I've been really grappling with my students' reading difficulties recently. We've been getting more students with genuine learning disabilities (there's some evidence that as area graduation rates have gone up, dropout rates for students with disabilities have gone up too. Why that is I'm not sure, but you can certainly draw your own conclusions). So teaching reading has changed a little for me...but it's always been true that my students have a hard time understanding what they read and then retaining it. But the worse things get in the world in general, the more I keep thinking, I want to give them the tools to understand the world and their situations better. I want them to see their own lives as embedded in the world they live in, not just a result of their having not done "what they were supposed to do." This is a tall order to follow while preparing for a standardized test, and I never really get there-the most that happens is that I plant some seeds and hope that someday later they'll matter. What I've been thinking recently, though, is that planting these seeds is made additionally hard for me by the fact that my students mostly don't assimilate information well through reading. It's not just that that's really what the GED tests that makes it a problem-it's that I myself assimilate almost all information that way. And it's maybe also that I feel like my right to discuss issues of race and class as a white middle class teacher can only come (aside from the fact that I care about it) from my ability to bring other voices into the room through what they wrote. I can't see much of a reason for my students to believe what I say about race, on some level, although sometimes they do. I know they can and should believe Frederick Douglass, though. I want them to talk to me and to each other because I think that is how action happens in the world-and that does happen. But I also want for them to talk to him, to feel that he is speaking to them through his writing-which, however, is rife with complicated vocabulary and sentence structure. I know I could modify the text, and pedagogically that's probably the soundest thing to do-but I've always felt funny tampering with peoples' writing.What if I take away something important? (Is it better to learn some of something important than not to learn any of it at all?) Maybe this is generational too-I know the motivation of all students, not just mine, to grapple with long complicated texts has gone down in the Internet age. But it saddens me nonetheless.