11. The Reading Mess--Amanda's Story

In this episode, Amanda shares a deeply personal story about her family's struggles with reading and the educational system. The narrative begins with Amanda recounting her own challenges in a special reading class in third grade, only to realize it was a lesser struggle compared to her sister's. Amanda's sister had significant difficulties with reading, eventually diagnosed with dyslexia, leading the family to invest in extensive phonics programs. Amanda describes the emotional and financial toll these struggles had on her family, including her sister's sense of isolation and the inadequacy of the school's support.

The story transitions to Amanda's experience as a teacher. She shares various strategies and observations throughout her teaching career to help struggling readers, highlighting systemic issues in education. Amanda details an innovative, self-created guided reading program, the obstacles she faced, and the mixed success. She acknowledges the significant gap in teaching reading effectively, pointing to a lack of proper training for teachers in phonics and reading interventions.

The episode concludes with Trina and Amanda discussing potential solutions, including the need for trained volunteers or retired teachers to provide targeted phonics instruction, and calls for systemic change to prioritize and compensate high-quality reading instruction in schools. The segment ends with a call to action for education reform to address reading challenges and support all students.

00:00 Introduction: A Personal Story of Struggling to Read
02:23 Family Challenges with Learning Disabilities
05:26 Sister's Journey: From Struggles to Success
07:14 Transition to Teaching: College and Early Career
08:45 First Teaching Job: Elementary School Experience
09:31 Innovative Teaching Methods and Challenges
11:04 The Importance of Reading Engagement
11:19 Charter School Experience and Student Challenges
12:00 Addressing Reading Struggles in the Classroom
13:08 The Need for Proper Teacher Training
15:50 Pilot Program for Reading Intervention
22:43 Reflections on Teaching and Reading Instruction
27:23 Conclusion: The Need for Empowering Teachers

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Transcript

Talk about the little girl that struggled to learn to read. It wasn't me.  It was a family member of mine, um, because I learned to read like you, you know, and like you said, most teachers pretty easily.  But there was one in third grade, I was put in  a special class with another, other kids from my class. So I was pulled out.

This was in Texas.  And I noticed the kid I actually wrote like a personal narrative about this like a mentor text  Um called red robin because all the groups were like different birds  or something like that. And so my group was, my reading group was pulled out to this special class. And like all the other kids in this class, I like looked around and they seemed, you know, like the special ed kids kind of, they just seemed, I felt embarrassed to be seen.

in this class and I still, I think that I did struggle a little bit and that's why I was put in that class. Um, and it's interesting, you know, cause I was in third grade. So in third grade, you know, you're like eight and even at age eight, you know, I, kids, get embarrassed and know and wonder why am I being pulled out and put with all these other like quote unquote weird looking kids or weird acting kids, you know?

Um, yeah, and so, and, but, but,  Other than that experience in third grade in Texas, I did pretty well in school  and it was my sister, uh, who, who's two years younger than me, who really, my parents had to work like every night helping her with her homework. Um, they bought like, uh, That really, really popular phonics program,  the name escapes me, but it's super popular.

I don't even remember what it's called. I'll have to look it up later. And, and I remember her watching these videos and like the program was huge. It was like this giant kit that like took up a quarter of our living room. And there were all these like books and, um,  and I just, yeah. So my sister, she was diagnosed, um, with a learning disability and, uh, And now she knows as an adult that she has dyslexia, so she's like self diagnosed, but they didn't, they don't diagnose that in schools, you know, like schools do their assessments and the terms they use aren't the same terms that like psychiatrists use, you know, and, and my parents, you know, I grew up in kind of a lower middle class family, um, And my, both my parents were in the Navy, so they just, they just relied a lot on the school, you know, and like the tools and the resources that the school provided, which wasn't enough because my parents had to go out and buy, spend their own money on this like phonics program and like force my sister to constantly practice and like, I just remember fights every night, you know, and like, Just my parents being so overwhelmed, constantly trying to figure out how to help my sister, you know, and it's like, what was the school doing?

Well, the school was placing her in one of these special classes where she was the only girl and she was surrounded by a bunch of rowdy boys and she felt, you know, like, really alone and isolated and, and, and, and struggled, you know,  The entire time, you know, to try and pass her classes and, um, and with just be feeling ostracized and like she doesn't belong.

