Tedros at the Board

I went over to check in on Tedros (not his real name) to see how he was doing with the word search. My Literacy class was looking for five words they had been studying for our unit on grocery shopping. The two advanced students were done. Others were still diligently searching as if they were deciphering an ancient text. Then there was Tedros. 

His head was bent over his paper, and his hands were making circles over the page, as if trying to conjure the words into illuminating themselves. As I neared his desk, I hoped he’d have at least one word circled. I spied that, yes, indeed, he had one. Okay, I thought. Great. Then that sinking feeling. Nope. Not a word. 

He’d circled the first five letters at the top left of the word search: r, g, y , o , q. The words he was searching for were eggs, milk, cheese, butter, yogurt. None of them began with an r. On the bright side, collectively, those five words contained at least one or more r, g y, o, but not q. 

He looked up at me with his smiling eyes. He pointed out the word – at least, to him, it may have been a word. 

“Good?” He said. 

I nodded, not out of assent, but to buy time until I figured out what to do. 

Then he pointed out each letter. 

“Rrr,” he said. 

“Good,” I said. 

“B.”

I shook my head. 

“No. No. D,” he said. 

“G,” I said. 

“Ah, yes. G. Yes. Yes. G,” he said. 

It went like that for y, o, and q. 

When we were done, we checked the words to see which one started with an r. When he saw that none of the words started with an r, he groaned and slumped in his chair, said something in his language, at which his compatriots laughed. He looked up at me and let out a long sigh of resignation. 

It’s at such moments I feel like a complete failure of a teacher. My experience, training, and even my two years teaching Literacy still leave me gutted every time I encounter a student such as Tedros. Learning disabilities. Trauma. This is how I feel: I am quickly sinking and the surface of the water is getting further away as I drop to the bottom of the ocean. My arms and legs are paralyzed. 

The only thing I could seize as a teaching opportunity was that Tedros couldn’t identify four of the five letters he’d circled without my help. So, I walked over to my desk and pulled out a Ziplock bag of magnetized letters and stuck them on the board in no particular order. 

“Tedros, come,” I said. 

Grumble. Grumble. But he came to the board. 

“A,” I said. 

He searched and searched. There were capitals and lowercases of each letter. He dragged a C. 

“No,” said the students. 

A young woman got up and went over to the alphabet flashcards on the wall near my desk and pointed out Aa. One of his countrywomen joined him at the board. She pointed out the capital A, but she let him find the small a. 

Soon, the other students joined Tedros at the board. I sat at my desk and watched as the class helped their classmate. 

It was a good exercise. The students became the teachers, and in helping him, consolidated their knowledge of the alphabet. They showed Tedros no one judged him. They supported him. They wanted him to succeed. And Tedros? Maybe this experience inched him closer towards decoding words, identifying letters. Better yet, maybe it gave him some hope. 

When he had arranged the letters in alphabetical order, we all clapped. 

“Teacher!” He said to me, eyes bright with pride. 

We’ll repeat this whole episode tomorrow. But, in teaching, especially Literacy, you learn to appreciate the victories, no matter how small.