Edyth E. Young, Ph.D., NCREL program director/research, Center for Literacy relates the professional impact of her first teaching position.
Young:
My first teaching experience was in a very low socioeconomic status area in the city of Chicago where the principal just wanted to know, would I be there just the whole year because these kindergartners had three different teachers to leave them.
And she said none of them could read. She said to me, just, you know, kind of feel good if you can just have them speak in complete sentences by the end of the year. Well, that went in one ear and out the other because I'm like, they're going to all read. And so, off I went on my journey. And when I started my Ph.D. program in '96 (pause) excuse me, in '86, and I just was looking at the whole field of reading, and we had, well, these are what poor readers do, and this is what good readers do.
And so, I knocked on the door of, of research, and said, you know, excuse me, why can't the poor readers do the same things that the good reader do? So, off again I was on my journey of, you know, how can we empower students? And so my first major research was, you know, how to help lower ability high school readers read like experts. And we found out that it, indeed, is possible, but it is a journey.