Is My Child the One Left Behind?

Usually by age 8 or 9, most children are reading relatively fluently. If they’re not, parents are very worried something is “wrong” with their child. “Is it a learning disability? Is my child OK? Will he ever learn to read? What can I do?”

In this situation, the best advice I’ve ever given is, “Relax. He’s not ready yet.”

Certainly there are children with obvious learning disabilities who have fallen through the cracks. I’m not referring to those kids. I’m talking about the students who are comfortable in the classroom and social situations, who know their math facts and can ace their spelling tests every Friday morning.

But they can’t read.

In my very first classroom in East Palo Alto, I had a student like this in my second-grade class. De Shawn would shine in every academic and social situation, but when it came to reading, he’d stumble through the easy reader, Dick and Jane.

I had no idea what to do. The rest of my students were reading their second-grade basal reader. My experienced co-teachers at second grade told me to refer him to the Student Study Team, a group made up of teachers, the principal and special education staff. This team would help me create some plan for my struggling student.

In order to get De Shawn on the team’s agenda, I had to fill out questionnaires, forms, assess him and provide copies of his class work. This took hours and hours of my precious prep time. Not only that, but they didn’t have room for him on the agenda for two months.

For one full month, every single day, I’d have one-on-one time with De Shawn. No progress. He still couldn’t read. After school one day, it occurred to me that maybe I was pushing him too hard. Maybe I should just let him be.

It’s not in my DNA to just let things or people just “be.” So I modified that a bit. Rather than pressuring my 7-year-old student by teaching him sight words and shoving phonics rules down his throat, I let him have quiet silent reading time. Time alone with books, looking at pictures, experiencing beautiful literature and words in print. I did not teach him. All I did was praise him and give him positive words of encouragement. “De Shawn, you’re reading so quietly.”

And he believed it.

By the time the student study team was ready to review my student, he had made huge progress. As far as I could tell, De Shawn went home on a Wednesday as a non-reader and came back to school the next day as a reader. He proudly read me a passage from a second-grade book. It was as though his reading light bulb inside his brain turned on.

Ironically, years later, my own son would struggle with reading. I now knew that not every child is ready to read in first grade, but I worried just like the parents in my class do. I had to do lots of self-talk: “Children all grow, learn and mature at different rates. Don’t pressure. Let him be.”

He did learn to read. He’s going to be OK.