I got a hold of one of the chairs that we used to sit in at Northside School in 1972. It was a little red wooden chair.  

People who sat in those chairs learned to read.  Eventually, I did too.

We sat at our regular desks and copied sentences from the board or worked on papers at our desks while reading groups sat together at the front of the room to read from the Sally, Dick and Jane books with Spot and Puff, among others. We started out with words like “Look!” and “Stop!”  

We also worked in books we called “chatter books” in which we traced letter sounds and made connections with the letter people, a group of characters we’d met in kindergarten and who had a television show on PBS. The letter people taught us sounds and the intricacies of phonics.  

Sitting with Sally, Dick and Jane helped us learn sight words. Both strategies gave us a solid basis for reading, and there were quite a few of us who learned to read really well.

Fast forward to my teaching career. I never knew what was happening, but more and more kids came down the pike not knowing how to read. By the time I got them in my class in the upper grades, there wasn’t much I could do to help them with the reading basics, but try I did, as did other teachers of the upper grades.

Some of those kids spent extra time in supplemental classes to hone their reading skills.

I remember there was just one kid in kindergarten who could read. Years later, I asked him about it, and he told about his mother being a teacher before she was married and he told how she began working with him and all his siblings, just a little, here and there.  They weren’t inundated with flash cards or hardcore studying: their parents just focused on sounds and words and reading from the time they were quite small.  

This kid was the runt of the litter: he had just learned to read at age 5 while two of his siblings had learned by 2½ and 3.  

But I think that’s just it: parents don’t make it a priority anymore. To me, it’s not rocket science. I usually took an informal poll, to avoid embarrassment, and would covertly find out which kids were read to once in a while, by parents or siblings or other adults in their lives. Invariably, the kids who were read to just a little bit were better readers and writers.

Shoot, you ought to see the lists of kids who need reading help these days.  Parents come to conferences and complain about it.  We have to add teachers to cover the help needed.

I once had a parent say “I wish my kid could read,” yet the responsibility was on the school solely. The school was blamed.

Now, this parent took the kids to every pitching and batting lesson they could, traveled extensively with select sports teams, and did just about everything in their power to improve the kid’s athletic prowess. Yet, the complaints that their kids couldn’t read continued.

I watched those kids grow into adulthood, wondering if any of them ever got better at reading.  

One thing I know is this:  none of them play sports anymore.

Judgemental? Probably.  I make no apologies.  

We have parents who place sports above all else.  Heck, schools do it too.  School boards, administrators, teachers: they all hold sports programs and athletes in high regard.  

It is screwed up, I tell you.

Those same parents take week-long vacations in the middle of the year and expect teachers to gather all the work they’ll miss and send it on vacation, yet either do none of it or get confused about how to do it because they are missing classroom instruction.  

Some parents get mad when schools make it a policy not to send work on vacations. They want to blame teachers and claim that they are lazy.

Whatever. To me, parents have mixed-up priorities sometimes.

We talk these days about the education system failing. We need to lump in the breakdown of the family and a new generation of parents who don’t know what the heck is important.