE: "I want to eat."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Let's get on tune okay. Let me get on tune.

"I want to eat."

AUDIENCE: "I want to eat."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Eight apples and bananas."

AUDIENCE: "Eight apples and bananas."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "I want to eat."

AUDIENCE: "I want to eat."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Eight apples and bananas."

AUDIENCE: "Eight apples and bananas."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Now we will do "oo."

"Oo want to oot."

AUDIENCE: "Oo want to oot."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Oot apples and bananas."

AUDIENCE: "Oot apples and bananas."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Oo want to oot."

AUDIENCE: "Oo want to oot."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Oot apples and bananas."

AUDIENCE: "Oot apples and bananas."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: The "e" sound.

"E want to eet."

AUDIENCE: "E want to eet."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Eet apples and benenes."

AUDIENCE: "Eet apples and benenes."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "E want to eet."

AUDIENCE: "E want to eet."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: "Eet apples and benenes."

AUDIENCE: "Eight apples and bananas."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Yes, I like that.

Words. Do musical spelling. This is something that you can do. This particular song will work with any seven-letter word or multiple of a seven-letter word. Phthalocyanine is some sort of chemical compound. Do not ask me what it is used for. It is just a big long word that I am using as an example. But we can actually sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and spell this word. So if you would join me.

"P-h-t-h-a-l-o-c-y-a-n-i-m-e. P-h-t-h-a-l-o-c-y-a-n-i-m-e. P-h-t-h-a-l-o-c-y-a-n-i-m-e. P-h-t-h-a-l-o-c-y-a-n-i-m-e. P-h-t-h-a-l-o-c-y-a-n-i-m-e."

So, you can come up with different songs for different words. Some will work with four-letter words. Some will work with three-letter words, five-letter words, et cetera. We have not studied this nearly as much as advertisers have studied this connection between music, memory and words, which is why "N-e-s-t-l-e-s, Nestlé’s makes the very best," and we can just rattle them off. All kinds of different words that kids will remember for the rest of their lives because that musical connection has been made.

Sentences. We could take the parallel construction thing and do examples. For example, Elvis, "I want you. I need you. I love you." Parallel construction.

Non-parallel construction "I want you. I need you. I am feeling all sorts of romantic feelings for you."

You can hear it. You can hear the non-parallel construction. It sticks out, where it does not necessarily stick out to a kid who is just reading an example.

The same thing with the Beatles. "Hey, Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better." That's parallel construction. Very good.

Hey, Jude, don't make it bad. Why don't you get a hold of a sad song and make it better?"

So, we know that good songwriters already understand parallel construction, and we can hear it. An especially highly developed proclivity, oriented musical thinkers, it is going to hit them over the head like a ton of bricks, and you are never going to have to teach it in any other way anymore.

Another strategy, help students remember. This is a big one for a lot of teachers. It is the old beginning, middle and end objective. In this case, we are actually going to have a story that has five parts to it and we want kids to remember the sequence of the story. This helps them understand narrative, flow of plot, that kind of thing. So, what I want you to do is we are going to do this using sound effects. Sound effects actually are musical. They are the musical part of our brain. Rain falling on the roof, whatever.

I am going to do is I am going to give you a five-part story, and for each part, I want you to create the sounds effects, if you would.

Part one: It was a dark and stormy night.

AUDIENCE: "Woooo."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Okay, very good.

Part two: There was a knock at the door.

AUDIENCE: "Knock-knock."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Part three: A shot rang out.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: "Pow."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Part four: A cry was heard.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: "Aww."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Part five: It was the opera lady.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: "Ohhh."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Okay, very good. Now, we are going to go back and I am not going to use my words. I am just going to put them out on the screen. You create the sound effects.

AUDIENCE: "Woooo."

"Knock-knock."

"Pow."

"Aww."

"Ohhh."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Now I am taking it off the screen and all I am going to do is give you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you have to tell the story for me.

AUDIENCE: "Woooo."

