What that fourth-grade teacher lacked was not compassion. What was lacking was the kind of knowledge that would have given her the basis for understanding that not all kids come to or leave grade four able to read fluently; the kind of training that would have enabled her to teach older children to do just that; the motivation to work until no child in her classroom failed. The teaching of reading is hard, full of pitfalls, with obstacles all along the way until children reach the level of proficiency that allows them, whatever their learning trajectory, to pass over from the text to their own
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