…and liddle lamzy divey, as the song goes. Words baffle, words elucidate, words induct you into a club – or exclude you. Consider this opening sentence to chapter one of a book I was looking at last night:
The vascular plants, or tracheophytes, which possess specialised conducting system include four phyla of the plant kingdom: 1, Psilopsida (chiefly fossils); 2, Lycopsida (clubmosses); 3, Sphenopsida (horsetails) and 4. Pteropsida (ferns, gymnosperms or cone-bearing seed plants, and angiosperms or flower-bearing seed plants).
Abraham Fahn: Plant Anatomy, second ed. (1974)
Does it invite? Intrigue? How much there can I read (if reading is decoding)? How much of this can I read (if reading includes understanding)? I suppose I am thinking about this because I have been reading the book I ought now to call Clements and Tobin (“I hope you all did the reading from Clements and Tobin this week? Good.”), Understanding and Teaching Primary English, with its detailed account of all sorts of aspects of reading in Early Years and Primary education and (key to my point here) the holistic, contextualised and meaningful reading experiences which convince children of the purpose and pleasure behind reading.
What I miss from Fahn is that contextualising element. It’s not his fault: I have plunged in medias res with trying to learn technical building-blocks terms from an advanced book. In other words, as Maggie gently pointed out to me “I do have some more basic books if you like.”
A bit of Greek is my way in, but leads to more and more questions. Psilopsida are naked forms (and I now see the term is no longer used); are Lycopsida wolf-shaped – but why? Sphenopsida are wedge-shaped forms (yes, I’m looking them up by now) but what gives Pteropsida their winged shapes? I enter a maze of definitions and four paths open in front of me – my only guides the indices of books and a bit of etymology. Gymnosperms I knew both parts to, and could work out, but find at this point that I do not understand why they are gymnos, why naked; and I do not (yet?) understand what vessel or container holds the seed for an angiosperm. What does endo- mean in endosperm? A further level of comprehension is needed, more knowledge to understand what these things do, to understand why we have called them what we have. I am learning the words on this first page of chapter one like I learned the details of W S Gilbert lyrics (still not sure what dimity is here, in the Pirates of Penzance) or like, as an unlatinate child, I learned the Credo. In the right place, at the right time (and with the right people to support and inspire) these strange utterances have their own power. No wonder magic is often brought to life in spells, in words in a particular context.
Heaney, in his wonderful poem In Illo Tempore (text here) attests to the power of language: The verbs/ assumed us. We adored. And we lifted our eyes to the nouns… It is this power that provides me with motivation, just as the experience of being able to explore with my Vygotskian more knowledgeable peer (i.e. my Maggie!) gives context to my wondering. But as I think about how I dig about for meanings in an unfamiliar context, I think again about how I fight shy of the technical terms I am more used to.
I have no idea if a scandicus is a term in plant anatomy – maybe putting it in the title of this blog was just a bit naughty – but it is a term in in chant notation. We could start with a list of words a bit like Fahn does, and, like the intended readers of his Plant Anatomy, a beginner in chant could learn quilisma, pressus, podatus and the rest. The Liber Usualis, a sort of compendium of resources for western Church chant, takes this approach. In a similar way, a young altar server might learn responses and prayers and be drawn into the cadences of the text of the Mass (see Heaney, above), or – a more everyday experience in early learning – the glory of the names of dinosaurs (and I do love this list). However, the nomina nuda do not tell us much, unless you delve into word derivation. A passage from the Liber Usualis such as this:
Scandicus and climacus: these groups may be made up of three, four or five, or more notes…Not to be confused with the Scandicus, [the salicus] can be recognised by the vertical episema placed under one of the notes.
Liber Usualis, 1959
is as inscrutable without a guide as are Lycopsida and Pteropsida, Amygdalodon or Riojasaurus.
What does a reader need? One thing my dive into plants this week has shown me again is that we are all, if we let ourselves, learning to read. There is a power and a joy in reading a text or reading a landscape that for me is enhanced by an enriched vocabulary and a facility for diving into detail. So what the support do we need, whatever our age? Well, to look again (in conclusion) to a lesson straight out of Mat and James’s book, we need Margaret Meek‘s human connection, someone to read with us, to tread the path with us, pointing out this feature of a plant, or singing along with us or appreciating the teeth of a large therapod.
nicktomjoe 