Learning to Read - Princeton University



Learning to Read:

Sharp Blades Sharpen My Eyes

Katherine Heavers Princiotta

Professor Michael S. Mahoney

Teachers as Scholars: Technology and the Human Experience

July 22, 2005

Having been educated in the Waldorf tradition from age five until the age of ten, I remember learning to read when I was about eight years old. I read a book about a badger named Frances. I read about the adventures of Frog and Toad. I read only the words I recognized in the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and guessed at the rest. I remember riding in the car and reading signs out loud for the first time. In the beginning, I would substitute one word for another, generally getting the meaning pretty close by using a word that began with the same letter and might or might not be actually relevant. I remember a sign that read “plugs it up” and I thought it said “pollutes it up.” My point is that I remember quite vividly the experience of using the whole word as meaning and at first not understanding that the specific letters and their combinations within a word were very important to the meaning of that word.

It was many years later when I received an e-mail with a message that read something like this:

“Ydo cgn udesrgdfgd wjht tpds syas,”

can be translated as

“You can understand what this says.”

The idea is that if a word begins and ends with the correct letters, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the letters in the word are, because you will still be able to recognize what each word is supposed to be. Now, I would like you to know that I do not claim to be a linguist, by any means, nor have I studied the acquisition of language or the new “whole language” method my colleagues at the elementary level are using to teach children to read. But I do have the advantage of not having been officially taught to read until I was eight years old. My mother and father read to us every night, continuing to do so as I entered my teens, at which time I had to listen from desk as I worked on homework and my lucky little brothers got to listen to my mother’s rich, beautiful voice read books such as The Power of One and The Count of Monte Cristo. (Boy, was I jealous.) What advantage did I have when I did learn to read? I was prepared. I was no stranger to language and I am sure that my vocabulary was rich for an eight year old. I knew that words were different combinations of letters on a written page, and I knew that somehow those combinations held the secret to the way the word sounded. I had already long known that the sound and the meaning were inextricably tied.

Likewise, I have known for as long as I can remember, longer than I have known how to read, that the structure of something determines its function. I can’t remember a time when I did not know that. And now, as a teacher of biology, I help my students to see the world that way so that they will understand the process of evolution, the unifying theme of biology.

Upon reading Professor Mahoney’s “Reading a Machine,” it did seem a bit “novel or strange,” as he puts it. When asked to identify the motor of a model airplane on the first day of class, I couldn’t. I was brought back to my days in Sunday school when the kids who went to public school could read in first grade and I still couldn’t. The teacher would ask me to read out loud, and since I was embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t, I would politely decline. This time, though, learning to read was a new experience for my classmates, too. Yes, some of them had built model airplanes themselves and recognized a two cycle engine, piston, cylinder, needle valve, spark plug, and so on, but soon we were reading James Hargreaves’ jenny and Christiaan Huygens’ pendulum clock. I knew I was getting the hang of it when I began to anticipate the solution to the problem of a changing period of the pendulum as a function of latitude. Of course the notes I jotted down did not include the use of cycloidal leaves, but I was still thinking in a new way. While I couldn’t solve the problem, I could truly see the solution when it was revealed. I was learning to look. I was learning to read.

I am learning to look at the world in a new way, when I thought I had it all figured out. I should have known better.

Every day, Professor Mahoney would say, “Let’s read this machine.” It could be a loom, an engine, a factory, a Ford, it didn’t matter. “What do you see?” he would ask. “What ‘quotes’ do you see?” By a “quote” we learned he meant an old idea embedded in a new machine. Daily we heard, “the new appears in the context of the old,” or “this is a new way of doing things that contains the old in it.” Everything comes from something, in other words, and necessity often drives this process. Then again, according to Henry Ford, there was no demand for the automobile. He made it, and then a demand arose. It makes one step back to think about one’s needs and wants. How quickly our wants become our needs, it seems. Technology makes that possible and we are quite happy to allow it.

I have gone about my days for the past two weeks learning to read. My first two readings of machines are as follows:

Reading a Garlic Press

It is 3005. July. I have recently discovered tools from a practice in which humans used to engage. This practice was known as “cooking”. It is difficult to imagine a time in which a human’s energy source wasn’t found in the comprehensive VEM pill, but at one time, at least between the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as far as I know at this point, humans still had to rely upon their own resources to gather and assimilate all of their nutrition from myriad sources. Based upon my research, I know that humans took it upon themselves to make unique combinations of food stuffs, and hoped that these concoctions contained all of the required vitamins and minerals to keep their bodies healthy. At this time in the history of our planet, cancer was a still a threat, and humans believed that the answer to its prevention was to gather plant material and prepare it in ways that would somehow magically come together in their bodies and render them impenetrable to the disease.

