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At Age 8, Crossroads in Reading

Jacque Steinberg, The New York Times

February 24, 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.

Ted Kesler paced anxiously outside the tiny office with the gray metal door.

It was a grim morning in early February, and he was about to meet with a team of evaluators -- a psychologist, a social worker and a former teacher -- about one of Mr. Kesler's third-grade students, Lawrence Marcel.

Lawrence, a shy boy with glasses as thick as a windshield, arrived in Mr. Kesler's class unable to read beyond the three-word sentences in a kindergarten-level book and had been struggling all school year.

Frustrated, Mr. Kesler had asked the special-education team at the school, Public School 75 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to evaluate Lawrence, and on this day they were to deliver their recommendation.

They were to decide whether to assign Lawrence a tutor during class; teach him one period a day in the more intimate setting of a resource room, or put him in a special-education classroom full time.

Mr. Kesler said he was worried that the team might choose the last alternative.

Students assigned to full-time special education rarely graduate from high school -- a harsh sentence, he thought, for an 8-year-old.

"I guess it scares me," he said, "because, once you get in, you never get out."

The story of how Lawrence got to this crossroads is, in a sense, the story of a teacher's struggle to help a desperately needy reader -- when 29 other children are also clamoring for his guidance.

But it is also the story of a boy from a loving family who turns out to be far more intelligent than his teacher thought, but who is plagued by baffling periods of inattention -- periods so pronounced that he can twirl a pencil or his shoelace for minutes, seeming to ignore the assignment he has been given.

Lawrence cannot explain these lapses, but he knows how they are read. "People think I'm stupid," he said. "I think I'm smart."

Mr. Kesler did not agree with that assessment in early September.

On his first day in Room 3-223, Lawrence could not write his last name. The next day, Mr. Kesler dismissed the children from lunch by calling the months of their birthdays. But after he had called all 12, Lawrence was still there. When Mr. Kesler asked him if he knew his birthday, Lawrence said he did not.

Mr. Kesler thought to himself: "Why the hell is he in third grade?"

If his kindergarten teacher had had her way, Lawrence would have repeated that year and been in second grade this year.

She said he appeared to be "slow," Lawrence's father, Francisco Marcel, recalled.

But Mr. Marcel, a video repair technician raised in the Dominican Republic, refused.

Early in first grade, Lawrence, who speaks Spanish and English at home, struck his new teacher as being exceptionally quiet.

"He made friends," the teacher, Lisa Wilson, recalled, "but he wasn't the kind of kid who would volunteer to speak."

Ms. Wilson noted that Lawrence recognized some, but not all, of the letters in the alphabet and had difficulty identifying their sounds.

Over time, Lawrence improved. Phonetic exercises seemed to help.

Indeed, by the end of the first grade, the only remedial work she recommended was an after-school program conducted by the Jewish Community Center.

By the beginning of second grade, however, Lawrence had slipped backward. His teacher, who asked that her name not be used for reasons unrelated to Lawrence's case, said he was "spacy."

He had trouble reading, she said, stumbling over stories like "Lizzie and Harold," which was excerpted in his second-grade reader and began, "More than anything else, Lizzie wanted a best friend."

Last March, the teacher sent school officials the form that can prompt a special-education evaluation, saying, "He is interested in reading, but he cannot."

But she later dropped the matter, she said, because she noticed something encouraging: Lawrence was becoming increasingly alert. The periods when he would stare off into space were diminishing, replaced by long stretches when he was engaged and able to read fairly well.

The teacher gives some credit to the volunteers from the Jewish center, but reserves much of it for Lawrence himself, who seemed to be trying harder.

By last June, she said, Lawrence could read stories on a late second-grade level, and she promoted him into third grade. "I thought maybe time would work its way with Lawrence," she said.

But time again worked to Lawrence's disadvantage.

What happened, at the beginning of third grade, to make him go blank when Mr. Kesler asked him his birthday -- Halloween? Lawrence says only, "I was a little embarrassed."

On Oct. 24, Mr. Kesler had his first "conference" with Lawrence.

Mr. Kesler watched as Lawrence walked to the classroom library, picked up the book "Three Blind Mice" and shifted it back and forth.

"Lawrence, come over here," he said finally.

