One Student’s Story

This is a story about a young man named Carlos.  Carlos came into grade 9 at our school in my first year of teaching here, and he couldn’t read. He left our school to attend an alternative school at age 17, and he still couldn’t read. His story is important because many students like Carlos attend our school, and we could be doing much more to help them acquire literacy skills than we currently do.

I had Carlos in a grade 9 locally-developed (essential stream) English course in the first semester of my first year at this school. Our school is an inner-city school in downtown Toronto. I was in my second year of full-time teaching and had never taught essential level English before. Technology was not at that time (2004) being integrated into the English curriculum in any regular or consistent or meaningful way. Carlos was in one of my two ENG1L sections. Both sections were populated primarily by boys. All students in the two sections had IEPs and both sections were very challenging to manage due to the number of students with attention deficits and behaviour problems. Carlos was one of my favourite of these challenging grade 9 students. He was a bright-eyed and sociable young man who enjoyed telling me stories about his life and his family. He got along quite well with the other boys; he loved to laugh and joke around but was generally respectful and seemed eager to please. He responded very well to attention and praise. He had a passion for automobiles and had already learned some basic mechanical skills.

Carlos was an average guy in terms of his size and physical appearance and social behaviour. His oral comprehension ability indicated low average intelligence for his age. It became apparent to me very early in the semester, however, that Carlos could not read, and my course curriculum was designed for students with reading ability. I had an EA in the class who often helped Carlos, but each of the 12 students in the class had special needs and all required assistance, so the EA could not spend all her time with Carlos. Anyway, Carlos had 3 additional classes in his daily schedule and he couldn’t handle the work he was being asked to do.

The pressure and stress began to take a toll, and Carlos’ attendance began to slip and he fell seriously behind. He began to skip classes, hang out with older students and smoke pot.  Socializing with these older pothead students must’ve felt like a sort of victory to Carlos, who faced constant failure in his coursework and so couldn’t possibly imagine education leading him to a successful future for himself. Our school offers a High-Skills Major program in the very subject Carlos was passionate about, which was auto mechanics. But that program doesn’t start in grade 9. And anyway, Carlos needed basic literacy skills to succeed in the HSM program, and the courses he was taking weren’t helping him progress toward acquiring those skills.

He got involved in street gang activity in his neighbourhood. He often was in trouble with  our school administration and sometimes with the police. When he did make it to my class, he was often stoned, couldn’t focus on anything, and would fall asleep. Sometimes he told me dark stories from his street experiences, stories about guns and fighting and tribal conflicts.

At our school, I spoke about Carlos’ functional illiteracy with counselors, administrators, special education teachers, and department heads of English and Special Education. I got frustrated and tried to to help from the board, calling resource people I thought might be able to recommend a course of action for Carlos. All my efforts resulted in nothing except my own realization of how we are failing students like Carlos. I was appalled that we had nothing to offer the non-reading secondary student. I told the family numerous times that Carlos needed help to acquire reading skills, and I suggested they look outside the school system since we seemed to have nothing to offer.

Carlos continued unsuccessfully at our school, getting stoned and getting in trouble and accumulating very few credits, until he came to an appropriate age to be redirected to an alternative school campus in our board. I am not sure where Carlos is now or what he is doing, but I have witnessed many other students just like Carlos putting in their time at our school and receiving little of worth from all the hours they spend at school.

I believe we need to change our approach to teaching these students. I believe we could quite easily access the necessary resources and we only require the will and dedication required to change our programming to better suit the needs of at-risk students. Two avenues to consider if we want to meet the needs of students like Carlos are as follows:

adding a technology-rich remedial literacy course, designed especially for grade nine and ten students but useful for any student. (Perhaps this course could be “packaged” with an English course and a 2-credit offering to maximize exposure to assistive technology, facilitate project-based learning strategies and minimize the number of different teachers and class environments these at-risk students are subjected to)
adding 4-credit interdisciplinary package programs designed for students in grades 10-12 who have not managed to accumulate credits in their first secondary school years.

