Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Sometime last year, some folks
Speaker 1: here at work asked if we had anything planned for
Speaker 1: the show to go along with the two hundred and
Speaker 1: fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that's being celebrated
Speaker 1: this year. I think it is safe to say that
Speaker 1: there is not a year in which either of us
Speaker 1: would really be interested in the kind of like over
Speaker 1: the top patriotism and national pride that is usually expected
Speaker 1: to go along with that kind of a milestone observance.
Speaker 1: We especially were not in the mood for that when
Speaker 1: we were asked twenty twenty five. I did, though, go
Speaker 1: looking around to see if there was anything that was
Speaker 1: kind of more off the beaten path that might spark
Speaker 1: my interests and also let us say to the folks
Speaker 1: that work, yes, there will be something related on the
Speaker 1: calendar our recent episode on Kasimir Pulaski. Unrelated to that conversation.
Speaker 1: That is just a coincidence somehow in my search for
Speaker 1: something that would let us say, yes, we do have
Speaker 1: something on the calendar. I found Rebecca Smith Pollard, who
Speaker 1: also published under the name Kate Harrington, and her connection
Speaker 1: to the US Simmy Quincentennial is that she published a
Speaker 1: book of poems to mark the US Centennial in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six. That is not much of a connection, and
Speaker 1: this episode's also mostly not about that, because Rebecca Smith
Speaker 1: Pollard's major influence was not this book of poems that
Speaker 1: she published. It was creating a method for teaching children
Speaker 1: to read that was really influential in her time and
Speaker 1: still has relevance today. She also wrote a novel that
Speaker 1: was meant in part as a critical response to Harriet
Speaker 1: Beecher Stowe's anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, so we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about that as well. Rebecca Harrington
Speaker 1: Smith was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on September twentieth,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty one. Her mother, Marjorie, was born in Ireland
Speaker 1: and immigrated to the US with her family when she
Speaker 1: was a child. Rebecca's father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, was born
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, went to Harvard and then became a teacher,
Speaker 1: mostly in private schools. He liked to teach the works
Speaker 1: of Shakespeare, and he wrote his own grammar and spelling books.
Speaker 1: A grammar textbook by Samuel Kirkham described Nathaniel Ruggles Smith
Speaker 1: as a quote distinguished and acute grammarian. Nathaniel also established
Speaker 1: and edited a literary journal called the Hesperus, and Rebecca
Speaker 1: was their youngest child. Yeah, that literary journal was apparently
Speaker 1: one of the first, if not the first literary journals
Speaker 1: published west of the Mississippi. It's been a running theme
Speaker 1: on the show lately that we don't know much about
Speaker 1: people's early lives. But we don't know much about Rebecca's
Speaker 1: early life. There's even some uncertainty about her middle name.
Speaker 1: A couple of sources I found gave it as Hutchinson
Speaker 1: rather than Harrington. I'm not totally sure, but I think
Speaker 1: this is because she had an older sister named Rebecca
Speaker 1: Hutchinson who only lived for a few months, and that
Speaker 1: was the year before this Rebecca was born. At some point,
Speaker 1: the Smith family moved west. First they moved to Ohio
Speaker 1: and then to Kentucky. Apparently this move is because Marjorie
Speaker 1: was ill and they hope that the change of climate
Speaker 1: would help her. It's hard to say what impact this
Speaker 1: had but from what I was able to piece together.
Speaker 1: Marjorie Smith lived until eighteen seventy two, when she died
Speaker 1: at the age of eighty four. She outlived Rebecca's father,
Speaker 1: who died in eighteen fifty nine at the age of
Speaker 1: seventy five. While living in Kentuck, Ucky, Rebecca became a teacher,
Speaker 1: and she also started publishing her writing. She published poems
Speaker 1: in the Louisville Journal under the name Kate Harrington, often
Speaker 1: with a notation of prairie cottage and the year the
Speaker 1: poem was written at the end. In eighteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: she and another poet, miss M. E. Wilson, of Maysville, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: each wrote a poem called Moonlight Tryst that was inscribed
Speaker 1: to the other. These were published in the Journal, together
Speaker 1: with a note from the editor saying that quote, two
Speaker 1: of our romantic young poetesses, living more than one thousand
Speaker 1: miles apart, made a covenant to meet in spirit on
Speaker 1: a particular night and talk to each other in poetry.
Speaker 1: When Kate Harrington didn't submit anything to the paper for
Speaker 1: a while, in eighteen fifty five, her next poem appeared
Speaker 1: with this note from the editor, quote, we are heartily
Speaker 1: glad to see you back. Dear Kate, you must never
Speaker 1: play truant so long again. She also published essays in
Speaker 1: other newspapers around Kentucky. Sometime in the mid eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the family moved to Iowa, and in eighteen fifty six
Speaker 1: Rebecca published a novel titled Emma Bartlett or Prejudice and Fanaticism.
Speaker 1: The title page said that it was by an American lady,
Speaker 1: but the copyright statement lists it as the work of R. H. Smith.
