Hal’s Reading Diary: November 2007

When six-year-old Hal makes mistakes with his literacy homework he gets furious if he is corrected. His father, psychodynamic counsellor Roger Mills, wonders why.

This weekend Hal and I were working on some of his literacy homework. The task was reading and then copying out a series of words which featured the ‘a’ sound found in ‘name’ and also in ‘pain’. Hal is now familiar with the way that an ‘a’ followed by a consonant, followed by an ‘e’ makes this sound and he had no difficulty reading and writing words like ‘name’, ‘game’ and ‘same’. After a bit of prompting he was also OK with reading some ‘ai’ words like ‘rain’ and ‘again’. But when it came to writing the ‘ai’ words it was a very different story.

For the final part of the exercise Hal had to write out the words we had looked at, but this time without seeing them on the page first. Hal’s first attempt at ‘again’ was agae, clearly inspired by the a/consonant/e idea. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not right.’ Hal looked crossly at me. He thought a bit and then inserted an ‘n’, ending up with ‘agane’. ‘But remember the other way of making that ‘a’ sound.’ I said. I rubbed out the last two letters. ‘Have another go.’ This was too much for Hal. Out of pure, irate, defiance he wrote out exactly what had been there before – ‘agane’. And he wasn’t going to have another go at it. He was clearly furious.

This experience got me thinking about how difficult it seems to be for Hal if he gets something wrong. I began to wonder how I could talk about mistakes so that they seemed acceptable rather than some kind of disaster. Later that morning, on a brief car journey, I tried telling Hal that everybody gets things wrong when they are learning them for the first time. You can’t not get things wrong. It’s how we learn. Hal looked out of the window and said precisely nothing. And then when I tried the same tack again he simply started talking about something that he had recently seen on TV. Mistakes were clearly a no-go topic.

But why is it so intolerable for Hal if he can’t get something right? Hal reacts to correction at times as if he has been insulted. Being told that he is wrong about something is an offence. The sense that I make of this is that correction brings him up abruptly against the limits of his power. For reasons that he can’t understand, an adult has a power and a capacity that he simply cannot command (and interestingly he takes literacy corrections a lot better from his 8-year-old friend down the road than he does from us).

The psychology of this is essentially, I think, the same kind of thing that psychoanalyst Melanie Klein highlighted when talking about the infant’s internal world. Klein described how the small infant has a fantasy of being omnipotent (food and comfort turn up apparently simply by being wished for) but when the infant learns that its real state is one of impotent dependence, incandescent rage can be the result. As I’ve mentioned before, I think that Hal’s notion of learning is still to a large degree a magical one. Rather than thinking that literacy progress comes out of effort and trial and error, he thinks it comes out of some kind of revelation divorced from effort.

If I’m right in this, it wouldn’t be surprising. Because almost all of the numerous things you learn to do in the first six years of your life are picked up without making any effort at all. Crawling, walking, talking, learning the names of things. You don’t actually have to work at learning these things. They just happen. It’s only when you get to school stuff like numbers and reading that you encounter forms of knowledge that don’t drop into your lap but have to be slogged away at.

Effort, tenacity, perseverance – these are really very grown-up capacities if you think about them and for some kids the transition from effortless learning to effort-required learning can be a difficult, and even humiliating process. This, I think, is what it is like for Hal and the basic reason why his mistakes make him so furious with himself and with us if we try to correct him. Because of this difficulty I’ve started on a slightly different approach with Hal’s reading now. It is early days yet but the initial signs are promising. But more of that next time.