"Knock-knock."

"Pow."

"Aww."

"Ohhh."

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: A five-part story. And kids, again, who think musically, that is how they can reconstruct the sequence. That is how they can construct the beginning, the middle and the end, or any kind of related skills that we may have along those lines.

Moving on to books. Books that have things like keyboards in them. There are a bunch of these running around. For example, I do not have the title of this book, but you can see at the bottom of the book is an actual keyboard with a little computer chip thing in it and a speaker there. It is color-coded, so there is actually the spatial intelligence. Of course, reading music involves a lot of spatial intelligence. But they have the color-coding. They have got the numbers. They have the numbers connected to the words. So, it is all kind of integrated.

But the thing is, for the highly child, you are putting the music and the instrument right in the book. You are saying books are not scary. Books are for you, too. And so this kind of approach I really like.

Literacy styles. Let kids hum, sing, while they are reading. Now, in the book, "The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing," I actually have a whole different chapter on oral language and its connection to reading and writing. And I just want to make a comment here. I did not include it here, but I wanted make a comment about sustained silent reading. It is an idiotic idea.

Why? Well, let's look back in history. Let me give you an example. Saint Augustine, one of the early church Christian fathers, wrote his confessions. It was one of the very earliest in Western culture books of personal revelation. Here is this guy telling about the rotten life that he lived in quite graphic detail actually and how he was saved, et cetera.

One interesting thing is in the book he is talking about his mentor, Saint Ambrose. And he said Saint Ambrose has this weird thing he does when he is in the library. He does not move his lips when he reads. It is the weirdest thing. And Augustine tries to figure it out. He says maybe he just does not want to get hassled. People will see him moving his lips and they will think he is reading and they will come up and they will start bugging him with questions. And he comes up with several other hypotheses, but he cannot figure out why does he not move his lips because everybody moved their lips. That is the way you read.

That is the way that most people read for a few thousand — well, what have we read for — we have been reading for 5,000 years. We have been reading out loud for most of that time. I do not know who invented sustained silent reading, but whoever invented it did not know very much about history, did not know very much about the brain, did not know very much about Vygotsky, in fact. Vygotsky, who talked about the critical importance of speaking out loud to internal speech. The speaking that we do out loud eventually gets minimized to subverbalization.

Oh, that used to be a very horrible pathological thing to do, to subverbalize. All subverbalization is is taking that out loud language, making it a little quieter. When it gets even quieter, it becomes speaking in the mind. It becomes the writer's voice. The writer's voice. That is what we want to help our kids become good writers is to listen to the voice. But we are cutting off that speaking out loud or that singing. For the poet, it is going to be singing. And it is going to be humming. And it is going to be feeling the flow of words. Why do we cut this off? Well, just some thought.

Logic smart. For this text, it is a sentence that has a couple of blanks in it, and I want you to fill in the blanks. It you want to consult with each other a little bit about it first, I will give you like a half a minute or so just to talk with each other about it, to figure out what goes in the blanks and then I will ask you to tell me what's in the blanks.

Yesterday, I gecked a gavortle that spoodled at me. Today I gecked five more... And you talk a little with each about what should go in there.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: What are we looking at here? Yesterday I gecked a gavortle that spoodled at me. Today I gecked five more...

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Gavortles.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Now, how did you know that? How did you know that? We do not even know what a gavortle is. We do not even know what it means to spoodle. This has no relationship with any experiences that we have had in our life and yet we all came up with the right answer. It is an amazing thing when you think about it. And the more amazing thing is three- and four- and five-year-olds can do the same thing with far less experience than we have had.

Now the key person around all of this is a guy named Noam Chomsky. He totally revolutionized not just linguistics but, in many ways, our understanding of psychology. Back in the mid-fifties he wrote a book called Syntactic Structures, which I have decided not to include in the resources because it is not one of the most exciting books I have ever read in my life. In fact, I did not get past about page 15. But I did include in the resources an interview of Noam Chomsky with an educator in a magazine, The Reading Teacher. Because Chomsky's perspective is amazing on a lot of different levels.