And, um, and I was just a terrible sister. I didn't  help her. And I just, yeah, I mean, it, it was sad. And so like, I,  that experience,  I look back on it and I feel like we were all so helpless. My sister, my parents, Um, and we were all like really, really impacted by all of this, you know, like, and, and,  and my parents, they just didn't know what to do, but they did everything they could.

And she graduated high school and she ended up going to a technical school for welding.  Um, and then, uh, And then she, she got really tired of welding and it was really kind of dangerous and a lot, very, a lot, like really hard on the body. And she realized that like, that this is not a healthy career, even though it was a really amazing creative outlet for her.

Like she did this welding rodeo and like my, we were so proud of her, just the things that she was doing. And like this competition where she's building like these really cool designs out of metal, you know, and. Just she's so artistic, um, and that was not harnessed, you know, in school, uh, and, and it wasn't really prioritized at all, uh, in our family.

But as an adult, as a young, uh, young adult, my sister really discovered her creative side. Uh, she taught me how to knit, like she was really into knitting and now she's, she paints and she has her own Etsy shop and she has, she's, uh, she, but she changed jobs to, uh, From welder to, uh, she works for the state patrol now.

Uh, and, and she's, she's great. Like she's doing so well, but  everything that she went through, you know, I, it really scarred her and I think it scarred me. Um, and I know that there are stories of. kids who go through school and don't graduate, you know, and, and who don't have parents who can buy these big flat phonics kits, you know, and like,  do all of these things to try and like, boost their kid's self esteem with  their, in various ways or whatever.

Um, And so then, you know, like, segwaying into, like, my college experience, uh,  you know, I was, like, the first in my family to go to college. I mean, my parents did end up graduating college, both of them, but while being parents and, like, in the Navy at the same time, which is crazy. So, like, I was the first one to You know, go to college when you're supposed to go to college, right?

Um, and so there was a lot of pressure there and, um, and, you know, my parents, I was always like writing came very naturally to me and we both process a lot. Out loud, like speaking, communication, I don't know, like those are strengths that I have and I've always had them. So like struggling with school wasn't,  I struggled socially, you know, I didn't struggle with like academics.

And I went to school to teach high school English. I went to a really very, very reputable, like, I don't know, expensive school. Teaching school that kind of has a like a really amazing reputation, which made it so that they could like charge way too much money. Um, but I did take multiple classes that got me super excited about reading just edgy stuff with kids, um, and and helping kids develop a love of reading through. 

YA literature. And so that was super exciting. But then when I got my first job, it was at the elementary level teaching fourth grade. And so that was a shocker. Like I didn't, you know, I looked for jobs to teach English, but I couldn't, I applied to many, but I didn't get. any offers and they were desperate in Salt Lake City for elementary teachers.

So I just, you know, I started teaching fourth grade and it's interesting you started in the Flatlands, so did I. And my school was mostly made up, like, white students were the minority, black students were the minority as well, uh, mostly. Hispanic, um, students and a lot of like English language learners and things like that. 

And we had a canned curriculum that we were supposed to teach to fidelity. And I just, that, you know, that's like the exact opposite of what I learned in my teaching program, like use really engaging books to teach reading. And so I very quickly, uh, discovered a hate  for canned curriculum, you know, like a, like a hatred for it, but there was  brava brava but there was like, um, you know, phonics and things in it and it was vocabulary and spelling and like all of these aspects, but it was like one story that you read Like multiple times throughout a week, and then you would use words from the story to teach vocabulary, then you would use words from the story to teach spelling, you would use, uh, like a writing prompt to teach writing, right?

And like the writing, um,  um, Stages of writing and so yeah, it just got really kind of boring and the kids were disengaged and like there were behavior problems and so I started secretly reading, I think Hatchet, like I started reading novels out loud. To the students and I felt like I was breaking rules doing it, you know, and, but that was when the behavior problems stopped.

And that's when kids, even kids that said they didn't like reading would go, Oh my gosh, I love that book. And, and I felt like, wow, okay, I, this is it. This is the answer. Like I knew it all along, like books.  Why aren't we reading more books? And just became really obsessed with engagement. And then I ended up teaching at that school for five years.

