I Got Stood Up, AGAIN

My reading student (we'll call her B) stood me up again. I want to feel annoyed by it because it inconveniences me to plan a lesson and then haul everything down to the meeting place, but then I remember that it's not like she can just write a note to herself about the time and place of the meeting, and then I feel bad about my anger.

Working with them is very interesting, because it boldly underscores the importance of early childhood education. Not that I thought education was frivolous before, but now I can see so much more clearly how kids who slip through the cracks even as young as the first grade face such disadvantages. Student B works very hard, but she is nearly 50 years old and I think that it will take her years of hard work to achieve a third or fourth grade reading level. She's not stupid. She has an excellent memory for words; she recognizes hundreds of words because she's memorized what the combinations of letters look like. It's just that her brain is totally untrained to read. She approaches words from every other angle before she gets off her duff, metaphorically speaking, and tries to read them.

Student B tells me that several members of her family have literacy problems and that there were never any printed materials in the house when she was growing up. Likewise, she never had books or newspapers around while her son was young, and he has reading trouble too. I found it interesting because Susan's sister Maureen, acting on some statistic she found that says that having ten books (or something in that vicinity) in the house is all it takes for a child to develop an interest in reading, has been trying to get books into the houses of her lower income neighbors. It sounds quixotic, but if Student B is any indication, maybe she's onto something very important.