Planting Seeds

Our school philosophy is to strive to make students WHOLE. We strive for their wellness, happiness, organization, their learning, and overall excellence. We believe addressing the WHOLE child will allow us to hone in on the elements of their wellbeing that traditionally have been ignored. Teachers, along with counselors, administrators, community programs, and other staff, are all now a part of the therapeutic web designed to catch a student from falling, falling away, becoming unavailable emotionally and/or academically. In all of this heavy lifting up of the WHOLE student, I’m wrestling with how to also address the current literacy crisis. What language is there, or what language do we create that centers both trauma and literacy as equally important educational emergencies, deserving equal time and attention?

“The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate 68% of fourth graders and 68% of eighth graders scored at or below the basic level of reading achievement” (The Big Picture p.6). In our own district, MAP testing reflects 33% of our 9th grade students are reading at or below the 3rd grade level, while 29% of our 10th grade students are reading at or below 3rd grade reading level.

When we put ourselves in a student’s shoes for a moment, one who has missed the critical foundational skills in reading and whose literacy is in arrested development, perhaps we can imagine the daily frustration this must cause, only adding to any other frustrations faced outside of school. How discouraging and frustrating an experience school has been for any one student who has struggled reading a newspaper article, or a paragraph in To Kill A MockingBird, not to mention the arduous task of reading “Romeo and Juliet” — all work that is required of most 9th graders. Then, when the same student enters math class and has to decode math problems, the issue is ever present again.

Addressing literacy in our classrooms simultaneously addresses trauma. Because literacy is access to possibilites, literacy spurs imagination, literacy is hope, literacy gives purpose to a student’s future whose present may feel devoid of a focus other than immediate survival.

So, when we focus on closing literacy gaps in our high school students by creating, for example, a cell phone free environment in exchange for student attention to reading strategies, we are contributing to the WHOLE child. When we pause from pushing through a unit on The Odyssey, to practice deconstructing multisyllabic words, If that’s what is needed, we are enriching student learning by re-introducing paths to literacy. When we turn off the audio of a text, where students are mostly passive listeners at best, and tuned out at worst, and take time with lessons that revisit phonological skill building and vocabulary fluency, we are aiding in lessening reading deficits, leading to better reading comprehension, which leads to a more confident reader, which translates into seeing a student grow into his/her wellness, both emotionally and academically.

My personal philosophy differs from my school’s philosophy on “making” students WHOLE. I feel “making” someone anything borders on me becoming their savior, of which I’m not a fan. However, I do believe I contribute to the WHOLE philosophy by planting seeds, and if I can plant seeds to literacy, seeds that were somehow missed along a student’s educational path, I have done a small part as a member of the therapeutic web that supports our students in becoming human beings better able to envision themselves as agents of a hopeful future.

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