What, then, was this tool designed to do? The apparent approach, at first glance, is that some sort of object or material is placed inside the small, oblong compartment. The tool appears to be made of aluminum. Whether it is a tool or a machine remains to be determined. In any event, the design has two hinges, each swinging in opposite directions. There are holes in the bottom of the oblong compartment, 41 holes to be exact, each the same size and depth, about 1.5 mm in diameter and about 2 mm in depth. The first hinge is between two handles, which the human hand could grip and bring together with relative ease. The second hinge is on a small flat piece of aluminum that is in the same oblong shape as the compartment with holes in it. When the hinge of this flat oblong piece is swung in one direction, it is inserted into one of the handles, the handle that has “Zyliss U.S. Patent 5.513.562” molded into the metal. It doesn’t seem as though this is a “natural” fit, as it simply bangs into it and makes a small “ding” sound. But when the hinge between the two handles is opened all the way, the tool lies flat on a surface and the small compartment with holes is open. An object or substance could then be placed in the compartment. If the second hinge is not moved, but the hinge between the handles is closed, in other words, the handles are brought together toward one another, then there is no resulting action. But if the small, oblong flat piece is swung on its hinge first, so that its edge rests on the open hinge between the handles and then the larger hinge between the handles is closed, the action is one that lowers the flat insert into the compartment and compresses whatever has been placed in it. If the object is of a consistency that is relatively soft and has a relatively high water content, then the water from the object will be squeezed out evenly through the holes. In this case, the tool could be a weapon because it could squirt the liquid squeezed from the object into the face of an enemy.

You will have to stretch your imagination now to conjure up an image of the day, but it is possible to guess in what context this tool was made. Believe it or not, humans used to process fruit and vegetables themselves. Garlic is a plant of which the root grows in bulbs under the ground. The pieces of the bulb are referred individually as “cloves”. One of these cloves just happens to fit perfectly into the small oblong shape compartment, since one end of a garlic clove is a bit more pointed than the other, which is wider, resulted in the shape of the fruit known as the pear. At one time, about 1000 years ago, a human could recognize the root of this plant at first sight. A human could also identify the plant by its smell and taste, because at this time, the food stuffs all had to be identified by their different smells and tastes. This was how humans decided what was palatable and what wasn’t. In this way, they bumbled their way through choosing the foods they believed were “healthy”. In the case of garlic, they were right, and so, as you may or may not know, the VEM (vitamins, energy, minerals) pill you take three times a day contains some of the fructans, organosulfur compounds, allinase, the amino acid arginine, phytic acid (of which garlic contains 0.08% in composition), saponins, and beta-sitosterol ().

Remember, this was not necessarily the knowledge the inventor Zysset possessed when he designed this instrument, but in all likelihood it was designed to process garlic. This meant that at the time, humans must have added garlic to the materials they consumed for vitamins, energy, and minerals. Ancient records of cooking practices can be found in what were called “cook books,” and often the instructions tell the human who processed the food to “sauté” the garlic. As a clove, the garlic was not readily sautéed, but if it were cut or “minced” into smaller pieces, it could then be heated in a flat pan on an energy source, the “stove”. Thus, this tool, when used properly, took a clove of garlic and turned it into small pieces as a human hand squeezed the two handles together and the small, flat insert pressed the water and solutes through the 41 holes of the small compartment. The action of the small flat piece was to “press” the clove through the holes. It makes sense, then, that the term for this tool was “garlic press”.

The designer of this tool may have assumed that a person in the kitchen would wish to mince more than a single clove, since an instrument such as this replaces the process of cutting a clove of garlic by hand (with a knife). Thus, it is safe to assume that Zysset assumed a person cooking would want to “save time” by using the garlic press to mince many cloves of garlic quickly. Also implicit in the design is that the person using the tool had two hands and was squeezing the press over a container which would catch the juicy product.

It is assumed that the person using this tool would harvest or buy the input and eat the output. It may also be assumed that the output would be heated before it was eaten, but not necessarily. It is likely that the person using this tool “knew how to cook”. A degree of expertise in the kitchen can be assumed. The “worker” or “operative” had close contact with food production. The operative of this tool was probably working alone and there was probably only one available to him or her. The tool helped the worker, or cook, prepare food that contained a specific plant, which means that it was an ingredient that was widely used. The sale of this tool in the early 21st century was probably to people who had extra money to spend on saving the time it took to cut a bulb of garlic into small pieces using a knife.

Reading the Guillotine and the Cigar Cutter

The politics of technology are demonstrated by the guillotine – it was believed to be relatively painless compared to horrors such as quartering or being burned at the stake, so that the use of the guillotine for the execution of aristocrats and peasants alike was seen as democratization.

My husband enjoys smoking a fine cigar. He frequents Windsor Cigar Company and seems to savor the rituals of smoking a cigar as much as he does the flavor and aroma of the cigar itself. This is something he has taught me, but which I have yet to experience for myself. Apparently, it’s not just about the nicotine. Searching through a kitchen drawer, I couldn’t decide among all of the choices: a corkscrew, a wire whisk, a wooden spoon, a small, light wooden rolling pin, a large, heavy rolling pin with a nonstick surface, two hand graters, and a fork. Tucked inconspicuously into one corner of the drawer I found a small, flat plastic object with little round handles on either side and a metallic insert in the middle of the rectangular plastic middle. For a moment, I didn’t recognize it. Then, I knew exactly what it was – a miniature guillotine! If the cigar tip cutter I found in our kitchen utensils drawer didn’t quote a French instrument of death, I didn’t know what did! What I saw was that a sliding blade and a fixed surface comprise a simple yet elegant machine that has served to shape culture through the ages.

