.

The door opened  to a chubby, dark skinned little boy full of smiles plus a lot of tension in his body which was noticeable by the way he clenched and unclenched his fists.

“Hi,” I greeted him, “so happy to meet you.  My name is Bella and yours?”

“Yonathan”, he proudly said and shook my stretched out hand.

“Come on in.  Let’s see what I can help you with?”

Yonathan sat down across the table from me and very proudly told me that he could not read. This picture of pride remained in my mind.

The story that I had been told by his teacher was a strange one.  Yonathan, was more than halfway through his second school year. He had learnt to read already in his first year at school.  All of sudden he lost this ability.  He had been sent to all sorts of tests; eye tests, psychological assessment, cognitive assessment. No-one could find anything wrong.  I was the last resort she said.  A heavy responsibility indeed.

 I tried this and I tried that.  Tried all the old tricks and made up new ones.  We had lots of fun together but no progress whatsoever.  During one of the sessions,  I said I would read a sentence and put in nonsense words instead of a real word and I wanted him to tell me if he could recognize the word I read incorrectly and correct it.  He always knew when I put in my nonsense words and how to correct it. But when he read a word incorrectly and I pointed it out to him, he could not correct it. I couldn’t work out was was going on.  No sign of improvement, it was most unusual.  One minute he knew and the next minute he didn’t.  It was nerve wracking and weird.  The words ‘does he know or doesn’t he know’ kept floating around my brain.  I was on the edge of giving up and marking my first failure.   Whilst sitting with my cup of morning coffee and thinking whether to ‘throw in the towel’ a mad thought eureked into my brain and I  could not wait for our next session together.

For the next meeting, I decided to change the setting of the room.  I wanted him to understand that we were going to work differently from now on and that he has to make new decisions.  It wasn’t about me teaching him to read, it was something different entirely.  We sat opposite each other without the table separating us and  with a very serious look in my face and eyes, I said:  “I have discovered your secret.”  I did not say what I had discovered but he could hear that I was not playing games with him.

His body seemed relaxed at this point, almost as if he was happy that at long last he could share his truth.  I handed him a glass of water which he willingly took and drank while looking straight into my eyes he said, “No one else managed, so how did you guess?”

I did not answer this question of his, I just quietly asked him: “Why did you do it?”

I had put all the information from all the sessions that we had done together and it seemed clear that this second grader had all the necessary knowledge to be able to read.  But for some reason he had decided to mix everything up and make out that he could not and then I believed that he reached a stage where he was so confused that he couldn’t straighten it out for himself and had lost his own judgement as to what was right and what was not.  His story was simple and somehow sad and lots of food for thought for all teachers out there.

He looked straight in my eyes and started getting the whole story out of his system.  “I learnt to read quite easily and because of this no-one really paid much attention to me.  The teachers were busy with my classmates who couldn’t read.  During the year I noticed the teacher always talking to parents and telling them all sorts of things.  I didn’t know what she was telling them.  One day I asked her why she never spoke to my parents and she said that there was nothing to say to them because I was a good pupil.  I felt hurt.  I so wanted my parents to know that I was better than most of the others but understood that the only way to get her to invite them was if I didn’t know and not because I knew.  And so I decided that I would become a ‘bad pupil’.

‘What an effort!’ I thought, ‘to know the sound and to put in its place something else…exhausting if you ask me!’  He was getting so good at it that he was beginning to forget which were the real sounds and which were the made up ones.

    I promised him that I would not tell anyone his secret, on one condition, and that was that he would get back his reading skills and we would surprise everyone.  We planned together that I would ask the teacher if he could read a story to his classmates one Friday morning when he was ready and invite his parents to come.  It took us 6 more sessions  and he was ready to face the class.  Yonathan and I were so excited about the whole venture that neither of us slept the night before.

    I waited at home anxiously, nervously and impatiently for an excited phone call from his teacher.  By the afternoon i could not control myself any longer and called.

“How did it go?” I politely asked.

Her reply was one of anger.  “What sort of tricks are you playing?  You taught him a story which he learnt by heart and pretended to read!!!!”

    TO LAUGH OR CRY  – that is the question…

I almost lost my cool.  I wanted to scream and shout and tear my hair out.  I could see Yonathan so proud of himself standing there in front of the class and reading and once again just getting a causal sort of “that was good, thank you Yonathan’, from the teacher.  No acknowledgement once again of the huge effort he had put into it.

“Instead of being angry”, I suggested, “you could have easily checked him quietly on your own with another text.  I suggest that that is what you do and I will call you again and would like to know what happened.”

    His mother called, “thank you for all the work and thought put into the sessions.  I bought him a new basketball as a present for all the work that he had done and his success.” she said

I sat with the adviser to make sure that all parents should in the future be invited to school – even good students needed positive feedback!  This little student was an important teacher to so many people and perhaps saved so many others from doing something like this.