Happily, it will not be necessary for me to kick anything. When we got our client assignments last week, I saw that my client, whom I'll call Miguel (for confidentiality purposes I'm not supposed to give his real name, especially in an online posting) had left elementary school far, far behind. He's 25, in fact. There are a handful of adults who come to CEPS for reading services, so this isn't unusual at all.
I was a bit nervous to meet him, and grew infinitely more so when Dr. Masullo told my friend Kea and me that we have "the book people." Again, for confidentiality purposes I won't list the title of the book or its author here, but suffice it to say that last year a prominent journalist who covers education in New York wrote a book about kids who fall through the cracks when it comes to literacy in the NYC public schools. The stars of her book were Miguel and his sister, Jasmin, who is Kea's client. The journalist got wind of the situation when Miguel's high school counselor, noticing that he had essentially no literacy skills in 10th grade, pointed out to him that, legally, the school system was supposed to be providing him with appropriate services. The case went to court and Miguel and his sister, both in their 20's now, were each awarded over a thousand hours of top-of-the-line private tutoring to make up for all of the years of education they missed.
How do you get to be halfway through high school without being able to read at all? Miguel and his family moved to New York from the Dominican Republic when Miguel was 7. He was placed in a standard classroom where English was the one and only language spoken and received no additional instruction designed for an English language learner (ELL in edSpeak). Now he says he is more comfortable speaking English than Spanish, but I'm sure it was a long road. Through the years, I assume his teachers wrote off his poor performance as an issue with English rather than with language and literacy itself. Had they asked him, he would have told them that for as long as he can remember he's been behind the other kids, even when he was in school in the Dominican Republic. He can't tell left from right, has difficulty remembering things unless he's heard them many times, took a long time to learn the names of colors - in short, this was not a normally developing child. These disabilities are often heritable, and he says that, in his judgement, everyone in his family needs special help with reading, although he and his sister Jasmin (two of four children) are the only ones to have received it. In sixth grade, he was given a formal evaluation and placed in special education classes beginning in high school. While I think this was probably the right move, he still did not receive specialized literacy services and eventually dropped out. Interestingly, he's not even sure how many years of high school he "completed" - he guesses two or three - that sort of thing being kind of arbitrary when your classes don't mean anything and you're not actually earning real credits.
Post-court case, he attended a private tutoring clinic for 2 1/2 years until the settlement money ran out, and now he's at CEPS, where, with fee adjustments based on his status (he's unemployed - how can you work when you can't read?), he'll pay $5 twice a week for 90-minute sessions with me.
I was, as I said, nervous to meet him. I had no idea what to expect. Over the phone he sounded dull and slow, and I worried about how we would get along. One walks a very fine line in adult education, having to teach very, very basic skills usually taught to very young children to a person who is not a child. I wondered how I was going to explain things slowly enough for him to understand them without talking down to him. And what materials was I going to bring in that were simple enough for him to read but that didn't feel babyish?
I need not have worried. Miguel and I spent 90 minutes on an interview and the first part of a battery of reading assessment tests and I can't tell you how pleasantly surprised I was, nor how much I'm looking forward to the semester. While Kea said that her client expressed almost no outside interests, Miguel wants to study business and maybe open his own business. He is interested in robotics and films (his favorites are _To Kill a Mockingbird_ and _The Graduate_ and he told me all about Harper Lee; rather amazing for someone who really can't read), and said that his dream is to write a screenplay. He loves music. In short, I've got a lot to work with here.
Kea says Yasmin can do almost nothing in terms of reading and writing. Miguel didn't exactly blow me away with his performance, but I won't be starting completely from scratch. Best of all, he's very self-aware. He told me without embarrassment that he reads too slowly and that he has difficulty putting words into sentences. (Interestingly, aside from a few sound-vowel association errors, he's a decent speller, but he says he couldn't write me a letter or an email.) When I asked him whether he thought his private tutoring services had been effective, he said simply, "Now I can read." Not much, though. He could write most, but not all, of the alphabet, and had a lot of trouble separating the sounds that make up words (saying "m-op" instead of "m-o-p"). But he did not get discouraged and seemed very eager to learn. He made several jokes and asked me lots of questions about my background and about the Center. And when I asked him what his strengths are, he said, "I don't give up."
I'm really, really excited to work with this guy. My only qualm is that, with a disability as severe as his, I know I'm not going to make much headway with him, and I really want to. I'd love to be able to help him to the point where he can write that screenplay, but realistically he's not going to get even close to the point where he can during our time together, and he may never get there. But any progress we can make will improve the quality of his life. I know he'd like to work, and improved reading will help him with that goal. And when I asked him about coping strategies he uses to get around his reading difficulties, he said that he simply doesn't go out much; in a city like New York, you can't go many places if you can't read street and subway signs. What a sad life! I can't imagine having to stay in all the time because I was worried I might never make it home again if I left the house. (His sister once got on the wrong train and was lost in the city for more than six hours, getting on any bus or train that looked familiar and traveling farther and farther from her target.) So I will remain both optimistic and realistic with Miguel, perhaps with more emphasis on the former.
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