Retired Teacher Reveals He Was Illiterate Until Age 48
"I can remember when I was eight years old saying my prayers at night saying, 'please, God, tomorrow when it's my turn to read please let me read.' You just pretend that you are invisible and when the teacher says, 'Johnnie read,' you just wait the teacher out because you know the teacher has to go away at some point," said Corcoran.
Corcoran eventually started acting up to hide his illiteracy. From fifth through seventh grade he was expelled, suspended and spent most of his days at the principal's office.
The former teacher said he came from a loving family that always supported him.
"My parents came to school and it no longer was a problem for me reading because this boy Johnnie -- the native alien, I call him -- he didn't have a reading problem as far as the teachers were concerned. He had an emotional problem. He had a psychological problem. He had a behavioral problem," said Corcoran.
The further you go in the public schools the more clearly you see the profound destructiveness of a massive, half-trillion dollar institution* in which the employees cannot be wrong ever.
This is something I've been thinking about lately.
What happens to business and professional relationships, friendships, and marriages in which one party can't be wrong ever?
How productive and satisfying are business and professional relationships, friendships, and marriages in which one party is always, by definition, to blame for problems?
thought experiment:
Suppose someone handed you a magic wand that, when you waved it, would make just one change in the schools.
Suppose you decided that your one change would be to turn all the zeroes in Galen Alessi's survey of school psychologists into positive numbers significantly larger than the number one.
Would things be better?
I don't know what to think about that.
On one hand, Alessi's psychologists were diagnosing individual children; they were blaming individual children, by name, for their failures to learn or to behave. To stop doing that would be a radical step. I hope I live to see the day when a school psychologist's report says, "There's nothing wrong with this kid that a decent math curriculum wouldn't fix."
At the same time, our schools have been churning innovations for at least a century, often in the name of reform. The fact that our schools have apparently been in need of so much reform for lo these many years hasn't led to much in the way of a self-critical stance.
At some point shouldn't the ed schools just give up?
"Damn! We've been at this for a hundred years and we still haven't got it right. Let's say we get into another line of business."
Vicki Snider is right. We need a science of teaching. We also need school boards, administrators, and teachers who want a science of teaching. That's a trickier proposition.
Here is Corcoran's foundation.
* Current expenditures for public elementary and secondary education totaled $424.6 billion in FY 05, with $280.0 billion (65.9 percent) spent on instruction and instruction-related activities, $22.1 billion (5.2 percent) on student support services, $46.8 billion (11.0 percent) on administration, and $75.7 billion (17.8 percent) Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: School Year 2004-05 (Fiscal Year 2005)
I've come to know a mom who has a fourth grader who has struggled with reading from the get go. They've provided services through school, the family has paid for private tutoring (through school personnel) for years, and this mom has implemented all suggestions from the school with very little progress. She is in constant contact with the teachers and specialists, she works with her child at home, in short, and she’s doing what she's supposed to. Nonetheless, her child is still struggling and has been for years.
ReplyDeleteThis is an extremely bright, verbal, and hard working child. There is no explanation provided by the school as to why this child struggles as he does.
Somehow, we started chatting about reading and she shared some of her older child's challenges. The truth is that it didn't make any sense to me. From what I could glean, it didn't seem that this child should be having that degree of difficulty despite so much intervention unless the intervention wasn't working.
She noticed that my kindergartener is decoding words phonetically and reading and asked me what I was doing because she was aware that they weren't being taught that at school. We discussed the district's blended approach to literacy and I was honest about my distaste for it. She seemed surprised that whatever the school was providing might not be enough and said, "She is a product of this district."
Long story short, I recommended Engelmann's 100 Lessons because it's working well with my kindergarten daughter. She looked through my copy and decided it was worth trying with her own.
She was amazed at the progress her daughter had made in short order. Her five-year-old child is now reading quite well and they aren't even done with the program. Due to her experience with her younger child, it became clear to her that had her older child been taught to read differently she wouldn't be struggling now. Like a revelation, she understood, "There is nothing wrong with my child."