Speaker 1: In the words of her review and the Ohio Statesman quote,
Speaker 1: the heroine, Emma Bartlett, is the offspring of a young
Speaker 1: and lively German woman who was driven with her relatives
Speaker 1: by political and religious persecution from her own land to
Speaker 1: seek a home in America. She illustrates, through a succession
Speaker 1: of thrilling scenes, the character of a gentle, noble, and
Speaker 1: gifted woman suffering from the evils with which a corrupt
Speaker 1: social system and an unwise and unjust prescription have surrounded her.
Speaker 1: So as Tracy mentioned at the top of the show,
Speaker 1: this book was written at least in part as a
Speaker 1: response to Harry at beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Speaker 1: which was published in book form in eighteen fifty two
Speaker 1: and became a bestseller. Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, has
Speaker 1: its own very complicated legacy. Among other things, it was
Speaker 1: straightforwardly anti slavery and as credited with sparking a surge
Speaker 1: in abolitionist sentiment in the US, but it also depicted
Speaker 1: black people in a very heavily stereotyped way, and Uncle
Speaker 1: Tom became an insult to describe Black people who were
Speaker 1: perceived as subservient or complicit in their own oppression. At
Speaker 1: least thirty novels were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Speaker 1: which are often grouped together under the umbrella of Anti
Speaker 1: Tom literature. At least a third of these novels were
Speaker 1: by women, and they were mostly written by writers living
Speaker 1: in the South. A lot of Anti Tom novels were
Speaker 1: explicitly pro slavery. I did not read this entire book,
Speaker 1: but I did read selections from it, and Emma Bartlett
Speaker 1: has kind of a broader focus than that. In the
Speaker 1: words of a piece in the Weekly Courier of Atumwa, Iowa,
Speaker 1: it was quote designed to illustrate the evils of abolitionism
Speaker 1: and no nothingism. The review from The Ohio Statesman that
Speaker 1: we read from earlier described the book as exposing quote,
Speaker 1: political and religious prejudice and fanaticism as seen in Abolitionism,
Speaker 1: No Nothingism, and Kindred heresies. Abolitionism was obviously the abolition
Speaker 1: of slavery. The No Nothing Party was an anti immigrant
Speaker 1: and anti Catholic political party that flourished in the eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Its name purportedly came from the idea that if members
Speaker 1: were asked about any nativist organizations they belonged to, they
Speaker 1: would say they knew nothing. Smith does not seem to
Speaker 1: have been Catholic herself. Her family were Presbyterians, but she
Speaker 1: was sympathetic toward Catholics and opposed to the anti Catholic
Speaker 1: prejudice that was widespread in the nineteenth century. Some of
Speaker 1: this prejudice was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants
Speaker 1: from Ireland who were fleeing the Great Famine that started
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties. So Smith wrote this novel, too,
Speaker 1: exposed No Nothingism as evil, and she apparently thought abolitionism
Speaker 1: was just as bad. The books, abolitionist characters are hypocrites
Speaker 1: and they have self serving motivations. There are rebuttals against
Speaker 1: abolitionist arguments scattered throughout conversations that take place among the
Speaker 1: various characters, like at one point, someone describes the idea
Speaker 1: of people as property as shocking, and the response is quote,
Speaker 1: and yet who first brought them into a position to
Speaker 1: be sold as such? Was it not the inhabitants of
Speaker 1: that portion of the globe whose descendants are now continually
Speaker 1: crying against the sin of slavery? Good gracious. Another conversation
Speaker 1: frames accounts of brutality being carried out on southern plantations
Speaker 1: as overblown or even fabricated, basically the same kind of
Speaker 1: nonsense that still is in Internet comment sections today. We're
Speaker 1: not saying that depicting something in a book is the
Speaker 1: same as believing or endorsing it. Plenty of writers depict
Speaker 1: evil or prejudice or violence in their books without it
Speaker 1: being an expression of their own beliefs or tendencies. But
Speaker 1: this book was explicitly written for political reasons. It is
Speaker 1: dedicated to the quote true upholders of the Constitution and
Speaker 1: of the firm supporters of our glorious Union. The preface
Speaker 1: to the first edition said that she quote endeavored to
Speaker 1: present some facts in fiction just shaking my head. No, oh, Rebecca,
Speaker 1: I didn't know any of this when I picked her.
Speaker 1: That's what makes it good. That's what makes it a
Speaker 1: good thing to discuss. In the introduction to the second
Speaker 1: edition of the novel, Smith described it as demonstrating quote
Speaker 1: two or three notions which have of late grown to
Speaker 1: the importance of political doctrines to be great political and
Speaker 1: social evils. The two chief conclusions which she thought these
Speaker 1: facts established were that a fellow creature's place of birth
Speaker 1: should not be made the test of his capabilities or
Speaker 1: intrinsic worth, and that there is neither reason, religion, nor
Speaker 1: justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate
Speaker 1: the blacks from a bondage in which they have been
Speaker 1: placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and
Speaker 1: no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented. Once again,
Speaker 1: I say, oh, Rebecca. In this book and other writings,
Speaker 1: Smith was also so deeply opposed to the idea of
Speaker 1: dissolving the Union over the issue of slavery. That's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that she framed abolitionism as a fanatical evil.
