Herban Sprawl

I am a little leery of posting this today, but it’s going to eat at me until I write about it, so what the heck?

BGF (Best Guy Friend)’s eldest was born with a soupcon of physical disabilities. I haven’t read the file yet, but so far as I can see, she’s not so bad off in the intellect department. In fact, she’s pretty darn bright. She went all through school, spending an extra year in high school, getting all that youngsters with special needs must have in order to become educated members of society. The one thing the schools seemed unable to deliver on was reading.

The school division in which she was educated does not employ reading specialists. They use a “program” to teach reading. It’s characteristic of the community in general that they would consider themselves above such a need, which is really strange given their drive to have a good school system. However, I spent most of my career teaching inner city kids in a school division that not only added reading specialists, but paid for the coursework for classroom teachers to get masters degrees in reading. To say they took it seriously is an understatement.

So, armed with a special diploma, special needs, after all – she goes to the center up the valley where she spent a couple of months learning all sorts of practical skills. They released her and advised that the school division be told they would have to attend to her reading deficiencies. Well, sure, but they don’t have anyone on staff who can teach a young woman with them!

Her dad is no slouch. He’s been grousing about this issue for years, and I’ve patiently waited for the explosive phone call. It finally came. It took me all of two seconds to say of course I’ll work with her! I’d never leave one of my own in the lurch, after all.

So for the past two days, I have been running her through my gamut of tests. This is not without a great deal of trepidation on my part, having left teaching five years ago and having the soon-to-expire certificate to show for it! But it wasn’t long before I got my groove back and today I finished the part where she read and I marked her errors and asked her comprehension questions.

I have two observations to make. The first is that she’s a classic word caller. That’s a person who can read orally, lickety-split, and doesn’t remember a dratted thing about the selection. The second is that her knowledge of word structure is so bad that I don’t understand how she could read the selections I handed her! I’ve even factored in her articulation issues, because she does the best she can and she really worked hard at making sure I could understand her. (That says a lot about her understanding of her own limitations. Mighty important and she hits homers on that kind of pitch.)

And now comes the big, fat question for that school division: Isn’t it time y’all got down off that big damn pedestal y’all done hoisted your sorry butts onto and faced the fact that you are graduating children who cannot read worth a tinker’s damn?

Well, okay, I guess I have another one for them: How can you, in good conscience, ignore The Virginia Studies and why are you so stubborn as to continue to use a canned ‘program’ when you could employ that research to make a pretty good school division nothing short of stellar? I now rest my case - but not before I design an instructional program for her that will make them weep!