Ben showed up at my clinic one morning with his mother in a great rush. She had phoned the clinic just minutes before, a bit breathless.
Mom had taken Ben out of school; she was looking for someone to work with him to fill the hole left from leaving school. It was tough because he loved school.
There had been a serious upheaval. Ben’s father, Mom’s ex, showed up unexpectedly and wanted his son. Mom had been living with Charlie, an old boyfriend.
As things stood, Mom had moved out of a rented cottage, Charlie found an empty vacation cabin on Mount Veeder Road, and everyone was hiding. Ben left school unhappily and angry.
I scheduled Ben for two sessions per week in the morning. Mom would pay in cash per session. She would take Ben to the public library to check out books; he had a card. There would be no intake protocol, no structured assessment.
Ben arrived early for his sessions and stayed on after, sitting quietly in the waiting area, reading a book or solving a word search in a booklet. I was liberal with start and stop time during the a.m. hours when my schedule allowed.
Over the few months I worked with Ben, I worried about his losing out on classroom experiences. He liked to talk and express himself. He liked to work hard and push himself.
My awareness of sociocultural learning theory in its embryonic stage, I had only my own experience of fourth grade, a turning point in my literacy development. I couldn’t be for him what my teachers had been for me in a rural school in an Illinois village. One of my teachers held weekly spelling bees that riveted me, for one thing. I began to learn to use resource materials. One of my teachers read poetry for the class.
I decided that my contribution to him would be adding to his experiences in analysis of challenging texts.
We together did frustration-level Barnell-Loft exercises from Using the Context, Drawing Conclusions, and Getting the Main Idea; he liked the idea of my reading aloud things that were at a high school level and then talking it through. The questions were multiple choice, of course, but he examined each option and occasionally argued that the answer key could be wrong. Here I was straddling the line of think aloud, though quite unconsciously.
Later, when I taught my own fourth grade, I taught and assigned my students the individual task of writing multiple choice questions for passages and answering them collectively in small groups.
I also assigned Ben work in a nicely prepared leveled vocabulary building series structured around in-depth treatment of roots and affixes with exercises in using context and in producing target words in speaking and writing. The tasks were higher-order, and I enjoyed his interest.
One morning, Ben pulled his nine dollars from his pocket and handed me a note.
“I guess I won’t see you any more,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“I have to get a taxi to take me to the airport. My dad, I mean my Charlie, I mean my dad knows where we are. Charlie and me stayed last night at the airport and Mom is meeting me at the store with a taxi.”
“Have you eaten today?”
“Charlie bought a bag of hamburgers last night, those little one’s at the A&W, and we had some left.”
“Well, I’ll miss you, Ben. Wherever you go, I want you to remember this: You have a strong brain, but more importantly you know how to work hard. You can learn anything you set out to learn if you keep doing what I’ve seen you do.”
I wrote a lengthy prose-poem about Ben that very day after he left his lesson the final session. I haven’t been able to put my hands on it, but it’s in the garage. I’ve read it several times over the years.
Ben’s fourth grade year was unconventional, but his earlier grades stood him in good stead. The case of Ben set me wondering about the dimensions of the struggle ahead for children in fourth grade who were coming from inadequate or ineffective primary grade instruction for whatever reason. It’s as if the gloves come off the curriculum in fourth grade. Ten years later I would teach middle school English in a high-poverty school and get a glimpse at the consequences.