In high school, I worked with Big Brother Big Sister through our community service program. During the three years that I participated in the program, I worked with the same little brother. For privacy issues, we will call him Tom. Each week, Tom and I met for an hour and for half the time we would read together, saving the rest of the time for board games or recess. When I first started working with Tom, he was in first grade, so I got to see how his reading skills improved through the years.
It was not until I was helping someone learn how to read that I realized how challenging and frustrating the whole process is. When reading with Tom and watching him struggle with the long, unusual, or tricky words, I began to recognize his frustrations as the same ones I had when I learned to read. When approaching words he did not know, Tom would use a combination of tactics like skipping the word and hoping I wouldn’t notice, saying the word incorrectly but with confidence and hoping that I wouldn’t notice, or just stopping all together to avoid the challenge the word presented. These are all tactics that I also used and tactics that my parents noticed in me, just like I noticed them in Tom. I saw how uncomfortable Tom got when I asked him to repeat a word or to sound out a word rather than telling him what it was like he asked me to do. This stuggle was hard to watch as I remembered feeling the same way when my parents did the same.
Looking back though, while reading is often a social event that many cherish, like bedtime stories, there is a good deal of independence placed on actually learning how to read. It requires confidence, patience, and the desire to struggle through those challenging words in hopes of eventually breezing through them with ease. Even though I did not like that my parents were constantly challenging me, I am now thankful that they did. If they had not, I would not have been able to challenge Tom the way I did and Tom will not be able to do the same with those whom he teaches to read in his future. It is important to promote the independence required to learn to read so that students, like Tom, will have the confidence to one day pass on the skill.