“Hi Coach! What’s the work-out for today?” is usually uttered with more force and volume than “What are we going to learn today?”  It’s a hopeful sign if kids do bother to ask what they are going to learn today, but you are bound to get a much better reaction from your athletes who choose to learn and practice their skills, than students who are compelled by our state laws to attend classes during certain hours of the day. In the year 2000, when I first began my own career as an educator, Valerie Ellery bought herself a whistle after watching how excitedly her son and his teammates yelled out “Baseball Players” in response to the coach’s  “What are you?”  Valerie announced to her students, “I’m your coach! When you grow up you are going to be readers!” Valerie Ellery shared this moment from her 6th grade classroom with an audience of educators during their lunch at The Connecticut Reading Association’s 61st Annual Conference. Back in 2000, her own fourteen year old son excelled at a variety of team sports, but he hated school and earned nearly all F’s. The Ellery’s were told that it would not be possible for their first born son to officially graduate from high school in the State of Florida. As a mom Valerie was faced with the choice to hold her son back an additional year or place him in a non-college prep high school track that would only allow him to graduate with a special education diploma. Fortunately Valerie was enrolled in The University of South Florida’s world renowned graduate school. Like many moms throughout history who have been told “no” by an authority figure, Valerie responded, “I don’t think so” and came up with another plan that allowed her son to attend a private school and to be a test subject in a nation-wide reading study. My own Aunt Delight began her career as a college professor when her principal told her back in 1972 that she was no longer allowed to teach sixth grade due to the fact that her students could now see that she was pregnant with her first child.  Both my Aunt and Valerie Ellery no longer teach sixth grade, but both women have gone on to become influential researchers, authors and educational leaders. 

Through her research from several different states, Valerie found that 8th grade boys all across the country were failing at reading. Many of the boys, the author’s son included, had been taught to read in K-3 classrooms which use the “whole language” approach.  School principals from the late 1980’s up until about the year 2000 often decreed that teachers should no longer spend time on explicit phonics instruction, so kids would have to find out what sounds the letters make on their own. This time period in public education produced some terrible spellers, and also many poor readers. Anyone who has read something in a non-native language knows that if you cannot pronounce 90% of the individual words on the page, your chances of deciphering that page’s meaning is very low. The same is true in my classroom. When my high school students cannot pronounce every tenth word in a text that we are reading, I know that we are studying something that is at a frustration level. Luckily, secondary teachers are no longer faced with droves of regular education students who have had no phonics instruction, but some older students still experience difficulty with pronouncing words at their grade level.

Many of us wish that our children will grow up to become professional athletes, and it’s true that sports teach many valuable skills and foster the gross motor intelligence that can be extremely difficult to develop inside the confines of a classroom.  Our hope as parents and educators is that 100% of our children will grow up to be readers.  Statisticians are not as optimistic as parents. For many decades, construction companies that build massive, concrete institutions, mostly prisons, correlate the number of fourth grade boys who do not learn how to read with how much concrete they will require ten years later to house a certain percentage of these non-readers. If you find yourself responsible for a struggling reader, don’t lose hope! After several rocky starts, Valerie Ellery’s son went on to become one of the Navy’s top bio-medical engineers who has saved the lives of many American soldiers.

 Ask the child to read aloud as much as possible, even to younger children. If you have access to the child’s vocabulary lists or school books, help him or her pronounce the difficult words.  Ask the student to come up with lists of words that rhyme with their vocabulary words, and play a modified version of Scrabble which requires the student to use the letters of the multi-syllable words to spell as many smaller words as they can. If your child attends a public school, most schools employ a teacher who holds at least a Master’s Degree in Reading.  Some school districts call these professionals, Reading Specialists, Reading Consultants or Literacy Coaches.  Reading teachers are not employed to help a handful of troubled students, and in fact all students should have access to this person at some point during the school year.  Reading teachers are responsible for the overall literacy of a school building.  If you are concerned about a child who is having difficulty with reading, he or she should spend some one on one time with a reading professional who can write a strategic reading plan for him or her. My friends and I who volunteer our time to promote literacy in our state certainly enjoyed world-renown author Valerie Ellery’s personal story about her son’s journey to becoming a reader and a successful professional.  She certainly inspires us to help every parent raise a reader. I hope to see many fellow educators and perhaps even a few parents at next year’s conference here in Cromwell, Connecticut.