When I was at primary school we were given what were called Comprehension Exercises – this meant we were presented with a couple of paragraphs of completely impenetrable English and were commanded to read it and to answer ten questions about it.
We had to write the title of this riveting excerpt of geographical or geological information in our exercise books, followed by our answers numbered accurately from 1 to 10, each number on its own line and followed by a full-stop. This was not only to show that we understood what we read, that we comprehended it, but also that we could write and use numbers in an accurate and neat way. Neatness was highly prized, literally, there were prizes given out for neatness at the end of the year.
So we had to make sense of the excerpts we were given. At least enough sense so that Miss Graham wouldn’t get one of her headaches. When Miss Graham got a headache she had to go and lie down on the couch in the staff room and be talked to soothingly by Mr Elliot the Headmaster. Miss Graham got a lot of headaches.
We couldn’t have cared less except that when Miss Graham got a headache Mr Murdock came in and none of us knew what to make of Mr Murdock.
Mr Murdock didn’t care about neatness or full-stops, he brushed neatness aside as if it was of no importance. He wanted to know if we understood. Huh?
Mr Murdock took us through the paragraphs, one sentence at a time, and he kept repeating that sentence and asking questions about it until he was sure we all understood it, even Willie McGregor who was still putting tails and straight lines on circles to make letters. Willie was not a slow learner or a reluctant learner he was an I’m Not Going To Because This Doesn’t Make Sense learner.
Willie had progressed to cat in the primers but mat defeated him. ‘It’s the mmm,’ he said, ‘the mmm doesn’t look like that. It looks like this,’ and he drew some little cramped wavy lines that looked like a worm had wriggled across the page of Willie’s exercise book.
If Willie had problems with mmms you can imagine how he coped with being asked to read two paragraphs of closely written information on the geological structure of a river bed. By about halfway through the year even Mr Murdock started to look a bit defeated when Willie continued to stare at him and smile as though he was being polite to someone talking Swahili. Willie had very good manners.
Then a miracle happened. Willie Mcgregor’s little sister turned two. She hadn’t started to speak yet so the Nurse at the Clinic got her an appointment with a Specialist and it was discovered that the little girl was deaf. ‘She needs a signer,’ said the Nurse.
So Willie stepped in. ‘I’ll be a Signer,’ he said.
‘You?’ said the Nurse.
‘You?’ said everyone else.
Willie just smiled. He set to and learned how to be a Signer from a teacher the Nurse found for him and he learned how to be good Signer because he loved his baby sister. It turned out he was a natural. Not only did his sister’s life change, Willie’s did too.
Not only did he become a good Signer but Willie also turned into a good reader. He turned into a good reader because he wanted to read stories so he could then sign them for his sister. Willie decided to accept that m was written the way it was and he’d better get with it because he also wanted to write stories for his sister and to do this he would have to use the letter m. No longer ‘the slow one’, Willie became the one his mother and father looked to for help, and his brothers went to when they were in trouble with their homework and wanted Willie to explain it.
The little sister learned to read because Willie taught her and she went to university and when she graduated with her MA, Willie was there, along with his parents and the brothers and everyone was happy.