And then I went to a charter school. Uh, and this charter school was mostly white kids. And one day a week they had homeschool with their parents. And so, um, and so four days of the week they were with me. And then one day a week they were with their parents and it was like a project based learning school and a reading and writing workshop school.

So they really prioritized those, those ways of teaching. And so I continued my passion around reading and writing workshop, but there was a kid and I taught third grade that came to my class that didn't know how to read. at all. And the reason was because he did Waldorf for kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, and he was in my class.

And Waldorf, they don't, I don't know if you, how much you know about Waldorf, but they, there's like a big belief that kids will learn what they need to learn when they're ready to learn it. So forcing them to learn to read is not something that's done. So if the kid is not interested in reading, then they, aren't forced to learn to read, right?

So this kid is in my classroom and this is like my sixth or seventh year teaching  and, uh, this is third grade, right? And, and I, by then had my multiple subject credential,  still never taught how to learn how to teach reading. Like I wasn't even in my, cause I got my multi subject credential, right? And so I have this kid, I'm like six or seven years experienced teacher and have no clue.

How to help this kid. Yeah. Wait, what state was that in? Uh, Utah. Okay, so in Utah you're not required to take a test like the Rika. No.  So, okay, so this is really important. Like, we have so much we have to learn and do. If we don't, if we're not forced to take a test like Rika, we're gonna just be, we're gonna end up being like Utah.

Like, I understand why we got rid of Rika.  Because a lot of teachers were failing it and it was like getting rid of some of the teachers we want most in the profession but like we still desperately need to be taught this information and we need to be assessed on it. So come up with something else folks.

Sorry. Um, yeah, so like this kid. As time went on, I just felt so inadequate, you know? And honestly, the kid taught himself. I mean, he really did. He wanted to read. He saw everyone else around him reading. And so every day, like during reading workshop time, silent reading time, you know, I'm like asking him like, what are you interested in?

And like, what topics would you be interested in reading about? And like giving him like just right books, you know, and things like that. And and like he would read with this other girl and I swear she taught him to read because she knew how to read and so just this he was one of those kids that it came fairly easily and quickly so I just kind of breathed a sigh of relief like huh but Over and over again, like even as a 6 year teacher that year, every year there were kids that during workshop couldn't ever find a book they liked and were constantly wiggling around, complaining, like not able to actually sit down for a sustained amount of time and read, and who couldn't write very well, and who, and even to this day, my 15th year of teaching, I have kids who  I don't understand why they're struggling so hard in school.

Like, what is it? And I am the intervention teacher. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that either, but like, I'm the reading intervention teacher. I'm supposed to know this. This is my 15th year of teaching and I'm teaching high school now. And there's kids that still, um, You know, are struggling and, and, and we're just continually like pushing them.

And I don't agree with holding kids back. No, I know, but  wait, can I interject? Yeah. Your story is phenomenal. You are so brave and so many teachers are going to relate with what you're saying. I relate with what you're saying. And I didn't really get to chance to talk. I'm sorry about that pilot program that I put together.

Yeah. Yeah. So here's what I learned. Yeah. By the time a kid's in sixth grade, if you pull them out of regular ELA time to offer reading intervention or any kind of remedial coursework, um, the stigma, you talked about stigma, you noticed when you were in the low reading group in third grade,  but it becomes so significant, it actually yields negative learning outcomes.

They are so embarrassed. It is so shameful to be in a low reading group by the time they're in secondary. It's humiliating. So I stopped with trying to figure out what to do with those kids during my regular class time. And I asked, please, I beg, please give me an intervention class. Please have it be their elective class on top of their other class.

ELA time.  Um, but my school was trying to keep the white kids happy. And because they were fleeing because we had a growing climate and culture problem because of all these kids from the flats coming up with these behavior problems because they have experienced racial and socioeconomic injustices and they have drama and we didn't know how to deal with it.

So what they did to keep the white kids from fleeing was they turned us into an international baccalaureate school,  which could have been the Which definitely actually was the worst thing that they could have done because in an IB school, the kids are required to take extra electives and you know, they're not going to make the school day longer.

