Walking Vowels

In the first grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Attaway (sounds farfetched, true nonetheless) and at the time I had already been reading at a relatively advanced level. I was having problems, though, associating words as I perceived them visually, and as I perceived them audibly, creating a disjunction where one word split into two distinct audio and visual forms. As I struggled with this, my mother and father sought to distinguish sounds of grouped vowels with me, telling me that when grouped vowels are used together, the first vowel in the group has the dominant, most pronounced sound. All this did was confuse me further . . .

The very next day (it seems) Ms. Attaway provided a visual demonstration of this concept. She had pictures of numerous things on the walls that were spelled with vowel grouping. There was a man under a net (for caught) beakers and test tubes for science, and a few others that escape my recollection. She asked us to spell them out in our journals. We did so silently.

After realizing that none of her infinitely intelligent first graders could spell the words correctly, she asked a student to come forward. She held the student’s hand and walked around the students seated in their desks chanting this echoing mantra: “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” Nearly all of the class spelled the words right, or at least identified the major vowel sound of the words and included them in their yet incorrect spelling.

This demonstration was all I needed to make all of my mother and father’s teaching make perfect sense. This showed me, as a first grade student, that 1) learning is not as impossible as most students make it, and 2) it analyzed the diversity of standard English spelling forms and 3) opened an awareness of common vernacular for me that led to my appreciation of style in the English language and the dimensions of single words across communicatory modes. This is significant for me because I effectively identified and understood a concept of literacy that I had henceforth had trouble with, and gave me the courage and confidence to both read out loud and experiment to mastery with the English language.