Reading Specialist

For me, reading has always been a joy; a door to receiving knowledge about new and interesting things. In addition, it has been about finding insights about me and life so that I could continually develop. When I entered the teaching profession and met my students, it was difficult to comprehend how little value they placed on reading and that some of them at 16, could not read.

My first term in a Form One Special classroom was extremely difficult for both myself and my students. They had been place in Secondary School although their scores showed that they had low or no score in SEA examination. And although I had had some training in teaching strategies and classroom management, and an undergraduate degree in English, I actually had no idea how to teach reading. For me that term, included a lot of hits and misses. For them, they were sometimes bored and often undisciplined as both they and I knew that although I tried different methods to reach them, it was not what they really needed to learn and that was how to read.

As I sought advice, material and courses from everywhere I could think or had heard of, it became less and less difficult. And I learned a lot when we later got Reading Teachers.

Adolescent Literacy development is extremely important as there are many young people with very little reading skills both in and out of school and this need has led me to want to become a Reading Specialist.