I hope that Carlos’ story helps to make a difference in the lives of other kids who are suffering because of literacy deficits and falling through the cracks of our education system. Our goal should be to improve our system so that every child that passes through the system has the opportunity to develop his or her potential.

Eight years have passed since I taught Carlos. I have never taught grade nine English since that first year. I am now the head of English at our school, and along with the core English courses, I teach media studies and communication technology and yearbook journalism. I have gained a great deal of knowledge about assistive technology since that year with Carlos, and I believe that we should be using this technology more. And although I haven’t had the need for reading acquisition materials in my own courses, I’ve heard about the non-readers in our midst over the years. Earlier this year, a Special Education teacher came to ask me for reading-acquisition resources for one of the grade nine students on her list. Since we have no courses designed for non-readers, I don’t purchase such resources, and apparently neither does her department... still.

Who will take responsibility for delivering suitable programming for these students? I believe that an administrator should step up and create the program, and for it to have the greatest chance of success at our school, it might be wise to place it in the English department, where you’ll find a number of effective teachers who already have a significant amount of training in and passion for delivering programming designed to improve literacy skills.

I know! Let's add a technology-rich remedial reading course to our school’s program offerings!

Our secondary school services many students with IEPs and special learning needs, and we always have a number of students who are not able to read or whose reading ability is many grades below the average for their age. These functionally illiterate students typically do not accumulate many credits and often do not graduate. Being functionally illiterate is very stressful for many children, and can result in serious social and emotional dysfunction. They often compensate for low self-esteem through rebellious behaviour and avoidance behaviour such as acting out, skipping, smoking, alcohol and drug use, gambling, participation in street gang activity, video gaming addictions, etc. By the time illiterate students reach grade 10 or so and are entering their early adult years, many experience a heightened sense of anxiety and worthless and hopeless about the future. In our school over the years, we’ve seen many young people with reading deficits giving up on their own learning and long-term goals and boosting their weak and damaged egos by seeking peer acceptance in unhealthy ways, prioritizing short-term pleasure and thrills and self-medicating to reduce their feelings of anxiety and self-loathing.

Why do they give up on their own learning and long-term goals? It’s not hard to figure out. We typically place the non-reading students in regular classrooms and they will have a variety of courses on their schedule from the open, locally-developed and workplace streams; all of these streams feature curriculum that assumes a reading level of at least grade 3 or 4. Many of the classes will have one EA, who must divide her time between a number of needy students. Sometimes these courses have no EA, since we do not have enough EA support allocation for all classes, and tough decisions about which classes to prioritize must often be made. The policies outlined in the ministry's recent Growing Success document are of interest to this discussion, sincethe current state of assessment practices at our school seem not be be equitable and fair for non-reading students -- in a traditional educational setting without intensive support or consistent use of appropriate assistive technology, how can non-readers possibly learn and demonstrate their learning?

Consider the following list of maximum class sizes for courses where functionally illiterate students are placed (according to the Collective Agreement Between TCDSB and TSU):

Open -- 26
Essential -- 15
Workplace -- 15
GLE -- 15
Credit Recovery -- 15
Co-op -- 20

When course materials for these programs all assume at least grade 3/4 reading skills, the student to teacher/EA ratios mean that a student who is a non-reader or a struggling reader can’t possibly get the intensive support he or she requires to succeed. Imagine the stress of being a non-reading student in this learning environment! The student receives handouts and texts he cannot decode, sees overheads and screen projections laden with text he cannot decode, is given a multitude of written assessment activities with instructions and resource materials he cannot decode. Class to class, the student has to adapt to different teaching styles, receives varying levels of support and understanding from 4 to 8 different teachers, and cannot count on regular or consistent support from EAs. This secondary system seems cruel and must feel punishing for a non-reading adolescent, who is simultaneously dealing with all regular the developmental and social issues that arise during puberty and young adulthood.

