Lindsey Arnold

ENG 3550
10-19-2021

The Right Teacher

For three years I nannied a little boy and I worked with him on his studies for two hours,

three to four days a week on average. I started working with him when I was a freshman in

college, and he was five years old. His parents asked me to be his nanny and his tutor, and I

worked on a lot of studies with him, one of which was helping teach him to read and better his

reading skills. He was naturally talented at mathematics, but he struggled with reading. Perhaps

he simply didn’t enjoy reading as much because he did not naturally excel at it or maybe he was

not yet being given the right materials or being taught in the right manner. However, helping

teach him was interesting to view, aggravating to stick with, and rewarding to have taught all at

the same time. Corcoran writes in his book The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read, “What a

difference… a little extra time makes in learning. Imagine how the performance of students in

the lower half of the class might improve if they just had a few more seconds or minutes to

respond. Are children being given the time they need to succeed?” (188-189). This is how I

functioned; I provided that extra bit of time for him that he needed to reach the level of

achievement in reading that his peers were reaching. He needed those few extra minutes of

practice and think time with me to accomplish success at the level we all wanted him to,

including himself. There were many challenges and sometimes it took the extra push from me,

but with the right help, we were able to see progress together.

When I started teaching this little boy, he was just starting kindergarten and he was not

fond of his studies. The only one he liked to work on was math and we would do math together

as well as reading. I would have to work on three subjects with him while I was there: math,
spelling, and reading. I would ask him what he wanted to work on first when I got there and he

would always choose math, then spelling, and reading always came last. What I came to

understand about why he had a hard time with reading was that he couldn’t memorize the book.

He was memorizing the math problems that he had seen many times rather than solving them. He

was also memorizing how to spell words when I said them but if I showed him a written word he

might not know what it was. For math, I would show him a card and he would immediately

know the answer because he recognized the image of the math problem but if I spoke the

numbers, he might not know the answer. It took a long time to put these two together and realize

what was going on. Once I did though I was able to change my practices with him and

understand why reading was more difficult. Then, once he got comfortable with a particular set

of books (Mo Willems’ Piggy and Gerald series), he began to memorize the exact stories and he

would speed read them and say he had completed his thirty minutes of reading. This was smart,

but a cop out that he tried to use because he did not want to struggle with sounding out words

with new books he had not yet read. This reminds me of Corcoran’s story of memorizing stories

that his daughter read and telling them to her from memory without reading the words on the

page. It is easy to let this slip by and have people think that actual reading is occurring. A

watchful eye is necessary, not to ‘catch people in the act’ but because we need to be aware and

help those who have difficulties. If I had not been paying attention, I might not have caught the

fact that he was faking his way through the lesson and using his skills with memory to get by

without actually sounding out words to read. We began to try and work on sounding out words

and the next hurdle I saw was that he would skip a word and make something up if he came

across something he didn’t know. I would stop him while he tried to plow forward and have him

go back and try to sound it out. I would give him a couple chances and sometimes he would get
to the right word and sometimes not. If not, I would help him sound it out and then we would

move on. It could be a tedious process at times, and he would get aggravated a lot. However, I

began to see him making real progress.

As my kiddo got older, he began to practice guitar at his parents’ wish and spelling was

no longer part of his homework in school. Therefore, the three subjects to complete were now

math, reading, and guitar practice. Since he still loved math but not so much guitar, he chose to

do them in the following order: math, reading, and then guitar. A problem I began to see

occurring now was that by the time we got to the second activity he would start running out of

steam and by the time the last one came along it was just about completely gone. I wanted to

make sure he was getting better at reading since he had already made such advancements in

math, so I started having him begin with reading. I noticed he was getting much better at

sounding out words and he would finally start taking an interest when he found the Goosebumps

books by R.L. Stine, and he would want to read. He was reading much better now since this was

about a year and a half to two years later. I noticed that he finally began to take some ownership

of his learning because when he would come to a word he did not know he would ask me what it

meant and I would give him a definition and explain it in the context of the book. If I felt I could

not give a thorough definition of the word, I would let him ask his Alexa to give a definition and

then we would discuss how that new understanding fit into the context of the reading.

Interestingly though, he would still have difficulty telling me what happened in the chapter if I

asked him to give me a synopsis after the fact. I thought for a while that he was just reading the

words and not trying to understand what was going on. However, he was interested as he was

reading so this was confusing to me. I learned in an education class during this time (something

that Corcoran also discussed in his book) that through about third grade kids are learning to read
through phonics and sounding out words and then at about fourth grade and on forward they

begin to read to learn, having mastered reading itself and now reading to gain knowledge. This

made it clearer to me why he was able to read the book much better and more quickly than

previously but still not able to give a description of what he had read. He was still in the learning

to read stage and was not able to do both at the same time. While I am no longer working with

him, I would be interested to see if this is beginning to change now since he is in third grade this

year and getting close to the age at which children usually make great strides in this area. I am

sure in the next year I would see a lot of advancement in his skills.

While I do not remember a lot of my own journey with learning to read, it was

enlightening to see even just a few years of it from the other side. Being the educator (even if

only one of them) was very difficult and it was hard to be the one who was pushing this child to

a level that really frustrated and at times discouraged him. I continued to do so because I knew

he was capable of higher levels of achievement. At the end of the day though, even if he got mad

at me in the moment, he would thank me for teaching him and I know he truly wanted to learn.

He was just frustrated that it did not come to him easily. Perhaps I do not remember much of my

own journey to literacy because it came more naturally. I sure remember struggling in science

courses and with math problems. Some people are naturally inclined towards certain areas that

others are not, but everyone deserves a teacher who is willing to put in the effort to help them

succeed. There is a teacher for every content and every student. I am glad I was able to be one of

those teachers for this little boy and I hope he and all other children have many more caring and

concerned people in their lives in the years to come.

 Works Cited

Corcoran, John. The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read. Brehon Publishing, 1994.