The year is rolling to a close. A friend posts the remaining number of days above the time clock, and the spring weather has decreased our already dismal attendance.
Regina finds herself alone in my tenth period math class often.
I ask a question as she comes in that one day is going to get me in deep trouble.
"Reading or math?"
Regina is not half bad in math. She "passed" the state Regent's exam in January. By passed, I mean, she scored enough point to earn credit when her IEP is taken into consideration. It doesn't exactly qualify her as an algebra genius but most of the students in the self-contained special education program don't even reach that level.
We moved on to geometry. Which means we spend a lot of time coloring foldables (my new addiction) about angles and postulates and theorems and things like that. And Regina gets it.
But when tenth period rolls around and the halls have become deserted by all but the girl's track team, who practice in the hall since the boys get the running track, Regina often finds herself the only student in the math room. The first day in September I asked Regina to read aloud, she refused. She came up to me later and explained she didn't know how. She spent the first thirteen years of her life in country where education was not a regular thing and arrived in our school system long after the grade where reading instruction is a given.
I try to sneak it in. Sometimes we stay late. Sometimes I think maybe its more important to know how to sound out two syllable words than identify corresponding angles. I am aware it is not my decision to make. Its not Regina's either. I am her math teacher, her schedule says tenth period geometry.
We sneak out of the math room and hide behind the barriers in the Resource Room. There Regina figures out that pan and cake makes pancake. She knows the word or. When you have no phonic skills you get good at memorizing sight words. But it is a revelation that an h in front -and some letters in the back make horse. Or now store and forum become readable. Regina reads through a whole a story we found in an ancient stack of unloved readers. The pages are yellow. The stories refer to such anachronisms as video stores and beepers. They are not the shiny new complex non-fiction texts that the Common Core staff developer urges us to "scaffold" for our "challenged" readers.(Not that I have to worry about that - I'm a math teacher.)
But Regina gets through the whole page. She will never again say she can't read. (Okay so it was probably on a second grade level- but it was a lot of words and she understood what all those previously mysterious symbols were trying to convey).
She beams. This is happiness.
We got away with it. We did reading instead of math.
We didn't get caught.
Back to triangle theorems tomorrow.
Regina finds herself alone in my tenth period math class often.
I ask a question as she comes in that one day is going to get me in deep trouble.
"Reading or math?"
Regina is not half bad in math. She "passed" the state Regent's exam in January. By passed, I mean, she scored enough point to earn credit when her IEP is taken into consideration. It doesn't exactly qualify her as an algebra genius but most of the students in the self-contained special education program don't even reach that level.
We moved on to geometry. Which means we spend a lot of time coloring foldables (my new addiction) about angles and postulates and theorems and things like that. And Regina gets it.
But when tenth period rolls around and the halls have become deserted by all but the girl's track team, who practice in the hall since the boys get the running track, Regina often finds herself the only student in the math room. The first day in September I asked Regina to read aloud, she refused. She came up to me later and explained she didn't know how. She spent the first thirteen years of her life in country where education was not a regular thing and arrived in our school system long after the grade where reading instruction is a given.
I try to sneak it in. Sometimes we stay late. Sometimes I think maybe its more important to know how to sound out two syllable words than identify corresponding angles. I am aware it is not my decision to make. Its not Regina's either. I am her math teacher, her schedule says tenth period geometry.
We sneak out of the math room and hide behind the barriers in the Resource Room. There Regina figures out that pan and cake makes pancake. She knows the word or. When you have no phonic skills you get good at memorizing sight words. But it is a revelation that an h in front -and some letters in the back make horse. Or now store and forum become readable. Regina reads through a whole a story we found in an ancient stack of unloved readers. The pages are yellow. The stories refer to such anachronisms as video stores and beepers. They are not the shiny new complex non-fiction texts that the Common Core staff developer urges us to "scaffold" for our "challenged" readers.(Not that I have to worry about that - I'm a math teacher.)
But Regina gets through the whole page. She will never again say she can't read. (Okay so it was probably on a second grade level- but it was a lot of words and she understood what all those previously mysterious symbols were trying to convey).
She beams. This is happiness.
We got away with it. We did reading instead of math.
We didn't get caught.
Back to triangle theorems tomorrow.
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