Additionally, many of these students will not self-advocate, because that means drawing attention to the disability. Whether we like or not, and despite all our best efforts to make people respectful of individual differences, once a child reaches age 7 or 8 in our society and has not acquired reading skills, he or she will feel stigmatized. The response to feeling stigmatized is often not to work harder to overcome the disability, but to mask the disability with coping mechanisms, such as a heightened reliance on oral comprehension and avoidance strategies. If the family hasn’t the resources or knowledge to help the child overcome these challenges (as is often the case in our school, where many parents are ill-equipped to help a struggling student due to poverty, lack of education and awareness, illiteracy or language barriers) then the child’s best hope is an education system that recognizes the needs of non-readers and accepts the challenge that these students present. After all, if our education system could only teach  one skill to students, wouldn’t most of you agree that the one skill would be reading? In other words, if a student is capable of learning to read and hasn’t done so in or system, then our system has utterly failed that student. We need a new course at our school designed for students who are non-readers and struggling readers.

There is not a single course in our school, outside of the PHAST program, that features curriculum for reading skills acquisition at a level that is suitable for the non-reader. The PHAST program, effective as it is, is simply not available to all our non-reading students, and will not be made available to them in the near future because we do not have control or ownership of the program; in partnership with The Hospital for Sick Children, we offer this remedial reading program to a very small number of children who must meet particular criteria (through testing and other data-gathering strategies) determined not by teachers at our school but by the doctors and researchers at Sick Kids. Every year, a number of our non-readers or struggling readers are rejected, and we have no other satisfactory alternate programming to meet their needs. So we need to create programming to meet their needs. What will the new programming look like?

The NEW COURSE FOR STRUGGLING READERS will use various forms of assistive technology and remedial reading instruction:

• students will participate in an online or computer-based software remedial reading program (i.e. Read 180)
• students will receive individualized instruction from teacher and EA using traditional text-based remedial reading materials that are age-appropriate
• students will be trained to use assistive technology designed to help struggling readers (i.e. Premier, for which our board has already purchased a license) and will be taught strategies to make this technology useful to the student in all classes that require reading and writing skills
• students will use video “brain games” (such as those designed by Lumosity) to exercise a variety of brain functions that testing indicates to be lagging in these students 
• all IEP students registered in the course will apply for SEA (special equipment amount) funding to receive the use of a laptop computer to be used in all classes.
  

This new course will be coded on one of two ways. It can either be a GLE or GLS section or it could be placed in the English department and coded ELS2O: Literacy Skills: Reading and Writing. The benefit of placing it in the English department is that it can then be taught by a teacher who does not have Special Education Part 1 qualifications. Although Spec Ed qualifications would be preferable, I believe that a competent English teacher would be able to deliver this program successfully, perhaps more successfully than many of our current Special Education teachers -- I base this belief on the fact that the head of Special Education at our school protested the addition of such a course in her department, citing teacher unpreparedness and lack of interest as the main reason. Whether the English or the Special Education department becomes the home for this new course, it must be assigned to a skilled and motivated teacher. The development of a new curriculum requires hard work and dedication, and the course must be delivered by a teacher who fully believes in its value and is invested in ensuring its success. Above all, the teacher must demonstrate an interest in reading acquisition strategies and a commitment to student success through integration of technology. And most important to consider, the course coding we choose should enable access for all our non-reading students who are interested in working to acquire reading skills. An English coding might allow more registrants than a GLE coding, for example, which would be limited to students with IEPs. At our school, some very needy students do not have IEPs for one reason or another, and I would not like to see anyone rejected from the new reading instruction course for that reason.

Elsewhere in our board, we offer the Arrowsmith intensive support program for students with learning exceptionalities. This program has a good success rate, but it is only available to elementary students in 4 schools, none of which are located in our region of the city. Since the program is expensive to run, is implemented in our board only in the elementary panel, and requires specially trained teachers, it seems unlikely that it will ever be made available to our student population, but we can use some of the principles and strategies featured in this program in our new course. One of their main strategies is the use of computer programs to lead the students through brain-training exercises that target individual deficit areas. Nowadays, such technology is becoming more widely available and less expensive, and part of the course development plan will be to compare assistive-technology software and platforms and determine the best technology choices for our students based on their needs and our economic restrictions.