Speaker 1: She thought that the abolitionists were forcing the country toward
Speaker 1: a civil War. Near the end of Emma Bartlett, a
Speaker 1: character even recites a five stanza poem that argues stridently
Speaker 1: against dissevering the Union. Unfortunately, this book, which was written
Speaker 1: when she was twenty five, is the biggest example we
Speaker 1: have of Rebecca Smith Pollard's thoughts on this. I looked
Speaker 1: through newspapers for other stories or essays or poems that
Speaker 1: she might have written later on to see if they
Speaker 1: revealed anything in how or whether her opinions might have
Speaker 1: evolved during and after the Civil War, and I really
Speaker 1: did not find all that much. Her eighteen seventy six
Speaker 1: books Centennial and Other Poems does include a dirge for
Speaker 1: Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one
Speaker 1: of the founders of the Report publican party. He was
Speaker 1: deeply opposed to compromising over the issue of slavery and
Speaker 1: the lead up to the Civil War. So this poem
Speaker 1: describes Greeley, who was one of the people who worked
Speaker 1: to convince Abraham Lincoln to commit to ending slavery with
Speaker 1: the Civil War, as a spirit who quote so nobly
Speaker 1: endeavored to save from disunion the land of the free.
Speaker 1: So does this poem mean that she came to see
Speaker 1: slaveholders as the threat to the union rather than abolitionists.
Speaker 1: I really cannot say I have theories. See you Friday.
Speaker 1: We will get to her work as an educator after
Speaker 1: a sponsor break. On April sixth, eighteen fifty eight, Rebecca
Speaker 1: Harrington Smith married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor.
Speaker 1: An announcement of their marriage and The Little Journal described
Speaker 1: Rebecca as having achieved considerable eminence in the literary world.
Speaker 1: On their wedding anniversary a year later, they welcomed a
Speaker 1: daughter named Mary. Sadly, Oliver died of typhoid in eighteen sixty.
Speaker 1: Two years later, Rebecca married James Pollard, who was elected
Speaker 1: to the Iowa State Senate that year. James had four
Speaker 1: children from a previous marriage, and he and Rebecca had
Speaker 1: three surviving children together, Adelaide, Eleanor, and Joseph Addison Smith Pollard.
Speaker 1: Most written mentions of Joseph refer to him by his
Speaker 1: initials JAS. In eighteen seventy, Pollard published a book of
Speaker 1: poetry under the name Kate Harrington. It was called In
Speaker 1: Memoriam Maymy April sixth, eighteen sixty nine. It was in
Speaker 1: memory of her daughter Mary, who died on that date,
Speaker 1: which was her tenth birthday and the anniversary of Rebecca's
Speaker 1: wedding to Mary's late father. This was a series of
Speaker 1: poems that were written for her daughter, but also to
Speaker 1: any other mother who had loved and lost a child. Quote,
Speaker 1: it matters little what her station proved, or of what nation, race,
Speaker 1: or tribe she'd be. I'll place her sympathy beyond all price.
Speaker 1: I'll give her confidence and perfect trust. Such friendship true
Speaker 1: and strong as never dies, but lives. When lips that pledge,
Speaker 1: it turned to dust. Pollard apparently had an ongoing correspondence
Speaker 1: with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote to her that this
Speaker 1: collection brought tears to his eyes. I found references to
Speaker 1: this in writing about Pollard, but I did not find
Speaker 1: the actual letter. Pollard's books, Centennial and Other Poems, came
Speaker 1: out in eighteen seventy six, also published under the name
Speaker 1: Kate Harrington. This collection starts with Iowa's Centennial Poem, which
Speaker 1: is a patriotic poem celebrating the American Revolution. Of course,
Speaker 1: Iowa was not really part of the Revolution at the time.
Speaker 1: What is now Iowa was claimed by Spain and not Britain.
Speaker 1: This poem starts out describing Iowa as a barren wild
Speaker 1: one hundred years before, home only to indigenous people, who
Speaker 1: she refers to as the Red Man. But it goes quote,
Speaker 1: we share the nation's glory to by holding to the
Speaker 1: world's broadview. Our men of mark are genius, rare, scattered
Speaker 1: like sunbeams everywhere. The United States Centennial took place just
Speaker 1: a decade after the official end of the Civil War,
Speaker 1: so this was near the end of the reconstruction era,
Speaker 1: and federal troops were still stationed in South Carolina, Florida,
Speaker 1: and Louisiana, so for some people this was a strange
Speaker 1: and difficult time to be celebrating a national centennial. The
Speaker 1: country still seemed very divided. A lot of ways it
Speaker 1: was becoming more divided. This poem alludes to this, calling
Speaker 1: for quote prodigal suns to return and to be given
Speaker 1: a generous welcome, and to quote give them robes of
Speaker 1: a right royal hue. Let the rings that the restore
Speaker 1: them be offered by victors who honor the blue. The
Speaker 1: poem ends, quote, we ask you to pledge them, truehearted,
Speaker 1: a covenant promise anew remembering mong Patriots Departed No Line Parts,
Speaker 1: The Gray from the Blue Centennial and other poems. Also
Speaker 1: includes poems two and about members of Pollard's family, including
Speaker 1: her late daughter, a memorial to William G. Bell Knap,
Speaker 1: son of Grant's Secretary of War, William Wurst bell Nap,
Speaker 1: a temperance poem, some nature poems, and some poems that
Speaker 1: were written by her late father. In addition to writing poetry,
Speaker 1: Pollard continued to work as a teacher, mainly at schools
Speaker 1: for girls, including in Keokuk, Iowa. That's a school that
Speaker 1: she ran from eighteen seventy five to eighteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: It seems like she and her husband, James were separated
Speaker 1: by eighteen seven seventy seven, so especially after that, her
Speaker 1: teaching and her writing would have been really necessary to
Speaker 1: support herself and her children. James died in nineteen oh two.
