"I Can Read"

His dark hair which was always falling over his right eye was constantly being flung back up where it belonged. He was big for his age, and when his momma brought him in to our school at the end of first quarter in his sixth grade year I knew he was going to teach me some things, even if they were mostly lessons in patience. He had a quick sense of humor which tried hard to rescue him from his academic shortcomings. He was part of a class of 31 students when I first taught him. He was placed in the back because he came in late. He did not like Bible class from the start and the wisecracks proliferated whenever he sensed danger. The danger for him was being asked to read. Now this was a school that was using the NIV, so it was not an issue of ancient KJV or the like, but rather he just found it near impossible to read. When I pulled him in during lunch and asked him to read for me, he immediately stated, "I CAN READ" and then stared at the page.

"What's up? Why not read this for me right here?"

"Well, its not that I can't read," he protested. "I just don't feel like reading this stuff. It's stupid."

I switched to other materials, still "stupid." "Okay, you bring in something you don't think is stupid and read it to me tomorrow."

The next day he is back with a Flash Gordon comic. He "reads" it to me in quick, unfaltering, impassioned tones. Not a word of what he reads to me is on the page he is "reading" from. He repeats, "I can read."

Sometime later, after repeating our sixth grade, getting a lot of reading help, and in particular learning how to cover up his obvious lacks with lots of humor and laughter, he was back in class, this time towards the front.

And he was reading from any passage I asked him to read from. And at his eighth grade graduation (we did not go above 8th) he stopped me in the cake line to state that not everything we read in Bible class was stupid.

Now I could draw a bunch of morals and lessons from that, but I don't want these stories to end with "applications." I trust my readers to draw their own poetic notions from these little lovelies.