Re-embodying Empathy: Learning to read — again
On frequent weekend visits to my grandparents’ house as a child, my grandfather would interrupt my make-believe and call me over to sit beside him and read with him on the couch. He was a pilot and wing-commander of lancasters in WWII, and when he spoke, I listened. And I was not a reader. In fact, I *hated* reading. My grade 1 teacher had recommended that I spend two years in grade 1. I wasn’t good at it, and I preferred creating my own worlds instead of reading about someone else’s.
But when he called me over, I went. We would sit on the yellow flowered sofa in the living room, and Frog and Toad would magically appear from under the couch or from behind the copper repository used to hold ashes from the fireplace. He would crack the book open, and flip to a page.
“Let’s start here. Sound this out.”
I would sit awkwardly and struggle to register the letters and then remember which sounds they made, before finally trying to vocalize what seemed like an impossible puzzle. My anxiety would rise as, I’m sure, his patience would wear.
I hated reading. And I hated Frog and Toad.
It took a lot of painful practice and private tutoring to pass grade 1.
Fast forward 30 years and I am sitting beside my 5 year old son before bed who has gone through one of our many bookshelves and pulled, you guessed it, Frog and Toad.
As I sit with him, book in hand, he begins to stammer out sounds and make guesses about the words in front of him based on the pictures, and I am reminded of my own experience… and that reading is hard. It’s not just about sounding out the words phonetically, it’s about asking questions, making inferences, understanding contextual clues, recalling information, using the features of the text to support understanding. It’s a complex process and I realize that it’s more like doing 100 different puzzles all at once. It requires focus, hard-work, discipline, practice…and sometimes failure.
The afternoons spent sitting on that couch with my grandpa helped me learn to read, but it took time, patience and consistency.
How do I create the ideal environment to support my students reading?
While Kathleen Beers’ book When Kids Can’t Read and Smith and Wilhelm “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys” have informed my approach to literacy in the classroom, Frog and Toad has stirred a memory of my own struggle with reading. And this reminder of my own embodied experience of struggle has been more influential than any book about literacy. If we can remember what it is like to struggle, we will understand how to teach students who are struggling.
As a teacher, it can be difficult to understand how to break down a concept or idea. We forget that what is implicit to us needs to be taught explicitly to our students. Learning to read is hard. And it requires time, patience and an empathetic approach from teachers.
Modelling is also useful too. I use a doc cam and read and write beside my students so that they can see how I look for contextual clues, ask questions, identify patterns, structures, and craft moves. Modelling my reading and writing shows students I am also putting the puzzle pieces together, just like they are; learning to read is cyclical and never-ending. And learning to teach reading means going back to the beginning again. Even if it’s painful.