Speaker 1: It seems like Pollard was ahead of her time as
Speaker 1: a teacher. Nineteenth century schools often involved a lot of
Speaker 1: learning by rote and strict discipline, but she taught hands
Speaker 1: on history lessons with her students dressing up and re
Speaker 1: enacting battles. She cut up apples to help students learn
Speaker 1: about fractions, and she had a classroom garden outside of
Speaker 1: the school. Part of the lesson involved pulling up some
Speaker 1: of the plants at different stages of their development to
Speaker 1: see how they grew. In eighteen eighty seven, Pollard was
Speaker 1: awarded a patent under the name R. S. Pollard. This
Speaker 1: was for an educational appliance, and here's how the patents
Speaker 1: described this invention. Quote two or more plates connected together
Speaker 1: and shifting upon or within each other, and having upon
Speaker 1: their faces a series of characters, which, upon a proper
Speaker 1: shifting of the plate's form, and convey to the eye
Speaker 1: and mind different impressions, meanings and objects which singly or
Speaker 1: improperly grouped. They do not indicate whereby the mind of
Speaker 1: a student is trained by the constructive and synthetic methods
Speaker 1: in the formation of objects, characters, and the language. In
Speaker 1: one of the accompanying illustrations, one of the plates is
Speaker 1: a ring with a series of letters written on it
Speaker 1: like S, RP, and M. The other plate is in
Speaker 1: the middle and it has the letters A through T.
Speaker 1: So by turning that outer ring you can see how
Speaker 1: these letters combine to form words sat, rat, pat, and MATT.
Speaker 1: Another illustration shows this setup being used for arithmetic. These
Speaker 1: devices would be made from blackboard or something else that
Speaker 1: could be a RaSE, so that a teacher could prepare
Speaker 1: the board to go along with whatever the day's lessons were.
Speaker 1: Pollard had started teaching back when she was living with
Speaker 1: her parents in Kentucky. At this point, she had at
Speaker 1: least two decades of experience as a teacher. She also
Speaker 1: had her father's example as a teacher, and she had
Speaker 1: decided that teaching children phonics was critical to their learning
Speaker 1: to read. This was right in the middle of a
Speaker 1: century's long debate in the United States about how best
Speaker 1: to teach children to read. The idea of teaching children
Speaker 1: through phonics very basically meaning the relationship between letters and
Speaker 1: the sounds that they make, goes back to at least
Speaker 1: the sixteenth century, when the first formal schools started to
Speaker 1: be established in North America. Children were typically taught the
Speaker 1: alphabet and the sounds made by each letter. Students put
Speaker 1: that into practice by reading the Bible or historic or
Speaker 1: political texts. Since there were no text books made specifically
Speaker 1: for children until the seventeenth century, I'll just say I
Speaker 1: did not look into the history of reading education outside
Speaker 1: of the United States. At all for this episode, so
Speaker 1: we are not going to be talking about that. Some
Speaker 1: of the earliest reading and spelling textbooks in North America
Speaker 1: were phonics based. Those included Noah Webster's The American Spelling Book,
Speaker 1: also called The Blue Backed Speller, which came out in
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty three. He also released A Grammar in seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty four and A Reader in seventeen eighty five. We
Speaker 1: talked about Webster and his influence more in our two
Speaker 1: parter on the Dictionary Wars, which came out in June
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty three. In the mid eighteen hundreds, school
Speaker 1: started moving away from phonics in favor of a method
Speaker 1: that focused on learning whole words, or the look say method.
Speaker 1: One advocate of this was Thomas Hopkins Gaaladet, founder of
Speaker 1: the first American School for the Deaf and namesake of
Speaker 1: Gallaudet University. In his book The Mother's Primer to Teach
Speaker 1: Her Child Its Letters, he wrote, quote in the common modes,
Speaker 1: what can be more uninteresting than to commence with teaching
Speaker 1: a child to call certain arbitrary marks or letters which
Speaker 1: in themselves have no meaning, by certain arbitrary sounds or
Speaker 1: names of the letters, which also have no meaning. What
Speaker 1: an unintelligible and irksome task it must be. So Galiadet's
Speaker 1: method paired words with pictures, like a picture of a
Speaker 1: cat along with the word cat, so that the student
Speaker 1: could learn that whole word rather than its component letters.
