History of Reading News. Vol.XXI No.2 (1998:Spring)
by Jack D. Barchas

I was the oldest in a family that came to have eight children. Even when very young, my parents talked with me about the world and the politics of the day--we were in the middle of World War II. I liked learning about things. With my second-grade teacher, my otherwise happy world seemed to come to an end. While I was well behaved in school, everything I did or said, from the teacher's perspective, was wrong. While only a second grader, I knew I wanted to be a doctor and a medical researcher and in my heart I believed I would be able to do those things well. She asked to see my parents. Because of all the young children at home, my father came alone. It was after school and I was at one end of the room sitting quietly. I can remember hearing her tell my father I was retarded and, of course, would never be a doctor. I can also remember him patiently, but very firmly, telling her he disagreed about my intelligence and that I would be whatever I wanted.

My parents revered education. They called UCLA and were given the name of Grace Fernald, who agreed to see me in her private practice. I remember Dr. Fernald's house from the first visit somewhat differently than does my mother. I thought it was grand. It was, to me, a very big Spanish home in a very nice area of Westwood (what is now called Little Holmby Hills). It had a tall vaulted ceiling of wood and big timbers with a huge stone fireplace. I was amazed by the furniture which I thought must be antique and enjoyed looking at the oriental carpets. There were many shelves with books. Everything was very neat and very quiet.

Dr. Fernald was friendly, gray haired, with a wonderful smile. After talking to my parents, she took me into her office. It was a small office with a big desk and many many books. It seemed quite cozy and comfortable. We talked. She then told me I would be given an IQ test. It was fun. At a couple of points we both laughed at some of the questions: "If you fire two bullets at somebody and the first bullet kills the person, what does the second bullet do?" She also did some other testing. I did not feel at all nervous. At the end she told me that I had done just fine and would be learning to read and spell very quickly. She and I were going to impress Miss Potter (a pseudonym). And, we did!

Dr. Fernald's kinesthetic approach involved writing in the air as well as tracing words in large written or scripted format. My mother was very interested in the method and we worked hard on it after school between my visits to Dr. Fernald. In those visits Dr. Fernald was always cheerful and always smiling. As a child, I felt I had a new friend, one who I knew was helping me in very important ways. I wanted to do well.

By the summer, Dr. Fernald decided I should enroll in the class being taught at UCLA for children with my type of problem. My parents taught me to take the big blue bus from Pico and Robertson in West Los Angeles directly to the UCLA bus stop and to navigate to the other side of campus across its various little ravines to the wood school building near Sunset Boulevard that housed Doctor Fernald's program. The building was a simple barracks-style green structure that smelled very much of wood, cheap drawing paper, and the type of paint that children used to use many years ago. In the course of getting back and forth to her building I, of course, explored many buildings and many ravines!

The class had fewer than sixteen pupils. We sat two pupils to a table. There was a student teacher who was a UCLA trainee for every two pupils. Dr. Fernald was in the background circulating among the pupils and the student teachers. She did not run the class but was clearly in charge. The student teachers rotated being in charge of the class. The method of instruction was quite interesting. Every day each pupil had to dictate a story to his or her student teacher. It could be as long as you wanted--mine were quite long! The teacher wrote it all down. The next day she (all the student teachers were, as I remember, young women) would bring the story back, typed up on a special typewriter that made letters that I recall as being about a half-inch in height. We then read our stories to the student teachers from the neatly typed manuscript. I appreciated what a nice job the student teacher had done. We then would practice some of the words of the story which were written on big cards (in my mind's eye the cards were about two or three inches high and about ten inches long). We would trace the words and learn to spell them. While one of the student teacher's pupils was reciting his (most of the pupils were boys) story, the other pupil was doing the word practice, including softly repeating his story and tracing words. There was some work involving the group as a whole with larger cards.

Dr. Fernald always seemed to be in a good mood and as I look back on it, seemed to have an individual relationship and concern for each of the pupils and student teachers. Nevertheless, some of the students also had trouble behaving themselves. She was stern about the class being a place to learn. Students who could not behave in the class had to leave and go outside. I remember one or two of those students had to leave the class permanently.

The sessions lasted a half day. They included recess breaks as well as some time for painting. Much of that was finger painting, dipping our hands into chalky paints which had a rather nice smell.

Once I got the motion of reading I became quite avid. I tried to explain to Miss Potter what I was learning from Dr. Fernald. But Miss Potter made it quite clear that she was not interested.

Forty-five years after the experiences in this story, I was again at UCLA. Having spent twenty-five years on the Stanford faculty and holding an endowed chair there, I was invited to become Dean for Neuroscience and Research at the UCLA Medical School. I spent four years there before coming to New York. The ravines at UCLA have been filled in. There are far more buildings, and Grace Fernald's simple wood classrooms have recently been torn down for a new business school. But UCLA still has a Grace Fernald School, and it is considered one of the crown jewels of the institution.

Before meeting Professor Monaghan, I had episodically thought of Grace Fernald--particularly as I made various professional transitions. In my current positions as Chair of Psychiatry at the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center with responsibility for its Payne Whitney Clinic, and editor of one of the major scientific journals of psychiatry, I have sometimes wondered what Grace Fernald would have thought. How did life change for some of the other boys as a result of her help and ministrations? I still use aspects of the Fernald method to this day. It thus is a great pleasure to be able to pay homage to her here. I did not know her as a leader in her field--though I came to recognize that. Rather, I knew Dr. Fernald as a teacher who clearly loved helping children who had problems and who--with my two remarkable parents--made possible for me the future I dreamed of.

Jack D. Barchas is Chair of Psychiatry at the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center and editor of Archives of General Psychiatry.