What a fallen dedicated educator taught me about supporting struggling kids
I was on my knees sorting through the bottom cabinet of Ms. Rita Carter’s third-grade classroom last March, three weeks after she died suddenly from a heart attack at 62, when my hand hit a dented cardboard box labeled SEN’S THINGS in thick blue marker. Rita was supposed to retire at the end of that school year, after 38 years teaching at our small town elementary. I’ve taught there for 12 years myself, and I’m also a parent of a fifth-grader, so I’d volunteered to help clear out her things for her family.
I pried open the box lid and found a crumpled crayon drawing of a T-Rex, a half-used pack of thick pencil grips, a stack of reading worksheets with enlarged font and double-spaced lines that didn’t match the district’s required format, and a crumpled note card in messy 8-year-old handwriting that read “Ms Rita is cool because she doesn’t make me sound stupid.” I recognized the name immediately—Sen is the son of my neighbor, diagnosed with severe dyslexia back when he was in Rita’s class 8 years ago.
I still remember the meeting that got me paying attention to Rita’s approach. The district had just rolled out a new reading curriculum that required all students to read aloud in small groups every day to build fluency. Rita refused to force Sen to participate, and the principal called a meeting to discuss the policy violation. I was there as a new member of the school curriculum committee, taking notes. The principal said the rule applied to everyone, and making exceptions would be unfair to the other students. It was a research-backed requirement, after all.
Rita just pulled out her attendance book and slid it across the conference table. Before she started adjusting Sen’s work, he’d missed 12 days of school in first and second grade combined, 10 of them unexcused. His mom would call in saying he had a stomach ache, but everyone knew he just didn’t want to go to school and be made fun of for stumbling over every word. In the four months since Rita had stopped calling on him to read aloud, he’d missed zero days. “What good does fluency practice do if the kid won’t show up to class?” she said. “If he learns that school is just a place where he gets embarrassed every day, that’s the lesson he’ll remember, not how to sound out words.”
I observed her class a few days later, when Sen gave his presentation on dinosaurs. Instead of making him read his typed report off the page, she just asked him to tell the class what he’d learned. He talked for 10 minutes straight, reeled off the exact weight and length of a T-Rex, answered every question the other kids threw at him, and left the front of the room grinning. After class, I asked her how she found the time to make all these custom adjustments for kids. She laughed and said most adjustments don’t take extra time. Enlarging the font takes 10 seconds on the copier during lunch. Letting a kid stand instead of sit doesn’t require any lesson planning. “Most rules are just to make our jobs easier, not to help kids,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you throw all rules out. You just check: is this rule working for this kid right now? If not, change it.”
That lesson stuck with me when my own son, who has ADHD, ran into trouble in third grade. His teacher sent home a note saying he got up out of his seat eight times during 20 minutes of silent reading, disrupted the whole class, and I needed to practice sitting still for 30 minutes a day at home to build his self-control. I tried it for a week. It turned into a screaming match every night, and my son started hiding his reading book under his mattress so he wouldn’t have to do it. I thought of Rita’s unwritten rule, and emailed the teacher to ask for one small change: could he stand at the back counter by the window while he read, or sit on the unused bean bag in the reading corner instead of his desk? The teacher was hesitant, but agreed to try it. A month later, she sent me a note saying he only got up once or twice a week now, and his reading comprehension quiz scores had gone up a full letter grade.
Rita never wrote a book about education, never presented at any national conferences, never got any big state teaching awards. She just showed up every day, and bent the small rules that were hurting kids, one kid at a time. The adjustments she made are accessible to any parent or teacher: you don’t need a special degree or extra budget to try them. If your kid can’t sit still through homework, let them do it standing at the kitchen counter. If reading aloud stresses them out, let them record themselves instead of reading in front of the family. If writing an essay is too hard, let them talk through their answer and write it down for them. Small changes don’t make you weak or permissive. They just meet kids where they are.
Sen came over to pick up the box last month. He’s 20 now, studying to be a park ranger at the local community college. He still has dyslexia, and he still asks his professors if he can do oral exams instead of written tests when he can. He took the T-Rex drawing and left the rest of the box with me, said I’d get more use out of it. I have the sticky note Rita taped to the inside of the box, that says “Exceptions aren’t unfair. They’re just what kids need,” taped to the front of my lesson plan book.
We’re still fighting for small adjustments this year. We’re working through the paperwork to get my son extra time on his state standardized tests, and I’ve already had three meetings where people have told me he just needs to learn to work faster. Some days, it feels exhausting, and I want to give up. Then I look at that sticky note, and I remember what Rita did. Honoring her isn’t just about putting up a plaque in the school lobby, though we are doing that too. It’s about bending the rule when the rule hurts a kid. It’s about doing that one small thing, when you can. That’s the lesson she left, and it’s the one I still carry every day.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What a fallen dedicated educator taught me about supporting struggling kids