A month after we started the school year this August, BECA’s third grade class at ADJ received a new student. David had been in school before coming to the children’s home, but his English was extremely limited and not nearly at the level of his peers. When I first started working with him, I was worried about how this would affect his self-esteem, relationships with his teachers, and his participation in school. I could see he was overwhelmed and frustrated and I had seen students shut down or fall apart over far more benign setbacks. So we began with reading bilingual books together to work on comfort with sounding out words and moving past mistakes. As it turned out, these were skills David had already mastered in reading Spanish. I felt optimistic but also unsure of how to switch to English only – I didn’t want to mess up a good thing. Then one day, while I was sitting in the back of the class, David sought me out. He was carrying a book and asked me very quietly if he could read it to me. It was all in English. He sat down next to me, opened the book, and took out his “following finger” to point to each word as he read it. He sounded out each syllable of each word carefully. He did not bat an eye when he stumbled over a letter or two; he just started the word over and tried again. After he finished every page, he would ask me questions in Spanish about what was happening on the page or how to say certain words in English. When he was done, he turned to me (where I was sitting speechless and on the verge of tears), smiled, and said: “tomorrow another one.”
