We were midway through our long winter’s drive. I was reading a book aloud to Mark, who was driving. (A terrible book. We got our money’s worth mocking it. I’ll review it later for you.) The kids were bored but quiet, listening to music or leafing through books. The eight-year-old was scribbling on a sketchpad; he is my cartoonist. “Mom?” he asked. “How do you spell ‘Indiana?’”
“I-N-D-I–” I started.
But he interrupted me, talking over my spelling, to repeat as he wrote it down, “I…N…”
“Hold on, slow down,” I said. I began to invoke a spelling-learning technique I learned from somewhere. “Okay, don’t interrupt me. Listen to the whole word and picture it in your mind as I say it, then write the whole word down. I-N-D-I-A-N-A.”
Mark interrupted me in a baffled tone of voice. “How do you expect him to do that?” he asked me.
I was equally baffled. “What do you mean, how do I expect him to do that? I just want him to remember the letters as a whole word and then write the whole word down.”
He insisted, “But what do you mean, ‘picture the word in his mind?’ How is that supposed to work? You can’t see a word. It isn’t a thing, like a screwdriver. It’s just an abstraction. It can’t be pictured, like it was a screwdriver or something.”
Now I was really confused. It really hadn’t seemed like that tough of a concept. “Um… I want him to imagine that he can see the word. Imagine a picture of it, with all the letters in order.”
“All the letters? At the same time?”
“Yes… can’t you?”
“No!”
I was amazed. He really couldn’t imagine being able to picture a word in his mind? I couldn’t imagine NOT being able to picture it. “Well… I can. It’s like, um, like, in my mind’s eye I can see it on a page, as if it were typed on a page.”
“Typed? Not handwritten?”
“Well… I can imagine it handwritten if I want to” (here I paused to imagine the word “Indiana” in my own handwriting on a page, just to check) “but I guess the default picture is typed.”
“What typeface?” he pressed.
“Uh, more like Courier than anything else. I mean, I can do Times New Roman or Helvetica if you want me to. Really it looks like an old typewriter.”
He shook his head as if he didn’t believe me.
“Listen, Mark, can you imagine a process and instrumentation diagram?”
“Sure.”
“How about a plate-and-frame heat exchanger? Can you imagine opening it up and seeing all the parts, or maybe an exploded diagram of one showing how it all fits together?”
“Of course.”
“Imagine going into our kitchen and picking up the rotary cheese grater and taking it apart?”
“Yes…”
“Okay. You walk into a room. There’s a desk with a typewriter on it. You walk over to the typewriter. Pull the sheet of paper out. On the paper is typed a single word: ‘Indiana.’ Can you read the word?”
“No. Too many letters.”
“What if the word was ‘cat’? Can you read that?”
Pause. “Yes, I think I can do that one.”
“But not, umm… Give me a word that’s hard to spell….”
“‘Necessary,’” he suggested.
“Okay, that’s a good one, I always have to think about it too. Okay, ‘necessary.’ You can’t imagine the word ‘necessary’ in your mind as a picture?”
“No.”
“Well, what do you see when you try?” I asked, fascinated.
He paused for a while. “I can see the N and the E at the beginning, and the Y at the end, and in the middle just a jumble.”
I stared at him. “How is it that you can spell anything at all?”
“Well, I just start at the beginning and take it a few letters at a time until I get to the end.”
“You can’t compare the word you’ve written with a picture of the word in your mind.”
“No, I already told you that.” He was getting exasperated with me. But his tone changed to curiosity: “I can imagine a pencil. I can turn it around, look at it from the end, rotate it all different directions, mentally break it in half and see the inside. Can you do that with the word ‘necessary?’”
I had not considered that. I tried it. I pictured the word ‘necessary’ typed on a clean white page. Imagined the page rotating counterclockwise, the y-end of the word ramping up above the n-end slowly, up to the vertical. “I can still see it, all the letters in order, all the way up to ninety degrees. But if I rotate it farther it kind of collapses into a jumble. Wow, that was a good question! I never tried that before.”
“Can you flip it around and see it written from the back? Like through a sign painted on a glass window?”
“Or like those animations of words they used to have on the old Electric Company shows,” I said, remembering. “Let me see. Um, I can’t do it with ‘necessary.’ I can do it with ‘cat.’”
He shook his head. “I think maybe your spelling technique won’t work with everyone.”
“Well, how am I supposed to tell the child how to spell a word then?”
“Do it slowly enough that he can write it down as you say each letter.”
But that will take forever! I thought, but didn’t say. “It’s just for a few seconds, just long enough to take it in and then write it down — like remembering a phone number just long enough to hang up and then dial it. Can’t you do that? ‘Indiana’ isn’t any longer than a phone number.”
“I generally write it down.”
Married thirteen years, and it seems we still don’t understand each other. Well, I will try to be more sensitive from now on.
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