Reading with Martín, the Boy Who's Best at Playing

Martín tells me he doesn’t want to learn to read, and he won’t need it in his life.

“No?” I say, perplexed.

It throws me. How do I prove to a TV-obsessed 8-year-old that reading will benefit him? I don’t want to tell him, “You’ll need it to get into college” or “If you don’t learn to read, you’ll struggle to even apply for jobs.” Those reasons feel too external, too capitalistic, not focused enough on the singular pleasure of reading good books.

“Sometimes you’ll be stuck somewhere without a TV or toys, and all you’ll have are books to read,” I say, feeling rather lame.

He does enjoy books. I’ve been working with him twice a week with the organization Reading Partners all school year, and I’ve been so impressed by his deep understanding of the books I read aloud to him at the start of each session. The books we have to choose from have lists of questions to ask the struggling students taped inside them, to encourage them toward greater reading comprehension. Not only does he answer those questions for the second-grade books with ease, but we’ve moved on to third-grade ones without issue.

Yet, he struggles to recognize sight words like “come," "have," "cat," "dog," or even "and."

He's got "the" down pat, though, so I know he can do it.

To Build a Dream

"What do you want to be when you grow up," I asked Martín one day.

He thinks about it for a second, then says, "I don't want to be anything. I just want to play."

Fair enough, kid. Join the club, right?

"Me too," I say. I'm a nanny and literally do play for a living. But suggesting he become a nanny won't motivate him to want to learn to read, so I take a different track. "What if you could write cartoons?"

Martín loves TV, especially cartoons. Pokémon, Power Rangers, Star Wars—if it's on TV and for kids, he's into it. But the suggestion that he could write the shows seems to puzzled him.

"Someone else will write them," he says.

"True, yeah," I say. "But I bet you could write them. Like, you know how you play Power Rangers after lunch with your friends? Writing cartoons is like getting paid to play Power Rangers."

"Hmmm," he says. "That does sound like a better job than construction."

Construction

I've seen Martín's father outside the Home Depot, waiting for someone to come by looking for day labor work. I always say "Hello" to him and remind him in my bad Spanish that I know his son; I work with him at his school. His response is always the thank me, which only makes me feel embarrassed.

"No, thank you," I say in Spanish. "Martín es un chico muy bueno." I make sure to pronounce "muy" correctly.

One of the first times I met Martín, he informed me that I pronounced "muy" wrong. "It's 'moo-eyy' not 'moyy'," he said. The difference sounded subtle to me, but he was keen that I get it right, so I made sure to stretch it out into two syllables, exaggerating it for his benefit.

"Close enough," he said at last.

Martín and I had a "getting to know you" activity during our first session wherein we both listed things we're good at. For myself, I wrote, "Listening to kids, playing guitar, cooking spaghetti."

When I asked him what he's good at, he stayed silent for a long time before he said, "Nothing."

"That's not true," I said. "When I came to get you after lunch, it was hard to pull you away from the other kids. That's because you have a lot of friends and they really like you. And that means that you must be good at being a friend."

He shrugged and agreed to let me dictate the spelling of "friend" to him so he could place it on his list.

The next two, he came up with by himself. "I'm good at games, and I'm good at speaking Spanish — but you're not!"

He'd overheard my bad Spanish when we'd met outside after school a few days earlier. I spoke briefly to his mother when the Reading Partners coordinator introduced us, letting her know I'd begin tutoring him soon. I had a different student for a few sessions before that, but she'd been reassigned to a volunteer who spoke Cantonese. Our East Oakland neighborhood is extremely diverse.

I laughed when Martín insulted my Spanish. "You're right," I said, "You are good at Spanish, and I'm not. Maybe I can help you read better in English, and you can help me speak better in Spanish."

"Sure. But, also, can we play a game? That's what I'm really good at. Bet I'll beat you."

Progress

The first time Martín read an entire book beginning to end without my help, I practically threw him a parade. The book had maybe 50 words in it and many of them were repeated numerous times, but that didn't diminish the accomplishment one bit. After all, he often forgot words we'd gone over only moments before.

"Wooo!" I cried, interrupting all the other kids and volunteers in the Reading Partners' room. "This boy just read a WHOLE book entirely BY HIMSELF!"

Oh my goodness! That's incredible! Wow! Every volunteer in the place took a moment to share in the glory. They all recognized that there was nothing small about this accomplishment. It had been exceedingly hard won.

Martín beamed. I'd never seen him smile so big, not even while doing his self-proclaimed favorite thing he was best at — playing. I gave him not one but two stickers. One for his sticker card, the other to bring home to show off to his parents.

It's slow-going work, teaching him to read, and sometimes his progress stalls or even backtracks, but I have complete faith that we’ll get there. Maybe I wouldn't feel that way if he didn't love stories so much, but this boy, I'm convinced, was born to read. And maybe even write.

Keep Trying

So, I keep working with him, and I will keep working with him for the rest of this school year and into the next one, until he reaches grade-level proficiency in reading. He's an intelligent young man, who is good at many things besides being friendly, playing, and speaking Spanish.

Especially, he's good at being him. No one else could ever be as good at being Martín as Martín. He's a pleasure, a joy — an excitable, hyperactive, valuable member of my local community and the human race. Maybe he'll go into construction like his father, or maybe he'll write TV shows, or maybe he'll do something else altogether.

It doesn't matter what he ends up doing. No matter what, he deserves a chance. A chance, at the very least, to experience what I see as one of life's greatest pleasures, and one that also happens to be key to expanding horizons, opening doors, and making the impossible possible: reading.

He deserves to learn to read. He deserves my time. I'll keep giving it to him.