They can't do that. So they took those instructional minutes they needed to allocate for their extra electives from the core subjects.  So, you know, like I lost over 3000 instructional minutes a year with my kids. When then we switched to IB, you know, as a core teacher, cause you've been a core teacher, core means.

At least in the district in which we teach now, we just say core. We know what that means. In other districts, you have to say ELA Humanities Core because there's math and science core. Core refers to what we do with education in middle school. We're not really sure what we're doing, so we're trying out a number of things with middle school kids, one of which is to have them lumped with a multiple subject teacher for ELA and history, right?

So you know, because we teach five classes, that we have one, what we call split core. Right, so we have the same kids for early history, same kids for early history, and then you have a third group of kids. So you have two whole cores and then a third group with a split core, because you need a prep in there.

So you share that group with another teacher. We call it a split core.  The amount of instructional minutes I lost when we switched to an IB school were so significant, they were able to give me three full cores, Amanda.  Three full cores. full course because they're able to put it all in in a school day.

So the kids who needed more ELA instruction time got less at that school. And this was all in an attempt to keep the white kids from fleeing their own neighborhood school to make it look good on paper that were an IB school. So the guided reading model was what I used as my pilot. I got my hands on, like you were saying, just right books.

And it's really hard to find high quality books that don't insult older kids that are leveled, right? That are leveled. So I, I found out about read 180 books, not the pedagogical approach, not just the actual books. They're high quality books that are interesting and at the interest level of older kids, but they're leveled, right? 

And so I taught myself how to do the guided reading model, which is having a kid read out loud to you.  Right? Or you take turns reading back and forth, and you quickly correct for accuracy issues, and you notice prosody, you notice, you notice, notice fluency. So for those of you who aren't reading teachers, the things that we're trying to notice are how accurate are the words?

Are they omitting words? Are they saying the wrong word? How fast are they reading? And what is the tone like of their speech as they're reading? Is it rising and falling like it should? Or do they sound like a robot? And so I couldn't teach it because I didn't have the time in my schedule. So I got volunteers to come to my site.

I trained them how to sit down in pairs with these kids who were reading below the third grade level with these books and they would take turns reading back and forth asking questions about it, talking about it, and then moving on to the next thing. book. And it was an after school program that I created from scratch.

And I also followed up at home with parents. So they would take the book home with them that they just read with their reading buddy, their adult trained guiding reading partner.  They would take that book home with them and read it at home. Now, is that offering direct instruction in phonics? No, it's not.

There was no way I could do that.  There was, that was not an option. So it was going to help as much as it could help. And it helped for some. Like I had these like 10 kids who were reading far below grade level, who were behavioral nightmares in the classroom, driving, driving teachers away from our campus.

I would say a quarter of them showed measurable gains that just in that first year. So even that shows us even the benchmark data we were getting on them wasn't totally accurate either, right? So like, I don't even know how, where they were, where they really were on the continuum of reading skills. I That continuum, because I had not been able to sit there and assess them.

Nobody knew exact, because they were not Spen, they were Gen Ed,  nobody had ever sat down and really looked at these kids to see why can't they read. So I just threw high quality, and I had to grab those books by the way, those Read 180 books. I dove into the libraries of Many schools in my district during summer vacation because they were abandoned books that were just collecting dust in libraries,  jumped into these old libraries, collected these books, drove all over town to get them,  recruited the volunteers, trained them on the guided reading process of how to  correct, train the parents.

I talked to the parents at night every night on the phone  and also met with the kids.  I just donated copious amounts of my free time. That's what we did. Guided reading  and it was nominally successful. I think it was really only helping the kids who were  below grade level but probably not as low as we thought they were because some kids just bomb those reading tests, don't they? 

Yeah, they do. For various reasons and we're not quite sure why sometimes. Sometimes, um,  Because sometimes it can be because they can't read or because of motivation issues or other reasons. But, um,  yeah, I'm glad you were able to share what you ended up doing when you piloted and like how you kind of, um, piecemealed like a program to support your kids all by yourself.

