ReadAble’s vision is “Every child literate for life”. It translates to every child we work with having the ability to seek nourishment from language and text, while being able to wield literacy to achieve their life goals. This vision came about naturally in our first few meetings during which we clarified that we wanted to address the host of problems that come along with childhood illiteracy. As beneficiaries (or victims?) of Singapore’s own content-heavy, tuition-fuelled education system ourselves, the irrationality of the system became clear to us when we met the kids in the Jalan Kukoh estate.
What has posed an unexpected problem is defining our objective in continuing to work with children who have achieved a satisfactory level of literacy. The answer is that we will continue to nurture their interest in the written word, connect it with the world around them and push them to further explore. No child’s interest should go unnurtured because of their family circumstances. Yes, volunteering is time-consuming. We find the time to do it because most of us are privileged and unencumbered by child-raising or other domestic demands. We are also driven by passion for ReadAble’s vision, and passion is the great schedule-clearer.
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Our educational focus is different from that in public schools in the sense that relationships fuel ReadAble. We have the luxury of building deep relationships. Our student-teacher ratio is low enough that each precious kid gets close to individual attention. We want each of them to know — and feel — that there is an adult fighting in their corner. We follow them for years. Our first kindergarten student is now in our secondary school group. We know many of their families and are close to them. You get a lot less of that in public schools, mainly due to issues of scale and other constraints.
We focus on literacy and since 2018, numeracy. We work with kids on the fundamentals — reading fluency, understanding and enjoying text, and deep-learning early numerical concepts. Our volunteers identify reading materials within their students’ reading ability and scope of interest, read with them, and engage them in discussions about their learning while guiding them in exploring some of the themes discussed. Schools do less of these. We can speculate the reasons — exam pressure, KPIs, a fast-paced curriculum — but whatever it is, the unfortunate reality is that a kid who enters Primary One with no reading or numerical skills falls behind very quickly and often, irrevocably. Their self- esteem plummets, and many are unmercifully labelled as having an “attitude problem”.
We have all sorts of success and failure stories. We do not want to whitewash the difficulty of our work. Perhaps the contrasting stories of Anna and Brian (not their real names), two of our earliest students would highlight this range.
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Eight-year-old Anna was bright, lively, and sassy. She had no reading skills when we met her and refused to do any seat work. Throughout the five years of her primary school life during which she was our student, many volunteers worked individually with her and were driven nearly to despair by her slipperiness and wilfulness in class. A side effect of our work with her however was that she became very articulate as she was naturally outspoken and is now capable of impeccable speech!
Anna’s family background was also difficult. Her father was constantly incarcerated and she was raised single-handedly by her mother. Unfortunately, Anna and her clashed often, and badly. Anna’s family circumstances had a deep and lasting impact on her emotional state. She was often at loggerheads with certain schoolteachers, who disliked her strong personality and often humiliated her in public (by her own telling). She has struggled academically since primary school. By secondary school, she was rejecting authority as well as the help of ReadAble volunteers, and has lately withdrawn into herself. We remain friends with her mother, but we are waiting for her to reach out and reconnect.
Brian is a five-year old boy that our co-founders Jonathan and Michelle met on Christmas Eve 2013, the very first ReadAble home visit. He was a lovely child — shy and somewhat inexpressive — but with a naturally high intelligence and strong attention span. Despite being unable to read at all when we first met him, working on phonics had him reading Roald Dahl in just four months.
His family is intact and stable, and he is especially close to his sister and mother. Like Anna’s mother, his mother cajoled streams of volunteers to tutor him; unlike Anna, his studies blossomed. He formed a deep interest in STEM subjects and scored 260 for PSLE. He also maintains close ties with his current and former ReadAble teachers, to whom he and his sister still turn to for company, comfort and the occasional life advice.
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How do we judge success with either child? By what metric? They are both still very young with their whole lives ahead of them and with good adults continuing to invest in their lives. We can only hope that the lessons we have taught them, and the role models we have been, will help them to make sound decisions in their later life. 2021 will see us keeping on at we have always done, but hopefully as a properly registered charity — we aim to get charity status this year. We are also hoping to open a class for three-year-olds. Our youngest students now are four years old, but if we want more children to succeed, we need to expand our early intervention efforts.
One can reach out to us at team.readable@gmail.com to offer your time or resources.
This story about Team ReadAble first appeared in the February 2021 issue of Men’s Folio Singapore.
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