Andy on Wednesday
Get up, get dressed, grab a piece of toast and lunch money (burgers today, which were pretty good), catch bus, go to homeroom. 
The morning was zooming by, except for a pleasant couple of moments when he got to sit near Elisa. When he glanced up to say hi, he saw that she was wearing a very pretty dress. She smiled and said “Hi” back to him, and his burden lifted for a few minutes.
Fast-forward through math (could an hour really have passed that fast?), and then … the long, slow trudge towards the fate he had been dreading, namely, literacy class, and specifically, reading. And even more specifically, the new reading program the teacher was starting. What a nightmare.
Andy sat down in his chair and waited very nervously for class to start. Some of the kids in the class were OK readers and just read what was necessary to do the work the teacher assigned them in class. Four of them were really good readers, and read just for the fun of it. He really could not figure out how they did it, and he really didn’t care, since for him, reading was just pretty much torture.
| listen: Blended |
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| listen: Blended |
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The rest of the kids, not quite half the class, were like him, working twice as hard just to keep up, and not being very successful. In his mind, the “new” ways of learning to read were a waste of time. No matter how they started, they always ended up doing the same old thing. He had been through it too many times before, and it just didn’t work. The main result of all of these earlier efforts was that he just felt worse and worse about himself. By now, he had just about decided that he would never be a good reader, no matter how hard he tried, because he just wasn’t smart enough. He sighed noisily.
There was a knock on the classroom door, and when the teacher opened it, a man came into the room. He was kind of tall, with curly hair, and he was dressed in khaki pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The teacher introduced him, and he turned to face the class. This was strange, because most of the men who came into the classroom wore suits, and mostly they just spoke to the teacher, and sometimes watched the kids as they worked. The man introduced himself to the class and said they could call him by his first name. Wait, what?? At school you never called an adult by their first name, unless you really wanted to have a meeting with the principal, and this guy was saying it was OK. Cool start. Andy almost started to relax.
| listen: Stretch |
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The man started speaking to the class. Although he was very serious as he spoke, his eyes looked friendly. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked like he really meant those smiles, which was nice, since so many grown-ups just smiled fake smiles.
The man didn’t ask which kids had trouble reading, as Andy was afraid that he would. In fact, he started talking to the whole class about what a mess the English language was. He told them how it had been formed hundreds of years ago, by smashing together lots of different languages, and although each of these languages had its own letters to make specific sounds, once they were all bundled together, things kind of got weird, and the letters and sounds no longer matched. This, he told them, was why so many people had trouble reading. It wasn’t because they weren’t smart enough; it was because the spelling of the words made no sense.
He now had Andy’s full attention. So maybe his trouble with reading wasn’t because he wasn’t trying hard enough? Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he thought he was? Andy sat forward in his seat, not wanting to miss a word of what the man was saying. The man told the class that kids who had difficulty reading, often had, mind-shame. This was a new term to Andy, and then the man said that when you felt that, you were ashamed of your mind, because you thought you weren’t smart enough to do something. But it wasn’t your fault!
Andy was wide-eyed, as the man somehow described exactly how Andy felt so much of the time. And as he looked around the room, he saw other kids, the ones who also had a tough time with reading, with a look of surprise on their faces that mirrored his own. It WASN’T THEIR FAULT! Andy felt as if something inside of him had been set free.
Then the man told the class to turn on their computers. This was a treat, because usually the only time they got to use their computers in class was if they were looking up spelling word definitions (boring!), or if they had to write a story (even worse!). Most of the time the teacher used the whiteboard. There was a new icon on everyone’s computer. It looked like a blue P, and an orange Q. The man explained that these letters stood for ‘pronunciation cues’. Then he told everyone to touch the icon and open the site, which was called the Magic Ladder. It took about 5 minutes for everyone to get through the (super easy) opening steps. Then they were looking at lots of story titles.
The man told them all to click on the same title. When they did, they saw a story, where if you clicked on a word you were having trouble with, the word could give hints about how the letters and syllables should sound. If you still couldn’t quite get it, you clicked again, and the word was pronounced for you. Andy held his breath. He had never seen anything like this.
Andy groaned out loud when he saw words like mythological, and Minotaur, and Cyclops, and warmonger. The man heard him and smiled. He let Andy know that everything would be ok, that all he had to do was click on the difficult words. Andy clicked on mythological. The word opened up on the screen before him. Each letter showed how it should be pronounced. Each syllable opened up. Andy took a minute to look at it and, as the class looked on, he read the word “mythological”. And then ‘Minotaur’, and then ‘Cyclops’, and then, and then, and then … Andy was reading, and everyone was listening. Suddenly everything was different. These words acted like they wanted to be read. They opened up to you; they didn’t all crunch together and try to hide their impossible sounds.
And the bell rang. Class was over. Reading class had never gone by so quickly. And for the first time ever, Andy could hardly wait for tomorrow, so that he could read more.
1) What was Andy dreading (specifically)?
a) seeing Connor
b) going to math
c) the new reading program
2) Andy felt that he would never be a good reader because:
a) he did not like school
b) he always skipped reading class
c) he felt he just wasn’t smart enough
3) The man in reading class told the class that a lot of people had trouble reading because
a) they weren’t smart enough
b) the spelling of the words made no sense
c) reading wasn’t important
4) The man let Andy and the other kids know that their difficulty with reading
a) wasn’t their fault
b) was the teacher’s fault
c) came from not doing their homework
5) When Andy used the PQs ( Pronunciation Cues) on the computer:
a) the words disappeared
b) the words showed how they should be pronounced
c) the words got harder to read
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