Um, and I mean, I feel like,  I did that in a lot of ways too. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, like I read, um, a lot of books about like how to teach reading and actually even recently read some really  eyeopening books, like the knowledge gap by Natalie Wexler, which is about the importance of background knowledge in, in terms of like what you're actually reading and the importance of kids being exposed  to, um, Like cultural information, you know, and like news and, uh, nonfiction, um, information, science, um, and that, like in those upper grade elementary and middle school years, um, how amazing it can be for kids to be able to not only  increase their reading skills and comprehension and analytical skills and discussion skills, but also to learn about like scientific concepts  or to be able to talk about the world, you know, in like an articulate way.

And that's what, I mean, that's what the knowledge gap is about. And then, uh, reading reconsidered by Doug Lamov, um, he really  helped me understand the importance of reading aloud  with students and, and like,  we shouldn't feel like bad about reading out loud in our classrooms, not just us reading out loud to our students, but having student volunteers read out loud.

And I say student volunteers, like Doug Lamov, he talks about cold calling, which that's one of the like,  I still, I don't, I still don't necessarily agree with that. That's like really hard  to do to kids, you know, I don't do it, but I know that I'm, I should listen to them all read, but it's humiliating. Yeah.

Well, especially if you don't know how to read or you're, yeah, you have to. You're an introvert and like it's it's scary and I feel like that is like kind of mean but he does talk about how it like  really raises the engagement you know because kids are like really paying attention and don't want to get lost in the the text you know and that's one of the reasons that he does it and just like rigor and like high expectations for everyone and kind of that like holding the bar high for all kids no matter who they are.

But one more thing about Doug Lamov is and reading reconsidered that he talks about is the importance of when you do read novels with kids or even articles that they're advanced, you know, that they're above grade level, because if you're reading it out loud.  You want it to be a little bit higher level because you're processing it with the kids, you know, you're totally I completely need to be exposed to advanced text and be able to unpack that. 

Taking time, you know, to do those things in even elementary school classrooms, you know, like,  um, so I feel like we've just kind of solved the reading problem from K to 12 right now, just in what you just suggested and what I suggested, but also what you said, like getting volunteers that you trained. 

Those books with kids, I feel like we could get like retired those like dope retired teachers, kindergarten teachers that have the esoteric knowledge of teaching phonics to come in, you know, and teach phonics and but that's like, Like one on one or like a tutoring program for those kids that we know are illiterate,  you know, okay, so, so in our district that we're at now, right, we don't have, we have high quote, quote, quote high reading achievement.

I think it's some of it's highly disputable, to be perfectly honest. Um, part of the problem is that a lot of our students show up on the first day of kindergarten, already knowing how to read. Why? Their parents have paid for expensive reading instruction programs.  But what that means is our teachers  are not busy with the hard work of learning how to teach reading to the, to their students.

So there are still kids, like our dyslexic kids. Who show up not who are ignored and not are not getting that instruction or kids with specific learning disabilities who are not getting that instruction. We still have the exact same achievement gap in our district. We have now that we see nationwide with reading  with reading achievement when we're not doing a fantastic job in our district either like you.

What we need is high quality reading instruction from well vetted proven teachers Who know how to start from the beginning with the foundations of reading skills and go through that sequence, offering that direct instruction for tier one,  and then nobody who's not a proven entity should have any,  have any access to reading instruction until they've been properly mentored by these highly trained, highly paid, I mean, these will be a TOSA, right, a teacher on special assignment that got, it's got to be paid commensurate with that knowledge.

Thank you very You can't put them in these high responsibility jobs, these veteran first or second grade reading teachers, um, and then not pay them  more than a regular teacher salary. Like it's ridiculous. Like we have to honor that this is hard. We have to honor that these women hold esoteric knowledge.

We have to pay them for it. And there's no substitute. There's no quick fix for any of this. We don't have a good reading instruction game in this country because we don't empower our teachers to lead what we're doing. That's really it. We don't trust these women to tell us what to do with ourselves. And that's how we've gotten into this mess.

It's an embarrassment.  Yeah, um, and I, I just appreciate, you know, your vulnerability and I appreciate myself as well. Like admitting, you know, that this has been challenging. in our teaching careers and it's been, um,  yeah, it, it, it's defeating when you see a kid struggling and getting bad grades  and you don't know how to help them. 

That's it for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Don't forget to go to teacher shortage crisis. com to sign the petition and join the movement to stop it. Save K 12 schooling and our democracy. And remember, we may just be teachers, but we're the only ones who can fix this mess.