The first week of June hopeful and high achieving high school students abound anxiously know that in large rooms readers grade their exams. Those students hope for fives, and maybe fours. Readers . . . we hope for decent exams that will not make us second guess our teaching and jobs entirely. This year I was one of those AP Exam Readers.
A week in Louisville, KY wasn't so bad. Grading thousands of exams (actually, there was a million and a half total for the US History test) wasn't so bad. Plowing through oddly placed comments, and outright funny statements from students did more than amuse. But . . . finding the exam from a student who is barely literate made you stop in your tracks.
Why are these exams--clearly not on par with the popular culture ideal of type-A personality, power driven, and high achieving students--in with the other AP exams? Some school systems require all students to take the exam. I am told that Georgia has this practice, and in other places everyone in the class has to take the exam. Hence, we got some drawings, some poems, recipes for brownies, and the painfully brutal reminder of student ability and cracks in education with the barely literate ones.
How does this relate to literacy and learning to read? When students graduate high school with little to any reading level they become the "problem" of the larger society. More so, in some instances they try to remedy their situation later on. Sometimes these students are learning disabled, have been given false hopes for years, and other times they have been misdiagnosed. There are even the times that potentially brilliant folks have slipped through the cracks. What do we do about this?
I would love to say overhaul education nationwide, but that is something that has been in the works for years and decades. All bad teachers can not be fired because there is not always someone waiting to take that position. So, sometimes schools have to make do. Yet, little programs like mine or big ones can see potential for these students. Allowing all students with weak reading skills to come for tutoring can help the problem. I've had students who were top students in their classes, yet they still showed up at my door looking for reading help and GED testing. Why? They fell through the cracks. These aren't the same students who took the AP Exam, but they are the same type. They can barely construct a simple sentence, they can not understand words with more than two syllables, and often they stick to one syllable words for ease and knowledge.
Instead, the next time a new student crosses your path think about their placement and role within the large path of literacy and the lack thereof.