By the time third grade rolled around I was a much better reader. It gave me great pride to be among the best readers. Mrs. Church placed us in reading groups at the beginning of the year according to our ability, but gave us the option to move up if we showed her by our extra efforts that we were worthy of it. I was in the top group of the three reading groups in our class and proud of it. For me, being in the top reading group made it so there was no where else to go. I was at the top, except for one girl who became her own reading group since she was such a good reader. Nobody wanted to get to that level since that girl was considered “teacher’s pet.”
At that time, I was preoccupied with success stories about people who overcame adversity and rose to great heights. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could rise to the highest reading group. To do that, though, I would need to get myself placed in the lowest reading group. Mrs. Church had also made it possible to do that. She warned us that we would be moved to a lower reading group if we didn’t do our reading workbook assignments. I suddenly stopped doing mine and before long I was placed in the middle reading group. A week later, I found myself in the lowest group. It wasn’t much fun. The kids in that group were all pretty good readers, but they were slower. At reading time, we were in a circle, and we took turns reading from our books. Some kids read so slowly and I found myself reading ahead because I was bored. The problem with this was that when it was my turn to read, I didn’t know where we were. So it looked like I couldn’t keep up with the others.
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