Leonardo Blair, Staff ReporterIt's GSAT crunch time for nervous grade 6 students across the island who are scheduled to sit the annual exam March 27 and 28. At ages 10, 11 or 12, their GSAT results could decide their path in life. Most will perform competently, but not the ones like Dean who made it to grade 6 without learning how to read. What happens when you are 14, poor, bright, have big dreams and can't read? How do you get to grade 6 and while still grappling with the letters of the alphabet? Dean's story.
IT IS October 14, two days before the 2002 General Election. Una Williams' fingers are doing a patient tap dance on top of the small wooden desk in the reading room at the Oxford Remedial School in Kingston.
Ta-dap-ta-dap, ta-dap-ta-dap...
Sitting in front of her on a wooden school chair is Dean.His lips are making silent Os, then Ms, but not even a whisper of the word he is trying to pronounce can be heard. There is a nervous silence. Even the green lizard crawling on the off-white walls of the dingy book-packed room appears to be waiting.
Ta-dap-ta-dap, ta-dap-ta-dap...
Just when it seems that Dean is about to choke on the word lodged somewhere deep in his throat, Ms. Williams' soothing voice breaks the silence and Dean swallows in the timely intermission.
"Think Dean! Think! F-R-O-M, what is that?
"FFFFall?" asks Dean.
"No," says Ms. Williams. "Spell it, spell the word. F-R-O-M - from, Dean, - from. Look at the letters, look at the word and remember the sound before you talk. What's the next word, Dean? Think." A-W-A-Y Dean, A-W-A-Y."
No one has laughed yet. And no one is laughing. Dean can try again and he's thinking hard -- A-W-A-Y on October 14.
DIFFERENT CLASS
A month later, November 2002: He's in a different class now. He's reciting a Louise Bennett poem this time and he is the star of the show. His voice climbs above the other students'. He's a natural. So confident.
That's Dean, tall, wiry, 14 years old and so good at show and tell. He once thought about becoming a doctor but "me and sharp things don't 'gree," he says. "I might want to take a bullet out of someone and take out their lungs instead."
He has almost perfected the art of comedy. He'll make you laugh without even trying but don't suggest that he becomes a Chris Rock (United States comedian). "Every black man you see on TV is a comedian. You never see no white man a turn comedian."
Dean wants a serious job -- like being a lawyer -- not a job where people laugh at you all the time. He has been laughed at enough in his lifetime.
The last time he was laughed at, he was in another class. A class where most of the grade six students could identify words in the reading book without the teacher's help.
The teacher had picked him to read for the first time before the class. But talented Dean, who was always quiet in reading class, who loved show and tell, could hardly remember the alphabet at times much less read.
He tried anyway.
The titters came dripping like a sudden drizzle of rain. Every time Dean tripped over a word or called 'bat', 'ball'. The titters came, followed by a thunderous downpour of laughter. It whipped his confidence like lightning stripping bark from an old tree. The teacher joined in the tumult and eventually, Dean laughed too.
"All of them laughed and the teacher laughed with them," recalls Dean in quiet disbelief. "See me laughing with (them) but I want to take something and lick them down," he adds before he clams up again. He looks away then breaks the silence, not too loud, just enough for you to hear. "I don't like reading, even the little rat will see you and laugh and drop dead when you can't read," says Dean.
Still, he's trying. He wants to be a lawyer -- lawyers are serious and nobody laughs at them. Besides, he's in a different class now.
On this windy, cloudy November morning Dean is loving the drama. He is finishing his Louise Bennett poem. All eyes are on him and he doesn't mind it. He is the star of the show.
He likes the audience in his new class. Just Ms. Williams, co-ordinator of the Oxford Remedial School; his poetry instructor, 21-year-old Kadian Donald; Florence Grant, a remedial teacher for the last 40 years who is now retired; and about five other students. Most of the other students are at the same level as Dean. They are slow -- very slow -- but no one is laughing.
The recital ends and we retire to the dingy book-packed room with Ms. Williams at Dean's side. But this time we're not reading, just rapping and Dean is good at that.
He speaks with the confidence and intelligence of a grown man. "I like Ms. Williams," says Dean. "I like the attention at this school."
STRUGGLING TO READ
Two years ago when Dean came to the Oxford Remedial Centre, in New Kingston he was near the end of grade six, but had problems identifying the letters of the alphabet.
"He (Dean) had no idea of phonics and he was also a bit slow in math," says Ms. Williams. "He does math fairly well now but his main problem is reading. There was no consistency there."
Dean has an excellent memory of audio lessons, she explains, but he can't seem to remember anything he reads. "If you read him a story he recalls it better than most of the students in his class whose reading problems aren't as acute as his."
She knows he has a problem with the laughter so there is a rule against that at the school. "In here, the students are not allowed to laugh at each other," notes Ms. Williams.
LIVING IN THE COMPOUN'
While Dean is learning to conquer his fears in his new class the persistent poverty at home and the struggle for survival after school is making life all the more difficult for him.
