First the background:

My best friend can't read.  

Well, she can, but it is not her strong point.  She was so slow at reading, even in our early teens that when we would drive places, she'd ask me to read the signs for her. 

If we watch a foreign film together, to this day, she requests that I read out the subtitles.  (This results in much hilarity and if we are in a theater, people give us dirty looks.)

She calls herself dyslexic, although I am told this is not really the correct scientific term. Despite her lack of reading skills, she has an excellent vocabulary and always has.  This is due to the fact that her parents spent a lot of time reading to her as a kid.  And they didn't read Dr. Seuss.  They read her Lord of the Rings, even at the age of 6, although her mom would skip over some bits, like the battles. 

She doesn't necessarily know how to spell most of the words in her extensive vocabulary, but she knows what they mean and how to use them.

She's also very good at math and has a rather lofty I.Q.  I suspect it is higher than mine, and I am a little afraid to find out.

However, due to her poor reading skills, schools generally had no patience or use for her.  The private school we both attended in elementary asked her to leave because they didn't have the resources to help her, plus they worried she'd lower their test scores.

The public school technically had slightly more resources, but the best they could do was to stick her in a special ed class, which wasn't quite appropriate either.  What she probably needed was just a tutor, but her parents couldn't afford one.   By high school, she was doing better but was still very slow at reading and had a hard time in the classes that required a lot of it, like government. 

Most of her classmates only registered the fact that she was in the special ed class and assumed that she was retarded*, because she was so quiet.  (Also, she wasn't in my class, so I was unable to correct this assumption, and only learned about it after we were both done with high school.)

What she learned from school was mostly:

-Since you cannot read, you are not valuable to us.

And this message was repeated almost everywhere to her. "You have to be good at reading, or else you will occupy a low place in society. That's just how it is."

~

The reason I have ventured down this stretch of memory lane is that I was speaking to a teacher today and basically asking her how she handles children with such learning handicaps.This woman teaches at a private school which I myself am interested in teaching at, and I wanted to know if she felt she had the freedom and time to accommodate such children in her classroom. 

The answer was mostly yes.  However, as I spoke to her I wondered if  I was really asking the right question. 

It occurred to me that maybe I wasn't.  Maybe the real question is not "How do you make them read?" but "What can you teach them about themselves when they can't read? Or when they can't do math?"

I'm not suggesting that any child should be exempt from learning to read or do math, or anything else, even if they are abysmal at it.  I think it is important to require that everyone do their best and that every child receive a varied and well-rounded education.

But I also think that we need to be careful of what message we send when we exhort our students to learn.  It shouldn't be "get good at reading, or else!"  It should be, "do your best at everything, even if your best isn't very good."  

I think schools need to value students more for the things that they do well and not place all the emphasis on the things we want them to do well.

I worry that kids like my friend will be disadvantaged if no one takes the time to make sure they learn to read well, but then I realize my friend is not really disadvantaged at all.

She earns enough money to support herself, and hasn't been unemployed in about six years.  She has a full-time job that she loves, where she is highly valued and gets benefits, which is more than I can say, and she also has a degree, which is more than I can say, for now.

She has no debt.

 She's great.  She's happy.  The school may have failed her (grade-wise and service-wise), but she's no failure.

*their word, not mine.