Chomsky really came into prominence when he refuted the behaviorists. Behaviorists said we learn language simply by listening to people. We model behaviors based on them. And then Chomsky comes out and he says, well, how can we do something like this? We have never heard anybody model this before. Where did we come up with this? And Chomsky began to look at the deep structure of language, the deep structure of grammar. He began to look at how there seemed to be some very deeply logical structures hardwired into our brain that we are born with.

And so he took on the behaviorists who said we are born as blank slates. He said we are born with innate learning. We are born with something that is really there to begin with, that actually does require some environmental stimulation to make it come out. And he did not say this, but I would say it, that every kid is a genius when it comes to language, because they have that innate ability. And a lot of this innate ability is of a logical mathematical nature.

He did a lot of work in the area of — well, back when I was in high school, the big thing was T grammar, transformational grammar, to look at how we can examine sentences and transform them simply by looking at different parts and how they logically relate to each other and how we can substitute certain words that represent the same part of speech or the same kind of clause and get a whole different sentence. Chomsky's claim, and I think it has never been disproved, is that you can take any sentence and do an infinite number of transformations on it based upon this kind of deep, deep structured, logical, mathematical kind of work that we have.

Now, they are still looking for Chomsky's hardwiring in the brain. I cannot say that they have named an area of the brain the Chomsky area, because it is a lot more complex. But certainly the initial candidate, even before Chomsky, for grammatical work, for syntax, was Broca's area. This was actually the first area of the brain that was ever related to a cognitive ability, back in the early 1800s, when the French physician, Paul Broca, looked at some of the Frenchman who were injured during Napoleon's ranting and raving around the continent, and discovered loss of language, loss of language structure. So, Broca's area has always been a candidate.

Some of the recent research I include in my book also talks about areas in the angular gyrus and Wernicke's area that are also important for syntactic structures as well. I think we should look beyond grammar, though, when we are looking at logical mathematical and reading. I am trying to remember who it was, one of my favorite reading people, who said that every kid, when they read, is like a scientist. Every kid, when they read, is like a scientist, creating hypotheses. They are reading a story and they are having to figure out, okay, what is going on here, and they have to make some decisions. Is this fiction? Is this nonfiction?

Right there, there is kind of a decision tree thing going on. We may not be aware of it, but we do the same kind of decision tree thing the moment our eyes light on a book or on some text. We have got to make some quick decisions. What kind of text is this? What I am supposed to get out of it? We teach kids to go through these logical processes, and sometimes we are successful and sometimes we are not.

But kids, when they are word attacking, they are doing the same thing. Goodman and Goodman I think did a wonderful job with their whole approach to looking at a miscue analysis, which is what I was trained up on when I was getting my master's degree, on how kids look at context cues. But a lot of that is sort of like being a scientist. I have to solve a problem here. What is that word? Okay, what does that word look like? What does it remind me of? What are the words around it? What are the pictures around it? So, they are gathering in evidence like an experimenter would, and then they are having to sort of revise their hypotheses.

So, I think it is very interesting, if we look at what goes in the mind of the child. And certainly a lot of reading instruction research has done that very thing, looked at the kinds of logical structures kids use and the kinds of logical strategies we can use to help them become more effective word decoders, more effective reading comprehenders.

Now, I will just do a few examples here in terms of strategies for the logical mathematical inclined kid. Sounds. A Venn diagram where you put two circles. In one circle, you have words that sound like "e." Flea has the sound of "e." Sea has the sound of "e." All of those in that circle have the sound of "e."

And the other circle contains all the words that look like "e," that have the actual "ee" pattern. See. Being or been has the "ee" pattern, but then we look at the cross-section, we look at the words that have elements of both sounding like "e" and looking like "e." See, me, be. And we look at the words that are outside of that confluence. And it is interesting because, again, it reminds of how illogical the English language is, why it is so difficult, because there are so many weird words like being.

