A former student of mine came to visit me after school one day.
“I’ll bet you can’t remember who I am!” he dared me.
Remarkably, I did remember this young man. Quite well, in fact. He’d made an impression on me with his cheerful attitude and complete disregard for his schoolwork.
“Of course I remember you.” As I said his name, his face lit up in the long shadows of the fall afternoon. We had a conversation about the new school he attended and his hobbies. He asked if one of the other teachers he’d had still worked at the school.
“Yes, but she’s changed rooms,” I told him. “I’ll walk you over there so you can pay her a visit.”
When we arrived at her room, she was in a meeting. I handed my student a pencil and paper and said, “Why don’t you write her a note and tell her you stopped by to see her?”
A panicky expression crossed his face, quickly replaced by a smile. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“She’d love to hear from you,” I encouraged him, pushing the writing implements toward him.
He shuffled his feet, put his hands in his pockets and asked, “Could you write it for me?”
That’s when I realized this student couldn’t write. He was unable to write a friendly note telling someone he’d stopped by their room.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why aren’t you able to write this note?”
“I’m just too busy with sports and family stuff to read and write,” he said. “And I just can’t keep up in school.”
Sadly, this is not an uncommon occurrence.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Why Aren’t our Students Reading and Writing?
In a country full of the written language, why is it that so many of our students are functionally illiterate? How can we expect them to perform at high levels of complex reading and writing when they can’t even read a magazine? Most important, why is this happening?
Certainly in this era when it’s fashionable to blame the teachers, it’s easy to say the schools aren’t doing their job of teaching literacy. But is it really as simple as that? Let’s take a look at our culture.
We pride ourselves on being busy and active, accomplishing something all the time. When you ask a co-worker what he or she did on a weekend, and they tell you about hiking, biking, volunteering, or some other activity, you probably engage in more conversation about it. But if a co-worker says “I read all weekend,” do they get the same recognition? No. In fact, some people have the attitude that reading is what you do when there’s nothing else to do. People feel sorry for the SOBs who don’t have anything to do on the weekend but read a good book.
Case in point: An employee who is recuperating from surgery is begging to come back to work early, because he’s bored. He’s says there is nothing to do all day but read.
Hmm.
Putting Value on Reading and Writing
If you’re reading this, you’re a literate person. You probably put in many hours of reading and writing outside of school. You probably wrote letters and emails. You’ve carried these virtues forward into adulthood.
You understand the value of reading and writing.
Let’s get that back for everyone. Let’s promote reading after school and on weekends. Let’s promote writing friendly letters and emails without textspeak, letters to companies, letters to our representatives. This all takes time. Which means we might need to slow our lives down a bit, cut back on some of our children’s extracurricular activities.
Teachers can teach children to read and write, but the way they learn to use these skills is by practice. Practice in school is not enough. They need hours more practice reading and writing to master them.
Let’s slow things down and give them time. Time to read, time to write, time to become literate. Let’s put the value back in literacy.
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