This afternoon we sat with the abc book and began reading it to lucian.
it was the first time we had really done this. beck and i have been teaching him to talk mostly the way you teach a kid to talk, by talking to him all day, all the time, narrating what is in the room, naming what is in his hands, repeating the sound he just made. that has been the install up to this point. ambient. unscheduled. running in the background of everything else.
today was the first time we sat down with him and slowed it down on purpose. one of us held the book open. the other was close. we read the letters. we read the names of the animals. we pointed at the pictures. he was kind of enjoying it. he was listening to the sounds. he was looking at the words and the animals on the pages.
he did not know what was happening. he did not know we had just started something different from everything we had been doing up to now. for him, my voice making the sound of a letter is the same kind of event as my voice making the sound of his name. for us, those events sit in two different categories. one is conversation. the other is the install of the symbol layer.
i feel a little late on this. we have read to him sometimes, but not consistently, not as part of a routine. i am glad we are starting now. i hope this becomes a steady thing. the symbol layer is going to get installed in him either way. the only real question is who installs it, at what speed, and in what form.
that is a real question for a child being raised right now.
a few years out, a kid his age is going to have a thousand frictionless options for getting the letters into his head. an ai tutor that knows his attention curve. a generated story tuned to whichever animal he is fixated on this week. a voice tuned to be slightly more engaging than mine. a screen that never has to be reopened to the right page because it never closes. a system that does not get tired at 1pm. a system that does not repeat itself unless asked. a system that does not need beck to bring a book over to where he is.
i am not against any of that. i will probably use some of it. that is not the argument.
the argument is who the first voice is.
the alphabet is the first piece of structure a person uses to sort the world. before he can tell signal from noise in any system he meets later, he needs the symbol layer installed in a form he trusts. and what installs it first becomes the reference. if my voice gets there first, my voice is the version he reaches for when a system later tries to convince him a word means something different than what he thought it meant. if a machine voice gets there first, the machine voice is the one he reaches for.
i want to be the first dictionary.
the slowness is the whole point of choosing the book. the page does not refresh. the picture does not animate. the book does not learn his preferences. the alphabet does not adjust to keep him in the room longer. the alphabet sits on the page in the same shape every time we open it. the animal stays on the page until i turn it. the sound the letter makes does not get re-rendered into a smoother version on the next reading. the install is at human speed because human speed is what i want him to remember it at.
he was listening to the sounds. that is the part i keep coming back to. he did not need to know the letters. he did not need to be tested on them. he was hearing what the alphabet sounded like when somebody who loves him read it to him. that is a different file getting written than what gets written when the same alphabet arrives through a speaker tuned to maximize engagement.
paper books are not magic. screens are not the enemy. the level of the argument is the install. the form. the speed. the voice it arrives in.
the version of him that learns the alphabet from an algorithm tuned to keep him watching will exist eventually. that one is going to arrive on its own. it does not need my help. the version of him that knows what the alphabet sounds like in his father's voice is the one that needs my help.
i want there to be a baseline. when he is older and the world reads to him in a thousand voices that are not mine, i want there to be a version of the alphabet inside him that sounds like a quiet hour at home, with beck nearby and a paper book open. not as nostalgia. as reference.
What I am holding onto
the install of the symbol layer happens either way. the question is whose voice is first. i want mine to be first. i want beck's to be first. the version of the alphabet he reaches for when he is unsure should sound like our voices.
the slowness of the analog book is not a sentimentality. it is the medium choosing to be at human speed. the page does not refresh. the animal stays where it is until i turn it. that pace is what i want his first sort of the symbol layer tuned to.
i am late. i started later than i should have. that is not a reason to keep being late. the routine starts tonight. the rest of the work is downstream of the regular hour with the open book.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if you are reading to your kid tonight, this one is for you. reply & tell me which book.