My dad likes to say it was made in Italy, but he was born in Brooklyn, New York. You see that his parents left Palermo, Sicily in February 1955 and sailed to America. My nonna (grandmother in Italian) was six months pregnant at the time and she was quite ill during the course of the month. However, like most immigrants, all she cared about was that her child was born in the United States and therefore immediately became a US citizen. My grandparents immediately settled in a Sicilian-Italian neighborhood called Bensonhurst, and the language of choice was Sicilian, of course. When my dad was 10 months old, he would say words in Sicilian and when he was one year old, he could put sentences together. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me that my dad was able to pick up the English language as quickly as he did.

Encouraged by my grandmother, from the time he could handle a pencil, my dad began tracing and then copying the letters on the boxes of groceries that my grandmother brought home from the supermarket every day. He laughs every time he tells the story of how Ronzoni’s products not only filled his stomach, but also his mind. Dad says that he used to get really upset if his mom put the groceries away before he had a chance to trace and/or copy the letters on the groceries. Nonna would have to take out all the boxes that she had kept in the pantry to satisfy my dad.

Nonna, who naturally didn’t speak any English, would sit with my dad and teach him the names of the letters. However, the Italian language consists of 21 letters (there are no H, J, K, W, X) unlike the 26 letters of the English language. So she didn’t learn the names of these letters until she started first grade (there were no kindergarten classes available at the time).

Dad likes to brag about his perfect penmanship because the only “A” he received his first semester of school was in penmanship, a direct result of his meticulous tracing and copying of lettering on grocery items.

How did all this lead to Dad learning the English language so quickly? “The familiarity with the letters and their sounds made learning quite easy for me,” he says. The only thing he had little trouble with was learning the names and correct pronunciation of the letters H, J, K, W and X in English, but even that didn’t take long. I asked him if there was an equivalent of ‘Sesame Street’ in his time that helped speed up his English language learning. We didn’t even have television, he laughs. What we did have instead were nuisance mothers and nuns who were persistent and tireless in their teaching efforts, despite the huge classes assigned to them.”

“After teaching the students the names and pronunciation of each letter, the nuns began teaching us the vowel and consonant sounds. Only after the vast majority of the class mastered the pronunciations did they begin teaching us three-letter words. letters. Each word was presented with a picture to help us remember the spelling, pronunciation and meaning.
Once we become familiar with enough people, places, and things, we begin to learn simple verbs like run, hit, jump, catch, fall, etc. We also draw the sentences, what I mean is that if the sentence were: ‘The boy hit the ball’, we would have a picture of a boy, a bat and the ball. It was a constant reinforcement. Looking back, I guess they were trying to engage as many of our senses as possible, which, I understand, speeds up learning.”

My dad is really excited about this topic. However, he makes it clear that he does not like the teaching modalities that are used in elementary school today. In particular, he detests the child code, a technique that teaches children to spell words, as if they were sounds. To clarify why my father is so “in the know” about the way some elementary schools are run, it is that although my father was a very successful investment banker in 1994, he suffered from a malignant brain tumor that left him disabled. and so he became Mr. Mom. Being able to stay home allowed him to become something of a personal tutor to me, and in turn, he was able to see how I was going backwards and forwards in school. The children’s code, he says, was something he wishes had never been invented.

“If one were teaching Italian, this would be a great way to teach children to read because every letter and combination of letters in the Italian language is pronounced the same way each and every time. In English, we have a lot of homonyms and different pronunciations for the same words, as well as mysterious silent letters, which are confusing enough, but when combined with the children’s spell, it is detrimental to student learning.”
I wish I could have been in one of those classes that ban code enforcement for kids, but unfortunately I wasn’t so lucky. Child code for me, as well as my classmates back then, still have a hard time spelling the simplest words sometimes. Although there is no reason to use this method in my opinion, I think some teachers rely on Code for Kids to see what spelling levels their students are at. However, I feel that other teachers use this methodology out of sheer laziness, which, in all honesty, is what I believe was the case with my teachers.

“What was wrong with Dick and Jane?” my dad asks rhetorically. I replied anyway, “I don’t know,” I said, “I learned kids code, remember.” “I remember, and that’s why you and Al’s Gals (my friends affectionately call themselves Al’s Gals to this day) can’t spell beans,” he says. I can’t argue with the fact that we’re a generation of bad spellers and I think you’re right, that the child code is to blame, at least to some extent. “Dad, let’s talk about ‘Dick and Jane’ if you don’t mind.” “Ann Marie, they were primers used in the early grades of elementary school. Each page was illustrated and had no more than a sentence or two. So even if you couldn’t make out what was being said in the written word, you almost did.” you would.” I could certainly infer that from the illustration. I think the same could be said for the Dr. Seuss books, although the sometimes ridiculous stories, I think, had a negative effect.”

“How long did the nuns continue to use ‘Dick and Jane’?” I asked. “Just for first grade, we had anthologies that contained a little more sophisticated language, still accompanied by illustrations. At some point during second grade, Mrs. McNamara introduced us to new single-volume storybooks, still with illustrations, and this process continued grade after grade. By the end of fifth grade, I had a complete vocabulary and good reading comprehension skills. At the beginning of sixth grade, a friend’s father started taking us to the public library every Saturday morning .It was about a mile walk.There was a four book limit so we argued with the librarian every visit.About the same time I started writing short stories for the entertainment of my classmates and you will enjoy this . , girls started asking me to write love notes for them to give to their boyfriends. I was the Cyrano de Bergerac of my time.”

I recently privately participated in a conversation my dad had with two former sixth-grade classmates who later got married. The woman was one of my dad’s old clients, for whom he had performed his literary magic. Apparently, the woman had never told her husband about the real author of many of her letters, until that conversation. The three of them laughed hysterically when the proverbial cat came out of the bag.
I asked Dad if there was anything else that could have helped him learn and master English as well as he had. I was surprised by his response. “I think Nonna had an influence on me. (Ironically, Nonna had never made it past the third grade). Not only did she help me learn the alphabet, but she sat with me and we read homework together. From that point on, I knew more than she had made me the teacher. That was another way to reinforce what I had learned in class, plus teaching nonna contributed a lot to my love of reading.”

As I contemplate how Dad became fluent in English at such a young age, without the slightest knowledge of the language, what stands out most is Nonna’s involvement in the process. This is certainly a missing element in our society today, mainly due to two working families. As a future elementary school teacher, I plan to replicate the teaching methods of those nuns who taught my father and many others not only to read but also to love reading. If “Dick and Jane” books are not part of the curriculum, wherever I start teaching, I will continue to use the inherent “Dick and Jane” method. To learn more about me and my family, visit our website lunchbagnotes.com [http://www.lunchbagnotes.com]