Speaker 1: This method probably made a lot of sense to Galandet
Speaker 1: because of his work with Death and Heart of hearing
Speaker 1: students who either couldn't hear the sounds that were made
Speaker 1: by different letters and letter combinations, or couldn't hear them
Speaker 1: very well. But this method did not provide a way
Speaker 1: for students to decode written words that they didn't already know,
Speaker 1: other than to try to work it out from context
Speaker 1: or maybe from illustrations that might be on the page.
Speaker 1: The first books designed for this method also only went
Speaker 1: up to the third grade, and by necessity, they were
Speaker 1: focused on words for concrete objects and concepts that can
Speaker 1: be illustrated, so consequently their vocabulary was kind of limited.
Speaker 1: The Mother's Primer was written for the parents of hearing students,
Speaker 1: and starting in the eighteen forties, Galliaut's method was popularized
Speaker 1: outside of schools for the deaf, in part by educational
Speaker 1: reformer Horace Mann. Man advocated teaching children to read by
Speaker 1: focusing on whole words and only after that to focus
Speaker 1: on the alphabet and spelling. This whole word model was
Speaker 1: fiercely debated among educators, but in the later part of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century it gradually became more widely used than
Speaker 1: phonics based instruction in the United States. So that brings
Speaker 1: us back to Rebecca Smith Pollard in the late eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: so about forty years after Horace mann started popularizing the
Speaker 1: look say method, she created a whole system for teaching reading,
Speaker 1: including a reader, a speller, and a teacher's manual, and
Speaker 1: it was based on phonics, which we will talk more
Speaker 1: about after a sponsor break. In eighteen eighty nine, Rebecca
Speaker 1: Smith Pollard published her first synthetic reader, synthetic Speller, and
Speaker 1: a complete manual Pollard Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling,
Speaker 1: which was a step by step guide for teachers on
Speaker 1: how to use the other two books with their students.
Speaker 1: She wrote in the preface to the manual, quote, instead
Speaker 1: of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting
Speaker 1: it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to
Speaker 1: take the sounds of the letters for our starting point,
Speaker 1: and with those sounds lay a foundation firm and broad,
Speaker 1: upon which we can build whole families of words for
Speaker 1: instant recognition. Her method included what she referred to as
Speaker 1: busy work, in which children practice sounding out letters or
Speaker 1: drew latters that were used to illustrate the progression of
Speaker 1: tones that different vowels could make, or drew wheels with
Speaker 1: a sound in the center and a spoke for each
Speaker 1: word that can be made by adding a letter to
Speaker 1: that sound. She described these as families, so for example,
Speaker 1: the ot the Aught family included words like pot tot
Speaker 1: rot and cot uh. There was a lot of busy work.
Speaker 1: Those are just examples, but Pollard also acknowledged the need
Speaker 1: to make things fun, incorporating drawing and sketching and singing
Speaker 1: to illustrate different concepts. In the preface, she wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: why should not something be used to awaken and hold
Speaker 1: the interest of children in the drudgery of the first
Speaker 1: lessons in reading? Are not splints, balls, toothpicks, clay and
Speaker 1: sandwork used for this purpose In teaching the first principles
Speaker 1: of arithmetic and geography. Every intelligent teacher knows when the
Speaker 1: developing mind of the child no longer needs these devices
Speaker 1: or helps in the last names branches, Why should there
Speaker 1: be any question as to when the devices of this
Speaker 1: method have served their purpose. Pollard's method of teaching phonics
Speaker 1: involved focusing on the twenty six letters of the alphabet
Speaker 1: and all the different sounds they can be used to represent. Students'
Speaker 1: textbooks were illustrated to help students remember sounds associated with
Speaker 1: different letters, like r R was shown next to a
Speaker 1: growling dog, while H was next to a panting dog.
Speaker 1: Stories incorporated the words and sounds that were the focus
Speaker 1: of a particular lesson, and these became more advanced over time,
Speaker 1: so lesson one in pollard Synthetic first reader focused on
Speaker 1: single syllable words that rhymed with hat, can, or bag,
Speaker 1: while the first lesson and the second reader is focused
Speaker 1: on words ending in ing, as well as talk, walk,
Speaker 1: each piece, and square. These textbooks sorted the letters into
Speaker 1: vowels and consonants, and then sorted the consonant sounds into
Speaker 1: subvocals or voiced consonants, and aspirates or whispers. She also
Speaker 1: described sounds as labial, lingual, dental, guttural, and pure aspirate
Speaker 1: depending on where in the mouth each sound was formed.
Speaker 1: After learning the letters and these sounds, students could move
Speaker 1: on to learning combinations of sounds, like digraphs and trigraphs.
