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2002-01-23 | 9:32 a.m.

I volunteer twice a week in the school reading lab. The program coordinator (with some encouragement from me) agreed to start bringing in the kids----"newcomers," she calls them----who speak essentially no English. I was excited to have the chance yesterday to work with a little girl named Xochitl from my daughters' class. She would listen to a tape of a paragraph-long story and then struggle to recite it back to me. Her performance was okay, not great, but that was to be expected, since she's only in first grade and some of the English-speaking kids in the class can't read, either. I knew she was trying to memorize the words whole, so I tried to slow her down and work on sounding out words. You know, phonics. But it became clear that she really didn't know her letter sounds at all. So I started teaching her the letter sounds. But then I realized that she doesn't even know the names of the letters. If I pointed to an 'A' she just looked at me. Because I had said, "A, aah, aah, apple," before, when going over letter sounds, she said "apple" the next time I pointed to an A. Obviously not incapable, yet she couldn't tell me the name of the first letter in her name. So I got out a letter chart and began to teach her the ABCs. This boosted her energy level quite a bit, and she was sort of bouncing around the table, barking out the letters in a voice louder than I had ever heard her use. Finally, she must have thought, something I can actually DO.

It really pisses me off to think that this seven-year-old child has been in first grade since September and doesn't know her ABCs. That nobody ever taught her even to spell her own name in English. I don't think I expect miracles, but let's give this kid some curriculum she can use, for Christ's sake. Even though I am only a parent volunteer, I am bound and determined to teach this little girl her ABCs in short order. Not to mention how to spell her name.

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