First Grade: My Dick and Jane Dilemma

Sometimes people ask me why I became a writer.

I have several explanations, but the clearest answer involves the Dick and Jane readers, lining school shelves in the 1950s.

Those characters puzzled me. Their lives unfolded inside a book, but there was no story.

Try as I might, I simply couldn’t understand why they only shouted simple verbs at each other. Nor could I see why they were forever looking at Puff, a cat who never seemed that funny to me.

I searched the illustrations for a hint of something better, a possibility these children couldn’t see.

Every morning Miss Long called us forward by reading group: Red Birds, Blue Birds, Yellow Birds. That puzzled me, too. Why couldn’t we ever be Pandas, Parrots, and Porcupines?

After circling around her in tiny wooden chairs, I volunteered to read first, so I could peek through the pages, searching for an upcoming hint of mayhem for Dick and Jane.

I never found any.

Fortunately, I married an early childhood education major. When I asked him about the monotonous books and one-word flash cards, he explained that was the Look-Say Method, a reading theory based on repetition and memorization. We raised our hands when we recognized the word Miss Long pulled from her deck. She called on someone to say it.

One day Miss Long accidentally dropped all the cards. She gathered them without sorting and flashed them one by one. Suddenly a never-before-seen word emerged from the cat-bat-hat stuff.

I knew this odd word, randomly included.

No hands were raised.

Her facial expression suggested she’d made a mistake, but before she could set the card aside, I raised my hand. She looked at me doubtfully but nodded. “Floor,” I said, politely.  Several classmates turned and stared at me. Cliff assured me the double-vowel word did not belong with the short-vowel set.

I don’t know how I knew it. It must have stuck with me from a Captain Kangaroo story time. It turned out to be my salvation.

Miss Long called my mother and suggested she take me to the public library every week. I discovered Curious George.

Finally, a book with a character who had a life.

I remember looking at those exciting pages and wishing I’d see Dick and Jane with the monkey.

I was desperate for them to visit the zoo.

At long last, their dull lives would be fun.

Our reading groups would have fun, too. We’d laugh and cheer in our circled chairs, eager to read about their antics.

That’s how I realized stories could change a child’s reading life.

And I wanted to write them.