Winning One Small Battle for Literacy
January 2, 1997. The New York Times.
Room 3-223
Third-grade teachers throughout New York City are trying to meet Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew's goal for the school year: by spring, all third graders should be able to read on their own and at grade level. Last year, fewer than half of them could. This series visits one class trying to meet the goal.
NEW YORK -- There are few books in La-Toya Pankey's apartment on 102nd Street near Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, and even fewer places for an 8-year-old girl to steal away to read them.
There is no desk, no bookshelf, no reading lamp or even a bureau in La-Toya's small room, one of only two bedrooms in the apartment she shares with seven other people: her mother, her five sisters and her infant brother.
At night, there is little light, save a couple of bare bulbs mounted on the peeling, beige walls. And there are not many places to sit, beyond a lone, wooden chair at a battered kitchen table, which La-Toya must wait her turn to occupy.
Yet there was La-Toya, on a rainy evening earlier this month, leaning against that table and reading aloud, flawlessly, to her mother from the Roald Dahl classic "The Witches," which she had borrowed from the makeshift library in her third-grade classroom.
For La-Toya, as well as her teacher, Ted Kesler, it was an important moment: after reaching for first-grade-level books like "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" well into the fall, La-Toya had recently begun to take on, and understand, books like the "The Witches," which is divided into chapters and written for children two years older than she.
"I would have thought that book was too hard for her," said Kesler, shaking his head as a visitor to his classroom, Room 3-223 at Public School 75 on the
The tale of La-Toya's success, with all its fits and starts, is as illustrative as any other of the forces that must come together, and the hurdles that must sometimes be vaulted, for a third grader to improve her reading.
Like rock climbers scaling a difficult peak, La-Toya and the 30 other students in Kesler's class, who are to return from Christmas break Thursday, are at various stages in pursuit of the goal that schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has set for every third grader: to be able to read, discuss and enjoy books written at their grade level by spring. It is an achievement that fewer than half of all third-graders at La-Toya's school, as well as citywide, accomplished last year.
La-Toya, a small girl who pulls her thick hair back into a tight knot with a rubber band, is only one of many in the class who are making some progress toward meeting the standard.
To be sure, Kesler has played a vital role: He has huddled with La-Toya several times over the last three months, imploring her to set aside Dr. Seuss for more challenging books; he has spent dozens of hours reading aloud with her and her classmates, teaching them to extract meaning from the printed page, and he has practically laid books in their hands, encouraging each student to take home a book to read for at least 20 minutes every night.
But the overriding factor in La-Toya's success, Kesler says, is La-Toya herself, and her determination to read.
La-Toya likes to read late into the night, her flashlight glowing underneath the thin, flowered blue blanket atop her metal bunk bed. She also reads while walking down
She reads, she says, whenever she can, mostly as an escape from a life that is rarely easy.
"A book is like a friend," she explained. "When you're lonely and no one wants to speak to you, you can go read."
It was, La-Toya said, a lonely time for her when she entered Room 3-223 for the first time in September. While the other children in the class had been drawn in bunches from three second-grade classes, La-Toya was the only child drawn from a fourth class that combined first and second graders. She knew no one.
"When we chose partners for lining up to go to lunch, she never had one," Kesler said. "She was afraid to ask. I usually had to find someone for her."
She showed a similar timidity in her reading. One of the ways Kesler monitors the children's reading at home is through a log, in which each registers, on a nightly basis, the title of the book she is reading, the author, the number of pages read and any comments.
La-Toya's early entries show that she was picking quick, first-grade-level books with lots of illustrations, including "Disney Babies at the Big Circus," on Sept. 26 and "Where is Mickey's Red Ball?" on Sept. 27.
It was difficult for Kesler to tell at first whether these books were challenging La-Toya, because she rarely spoke during class discussions. But when the children began breaking off into pairs to study the third-grade-level book they were reading as a class, "The Mouse and the Motorcycle," Kesler could tell, from eavesdropping on La-Toya as she read aloud, that she was sailing through it.
On Oct. 25, during the 30-minute class period devoted to independent reading, Kesler motioned La-Toya over to a small wooden desk.
She had selected "One Fish Two Fish" to read, and Kesler first asked her whether she considered the book "too easy," "just right" or "too hard."
"Too easy," La-Toya quickly said.
"What makes this book too easy for you?" he asked.
"The words," she said.
"Why did you pick the book, if it was too easy?" Kesler asked.
"Because I like it," she said.
Kesler then asked La-Toya to follow him to a set of bookshelves, where hundreds of titles were arrayed in categories like "quick reads," "chapter books" and "scary stories."
He selected several chapter books for her, including "Kimako's Story," by June Jordan, which is about a 7-year-old girl who, like La-Toya, is black and lives in a city apartment.
"Let me know how you like it," Kesler said. "I love this book."
Four days later, La-Toya logged on her reading chart that she had finished the thick book. She talked about Kimako's mother being too tired to braid the girl's hair -- just as her mother is sometimes too tired to braid her hair.
"Did you read every word of it?" her teacher asked her. "The whole thing? If you didn't, tell me."
"I read all of it," she replied, "on Friday when I got home."
Kesler beamed.
But the question immediately became: could Kesler make the habit stick?
