Learning to Read

My daughter can read. It is an amazing thing for a parent, a mother in my case, to witness this rite of passage, as it were, to see her learn...more than I thought was possible in such a short amount of time. Scribbles on a page have become symbols that represent words. I tell her, once a person can read the whole world opens up to them.
I learned to read before I went to school. I was alarmed when I got there to find out I had to learn it all over again. The school I attended had an odd teaching tool called ITA. I had already mastered, I use that term loosely, the 26 letters that have come to represent the 40 or more sounds, the phonemes of English. Sir James Pitman had devised a teaching tool called the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) that supposedly made it easier for children to read the traditional alphabet once they had mastered ITA. The Initial Teaching Alphabet has 44 symbols instead of the conventional 26; each of the 44 symbols represented one and only one sound. The alphabet is basically phonemic rather than strictly phonetic. Twenty-four of the 44 symbols are the traditional ones; 14 of the augmentations look very much like two familiar letters joined together. The other special symbols represent the remaining phonemes.
Suffice is to say, ITA did not ruin my life or prevent me from reading. I don't believe, however, it did me any good.