I Am Sam, Sam I Am

When I think about my literacy development in reference to my learning and teaching, I think of it in phases: as a child when my foundation was established, as a student when my foundation was built upon, and as a teacher as I explore this structure that has been created. I see this development as an ever-evolving process. It has been a metamorphosis from one stage into another; without one stage the next would be altered in some way.

I feel that some of us are more apt to have a passion for reading than others. Like Robert Slavin, in his article “Reading Reform”, I think some of us are natural readers and thus are prone to be drawn to books. I agree with Slavin in his breakdown of natural, teachable, and tutorable readers and feel that exposure to reading influences one’s ability to learn. I am lucky that I fell into the “natural” readers category, but even this might never have been discovered and nurtured if not for my early childhood foundation.

It all began with being read to as a small child. I believe this sparked my love of reading, enhancing my “natural” tendency. The Brothers Grimm fairy tales were my favorite. I knew every fairytale by heart. I also loved Richard Scary’s poems. I would have two read to me before bed and I would beg for more. Not because I wanted to stay up later, but because I really loved the poems. They came alive in my head. I could always lose myself in a book.

Another integral part of my literacy development was being introduced to I Am Sam, Sam I Am. He was the friendly lion in the thin yellow book. I had a whole box of these thin yellow books that I would read as a young child. Thanks to Sam, I learned how to read at an early age. I did not find him or his monkey friend intimidating. In fact, I enjoyed hanging out with Sam and his buddies. Mothers who wanted their children to read before they started school passed around these books in my neighborhood. I was lucky. Lucky that I had Sam’s books and a mom in my life who would review the vowels and sounds with me before I started school. My mom’s one on one time gave me a foundation in reading so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed when I began school. The gain in just one-hour every day of reading and phonics was tremendous, and without it, I doubt I would be the voracious reader I am today.

My mom would also take me to the public library regularly. I was in awe of all the incredible books and could spend hours looking for the right book to check out. Again, I was lucky. Lucky to have parents who would take the time to pick out quality books and read to me instead of sitting me in front of a television. Lucky to have a mom who would spend time reviewing sounds and vowels and spend time showing me how to select a good book and then set me free in a library to explore. Parental involvement played a huge role in my literacy. If I had not been exposed to books and the library at such an early age, I wouldn’t have been capable of performing at the level I did upon entering school. Unfortunately, as I discovered later in life, not everyone has this advantage.

I lived in a world for some twenty years where everyone was literate and well educated. Due to my love of literature and wish to share that passion with others, I majored in English and became certified to teach English 6-12. However, I ran into a problem during my student teaching at a culturally diverse high school in south Miami. My students were struggling with the reading material in the curriculum (Shakespeare, John Donne, Mark Twain). Unfortunately my supervising teacher offered no suggestions or guidance in how to meet these readers at their various levels. I discovered that this group of students was not alone when I started teaching night school developmental writing in Miami, Florida. My students were not able to get into college because of high school grades. Some could not write complete sentences. I asked myself, what had happened to these students? How had they missed the boat? They were so far behind. How would they be able to compete with the college students from my neighborhood? After this experience I went back to school to try to learn some more effective teaching techniques. I discovered that technique had a lot more to do with teaching than with what books I had read in college.

In graduate school I became interested in multicultural literature. A large part of this focus was due to my wanting to find colorful and diverse literature that would appeal more to my students who were mainly from South and Central America and the Caribbean. Through my reading, I could visit new places like Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and a Pauite reservation discovering the people as well as learning different points of view. I had been exposed mainly to English and American authors so my knowledge base was narrow. The new literature was exciting in that it dealt with conflicts differently depending on the culture from where it came. It gave me new perspectives. I could see how prominent a place multicultural literature would have in my classroom. And indeed, multicultural literature has remained a focal point for what I read for pleasure as well as what I bring into the classroom.

When I returned to the classroom, I used my new techniques and literature and students responded well. But I still wasn’t satisfied. There was something I was missing. Some piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there. I felt stifled in the classroom. I didn’t feel that my students had the freedom to explore topics in the ways that they could. It seemed traditional education just didn’t seem to work for many of my students. It was during my exploration of this dilemma that I discovered experiential education. I apprenticed and then became an instructor for Outward Bound, whose founder was an experiential education guru, Kurt Hahn. What appealed to me about experiential education was that students were actively engaged in the process of learning. The experience was the vehicle that provided them with insight. The teacher’s role eventually would be to provide minimum structure and assistance so that students would be successful. The beauty in this approach was true empowerment. Now all I had to do was incorporate this amazing approach into my teaching in a traditional school. My classroom went from being the trees, rivers, and mountains with hard core natural consequences to four concrete walls where the consequences, although often times not immediate, could be much more severe.

The next experience that significantly influenced my educational career was teaching in Indiantown, Florida. I taught mainly ESL kids in an impoverished rural community. Eight five percent of my students had difficulty reading and were below grade level with parents that spoke little English and were lucky to have an elementary grade education. I used experiential education as often as I could in the classroom but found that I had to give a lot of instruction because most of my sixth graders were performing so far below grade level. I began to wonder if I could teach using solely the experiential education model. Was it possible? It was by no means a standard form of curriculum but was gaining acceptance and high praise in some circles. This questioning brought me to one of the most powerful educational experiences of my life.

In the summer of 2002, I used the experiential education approach in a six-week course for high school students from the Bronx who were performing below grade level. We did an intensive reading, writing, and science unit and by the end of the course most were performing on grade level. It was truly amazing to see their self-confidence surge and the pride they took in reading and writing their stories. And what stories they had! So rich. So essential to who they were. When it was over, I was exuberant because I saw experiential education’s success. Reality when brought into reading and writing, math and science can make all the difference in the student understanding connections as well as motivating them to succeed. And these students didn’t earn grades – all they received were credits for completing a course. Yet they were committed and invested in the process, even though they had initially been unsure of the destination. After this course, other questions began to surface. Mainly, why should a student have to wait until he or she is fifteen or sixteen to feel empowerment? How could I bring this experience to kids at a younger age? I had been teaching middle and high school, but I wanted to find out what could be done at an earlier age to help so many of these students get to where they needed to be in order to escape the label of “struggling readers.” Every high school student who is below grade level doesn’t have access to an Outward Bound course, even though I wish they did.

These questions have brought me to where I am today – still searching for answers as to what works best when teaching struggling readers. I learned through Outward Bound that empowerment changed lives – it can create caring, compassionate citizens. In my opinion this empowerment can’t evolve if a student never reaches a high school reading level and the ability to write in complete sentences. Just as I know that luck had much to do with my own early childhood literacy development, I am aware we cannot depend on luck for literacy development in so many of today’s children. Intensive reading programs in the early grades provided by our public schools can bring some measure of luck into the lives of these children, opening the door to their literacy and the world beyond.