Then, this year happened.

This year, things changed in my thinking process because we switched over to another data system that revealed to us some cold hard truths about our students: Many were far behind. We had 7th graders whose reading skills were between Kindergarten and 3rd grade level. How could I possibly expect everyone to understand the theme of Poe’s poem, “A Dream Within a Dream,” when they couldn’t grasp the meaning of words in context or sound out words they didn’t know or identify the speaker? We’re talking about a lack of vocabulary and phonics skills. We’re talking about reading something and not remembering what they read.

The problem became clear when we first started reading a text. I asked a question about a character and the students were clueless. They couldn’t identify which details were about the character. They couldn’t identify which details were about the setting.

Example: “A man was traveling at dusk…” “The primrose were just beginning to blossom…”

Question: When did the story take place? Answer should be in the evening and the time of year is beginning of spring. Answers I received: Morning. Fall. Early in the morning. Summer.

The sad part is that we talked about what dusk meant. We talked about primrose, and prime meaning first, etc.

So I went back and retaught using colored highlighters. One color for character. One color for setting. Still there were struggles.

I’m back to the drawing board and we are in October. I realize that I have to abandon my ideals of teaching texts for teaching reading skills. Using those graphic organizers to keep track of identification. Teaching how to use the organizers. Teaching how to find the information when it is not right in your face. How to connect the dots in the middle when all you have is the beginning and the end.

When I was in college, I didn’t think about teaching students how to read. I thought about teaching those classic stories that I loved so much. Teaching reading was for elementary, right? Wrong! As teachers, we are having to go back and teach students how to read. Teach them how to find information in a text. Teach them to skim. Teach them what it means to find the information in the “context” of the paragraph. To read before and after. To re-read something multiple times to pull out all of the information and not just what they think it might say.

Some of this I feel came from that Covid bubble, but much of it can be traced back to how we once taught reading. It’s the same as when we moved away from teaching writing. We decided to do it prescriptively and only teach what was needed. Now we have students who lack writing skills. No punctuation. No paragraphs. Just words on a paper. No capitalization even. And then these students enter middle school and we have to teach them all over how to write. I told a student that a paragraph should be about the same thought. They didn’t know how to read their own writing and distinguish what information talked about a similar thought. It’s their writing. You would think that they would know what they wrote. Alas, no they can’t.

What about you? What instructional strategies are you discontinuing, and why?

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