Speaker 1: Pollard's books also included tables of all the diacritical marks
Speaker 1: and the sounds they corresponded to. The busy work included
Speaker 1: having students mark their textbooks with diacritical marks corresponding to
Speaker 1: the sounds made by each letter in each word. This
Speaker 1: was controversial, both because people objected to the idea of
Speaker 1: students writing in books and because people thought this busy
Speaker 1: work was tedious. Pollard later suggested having students make their
Speaker 1: marks on a piece of transparent material, so the book
Speaker 1: itself remained unmarked. Pollard did not invent the idea of
Speaker 1: teaching phonics, As we said, a lot of the earliest
Speaker 1: reading textbooks for children in the United States were phonics
Speaker 1: based until the field of teaching had moved toward a
Speaker 1: whole word approach. But she was one of the first
Speaker 1: to combine spelling and reading books with a teacher's manual
Speaker 1: so that everything went together. She also developed literature readers
Speaker 1: that became gradually more advanced for children to move on
Speaker 1: to after they had mastered the basics. She developed all
Speaker 1: of this material over the course of about eight years
Speaker 1: with the help of her daughter Adelaide, who had also
Speaker 1: become a teacher and also wrote hymns. Pollard's phonics based
Speaker 1: reading instruction became really influential in the late nineteenth and
Speaker 1: early twentieth centuries. Her system was used all over the country,
Speaker 1: and multiple other textbook writers took inspiration from her. A
Speaker 1: review of Pollard's Advanced Speller appeared in the journal Education
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety seven. The reviewer wrote, quote, this book
Speaker 1: teaches the pupil to spell, which is its great merit.
Speaker 1: The need of such book is made painfully evident by
Speaker 1: the newspapers, the books, and the business letters that one
Speaker 1: reads bad spelling is a fault of our busy her
Speaker 1: read American life. The author of this volume has done
Speaker 1: much to correct this fault. We believe in her system.
Speaker 1: It teaches its students to think as well as to
Speaker 1: write and speak correctly. It teaches him to note accurately
Speaker 1: the component parts of a word to form a scientific
Speaker 1: opinion as to its proper pronunciation. We would like to
Speaker 1: have our own children taught by this system, and we
Speaker 1: hope to secure the introduction of this book in the
Speaker 1: schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers.
Speaker 1: Proponents of Pollard's method included Edward Everett Hale, who was
Speaker 1: an advocate of education for the Freed people and of
Speaker 1: the Chautauqua adult education movement. In the History and Pedagogy
Speaker 1: of reading with the Review of the History of Reading
Speaker 1: and Writing and of Methods and Texts and Hygiene in Reading,
Speaker 1: which came out in nineteen fifteen, Ian Edmund Burke Hughey
Speaker 1: wrote of Pollard's method quote, the main business of the
Speaker 1: method is to make the child able to pronounce words
Speaker 1: for himself as he comes to them in reading new matter,
Speaker 1: and it accomplishes this result pretty effectually. Hue also described
Speaker 1: the method as having been worked out with care and completeness,
Speaker 1: and as successful at getting children to learn word structure
Speaker 1: and word calling, or recognizing and calling out the words,
Speaker 1: but he didn't praise Pollard's method across the board. He
Speaker 1: also described it as quote intensely artificial and adult in
Speaker 1: its conceptions, and destructive of right habits of reading and
Speaker 1: of using language generally. He was also of the opinion
Speaker 1: that working up from phonetic elements, to words, to ideas,
Speaker 1: to sentences as the opposite of how the mind naturally works.
Speaker 1: In her later years, Rebecca Smith Pollard wrote a number
Speaker 1: of religious hymns, and in eighteen ninety one she wrote
Speaker 1: a letter to George t Amas, founder and first president
Speaker 1: of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, noting, quote,
Speaker 1: the kindly mention you frequently make of our Catholic friends.
Speaker 1: So Pollard, based on the way Angel had written about Catholics,
Speaker 1: thought that he might appreciate an experience she'd had while
Speaker 1: traveling to train teachers to use her reading methods. That
Speaker 1: included visiting a lot of convents to train the nuns
Speaker 1: who taught in Catholic schools. She said she had been
Speaker 1: dealing with an eye inflammation for some time during one
Speaker 1: of these visits, and one of the Catholic mothers told
Speaker 1: her not to go to the doctor yet, but that
Speaker 1: they would have all eleven hundred children in their schools
Speaker 1: pray for her quote what wonder that the shadows lifted,
Speaker 1: the clouds dispersed, and that ere the week had ended,
Speaker 1: there was not to dim my vision save the grateful
Speaker 1: tears which I could not banish when I remembered how
Speaker 1: quickly the Loving Savior responded to the children's calls. Pollard's
Speaker 1: last published poem was called Althea or the Morning Glory,
Speaker 1: and it came out in nineteen twelve, when she was eighty.