Quick death was the aim of a blade falling onto the victim’s neck and slicing his or her head off in one swift motion. A heavy blade held high up in the air will fall with its own weight when released, so that no strong axe-swinger is required for the execution. This was the intent about a thousand years ago or earlier, when different societies were designing their devices which would all be precursors to the guillotine. Many assumptions were built into the design of this machine, including the fact that someone would have to operate it and pull the blade up by a rope that could then be released at the appropriate time. The designer assumed that those who implemented it could keep the blade sharp, could ensure that no one but the intended condemned would be injured by it, and could repair the wooden parts of it if, after repeated uses, the base became worn like an over-used cutting board. The intended purpose of this machine was the swift and (hopefully painless) execution of human beings by decapitation.

It is clear that the people who designed the guillotine, and earlier machines like it, assumed that the penalty of death was an integral part of life. Executions were a regular social part of weekly life, and people attended them as such.

Miniaturized, the cigar cutter isn’t all that different in design, with the exception that the force that moves the blade is supplied by the movement of two fingers of the operative, not gravity. The design is similar in that if the blade is dull, or the force not great enough, the cigar tip will dangle like a partially severed head that needs a second cut to finish the job. The inventor of the cigar cutter knew that a blade slicing through the cigar at an angle, just as the blade on the guillotine was cut on an angle, would cut more effectively. The designer expected that the person using the cutter would not sharpen the blade, as there no obvious way to do so. Also, the cutter is made of plastic and the blade cannot be removed from the plastic center of it. Therefore, the blade cannot be replaced. The purpose of this machine is to remove the closed tip of a cigar. This way, the smoker can place his or her mouth firmly around the cut tip and push and pull air through the tightly wrapped tobacco leaves of the cigar in order to light the cigar initially and then continue puffing from time to time.

In the case of the cigar cutter, the designer was improving upon the old way of cutting the tip of a cigar, which was to use a pen knife to chop it off. This would leave the tip of the cigar frayed and might make it more likely to unravel. The designer assumes that the smoker will not place his or her finger in the hole and mistakenly cut the tip of a finger instead of a cigar.

Now, to what system did the guillotine belong? To what system does the cigar tip cutter belong? First, I notice that neither is a necessity for life, and neither is something that ever was or ever will be used by “every man, woman, and child.” I believe it is safe to assume that only men operated the guillotine, though we know both women and men lost their heads to its falling blade. The system was the society of the time, a system of strict laws enforced quickly and often unfairly, so that the more wealthy offenders were granted, or could buy, a less painful execution. The system used metal, wood, and stone to make machines. This machine was made of metal and wood, with perhaps a twine rope made of plant material to raise up the blade. The blade was surely sharpened with stone.

The cigar cutter belongs to a different sort of system all together. It is an accessory to a huge system, the growing, processing, shipping, marketing, selling, and smoking of tobacco. The cigars in Windsor Cigar Company come from all over the world, from Nicaragua, Italy, Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Portugal, and the United States. Some cigars are made by machines, but most are made by hand. While the cigar cutter is not the component on which this system depends, no one can smoke a cigar as long as the tip is closed. Whether it’s pair of scissors or a pen knife, the cigar must still be cut in order to be lit, and so the cigar cutter, while not necessary to this system, is usually a part of it.

The system of beheading by guillotine no longer exists, though the system of capital punishment persists to this day. In the bagel slicer or the handheld cigar cutter, one finds the “quote” of the blade that is drawn to a fixed point, whether through bread or rolled tobacco. What I have noticed is that one structure, such as the sliding blade, can be adapted to so many purposes. It seems that it really is true that the new always contains the old, and that, in the case of these two machines, neither is very far removed from the original stone axe. The blade is one machine that really has not changed, though it has been put to so many different uses. Who would have ever thought that people would one day strap their boots to blades and glide around a frozen pond? But I could ice skate before I could read!

Cigar smoking is a social activity and used to be strictly for men. Now more and more women are smoking cigars and cutting the tips themselves, I’m sure. It’s a ritual I’m not likely to engage in since I use my lungs for running, but it is undeniably a part of our culture in which the miniaturized guillotine-like blade survives as a reminder of what was once done with a heavy, sharp blade and two tree trunks to guide its fall.

I’m looking forward to the rest of my life. In particular, I can’t wait for the next new piece of technology to come along, because I will not look at it the same way I used to look at new things. Beyond the next new-fangled artifact, I am excited to meet my new students in the fall and teach them to see in an entirely new way what they have seen, accepted, and used all their lives.

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