Reading Is Fundamental

 For thirty years I have fought the good fight: teaching kids how to read. 

Like so much of my career as a teacher, my experience skewed greatly from that of my days as a student. I was a very nervous kid. I worried that I might not be able to achieve, and I pushed myself to get the grades I hoped for: I wanted to succeed academically. 

When I look out on the sea of young faces for whom I stand as an authority, it has so much to do with getting kids to buy in on this whole "learning thing." This does not mean that I don't see those children with open eyes and ears, waiting to be led to the kingdom of literacy, but I can see all around those kids the ones whose interest lies anywhere but the classroom. 

Each year we begin with students, many of whom are multiple years behind their grade level in reading, and get behind to push. A lot of intervention and practice and more opportunities to read and understand what they are reading takes most of them on a lengthy ride up the hill to where they ought to be. 

At or near. 

Then comes the summer slide. 

We take our young charges where we find them, mostly, back at the bottom of that hill. 

I understand that growing up as I did in a highly literate home, going to school in a suburban school where economics were not a factor in determining the outcomes of standardized tests. The night before I took those tests, I worried and stressed about how I might show up. I had been told that this was an important thing I was being asked to do, and that it would be the basis for my permanent record. 

You remember your permanent record, don't you?

No?

Well, as it turns out, the notion of a folder that would follow you from cradle to grave is a bit of a fabrication. But it definitely worked on me, back in the day. 

That little secret seems not to carry the weight it once did for children, at least the ones I teach. They have intuitively judged the whole thing as a bit of smoke and mirrors, with the expectation that the real onus falling squarely on the grown-ups in this equation. Teachers, administrators, entire school boards, superintendents are the ones who seem to truly have the most to lose. 

I have been fortunate enough to hang around long enough to watch the potential outcomes of kids not learning to read. The kids keep coming back to school. Sometimes the grown-ups in charge don't. 

It's not getting easier.