Todos Leen

My little neighbor Bibi is eight years old, her sister, Ruistel, is ten.  Both are in the third grade, but neither can read the vowels or count to 100.  They are confused between “a” and “e,” and get tripped up after 30.  Both girls are perfectly normal Dominican kids.  I can see that they are both intelligent, both sweet.  They visit me and ask me to read them stories, then give me hugs and bring me gifts of bananas and lollipops as thanks.  I often have to kick them out of my house at night (along with other neighbors), or they’d probably try to sleep on my cement floor.   “Laura tiene muchos niños,” my muchacho neighbors say.  Laura has a lot of children.  They come to my house just like everyone else does, but they stay a lot longer, sitting on my floor and coloring or flipping through books they can’t read.  I let them stay as long as they don’t annoy me, and I read to them when I have nothing better to do.  For this they love me.  I “have a lot of children” because no one else ever read them a bedtime story before.  I mean, I also like kids most of the time.  They’re pretty funny, and bring me gifts, and can usually be counted on to help me sweep the leaves and trash in my yard.  Then again, they threw the trash there in the first place…  

So how did they reach the third grade without learning much at all?  Unfortunately, this is pretty typical here.  I wrote a little about the school system a long time ago, when I was still in training, but seeing the realities daily in Tabara is a different story.   The school day is about three hours long, but most of that time is spent disciplining, trying to get the students to stay in the classroom, and then having them copy something off the board.  Classroom management and varied instruction are not part of the program.  Students who have no help at home don’t stand a chance, and this applies to most students.  Bibi and Ruistel’s mother is a very sweet woman, who is also illiterate (she was originally a student of the adult literacy program, but gave up early on), so I would count them among the students who don’t have much of a chance.  Someone told me that Tabara has school about 90 days a year…for about 3 hours a day…which amounts to maybe 1 hour of work time a day.  If school is cancelled for something legitimate on a Wednesday, no one will go Thursday or Friday either.  Just because.

My new project involves invading the school and working with third graders.  Let’s call it “reading intervention.”  Last September, when I was still working on adult literacy in the evenings, I began visiting the school to see what kind of work I could do there with the teachers.  I quickly became discouraged by the craziness of the school, the frequency of strikes and cancellations, and the apparent apathy of most teachers.  When adult literacy (happily) ended in December, I revisited the idea of working in the school, and realized the best thing to do was to walk in and tell them what I was going to do.  The principal and teachers are pretty welcoming actually, but when I ask for their opinions we get nowhere.  They recognize that help is needed, at the very least, and they seem to like me.  

So I’ve enlisted the help of three of my adult literacy facilitators and friends, Awanda, Adalgiza and Toquia, to pull out small groups of third graders and work with them in forty-five minute sessions on reading.  Basically, an in-school tutoring program.  Between the four of us, we are working with over half of the third graders – forty-two kids who barely know their letters, and could be in danger of dropping out in a few years after repeating the same grade several times.  Originally I had planned to work with the second and third grades, but after evaluating them all and becoming overwhelmed by the number of students in need, we decided to concentrate just on third grade, as it seems more urgent. 

This program isn’t coming out of nowhere, and I’m not the only one doing it either.  A few weeks ago I collaborated with three of my fellow literacy volunteers to hold a joint training in San Juan with people from our communities to train them on teaching methods and games to use with kids (flashcards, bingo, stories, play dough, memory games, etc.).  The program is called Todos Leen (Everyone Reads), titled by my friend Keeton, who started a similar reading program last September.  We’re making this up as we go along… The kids love it, my facilitators are enthusiastic, the teachers appreciate it, and I feel like it is a completely worthwhile and potentially successful project.  So far so good!  Hopefully we will expand to work with more students, hold a summer reading program, and teacher training in the fall.