Ted Kesler, a 35-year-old marathon runner who wears the wire-rimmed glasses of a scholar, has been teaching for nine years. And if there is one thing he has learned, it is that what students do at home is critical to maintaining their success in the classroom.
"It's the same thing as a violin teacher," he said. "In that half-hour lesson, the student sees what is possible with the violin -- 'Look at this beautiful song I can learn.' But you have to practice those scales every day and work on your bowing technique. If the student comes back to class without practicing, they'll be where they started."
It is not always easy for La-Toya to practice.
For one thing, there is little to read in her house, except for a stack of Young and Modern magazines that belongs to her mother, a few slim spiritual books with titles like "Live Forever," and one of the only children's books the family owns: a 30-year-old story titled "Sea Beach Express," its back pages torn out and its cover stamped "Discarded: Salvation Army."
La-Toya's mother, Veronica Pankey, 32, who graduated from
She refers proudly to La-Toya as her "whiz kid" and "little bookworm," interrupting her third daughter's reading only when it is time to clean up the apartment. And Ms. Pankey attempts, although it is sometimes difficult, to quiet her children for some extended period each night for "peace-of-mind time."
Yet in school, something has been holding La-Toya back.
She usually weaves through class unnoticed, wearing a pair of green or violet corduroy pants, and a matching turtleneck. But occasionally she gets into trouble.
On the eve of Halloween, for example, the day after she finished reading "Kimako," La-Toya suddenly and dramatically flopped to the floor outside class, as the children waited to file in after recess. Kesler quickly determined that there was nothing physically wrong with her and, after failing to persuade her to get up, hauled her to the main office, where she spent the rest of the day.
The next morning, he held her back from gym class for a half-hour, trying in vain to get her to tell him what happened. No matter what the question, she only pursed her lips and folded her arms.
Finally, Kesler asked her to signal with a nod if she had staged the fall because she had been upset about something. She shook her head no. Then he asked, "Did you do it because you thought it was funny?" She nodded.
"I said, 'Good, now we know that's not a funny thing to do,"' Kesler recalled later.
"You can't teach her when she is like that," he added. "It's like a blockade."
But in the weeks that followed, throughout November and into early December, something noteworthy happened: The books that La-Toya began choosing to take home were increasingly challenging.
On Nov. 8, she reported reading the first 15 pages of "You Can't Eat Your Chicken Pox, Amber Brown," an early third-grade book; on Nov. 21, she logged her reading of the first 39 pages of "The Barking Ghost," a fourth-grade-level book in the popular "Goosebumps" series, and on Nov. 25, she reported reading from Pages 7 to 85 of "The Witches," which was written for fourth and fifth graders.
The lesson was sticking.
"Mr. Kesler taught us not to read baby books," La-Toya said, "to pick hard books."
And if she occasionally picked up something lighter -- like a "Calvin and Hobbes" comic book, as she did on Oct. 30 -- that was OK, too, Kesler said. "It's like saying, 'I'm going to exercise for an hour and then have ice cream for dessert," he reasoned.
The only lingering pattern of concern, Kesler said, are the periodic stretches when La-Toya avoids books for several days.
Scratched in pencil on her reading chart on Nov. 26, Dec. 3, 4 and 5, for example, are the words "I did not read."
On Dec. 5, Paul Bauer, a student teacher who had been reviewing the reading charts for Kesler, confronted La-Toya about why she had stopped reading. As she did several weeks earlier with Kesler, she refused to answer. And she did not speak to Bauer for the rest of the day.
Neither Kesler nor Bauer could determine the root of the silence. And La-Toya's mother fared no better several nights later.
"What is it that is wrong with you, when you shut us out?" Ms. Pankey asked La-Toya in front of a visitor. "Did something happen?"
La-Toya merely clenched her lips.
"'Toya, we're talking to you," her mother persisted. "We're asking you."
Nothing.
Later, her mother said: "She's been doing that since she was a little girl. I don't know why she does it. But I don't let it get to me."
The next night, La-Toya was reading again, this time an installment of the popular "Boxcar Children" series, which is right on her grade level.
And she has read, pretty much without interruption, every day since.
In fact, La-Toya has become such a good reader that she has recently begun to share her skills.
Over breakfast last week, she picked up the book "Pippi Longstocking," which her 6-year-old sister, La-Timmah, had received as a gift from an after-school program, and opened to a page.
"Come on, Timmah," she said, "try."
Her sister, a first grader, shook her head.
"From right there," La-Toya said, pointing, "where it says, 'When the policeman ..."'
"But I don't know how to read," La-Timmah said, cutting her sister off.
And so La-Toya began to read aloud, as her sister sat rapt.
Kesler had witnessed a similar scene.
On the Friday before Christmas vacation, La-Toya pulled down the third-grade book "You Can't Eat Your Chicken Pox, Amber Brown." She sat next to her classmate Simone Trahan, who is reading well, but not as well as La-Toya, and they began to read together.
"Here was La-Toya, not only engaging in a book, but supporting another reader," Kesler said. "I was proud of that -- proud that my classroom was a place she could do that."
It was a moment that evoked the essence of teaching, Kesler said, one when he knew a student had heard what he had said and absorbed it.
"I basically take the approach that I'm going to inundate them from every angle and variation," Kesler said, "sort of like pelting them with hailstones. Some of those hailstones penetrate."
From the New York Times, January 2, 1997 © 1997 The New York Times, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the