She scheduled a meeting with the fourth grader's teacher and the reading specialist and she brought Zig's book along. She asked, "Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you teaching our children to read in a way that works?"
That's just not how we do things in this district.
It is clear to her now that the problem is NOT her child; it is how her child has been taught that isn't working.
In five years of school, they never thought to try anything different from what they had been doing despite the fact that it was clearly not working. Instead, they encourage the family to invest in private tutoring and failing that, throw their hands up in despair and blame the child.
Their response to this mother was "Perhaps you should look into becoming a reading specialist yourself.” At that point, she knew that she was on her own.
The school will not admit that they have handicapped this child. Not even if it means the difference between turning things around and moving forward. Instead, they insist that with more of the same, the child will improve.
In this case, "There's nothing wrong with this kid that a decent reading program wouldn't fix."
"We need a science of teaching."
ReplyDeleteThey can't have a science if they can't (don't want to) define exactly what it is they are trying to do. What is "understanding"? They don't like mere facts. Too concrete. They don't like skills. Too rote. They don't want science. They want magic.
100 Easy Lessons won't be enough for the fourth grader. What she needs is Corrective Reading.
ReplyDeleteYour friend can download the placement test for Corrective Reading (the Decoding strand -- I doubt she needs the Comprehension strand) from this site:
Placement tests
I couldn't find the placement tests on SRA's USA site, maybe because they have too much information.
When she knows what level of CR she needs, I can make further suggestions e.g. where to get the materials cheaply etc.
Another thing, it's important to bring the child into this Aha! experience. She needs to know that the reason she is having difficulty is because of the methodology, not because of any fault of her own, and that now things will change. No more hours sweating over inappropriate homework -- READ assignments to the child she can't read herself, don't allow any guessing from pictures et al., memorizing Dolch words and other instructional malpractice.
If her spelling is as weak as her reading, the DI program Spelling Mastery is an excellent complement to Corrective Reading and moves quickly. I can provide more info if desired.
The parent can readily do these programs with her child. It might be worth paying a trained DI tutor to model a few lessons however, although I believe there are some training videos online. She can also join the DI listserv where there are helpful people (and a few a****** like Gerald Bracey, who only subscribe to try to throw a spanner in the works from time to time).
When I taught seventh grade at a (different) middle school, I was stunned to find a student who not only could not read a word, he didn't even know all the letters of the alphabet. College-educated parents, IQ 124, had B's and C's in reading through elementary school. I braced myself to phone the mom and tell her that her son was totally illiterate -- nursery-school reading skills.
Her response stunned me (at the time. I know better now). "I've been telling the school for years that he can't read," she said. "Nobody would take my concerns seriously." The boy was verbally proficient and a "behavior problem." I got together with mom and showed her how to use "100 Easy Lessons" and she taught him to read (I couldn't do it with a class of seventh graders sitting there, and we had no reading withdrawal help at that school).
I learned that parents -- even parents with little education, or limited knowledge of English -- usually have a better understanding of what their children know and can do than most teachers. Now when I talk to parents I try to elicit that knowledge before I babble on with my "expert" opinion.
When I demonstrated to the IEP committee that my daughter was excelling in math after being taught by me using Saxon’s curriculum, the resource teacher told me, “We can give your daughter special services, but we cannot change the curriculum for her.”
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can tell, about one-third of my daughter’s classmates are being tutored outside of the school.
The school is never wrong.
End of story, get outta here!
Oh, don’t forget to drop off the cupcakes at the front desk.
“Thank you for your ongoing support and cooperation.”
Palisadesk-
ReplyDelete100 Lessons is for her kindergartener. This is what opened her eyes to what could have been for the fourth grader.
She ordered Corrective Reading just last week. The best thing is that this mom now feels so empowered.
I downloaded the Corrective Reading placement tests and gave them to her along with general information about the program. I can't even describe the look of hope she conveyed.
ReplyDeletePalisadesk- You are a jewel! I will communicate EVERYTHING you have said when I see her next. I'm sure she'll have questions and I thank you for offering to answer them.
ReplyDelete