It started from my 8-years-old's question, "What is the Morse Code?" while reading 10 Days Thomas Edison by David Colbert. Needless to say, Thomas Edison's inventions are in our daily lives. Learning about his personal stories behind them are even more fascinating. Here is an episode. As a reward of saving his little son, Young Thomas asked James MacKenzie for teaching the telegraph operation instead of money. Although Thomas was brilliant with persevereance, it took too large amount of time spending to learn just one code at a time all by himself. MacKenzie became Thomas' mentor and, years later, an employee in Tom's project along with his son whom Thomas has saved.
I turned to my daughter, "Each code has a special meaning. But it is so hard to understand." Then, I realized that printed language seems like a code for early childhood ages in reading and writing world. If you have a efficient guidance and instruction like MacKenzie, you would gradually become an expert code breaker. Again, hat's off for Richard Gentry for explaining how the children's brain at certain literacy level functions and how to help develop to the next stage.
For English Language Learners who are not native English speaker, not only reading and writing, but listening and speaking are all complicated codes. Fourth graders in Japan learn Romatization of Japanese, called Romaji. Unlike traditional ways of the Japanese written format, all Japanese sounds beautifully turn into the miracle form of Roman Alphabet! Students learn this coding system fairly quickly because almost all Japanese sounds are combination of one of 5 vowels and consonant. For instance, do you understand what "Makudonarudo" is? It's "McDonald's". Fortunately and unfortunately, most 4th graders wouldn't know the significant difference between Japanese and English McDonald's in their sounds and spellings at the time.
The nightmare begins in 7th grade when they officially learn English. English is a subject they have to pass for good high schools and college, not a communication tool. One of the smartest kids shared with me how to brilliantly memorize a word "Christmas" in the spelling test. "You can say, 'Chiri' (dust in Japanese) 'sute' (throw away in Japanese) 'masu' (polite ending in Japanese)." How amazing that "(I) throw dust away," turns into a traditional Western holiday! I memorized his code. I was so close, but got wrong by spelling, Chiristmasu. As a typical Japanese, my Christmas had a vowel at the end.
In 9th grade, there was a question that asked the translation from Japanese to English. I had no idea what "island" meant in English at all. With my desperation, my pencil ran, "shima (島）," in the blank, hoping, my teacher would give some credit. I was wrong. No credit. Japanese ways of code breaking strategies for the test taking didn't work well in my needs as a High School student.
Although I am not a foreign language expert, my instinct says, there must be some other ways for young Japanese students to break the English code. What about more phonics instruction for Japanese students? (It's embarrassing at first, but fun to pop new sounds right from your mouth that you have never used in your life!) What about oral responses instead of written ones? Utilize computer software? More individualization?
Then I realized that I came back to my own field. Developing number sense is a code breaking as hard as reading and writing. No wonder why many kids struggle in math. Now my code breaking journey will sail off to the Elementary mathematical world. To be continued.
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