Speaker 1: Unlike most of her earlier poetry work, she published it
Speaker 1: under her own name, Rebecca S. Pollard. It's a long poem,
Speaker 1: It's more than thirty pages, and it's a meditation on
Speaker 1: faith and mortality with a lot of flower imagery. Rebecca
Speaker 1: Smith Pollard lost most of her eyesight toward the end
Speaker 1: of her life. She spent the last years of her
Speaker 1: life living with her son in Fort Madison, Iowa. She
Speaker 1: died there on May twenty ninth, nineteen seventeen, at the
Speaker 1: age of eighty five. A poem she had written several
Speaker 1: years earlier but had never published, titled Heaven, was read
Speaker 1: at her funeral. She was buried at Farmington Cemetery with
Speaker 1: a marker that says Rebecca Smith Pollard and then under
Speaker 1: that in quotation marks Kate Harrington. Around the time of
Speaker 1: Pollard's death, phonics started to fall out of favor again
Speaker 1: in the United States, with reading instruction once again moving
Speaker 1: back to focus on whole words. In nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: Rudolph Flesh's book Why Johnny Can't Read criticized the abandonment
Speaker 1: of phonics, which led to another resurgence in phonics based instruction.
Speaker 1: Then that shifted once again with a move toward whole
Speaker 1: language instruction in the nineteen eighties, and then the evolution
Speaker 1: of balanced literacy in the nineteen nineties. This back and
Speaker 1: forth is sometimes characterized as the reading wars. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say both the back and forth and the
Speaker 1: discussion around the back and forth has been characterized as
Speaker 1: the reading wars. Balanced literacy has been described as kind
Speaker 1: of a happy medium between phonics and whole word instruction,
Speaker 1: taking the best parts of each of them, but there
Speaker 1: has also been a lot of variation in exactly what's
Speaker 1: involved in different methods that have been under this umbrella
Speaker 1: of balanced literacy. Some of its critics described balance literacy
Speaker 1: as mainly a variation on whole word instruction without enough fun.
Speaker 1: Most recently, the idea of three quing that is part
Speaker 1: of some balanced literacy systems has come up under really
Speaker 1: heavy criticism. Three queuing involves trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues or pictures,
Speaker 1: or making a guess based on the sound made by
Speaker 1: the first letter, rather than teaching children how to sound
Speaker 1: out or decode unfamiliar words. A lot of public interest
Speaker 1: and criticism of this followed reporting by Emily Hanford at
Speaker 1: American Public Media, and then a podcast that came out
Speaker 1: of that reporting called SOULD a story in twenty twenty two. Today,
Speaker 1: in the US, there's been a growing movement towards the
Speaker 1: science of reading, which bases reading instruction on techniques that
Speaker 1: can be backed by scientific evidence of their efficacy. Broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: phonics and phonemic awareness are two components of the science
Speaker 1: of reading, which also includes multiple other elements like vocabulary
Speaker 1: and reading comprehension. Because being able to sound out the
Speaker 1: word based on its letters or phonemes is only one
Speaker 1: step in the process of understanding what something means. The
Speaker 1: Science of Reading isn't a program for reading instruction, though,
Speaker 1: it's more of a body of research into reading and
Speaker 1: literacy and the use of that research to guide programs
Speaker 1: that teach reading. And there is still, of course, a
Speaker 1: ton of controversy around exactly how best to implement all
Speaker 1: of this research. Yeah, I have seen a number of
Speaker 1: discussions among teachers and other people who work in education
Speaker 1: who feel like some uh, some systems that are framed
Speaker 1: as science of reading, feel like that that's just the
Speaker 1: phonics part and not all of this other part that
Speaker 1: is also necessary to really being able to read, and
Speaker 1: this part being able to figure out what individual words
Speaker 1: are if you're not familiar with them, or even if
Speaker 1: you are. That is just one component of what is
Speaker 1: being described as a literacy crisis in the US. After
Speaker 1: I finished this whole outline, like first thing this morning,
Speaker 1: I saw an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Speaker 1: that talked about other factors contributing to this literacy crisis,
Speaker 1: including smartphones, which the author of this article was like,
Speaker 1: I was kind of a naysayer and thinking smartphones were
Speaker 1: a problem, but there is a growing body of evidence
Speaker 1: that smartphones really are playing a role. Other factors were
Speaker 1: early reliance on AI chatbots to try to get information,
Speaker 1: and a shift in the way not just like the
Speaker 1: reading of words is taught, but once you get into
Speaker 1: reading pieces of work, a shift away from reading complete
Speaker 1: works to instead trying to get core pieces of information
Speaker 1: from very short excerpts so instead of reading the entirety
Speaker 1: of a novel, reading a small amount of it and
Speaker 1: testing comprehension that small amount, which sort of has left
Speaker 1: people getting into high school and college without sort of
Speaker 1: the reading stamina to read whole long works and analyze
Speaker 1: and follow them. We obviously are not teachers. We do
Speaker 1: not have hands on experience with all of this, but
Speaker 1: it is clear that there has been a lot of
Speaker 1: debate about all of this in recent decades. It's things
Speaker 1: that are having a clear impact and how students are
Speaker 1: taught and how society functions as people are or are
Speaker 1: not able to read and make sense out of information.
