When Wadsworth Elementary fourth-grade teacher Erin Cartwright asks her students for a volunteer to read out loud, you can count on the same hand to shoot up every single time. And every single time, the other students groan, because they know what’s coming: Logan Schild is going to read out loud.
Whether sounding his way through a paragraph in Shiloh or butchering passages about the plight of the settlers, 9-year-old Logan just isn’t very good at reading. He doesn’t have a learning disability or a speech impediment, but for whatever reason, he still manages to botch pretty much every sentence he reads. Which leads everyone in his class to wonder: Why does this kid always volunteer to read if he’s not any good at it?
“By the time Logan reads three sentences, I can usually finish the whole entire page on my own,” said classmate Madelyn Wahler, adding that Logan will frequently read halfway through a sentence, get stuck, and start all over again. “It takes forever.”
According to students, the situation is beginning to get out of control. Recently, Ms. Cartwright told the class that they couldn’t go to recess until they finished reading through their chapter on latitude and longitude. Naturally, Logan volunteered to read, and as a result, the class’s recess got cut five minutes short—a significant amount of time, considering they only get 20 minutes on the playground.
“Yesterday, it took him eight tries to get through the word ‘accessory,’” said classmate Ethan Berry. “It’d be okay if he only volunteered every once in a while, but he does this every day. Nobody wants to hear him read anymore.”
It’s unclear why Logan continues to insist on reading, but if he wants any chance of getting invited to Mitch’s laser tag birthday party, the consensus is that he might want to start letting other people read for once.
