Reading: A quintessential life-skill

My mother worked as a public-school elementary teacher in the United States for a quarter of a century.  Many of her kindergarten students would tell their approximately thirty-year-old parents that their forty-five-plus-year-old teacher was much younger than they were.  Years later, I would often joke with my mother and tell her that this was the reason she had remained a teacher.

But my mother was too indifferent to public opinion to set much store by flattery. Her actual motivation came from watching her students become excited when they learned something new, or from seeing a child’s eyes brighten when a concept they struggled with was finally grasped.  My mother was obviously as inspirational as she was conscientious in her duties: ninety-five percent of her students performed at a level at least two grades above their age group when tested at year-end.

But with the ups came the downs. What would frequently break my mother’s heart was to watch many of her former students who had showed great promise early on, deteriorate into below grade-level under-achievers within a few years of attending primary school.  It almost appeared as if the child’s potential had been squandered, never to be recovered.

So great was my mother’s exasperation by this turn of events  that she resolved to do something about it and reverse the trend. After thinking long and hard about the root cause of the issue, she concluded that there could only be three potential drivers:

• Parents : either they were incapable of helping their children, or were unwilling to subordinate the exigencies in their lives to do so
• Teachers: it was likely that they had begun to view their occupation as a job rather than as a vocation
• Students: it could very well be that they lacked the self-motivation to continue learning on their own

My mother was also very pragmatic. She realized that if the issue had to be resolved either by parents or teachers, she would not be able to do much about it. She had neither the position nor the mandate. Thus, she decided to change her core focus area in order to address what she saw as the main stumbling block for students.

She became a reading specialist.

She decided to train her attention on those students who were far behind the rest of the class.  She would work one-on-one with these students to enhance their ability to read, comprehend and retain.  As the school year progressed many of the students were able to return full-time to the regular classroom where they now excelled. Moreover, as confidence in individual ability grew, disciplinary problems in the classroom, often born of frustration and ridicule, shrank commensurately.

The success of my mother’s fortuitous decision to switch from a kindergarten teacher to a reading specialist may be demonstrated by the fact that, long after my mother retired, she would occasionally get a letter from one of her former pupils, or one of their parents, detailing some or other accomplishment – graduation with honours from a university, their first job in their chosen career field – which they would ascribe to her dedication and diligence.

But my mother preferred to pass on the credit to the students themselves, because it was her lifelong belief that if one can read competently, one can keep learning continuously. Reading is not just a prerequisite to mastering a language, it is a competency that enables thought, comprehension, knowledge retention and up-skilling.

This is why reading is a must-have life-skill, without which intellectual development is severely constrained.