How am I going to write about this topic which makes me so very angry? What is it we think we’re doing as educators? This is for real, it affects children’s lives. If teachers don’t do the best for kids, they are harmed, and if a ghetto child gets poor teaching 3 years in a row, well, you know. It’s practically set in stone.
My friend Konny asked me if I would be willing to diagnose reading difficulties of her bookkeeper’s daughter. This isn’t my field of expertise, although I learned some things about literacy in grad school. Plus I taught first grade. So I said I would see if there was anything I could do. I suggested the child bring two books with her, one that was easy for her to read, and one that was difficult.
The girl I will call Jamila arrived at my door, with her mother, quiet and downcast. I had been expecting an 8 year old, but Jamila is 10. Konny remembered her as a lively, creative, happy child with a wonderful spark.
Well, it quickly became apparent that Jamila could decode but wasn’t comprehending. I did a short reciprocal teaching session and discussed with her mom that Jamila was perfectly smart, she just didn’t know that reading is thinking. The kinds of problems she was having, not reading longer words correctly, was due to her not knowing that the words were supposed to make sense in the sentence, or even that sentences are supposed to make sense. If you don’t know that, then any long word is as good as another. Somehow, her reading instruction in school had missed this point.
Konny saw Jamila shortly thereafter, and the child proudly told her, “I’m not stupid!”
Wow, how many other kids in Jamila’s public school think they’re stupid not because they are, but because their teachers don’t know what they’re doing? These are schools where kids are tested every week, do benchmark tests every 9 weeks. But nobody is teaching.
So that’s what I mean, I’m really really angry about this. We have known about reading as thinking for at least 25 years—this research was done in the 1980’s. What kind of education leads an intelligent 10 year old girl to think she is stupid?