For the most part, we have been allowing our non-reading secondary students to “fall through the cracks” -- we have very little to offer them, and they regularly become disengaged, fail to accumulate credits, and eventually land in alternative schools or drop out of school altogether. We have an obvious need for programming that serves the needs of non-reading secondary students, we have an obligation to provide these students with access to appropriate assistive technology and programming. Effective assistive technology softwares and reading-acquisition programs exist and can help non-reading students gain essential literacy skills, but we are not currently offering these technologies and programs to our students.

Down the road, I would like to see our school making use of interdisciplinary package programs designed for students with limited literacy skills. Aside from our alternative schools, which are often the “last resort” for students that don’t function well within the regular system, we have little to offer. Instead of simply managing their behaviours and waiting to ship our unsuccessful students off to alternative school settings once they are old enough, we should be considering creative ways to redesign regular secondary school programming to increase success for at-risk students. With vision and dedication and creative programming, we can turn lives around and help disengaged youth develop into productive, healthy citizens.

This one new course is small step toward more suitable programming for at-risk students, but it will be a very positive step in the right direction toward fulfilling our obligations to these very needy students.

Welcome to a new semester in the media lab, room 207A. Communication Technology and Applied Journalism (AKA The YEARBOOK Course) will be held here. This room will be an incubator for experimenting with new appraoches to communication and creative expression. I am looking forward to a semester that is interesting, challenging and productive and maybe sometimes a bit strange (and hopefully a bit fun, too). i LOVE to see students being creative and spreading their wings; so, please, jump right in and try some new ways of communicating your ideas in my classes. You can email me any time, about anything at all, at cheryl.gould@tcdsb.org.

Ms Lo Bianco and I took our grade 12s to tour an old-fashioned (but still operating) publishing house called Coach House Books, located in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. A very interesting and educational experience, and the good folks at Coach House Books offer this experience for free. We were all fascinated and charmed by the old building and the antique (and modern) printing machinery.

We then stopped for lunch in Kensington Market. Or that was the plan, anyway. The teachers had lunch in Kensington Market and most of the students ran all the way down to Queen and Spadina for McDonald's! Old habits die hard, I guess.

Then we stopped in to MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) to check out their CONTACT Photography Festival exhibit. We had a terrific host there, a young man with lots of knowledge to share about the work and the photographers represented. After he guided us through the exhibit we wandered back to school.

The following photos are my digital photo creations, based on images I captured during this excursion.

How I Learned to Access, Evaluate and Question Information

I am turning 42 in a couple of months. When I was a high school student, I had one course that introduced us to computers. We had to learn the language called DOS (Disk Operating System) to instruct the computer to perform basic functions. There were no graphics. It was really boring to me, like learning to use a glorified calculator. I couldn’t understand the purpose of the exercises. This course was taught by the only computer instructor in our school, an unpopular middle-aged math teacher who wore heavy-rimmed spectacles and his pants belted under his armpits. He was unmarried, lived with his mother, called himself “daddy” and us his “kiddies”. If that wasn’t bad enough, things got really weird and uncomfortable when his mother got sick that year I had him and he began to have a mental/emotional breakdown. The class completely killed any interest I might have developed at that age in computers (and computer people).

Numbers weren't really my thing, anyway. I used to read all the time. Just about anything within reach, but especially novels. I learned to access, evaluate and question information through reading, especially thorugh reading words written by brilliant minds and by experiencing thoughts and intellectual activities via characters and narrators in books. I was most intellecutally stimulated when inhabiting a universe created by a skilled writer. Some films influenced me, as well, but I was generally disappointed with films when I compared them to the books that they originated from. Some discussions and words I heard from other people also influenced me in this regard, but rarely, in person, did I encounter in my young life anyone who actually taught me anything significant about accessing, evaluating and questioning information. Until I entered university, my mind was primarily influenced by reading.