"This is where I live," says Dean in strained English. It's almost the end of January in 2003 now. He is not in school today. He is in the place people in the Olympic Gardens area call The Compoun'. Dean calls it home.
The Compoun' is a cluster of buildings resembling the stick houses pre-schoolers like to draw in their note books packed unto a barren clearing. Surrounding them are other informal dwellings.
It rained on The Compoun' last night. There are puddles of water in soft mud. A mixture of rain and what seems like bathwater has settled in the yard. The smell of stale urine rises from the ground. I am following Dean in silence.
There are a group of women in front of one of the houses. Some are washing clothes, others are fixing their hair while still others are nursing babies.
Scuttle, scuttle, baby slips in the mud and cries.
Dean points to a wooden gate attached to a zinc fence with a Haagen-Daaz poster on the side. His mother, Marcia, is hurrying to fix up herself for the interview. "Ah soon come," she says from the small wooden structure.
The house is blue.
Marcia is a weather beaten woman with searching eyes but a welcoming personality. She is a busy woman, but like a hen brooding over her chicks there is a certain protective element in her voice when she speaks about Dean. She wants you to know that Dean isn't some misfit whose brain has done a number on him. It's just the reading, and it has been like that since he was a toddler.
"I try with him you know," she says. "Every school him go before this me talk to the teacher about him and me try and talk to him all the time but is not really him alone mi have. Mi have him brother and sister dem too and mi haffi hustle."
Since she got him into the Oxford Remedial School, however, she has seen improvements. "He couldn't write good, now him can write good so you can see that the people at the school are really helping him."
MEMORIES OF HIS FIRST SCHOOL
The first day Dean went to school he was glad. He was three years old and attended a school at the top of The Compoun'. Marcia would check his books sometimes but because Dean was so young at the time she "wasn't taking it so serious like now."
It was not until he was well on his way into his primary education that she began taking his performance in school seriously.
"At the time is the teacher make me know when him in five grade that Dean is very slow," she says. "None of the teachers from grade one go right up to four never said anything to me."
Dean's fifth grade teacher told Marcia that she needed to get him help from Mico. "She tell me that Dean is very slow to the grade that him into and him shouldn't dunce so. So mi must carry him to Mico."
She had noticed some of Dean's deficiencies before then too but says she didn't know what to do. She didn't have the time to spend with him either.
"But sometimes I would give him the last money to go to school.
"I don't have the dinner to give them in the evenings sometimes. So you know I have to go look the dinner money. Mi never really have all the time to take them up everyday," says Marcia.
"But when me take him up mi notice that him never like take up book. Him bawl. If you give him some words and take him up and say him fi go study it him don't study it, him go sleep. Anytime you take him up fi do anything him bawl. So mi say cho'. Mi just 'low him 'cause mi no want beat him."
NO MONEY, NO SPECIAL SCHOOL
Dean's fifth grade teacher gave Marcia a letter and told her to get him assessed at the Mico (Child Assessment and Research in Education) CARE centre.
"When mi carry him to Mico now, dem interview him and give me back an appointment and tell me must come back. Everytime mi go back mi never get through."
But one day she did, and after filling out some forms Dean was allowed to see a specialist. After that, Marcia says she was told that it would cost $2,000 for a two-day assessment.
"Mi say it nuh make sense fi me go pay $2,000 fi Dean and him naw go fi the week. And them a tell me 'bout some school up Red Hills way a fi $10,000, $12,000.
"Mi tell the teacher say mi nuh value dem deh money deh because mi not working. A likkle ice cream me ah sell. So mi no have it. So a so come mi never get through with him up there."
Dean doesn't know where his father is. The last time Marcia heard anything about him, he was somewhere in Montego Bay.
On The Compoun' is Marcia's livelihood.
"I sell ice cream from my house. I don't really make a lot because I only sell two box of cream and I'll buy like a dozen Big Dipper and a dozen of the other things and sell."
This is her only means of making a living. It's how she feeds Dean and his two younger sisters who are also in school. And Marcia has bills. "Ah have my Courts bill to pay, so it very hard. I need a work. I try but I cannot get any work. I want one right now. It rough. Sometimes not even cook mi caan cook. But them (the children) understand. Anything me give them, them satisfy. You just haffi try to put out the best fi them."
Dean is a stand up man in his household. "Him help mi out a lot. Him will do him work. Right now him a go wash up the plate and him wash out the rug them fi me already. Anything me tell him fi do him do it."
Her oldest son who also lives in the house recently got a job. He works $2,700 weekly and sometimes gives her $500 to help out. "He has his own life to live," says Marcia.
DREAMS
Dean is listening silently as his mother speaks. I tell her he wants to be a lawyer. "Him would like to be a lawyer?" she asks doubtfully.
"But him would have to take in him lesson," she says turning to Dean. "If you cannot read. You cannot be a lawyer," she adds. Dean is nodding his head and there is a yearning in his eyes that says he wants to prove his mother wrong.
Dean follows me out of The Compoun'. He is silent again. "Don't worry," I tell him. "Just keep working hard. You are only 14. You can still make it. You know that, right?"
"Yes sir," he answers.
Names changed