I love Japanese. I may be going off on a ledge here, but I think Japanese is relatively easy to learn. Not the kanji script and not the reading part, but just in terms of the sounds, because every sound is consistent. When you get to an "o" sound, it is "do." It is always "do." It is not going to be "du." It is not going to be "da." It is always going to stay the same. But English is all over the place. So, at least helping to sort out in some kind of logical way what the rules are, what the exceptions are, to do this in a logical mathematical way, might be helpful for some students.

Words. This is kind of just a knockoff, but spelling using codes. For example, digitalizing one's spelling words so the consonants are 1 and vowels are zero. So, you would spell foundation digitally, if you were to computerize the word foundation. Or you can create your own code or do an A-B-C, Z is 26. Foundation would be spelled that way.

For kids that are really into codes, code breaking, that kind of thing, it could wake them up. For highly number smart, logical mathematical kids who snooze when it comes to spelling or vocabulary kinds of things, this might bring thing back into the fold.

Sentences. Well, I already talked about the diagramming of sentences, so we can work with sentences in terms of their structures, their deep structures, their transformations.

Text. I will just use this example from Virginia Woolf. Of course, there is a lot of attention on Virginia Woolf these days because of the movie, "The Hours," which I personally did not think was a very good movie. I am sorry if you loved it, but Mrs. Dalloway, upon which it was based, is a fabulous book. If you read the book and then you watch the movie — stay with the book, folks, because the book is incredible. Virginia Woolf has this incredible ability, again, using all the multiple intelligences, to put you in the consciousness of another person.

Now, unlike Joyce, who I was going to mention, but I am not, James Joyce was the stream of consciousness guy. Unlike Joyce, who is kind of in his own sealed kind of world, Steven Douglas walking around in his own sort of egoistic world, Virginia Woolf's consciousness is consciousnesses being reflected off each other. I am thinking about what he is thinking about what she is thinking about me, about what I am thinking about him. It is incredible stuff to read. It is luminescent. The two great books of hers are Mrs. Dalloway, which, again, is wonderful, and To the Lighthouse," which is also just terrific.

But I am just using a sample here: But, then again, it was the other thing, too, not being able to tell him the truth. She is talking about her husband.

Not being able to tell him the truth. Being afraid, for instance, about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be. Fifty pounds perhaps to mend it.

Here obviously she is thinking about what her husband is thinking, in this very reflective way. But what I am picking up here is 50 pounds to mend the greenhouse roof. Right here we have got a question. What does that mean? Fifty pounds. What is a pound? Okay, it is a unit of money. What is it worth? Well, I do not know. Let's look it up. But that is 2003. In fact, do they even have pounds anymore? Aren't they euros now or did the British go along with the euros? See, we are starting to ask logical, mathematical questions. What year was this book written? What was the pound worth when that book was written?

So, I am saying that for the highly logical, mathematical kid, who is going to snooze when text comes along, there is a place, there is an entry point in there for them to say, okay, I am going to look it up. I am going to report back to the class, this is exactly what is going on. Now I have a sense of belonging to this text. I have a sense of involvement that may continue, because actually now I am interested in the rest of the story, too. So, look for those.

Gardner talked about them as entry points, in terms of different intelligences, entry points into text. Vulnerable areas where kids are vulnerable to being caught, to being trapped, to loving to read, to put it in a kind of ironical way.

Books. There are zillions of books, or maybe millions of books, that will involve numbers, calculations, adventures through numbers. I just put how much is a million. In my book, I have a list by the Council of Teachers of Mathematics of really great children's literature using mathematical/scientific ideas and that kind of thing through the grades. So, you can look that up.

Literacy styles. Well, obviously, we are talking here about the child as scientist that I talked about, the problem solving, the hypothesis poser. But also I am thinking about the kid who is the quantifier, who, when they read, would be interested in knowing how fast do I read, when they write, would be interested in knowing how many words did I write.

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