An Ell and a Squirrel

December 21, 1999
AN ELL AND A SQUIRREL

Today in the magic of e-mail there was a message from a new friend, forwarding a comment from a very old friend, mentioning that I taught her son to read, some 38 years ago. Few notes could please a teacher more, but the truth is even better. I didn't teach him to read; I made him into a reader. It happened this way: I was dutifully conducting 6th grade reading groups. Grouping inevitably labels students as good readers, mediocre readers, and bad readers. Imagine starting your day, every day, with the discouraging thought that you are an inferior being. All day long, the good readers will shine in every subject and you will drag along behind. Even in the respite of Gym or Music or Shop, the good readers will keep their halos. The teacher meets with each group in turn, having prepared enough "seat work" to keep two groups occupied while the third "reads." The students read aloud in turns, each thus reading maybe 10 lines a day. The rest of the time is spent in vocabulary definition, questions to test comprehension, story sequence questions, and a little talk about the ideas, if any, in the selection. All of this is punctuated by polite questions from children puzzled by the seat work, trips to the lav, minor skirmishes, PA announcements, departures of band members, and so on. The reading material is written by a committee with a vocabulary list in front of them.
(Going back to substitute in various grades, 20 years later, I found not much had changed, although here and there teachers were using good books written by authors with a tale to tell.)

This was a 6th grade. 25 healthy twelve year olds. I persevered with the groups until the day the teacher's manual directed me to discuss the new words for the day's selection, including the word Squirrel. I slammed the book shut, and "Reading" ended for that day. That afternoon I asked the principal if I had to teach that garbage. "No", he said. "What would you like to teach?" I told him I wanted to help children read, not stop reading at a certain line, not circle words in workbooks, not be bored stiff every day.

So, with official permission, we put away the Reading Books and went to the library, to get books to read. I pointed out to the class that people who want to become expert basketball players shoot baskets; people who want to play the piano well play the piano. They do not sit around talking ABOUT the color of the ball or where is middle C. From then on, the required contents of each desk included a library book; a dictionary and a home made notebook with purposely narrow pages. From then on, every day, after the chaos of the lunchroom and recess, we read for 45 minutes. Choice of books was entirely free. If a book was boring, you were to write one sentence explaining why, and start another book. You were to note ten new words in the course of a week's reading, and write each one in a sentence that showed understanding of the word. At the end of a book you wrote one paragraph about it. One boy read the Hardy Boys all year. Another read about dinosaurs. Another stayed with mythology. I did not mark papers or walk around bothering people. I read. There was no sound but the turning of pages. Once a neighboring teacher felt free to come in to talk, having observed that I was "not teaching." In other periods we did all the proper "reading skills", alphabetizing, phonics, whatever the manual wanted. I still read aloud regularly. Nothing would make me give up sharing Lassie Come Home or Trouble River or ….. but that was a different part of the day, later, when we were all tired.

The result was that we developed a bunch of experts in various fields, and everyone in the class advanced 2 years instead of 1 or none on the all-powerful national reading tests. The room was full of readers, with no labels.

Presently I moved to another school district and had to revert to proper reading lessons. Again it was a single word that changed my life as a teacher. I was patrolling the rows while people underlined and circled words in a phonics workbook. They were supposed to be tracking rhyming word endings and matching pictures. The pictures were so badly drawn that it was hard to guess what they were, let alone what they rhymed with. I came to a desk where a young man was giving up on a sketch that was supposed to be an ell on a building. He didn't know what an ell was. I said politely, " Your answer doesn't make any sense." He looked up at me and answered with equal courtesy, sadly, " None of it makes any sense."
Something snapped. I told him he was absolutely right, told him to close the book, and resolved at that moment to get out of the classroom and into the library where there was bound to be something interesting for every child. Even if the rest of the world went on circling words I could offer antidotes, hundreds of antidotes, thousands of antidotes, millions and millions and millions of antidotes. If Wanda Gag's kittens didn't appeal, I could bring on Bartholomew's hats.

In about nine months gestation, I opened a brand new elementary school library, which still seems to me the greatest job in the world. Fun, challenge, satisfaction, constant variety, constant learning, it's all there. We had a marionette theater, a hand puppet theater, a printing press, a 4 harness table loom. We circulated microscopes and cardboard box looms and puppets. The library became a state demonstration area, earning grants based largely on our success in getting teachers to use the library. To make sure teachers saw what we had I served food at every opportunity, always located at the farthest corner so they'd have to pass displays. The one recipe that will always be associated with that library is Schedule Cake. One year we had a principal who believed in settling everything by consensus, including scheduling. Since we had a great staff, each teacher deeply believed that his/her work was the most important and should therefore be scheduled in the first period, when the children were at their best. After 2 months of confusion I laid out a workable schedule, using lots of colored slips of paper spread over a large rug, and presented it one Monday morning. Hoping to get agreement I made sure to have a large supply of coffee and cake. They were all so tired of discussion and of shifting classes that they would have accepted almost anything, but the cake helped. Peace descended and we were back to teaching.

The process of change is slow and complicated, but the moment of decision is sudden and specific. That squirrel made reading addicts of dozens of children and that ell let me reach hundreds more.