Ms. Erika-Renee L. teaches high school in the Boston (MA, US) area and maintains a blog where she sometimes has entries about her teaching experiences. In a post about the beginning of school, she wrote:
I’ve also taken on extra lower-level English classes, and I’m amazed at how much they struggle with reading. I know, for many of them, their last English class was anywhere between 6th and 8th grade, and it wasn’t a good experience. I had to make a deal with my last class of the day - if they each tried to read one line aloud, I’d let them out five minutes early. It was so, so hard for some of them, and it was painful to watch them struggle like that.
She’s got it right! It is terribly painful to listen as a student who’s got poor decoding skills reads a passage—let alone, a line from a poem with all the often less-predictable syntax and words they include.
I see this as a fine description of the consequences of not teaching effectively. Students simply shouldn’t get to HS with inadequate reading skills. I’m not suggesting that they should be “held back,” but that some time over the years someone should have taught them to read. We know how to do it.
Maleducation is afoot and Ms. L.’s experience reflects it. Bummer
Link to Ms. L.’s post.
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Hi,
I just wanted to comment that the students I teach are previous dropouts, students who left at the 8th grade level or later for many, many reasons. Most are low-income where the risk of leaving for early pregnancy, gang life or a job to assist the family is high. A good portion of them have undiagnosed learning disabilities that left them too frustrated and underserved to make it through the middle school, much less gain anything from overcrowded high school classes.
The passage was an 8th grade reading level passage about superstitions in a small class of 8. I needed to assess their skill levels, and I’m not sure I went about it the right way (after seeing some of the reactions to reading out loud). It WAS painful to watch them struggle and to know that they’ve been failed along the way, but I did want to point out that this was a class of students who have fallen through the cracks and not necessarily a group representative of your typical American students.
Eka, thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree that you have a selected sample, that your students are not a representative sample. Still, I am discouraged that nowhere along the line did any educators take the necessary steps to teach them effectively. I hope to promote teaching—especially in reading—that reduces the proportion of students whom teachers in your situation encounter.