The students wouldn’t leave.
During the day, before the students came, I would dig through the shelves, searching through manuals and workbooks from past decades.
Our classroom had been the end-of-semester dumping grounds for teachers for the last 50 years. There were fraying books from the 60’s and 70’s on ESL and Citizenship. There were bound collections of poems or essays with titles like “Elaine’s Excellent English Level 1 Class! Spring 1981”. There was an entire cabinet of colorfully-packaged cassette tapes and magazines written just for adult learners during some long-gone era of spectacular funding and optimism.
There were children’s books, too: illustrated stories and 4th-grade Scholastic-type books on topics like sharks and earthquakes and Helen Keller. But the students I was trying to help couldn’t even read these books.
They didn’t know how to sound out a word. They didn’t know what the A in a word like bat sounds like. All their vowels shared the same undistinguished sound: uh. They mixed up B and D, and SH and CH. I told them, “This is a B, like bat. Here, try writing it.” But the next time they encountered a B, sometimes one or two words later, they would have forgotten.
At first I thought I could help them just by showing them. Didn’t I learn that way? But as I modeled sounding out one word after another in a children’s book (already cringing because the student knows this is a book for children), I became achingly aware of how many exceptions and strange rules there are.
“Yes, usually P makes a /p/ sound. But there’s an H there, so it’s /f/.”
“Ignore that E.”
“That H is… weird. Ignore it.”
“Yeah. So I just told you that A is /ӑ/, but in this word there’s the letter I next to it. So it’s an /ay/ sound…”
On a good night, I had volunteer tutors to sit with each one of the non-readers, and they’d struggle through a 4th-grade-level book about earthquakes or the rain forest, or even a children’s book, meant to be read to kindergarteners. The student couldn’t figure out the words – they couldn’t read, duh -- so the tutor had to provide almost every word in a laborious, humiliating echo pattern. You could feel the confidence draining from the student’s entire countenance, but they keep going, every now and then scolding themselves sternly (“Come on, man, come on.”) or muttering a mantra like, “I’m gonna get this. I’m gonna get this.”
It’s horrible to cause this much humiliation — and it’s not even working. We quickly quit this approach.
And then what?
Why can’t anyone tell me what to do?
They keep coming back.