ABCs

Tomorrow is the first substantive day of my course on literature and learning. Today it's back to the whole scramble-the-day before routine. This class broadly comes out of my dissertation--which is good--and it's giving me a chance to retrace my steps and rethink my project, or at least that's the hope. I'm realizing how much I didn't think about educational historiography, how what I was trying to do with learning outside the classroom (in literature and other imaginative forms) had been in vogue in history of education at least since the 1950s. Talk about coming too late to the party. I'm not sure how I missed this or even if I really did miss it (I may just be forgetting it now), but it helps explain why folks in history of education show relatively little interest in my project. What I'm doing just isn't news to them. It might not even be news to folks in literary studies, which is why the project needs so much more thinking and rethinking. But I won't bore you with those details here.

Instead, I'll tempt you with a puritanical treat. Tomorrow we're talking about The New England Primer, not a real crowd-pleaser, I fear. But it got me thinking about the ways in which children learn, or rather, consume letters in the process of becoming literate. In my own preliterate days, we learned letters through "alphabet people," colorful cartoon images printed on card-stock. I can't recall if they were tied to reading per se. I think, instead, their purpose was to acquaint us with the idea that letters were special kinds of signs with affiliated meanings. And we wanted to possess those signs, certainly more than we wanted to understand their meanings. We hung them from the chalkboard, from our desks, from the doorways, not unlike the way 17th-century children hung hornbooks from their waists. We developed, I guess you could say, a certain intimacy with letters.

Tomorrow I want to talk about this becoming familiar with the strangeness of letters. And so today I baked letters themselves. Chocolate letters, to be exact. I hope that it might help begin our first real conversation of the semester, one that's slated to be about alphabetization, the process of internalizing the alphabet and becoming literate in colonial america.

I used the smittenkitchen's recipe for brownie roll-out cookies. They have a rich chocolate taste from the generous 2/3 cup of cocoa. They're easy and quick. I'm just hoping that they have the power to get this class talking.

p.s. In true alphabetic dorkiness, I left out the "j" and the "u" because they, of course, weren't added until later.