Snow angel

Peggy’s Prompt—snow angel—45 minutes—011211




I never heard of snow angels until I was grown. We didn’t make snow angels in South Florida. We didn’t have snow. Ever. We did have sand, and salt spray, and seashells, and sandspurs, but they never showed up on the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test. The Metropolitan Reading tests were widely used to see if children were “at reading level”, and the Reading Readiness test was usually given to kindergarteners to see if they were “ready” to learn to read. Since there were no free kindergartens in south Florida in the 1940’s, I didn’t go to kindergarten, and thus was spared the Metropolitan Reading Readiness test. But it I had taken it, I would have flunked, and perhaps been made to repeat kindergarten. Even though I had been reading since I was four years old. All because I wouldn’t have recognized half of the drawings of common, everyday things that the children taking the test had to identify (say the name of to the teacher.) I didn’t know about sleds, or snowmen, or snow angels, or icicles, or even mittens. I certainly didn’t own any boots or have a snowsuit or winter jacket. No truck came down our street shoving snow to the side of the road. And although my grandparents did have a fireplace, it had been replaced as a heating source by a large kerosene stove.



It never occurred to me how handicapped I was for learning to read. But, years after doing that very thing, I went to work as the Research Coordinator for Florida A & M University Laboratory School. FAMU is an historically black institution, as they are now called, and so all the children in the Laboratory School were African-American, as they are now called. Because of my research obligations, I took a look at what data were already gathered on these children, to see what I could see. Well, lo and behold, there were data on reading ability for a number of children for all 12 years of schooling. And wouldn’t you know, it turned out that kindergarteners at FAMU’s Lab School were seriously not ready to read, according to their scores on the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test. But somehow, all of them did learn to read, as evidenced by their reading scores in subsequent years. No one had ever questioned this paradox. I guess they thought their kindergarten teacher was a genius, getting all those un-ready children to read in their year with her. But I was intrigued. How could a whole batch of non-ready children suddenly become readers, despite their unequivocal reading readiness scores. It didn’t take more than a cursory review of the MRRT itself to find the answer. All those “common everyday” items on the test, such as sleds, mittens, snow angels, that none of these children had ever seen, except maybe on TV.



From that moment on, I was a big believer in the effects of “culture” on standardized test scores. And grateful that public kindergarten and the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test had never been a part of my life.