By Featured Writer Steve Zemelman

Do you remember what it was like learning to read? Some people do, I’ve found, but I don’t. All I can recall was sitting in the SLOW reading group, distracted from Dick and Jane (yes, Dick and Jane. That’s how old I am.) because I wondered why the other group was ahead of us. It wasn’t fair.

But a few weeks ago I chanced to witness the moment when my grandson, Gil, suddenly switched from figuring out word and letter sounds to joyously reading me a story. He’s in second grade and reading had been challenging for him. It wasn’t clear why, because he has a steel-trap memory and a large and abstract vocabulary.

So it happened that during the pandemic, my highly active grandson’s impatience with online learning led his parents to home-school him for the year. And to give them some relief from attending to him, each grandparent took a day of the week to spend 45 minutes or so in the morning conducting an activity with him. My day was Tues. We communicated via Skype between me in Chicago and Gil in Greenfield Massachusetts. 

After some weeks I was running out of engaging and creative ideas. He’d tired of his dinosaur chart, and creating small spit-ball catapults had proven more frustrating than I had anticipated, so we were spending more time just chatting. On the morning of Mar. 16, 2021, to be exact, he came online and announced, “Papa Z, I’m going to read to you.” He launched right into four chapters of one of the Dog Man graphic novels, laughing and commenting as he went. He needed help with just a couple of words, though usually not the more complex ones. And when he was finished, he declared to his dad, who was working at his desk nearby, “Dad, I just read four chapters of Dog Man!”

We literacy educators debate endlessly about the right way to teach kids to read. But how often do we get to see that magic right at the moment when it kicks in – and with a child we deeply love? I’m truly a privileged man. And don’t tell me that great learning can’t happen at home during a pandemic lock-down.