I work in a small, alternative high school in rural North Carolina
where all of our students have struggled to succeed in traditional educational
settings. Some have anxiety disorders,
some have learning disabilities, some have experienced such severe trauma that
school has been rendered irrelevant.
It
is often difficult to tease out what particular obstacle is preventing any
given student from succeeding on any particular day. More often than not, it’s something
temporary—lack of sleep, an interpersonal dispute, some chaos at home. My solution is usually patience,
understanding, maybe a hug, and an extension of the deadline.
Still, when the same type of failure continues to occur, I am
apt to worry that something more intractable or nefarious is at work.
Frank[1]
kept failing my vocabulary tests. Where
nearly all my other students were getting As and Bs on them, Frank was averaging about 45%. And I wasn’t even
asking them to use the words in a sentence.
We’re talking matching and multiple choice.
I was beginning to wonder if Frank had a learning disability
or some type of processing disorder. But
then I watched him while he “studied” the words on Quizlet (www.quizlet.com). He would stare at a flash card for a while,
then flip to the next word. This went on
for as long as I allowed the students to study.
I crouched by his desk and
said, “Frank, show me how you study vocabulary.”
He
pulled up the list and began looking at it.
I
asked, “Are you quizzing yourself in your head?”
“Huh?”
“Like,
do you look at the word and then think in your head, ‘That word means . . . whatever stuit means,’
and then flip over the flash card to see if you’re right?”
The
look on his face was not unlike the one my dog makes when she hears my mom’s
voice coming from my phone.
“Try
this. Flip that card over and look at
the definition.”
He
did. “Okay.”
“Now
flip the card back over so you can only see the word.”
“Okay.”
“What’s
the definition?”
He
started to turn the card back over.
“Nope! Without looking, can you remember what the
definition is?”
“I
wasn’t paying that much attention.”
“Okay,
flip it back over and this time pay attention to the definition. Say it out
loud if you have to. Say it a couple of times.”
He did.
“Now
flip it back over to the word. Can you
remember the definition?”
“Yeah.”
I was
skeptical. “What is it?”
“You
want me to say it out loud?”
“Yes!”
He
struggled to say the entire definition with accuracy, but he was close.
“I want
you to do that for each of those words until you can say the definition and
know it’s right before you flip over the card.”
“Okay.”
On his next vocabulary quiz, he passed. Not by the highest
of margins, but he passed. His performance on vocabulary quizzes continued to be
erratic, depending on how much and how earnestly he studied. Still I knew he had the capacity to do the
work.
What I had been tempted to
attribute to a cognitive deficit was so much simpler. In 16 years of school, he had never learned
how to study for mastery.
A few weeks ago, I decided to see if a similarly simple
intervention might help with a different problem. Mark is a dreadful speller. And I don’t mean he leaves out or uses the wrong
letters; he leaves out entire syllables.
His writing is unrecognizable as English.
I had been operating under the assumption that he had poor
phonemic awareness and was fundamentally unable to spell proficiently. While students were working individually, I sat next to him
and asked, “When you were younger did anyone ever teach you about segmentation?”
“About what?”
"When
you break a word apart into syllables and you spell the syllables.”
Blank stare.
“Like, take the word
‘condescending.’ Spell ‘con’.”
Eye roll. “C-O-N.”
“De?”
“D-A?”
“We’ll come back to that. Spell ‘Scen’.”
“S-E-N”
“And ‘ding’?”
“D-I-N-G.”
Granted, he had still spelled it incorrectly but not so incorrectly that a reader wouldn’t be
able to discern what word he was aiming for.
Last week, I administered a midterm exam with 21 vocabulary
words. Mark spelled 8 correctly. Of those that remained, 9 were off by 1
letter, a tenth by 2.
Three were still unrecognizable. Baby steps, people! Baby steps.
I’m now in a pitched battle with a colleague over a shared
student who consistently underperforms.
She wants to lay the bulk of the blame on his ADHD. Does the kid have ADHD? Yes. Is
that a catch-all excuse for every problem he is facing in the classroom. Absolutely not. I need to work with him on studying more
effectively, asking questions when he doesn’t understand something, and using
all the resources available to him.
I am not suggesting that learning disabilities and disorders
do not exist. I am asserting that we are
often too quick to assume that a student can’t
do something when the truth is that no one has yet taught them how.
