from Life Learning magazine, March/April 2008
Reading With Grace
by Becca Challman

The year is 1971 and my six-year-old self is about to learn a traumatic lesson. My first grade classmates are all struggling to sound out a list of phonetically spelled words. Things are moving agonizingly slow and I feel as if my turn will never come. I cannot wait to show off how well I can read, thereby winning Mrs. Hank’s undying approval. She has only made it around to Daphne in the middle of the first row (they’ve arranged us in four rows of five). The tiny blonde girl flushes and sweats under the teacher’s critical examination. Meanwhile, I wait in my hard chair in the last row next to the window and oh, I am so bored. Craving stimulation, I flip to the back of the chunky phonics workbook. Jackpot! Whole paragraphs punctuated by colorful illustrations beckon. I begin reading about Dick and Jane, occasionally stopping to steal glances out the window at a squirrel gathering nuts beneath the maple tree.

Soon, I am oblivious to the fact that the students’ voices have fallen silent. I vaguely hear the click-clack of the formidable teacher’s shoes as she makes her way toward me. Finally, the pink and eggplant-purple paisley pattern clinging to her ample frame draws my eyes upward. “Becky S,” she barks, towering over my desk, “What do you think you’re doing?” I cringe. “Reading,” I whisper. She mistakes my honesty for sarcasm. “No,” she barks again. “Reading is what I am trying to teach you, what I get paid to teach you! I’m not standing up in front of this class for my health you know. Reading is what we are trying to do while you, Miss Smarty Pants, are looking ahead in your workbook instead of paying attention.” She finishes her demeaning dissertation by whacking me on my tender upturned palm with a ruler she keeps for just such a purpose. I ferociously fight back hot tears of humiliation, but to no avail. Her words sting my spirit far worse than her ruler stings my hand. My tears spill. From that moment on, I learn to hide who I really am.

That is how the government-run education system rewarded me for learning to read before I started school. My husband Scott endured similar experiences. He recalls being perplexed in first grade when his friends, who usually spoke clearly, suddenly began stuttering and stammering as they tried to read. When he asked why they were talking like that, his teachers thought he was poking fun. He explained that it just didn’t sound right; he didn’t read aloud like that. Well, that did it. His teachers refused to believe he could read at all, much less read coherently. They made this shy little bespectacled boy stand up in front of the class and read words from an overhead projector. When he recognized word after word, when he enunciated each word clearly, when he read, and read and read, they merely shrugged and dismissed him, without an apology.

Besides angering the teachers by learning to read on our own, we each had vivid memories of persecution by bullies in school. For whatever reasons, we did not swim in the mainstream. We were different from the popular kids, the athletic  kids, the challenged kids. We fit into no group. We were individuals in an environment that demanded conformity. Because we were unable to conform (I use the term “unable” because we could not change our circumstances, although there were times we tried to change ourselves in order to be accepted), our peers and the adults who were supposed to protect and encourage us punished us.

No child of ours shall suffer daily punishment in the name of “education.” Thus, we decided to reject regimented learning even before I gave birth to our daughter Grace. We wanted her so much, we are not going to entrust her formative years to strangers just because it is the societal norm. At least attending public school taught us that much.

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Becca Challman firmly believes that the most important lessons she has ever learned, she learned from experience. Those experiences have taught her that she would rather live to learn than live to earn, that there is more joy in helping a child discover her truest self than in making sure she attends school every day and that if there were no other reason to live, there would still be books. Becca and her creative genius husband Scott reside in the present, reject regimented education and embrace life learning, each other and their daughter Grace Lillianna.