Today was my first day of reading to a child with the SMART program.  I had been scheduled to hook up with a little girl named Virginia (which surprised me — other programs I’ve been with have not permitted male volunteers to work with girls, though perhaps because we’re all in one room supervised, it’s different … I saw several men reading to girls) but she had been taken off the program list by her teacher, for some reason.  So instead, I got a second-grader named Julio.  Julio’s parents do not speak English at home.  His teacher informed me, under her breath, that he’s the worst reader in the class.  The SMART coordinator informed me, also under her breath, that Julio had been in the program before, and she’d had difficulty finding anyone who wanted to read with him, because he was such a handful.

And so who shows up to read to this child?  Mr. Rochester, who is mildly terrified of children, has no idea how to handle small boys, and has never read to a kid in his entire life.

I must have gotten lucky … Julio seemed perfectly happy with me, though the book he chose for us to read was a bit odd … it was apparently written by someone from England, though it was a children’s book, and the vocabulary was strange.  I explained that a martin was a type of bird … and that phlox was kind of like a low-growing hydrangea.  What’s a hydrangea?  You know, those puffy ball flowers.  Mahogany?  Well, it’s a kind of dark reddish wood.  No, not really like the desk … darker than that. 

We came across the word “ink,” and he excitedly told me that people used to dip feathers into it to write with.  I told him he was right, and explained how in old schools, there would be an inkwell right in the desk, though students then would use nib pens, rather than feathers.  I told him that some kids would dip the braids of the girls in front of them into the inkwells, when they wanted to be naughty.  He was much astonished by this information, and seemed sobered by the thought that back in the day, there were different and perhaps more entertaining ways to be bad. 

As we were reading, we came across the word “pink.”  He couldn’t figure it out.  So I demonstrated that if you took the P off, you had ink.  And he knew about ink, right?  So … what sound does a P make?  And then if you put it with the ink, what do you have?  I wish I’d had a camera to record the look on his face. 

“I get it!” he shrieked. “It’s the same word, but with a different letter in front.”  He was so excited about this that I put the book aside and got a piece of paper and a pencil, so we could see how it worked with other words, like link and think and rink and sink.  Whether he’ll remember any of it,  I have no idea.  I’m sure I’m not the first person to do this with him, but surely repetition is the key.

After half an hour of this, I was completely exhausted.  I don’t know how parents survive, or schoolteachers. 

The SMART program gives books to children twice a month, to take home.  This odd book was the one he’d picked.  After all the weird words, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to take it home.  I didn’t blame him.