Speaker 1: So that's Rebecca Smith Pollard ahead of her time in
Speaker 1: some ways but not others. Do you want to read
Speaker 1: and make sense out of some listener mail? Yes? This
Speaker 1: is kind of funny that we're talking about reading comprehension
Speaker 1: because I had to ask Collie earlier if she remembered
Speaker 1: me reading this email already. We don't think I read
Speaker 1: this email ready, but apologies if I have read it twice.
Speaker 1: This is from Ellen. Ellen wrote another vote for a
Speaker 1: loft codiohearn and wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I started
Speaker 1: listening to your podcast when I had a very long
Speaker 1: commute to a job was giving me insomnia and panic attacks.
Speaker 1: I was working for a very critical supervisor. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to skip ahead and say having a really rough time.
Speaker 1: And I remember when I read this email the first time.
Speaker 1: I got very choked up at the next part, in
Speaker 1: which Ellen said, I especially appreciated your Friday blessing when
Speaker 1: you tell us all that you hope we have a
Speaker 1: RESTful weekend and do something that makes us happy. I
Speaker 1: want you to know how meaningful that little kindness was
Speaker 1: to me during that time. Now, thankfully I have a
Speaker 1: much better job, but still do a lot of driving,
Speaker 1: so I often have thoughts Velveteen Rabbit, Philip Glass embroidery.
Speaker 1: They have not yet made it into an email, but
Speaker 1: when I was listening to the Elizabeth Bisland episode and
Speaker 1: heard the name left coddioharn, I thought that name sounds familiar.
Speaker 1: As he went on, I remembered I have a book
Speaker 1: by him. Back in the early nineteen nineties. My mother
Speaker 1: gave me his book Some Chinese Ghosts after I returned
Speaker 1: from living in Taiwan for a couple of years. She
Speaker 1: knew I was enjoying reading the sort of weird old
Speaker 1: books you find in used book sales. This book was
Speaker 1: published in eighteen eighty seven, and my copy is a
Speaker 1: reprint by the Modern Library from nineteen twenty seven. The
Speaker 1: intro to this volume is a short bio of hern
Speaker 1: written in such an entertaining and old fashioned style, I
Speaker 1: decided to scan it and attach it for you. While
Speaker 1: his whole life story is extremely interesting, the book itself
Speaker 1: is a pretty rough read. It's full of Chinese transliterations,
Speaker 1: Victorian orientalism, and lofty prose. Sounds about right. According to
Speaker 1: his bio, this book was typical of his strange genius,
Speaker 1: and he considered it quote an attempt in the direction
Speaker 1: I hope to make triumph someday poetical prose poorlof Codio.
Speaker 1: He was not a very good judge of what people
Speaker 1: in the future would like to read. Maybe he would
Speaker 1: be a good candidate for a Halloween eppisode because, apparently
Speaker 1: quote he gives the reader a ghostly shutter by building
Speaker 1: up an intimacy with the unseen. I will pause to
Speaker 1: say I have him like as a potential October topic
Speaker 1: for that reason. To return to the email. Since Embroidery
Speaker 1: was also a recent topic. I'm sending you a photo
Speaker 1: of my first needle point project, which I inherited unfinished
Speaker 1: from my husband's grandmother. She had started it as a
Speaker 1: wedding present for me and had finished about a third
Speaker 1: of it when she passed away. I had never done
Speaker 1: needle point before, but it was such a beautiful pattern
Speaker 1: based on an artwork by Mukha that I decided to
Speaker 1: try it. After all, needle point is just one stitch,
Speaker 1: how hard can it be? Well? It ended up taking
Speaker 1: four years to finish it, as it is quite large,
Speaker 1: but since then I've completed several much smaller projects and
Speaker 1: even learned to do more than one stitch. As pet tax,
Speaker 1: here is a photo of our grand tortoise. He is
Speaker 1: a Russian tortoise named Ivan the Turtble. He loves to
Speaker 1: go outside and dig in the garden and is fond
Speaker 1: of you, snowdrops, dianthus and Petunia's when he can reach them.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your podcast, and especially for
Speaker 1: being your lovely, smart, kind, unique selves. You make me
Speaker 1: feel better about the world. Best wishes, Ellen. I want
Speaker 1: the email to show me the blocked content. Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: we have a little tortoise out in the yard looking
Speaker 1: at what appears to be a small ceramic statue of
Speaker 1: a bunny. Adorable, incredibly cute. And this needle point is
Speaker 1: really lovely. I don't even know how to describe it,
Speaker 1: but it's beautiful, and it's lovely that you finished all
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, I love that conceptually very much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I am sorry for the loss of your husband's grandmother
Speaker 1: who had passed away while working on this. Anyway, beautiful,
Speaker 1: what a great email. So thank you again, Ellen for
Speaker 1: this email and for the PDF from some Chinese ghosts
Speaker 1: and these beautiful pictures'autiful story. If you would like to
Speaker 1: send us a note or a history podcast atiheartradio dot com.
Speaker 1: If you would like to see our show notes with
Speaker 1: all of the sources for the episode, including all of
Speaker 1: Rebecca Smith Pollard's work that we talked about, that is
Speaker 1: at our website, which is missinhistory dot com. And you
Speaker 1: can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and
Speaker 1: anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,