Emma Barnaby smiled as she watched Marcus negotiate the bike slalom course she had set up for the children on the back field. He could just reach the pedals on the bike that had been handed down to him from his older brother who had grown too big for it. “He was crawling at five months and walking at ten,” Marcus’s mother had told Miss Barnaby when she’d brought him to school that morning and unloaded his bike from the back of the car. “I’m not surprised he’s taken to biking so quickly.”
Marcus was bent over the handlebars, his six-year-old legs pushing hard to keep ahead of the older kids he’d just overtaken. A squeal of delight took her eyes to the left of the field where a couple of the other five and six-year-olds were riding around the tennis court, their training wheels steadying their wobbles. “Miss Barnaby, look at me!”
“Go you!” Emma laughed, and her smile was more from pride than entertainment as she remembered little Abigail’s trepidation the day before, gingerly turning the pedals for the first time without her teacher holding on to the bike.
The sound of the bell seemed to Emma an unwelcome interruption to the happy activity going on around her, and it turned her mind to the reading lesson she needed to run over the next hour before the lunch break.
The children sat transfixed in front of her as she pulled each of the books which she’d chosen from the library out of her bag, as a raffler slowly pulls out the lucky numbers from a hat. But unlike the lucky numbers, which are of fleeting interest to all but one of the audience once revealed, the books were all attention-magnets as Emma softly led the children into the worlds of the books – the artwork, the characters, and some of the language in the text. She placed them on the reading shelf next to her, their covers facing out, inviting further exploration.
“Come and read with me, Marcus. Lionel would like you to read with him, too,” said Emma. “Bring a book from your Browsing Box.” The class were exploring books and reading them together, and she put the class mascot, a soft toy lion, onto her desk in front of her. Marcus struggled with reading. To him, letters had been complicated shapes, and the sounds that went with them would fall in and out of his memory, and trying to match them up again as he read was like trying to sort out a basketful of odd socks.
“Can I read ‘My New Bike’ again, Miss Barnaby?” asked Marcus.
“Sure can. How did you know that’s Lionel’s favourite?”
As Marcus read, the pride-smile came back to Emma. The little boy who had had no notion of letter-sound association had come a long way in the twelve months since starting school: he’d progressed from an emergent to a beginner reader. “His training wheels are nearly off,” thought Emma.
“Miss Barnaby, I’m up to the third book in the series!” Abigail said, holding her book up from her cushion in the Book Corner. Abigail was a voracious reader, and had started reading chapter books.
Staff were asked to have their reading data up to date for the staff meeting after school that afternoon. The school had an Education Review Office visit coming up, and Sue, the principal, was wanting to have a discussion about the school’s reading achievement data. The Ministry of Education had set specific benchmarks for schools to tell them at what levels children should be expected to be at when they reached their sixth birthdays, and at the end of the school year. As each teacher shared their information, it became apparent that some children were well below these expected levels. Some were also well above.
“We’ll be asked some hard questions about why these children are so far behind,” said Sue, pointing at the names in the ‘below’ column on the screen. Emma thought of Marcus, whose achievement was a long way below Abigail’s, but whose progress curve was just as steep.
Emma went back to her classroom, sat down, and put herself in the shoes of an Education Review Officer. They were very formal shoes, quite tight and not much room for her toes to move. However, the wearer had been trained to wear them without too much discomfort and had got used to them.
“Can you talk to me about why this child is so far behind please, Emma?” said the Review Officer.
Emma shifted back inside her soft sandals and wiggled her toes, and brought up the previous year’s data on her laptop. “Look at this, “ she said. “He’s made pretty good progress, don’t you think?”
Squeezing back uncomfortably into the Review Officer’s shoes, she said “Yes, that is good. But what strategies will you put in place to ensure this student catches up to the standard expected of him by the time he leaves primary school?”
Emma thought of Abigail’s squeals of delight on her bike training wheels. “I will do all I can to help him delight in reading,” she replied.
She had her sandals back on, though her feet were sore from the pressure of the tight straps of the other shoes. The Review Officer was standing next to her, looking out of the window to the back field and the tennis court. They could see Marcus, swerving adeptly between the slalom cones on his almost-too-big bike, while Abigail was slowly but steadily making her way around the tennis court on her training wheels.
“I wonder if Abigail learnt to crawl at the same age Marcus did,” said Emma. “And I wonder if she learnt to walk at the same age as Marcus. Maybe they learnt to talk at the same age, or maybe not. They certainly didn’t learn to ride their bikes at the same age, and yet it was only yesterday Abigail wouldn’t turn the pedals without me holding her bike. So, I guess my question is … why should we expect all children to reach the same stage in reading at the same age?”
The Review Officer looked down at her shoes. “I wish I was allowed to wear shoes like yours,” she said.
Now semi-retired and based on the beautiful Stewart Island, Andrew Watson spent 20 years as a teacher and principal in Southland, most recently leading Lumsden School for 10 years. Andrew wrote “Miss Barnaby’s Question” this year when reflecting on the introduction of National Standards in 2010. He was thinking that, “although National Standards have gone out the window, are the same expectations still in the room?”