Asked if he knew the book was the illustrated lyrics to a song, Lawrence said he did not. Asked if the book was appropriate for him to read alone, he said, "This is easy."

Mr. Kesler asked him to read a passage. "Three small mice," Lawrence read. "Three small mice, washed for some fun, washed for some fun."

Mr. Kesler corrected him -- "wished, not washed."

When asked to explain the passage, Lawrence could not.

"Let's find a book that's right for you," Mr. Kesler said. And they did, pulling "Pigs Peak," a collection of barnyard photographs with simple captions like "pigs peak" and "pigs stand" that Lawrence could read.

After school, Mr. Kesler was boiling, wondering how he was supposed to meet the goal of the Schools Chancellor, Rudy Crew: having every third-grader read at grade level by spring, as measured by a standardized test in April.

"It's quite a ridiculous thing for the Chancellor to say," Mr. Kesler said, "when I have a kid who is reading 'Pigs Peak.' "

Less than two weeks after Lawrence flubbed "Three Blind Mice," Mr. Kesler took steps to get him special-education help, alerting school administrators that Lawrence was "reading on a pre-first grade level." They agreed that Lawrence should be evaluated by the special education team.

Lawrence was then put through a battery of tests in December. During that time, Mr. Kesler concedes, he did not spend a lot of time working with Lawrence, in part because his needs were so daunting.

"This is a difficult thing for me to admit," Mr. Kesler said, "but I have a natural inclination to avoid the kids who are the most difficult to teach. I often feel like I'm hitting up against a wall, like I don't know the way in."

But still, something clicked: Lawrence showed marked improvement in the weeks after Christmas break.

On Jan. 30, Mr. Kesler huddled with Lawrence again for a 20-minute conference in which they studied a book in the popular "Henry and Mudge" series, on a solid second-grade level.

First, Mr. Kesler reviewed the ways Lawrence could figure out a new word -- using context clues like accompanying pictures or sounding it out. To Mr. Kesler's surprise, Lawrence breezed through the text, and then retold it in his words. "I was impressed," Mr. Kesler said.

Two days later, however, Mr. Kesler became discouraged again, as Lawrence selected a kindergarten book for independent reading.

On Feb. 6, Mr. Kesler, along with Lawrence's parents, met with the special-education team to hear its evaluation.

His hearing was normal, they learned, and his eyesight was 20-20, as long as he wore the glasses prescribed to correct a crossed eye.

They also learned that his conceptual and reasoning skills were average. And they were told that he was now reading, comfortably, at a mid-second-grade level.

Where Lawrence ran into trouble, the evaluators found, was when he tried to decode multisyllabic words -- including "correctly, doubtful and hesitating." In the end, the evaluators found nothing specifically wrong with Lawrence, but they said his verbal difficulties were sufficient to classify him with a mild learning disability. While one evaluator noted his occasional dreaminess, the team could not pinpoint its cause.

Carole M. Kraus, the special education administrator who supervised the case, said there was no evidence of attention deficit disorder or dyslexia. But she said she had ordered another test because Lawrence sometimes repeated questions aloud after they were asked of him -- a sign that he might be translating them from English to Spanish, which is not uncommon among children trained in both.

But since Lawrence has trouble with Spanish, too, Ms. Kraus says she does not believe his problem is merely one of English as a second language.

The team concluded that Lawrence was making sufficient progress and should remain in Mr. Kesler's class but that he would benefit from one period a day in the resource room, with only seven other children. Lawrence's parents, and Mr. Kesler, were pleased.

"Anything that will help him," his father said.

The next day was the monthly "author's celebration" in Room 3-223, when parents convene to hear Mr. Kesler read from their children's writings. The Marcels got a chance to see how far Lawrence had already come.

Among the first essays selected was one he had written, without assistance. It was titled "Today Is My Father's Birthday," and where his earlier writings were just a few illegible lines, this essay filled an entire page with neat block letters.

"Today is my father's birthday," Mr. Kesler read. "My mother bought my father a gift. It was a tool box with tools inside it. We sang happy birthday to him. He was happy. We were too."

Lawrence's classmates applauded loudly.

His mother and father wept.

From the New York Times, February 24, 1997 © 1997 The New York Times, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.