One particularly early memory I have of literacy is from my third year of preschool (I started early and stuck around for a while–the joke my father always made was that the preschool ‘red shirted’ me because I was such a good kid), when we had just started to learn the alphabet. It was easy enough once you got the hang of the song and all of that, but I had a weird quirk of always separating the letters by what I perceived their genders to be, and would always color them pink/purple or blue/green accordingly. To me, the girl letters were A, B, E, I, K, P, S, V, X, Y, and Z. If I think about it, I can still see some indescribable, but inherently male/female aspect to letters, although I still can’t really explain how or why. I later had the same experience with numbers, strangely. My pet theory is that it came from seeing those little anthropomorphic pictures of letters we would color when we learned about them one at a time, but I think this might even predate that.
I try to avoid unnecessarily giving genders to letters and numbers now, but I still support bringing coloring back into the classroom from time to time.
I think the letters as “gender” oriented things is something truly distinct, though I’m not really sure if it even has any good/bad implications, just kind of an interesting quirk to me. For me, numbers never really took on the same kind of “life” if you will, but letters could be measured in how “common” you saw them. I.e. letters like z or x which were seldom used always grabbed my attention more than frequently used letters like vowels, etc. Interesting perspective.
I really enjoyed reading your post and hearing about an alternative perspective of preschool. I had a very different experience with labeling as gender, having a very difficult time in Latin having each word be a assigned gender or neutral. The concept never made sense to me and because I had to memorize that instead of comprehending I was always pretty awful…
I think this is fascinating. I never really considered letters or numbers having genders until I took french in high school and we were told that all inanimate objects have these genders assigned to them (with seemingly no particular rationale). Now, hearing that a 4-year-old is assigning these genders to letters and numbers as they perhaps “feel right” or just arrive upon that thought is very interesting!