To some degree, music also taught me to question and evaluate information. I was stimulated by songs with socially critical lyrics, irreverent lyrics, or unique phrasings. Music with unconventional or sophisticated or complex composition expanded by capacity for thought. Music, in a variety of ways, expanded my intellect. It was like reading in that sense, but music had a greater visceral impact than words on a page. Music is, after all, a language -- but one that transcends words, and so, in that sense, might be considered superior to words. I am sure I would have a much more brilliant mind had I dedicated myself to reading music as I did to reading novels. But novels were so easy for me. I took the path of least resistance and graduated from university with an honours degree in English literature.

When I observe my students, I notice that the role of music hasn’t changed much in their generation. They have their iPods and portable speakers, we had our Sony Walkmans and ghetto blasters. Aside from the fact that they are more exposed to music videos than we were, I don't see a great difference in the role of music when I compare their generation to my own. Many of them thoughtlessly groove to any popular tune with a dance beat, but some of them find voices in song that inspire them to question society, evaluate information and perhaps rebel against convention. Some of them are dedicated to learning music, not just consuming it, and I wholeheartedly encourage them in this pursuit. I find that only a small percentage of them are devoting much time to reading, however, and I am not pleased about that.

Prensky’s arguments in “Digital Natives” are often compelling, but he seems to be implying that we should should just accept the fact that intensive reading (i.e. reading books and long articles) by young people is now history, and we shouldn't sweat that circumstance because most knowledge can be transmitted through multi-media and gaming experiences anyway. As I mentioned before, I have seen maybe one or two movies in my entire life that come anywhere near the experience of reading the books that inspired them. So I can’t roll over and accept the death of reading. I am interested in all kinds of mediums of communication, both as a consumer and a creator, and I am skeptical that multi-media artifacts can be as intellectually enriching and educational as reading. Students consuming a multi-media diet can become educated and literate, but a great deal of their intellectual potential will remain undeveloped. Reading helps individuals develop their intellectual capacities to the fullest.

If the physical construction of the brain is affected by immersion in the new technologies, I am skeptical that this "digitally-modified brain" will represent human progress. I believe the new brains are more likely to be intellectually limited, even stunted. My students who are not big on reading generally do not write very well. This might indicate that they don’t think very well, either. Self-aware digital natives tell me themselves they have limited attention spans and trouble maintaining focus. Many of them do not celebrate and embrace this characteristic, because it makes learning and completing many complex tasks difficults. Should we change our expectations radically, and decree that anything that takes longer than half an hour for a student to consume, learn, or complete is no longer desirable or worthwhile? Shall we begin to widely value and evaluate proficiency in playing games, cruising Facebook and watching youtube -- the tasks that digital natives have no trouble sticking with for long periods? The "future content" Prensky prescribes is useful and even necessary in moderation, but reading skills are still essential and we do the digital natives no favours by allowing the new technologically-saturated culture to dictate the parameters of the teaching methodologies we employ, thereby limiting their development as readers.

In addition to my pedagogical concerns, I want remind the Prensky-ites of the world about the now-scientifically-documented health risks that come with increased exposure to electro-magnetic radiation. In my opinion, Prensky and his comrades need to temper their enthusiasm for all things digitized. But please don’t misunderstand me to be a luddite -- I LOVE the internet and am excited about a lot of the new technology. I work every day, however, with digital natives who lack balance in their lives and suffer from digital overexposure and digital addiction. This is not good for the soul. I'd like them to spend more time outside and more time reading. For the healthy development of future generations, we might want to consider the ages-old "legacy content" called The Middle Way as we embark on redesigning our curricula.

I have never had a web site or blog before and I am entering into this world for the best of reasons: all my students! If I become the next superstar of the blogosphere I promise I will never forget my roots, St. Mary's people.

On to the important business at hand. On this site, I plan to use this online space to showcase student work, post items of interest and inspiration, communicate about the courses I teach and link to useful resources.

So what do you all (my students and community stakeholders, I mean) want to see on this site and do with this site? Let me know, please! I want to hear your beautiful voices through your written words.