When Shihab (10) noticed that his friends were reading sentences from their notebooks, he felt they were decoding a code that he had never learned to identify. All he saw were symbols that didn’t make much sense: “A looked like tents, B was a pair of eyes, and C just looked like an open mouth. I wasn’t seeing them as part of a larger word or sentence.” His inability to make sense of the words stifled him as his peers read out loud.
The silence made its way home with Shihab. With his father selling bus tickets to support the family, they often struggled to afford books and other necessary materials. Shihab's fear of going to Panthabari Balakandi Government Primary School grew day by day -
I eventually would make excuses to not go to school, and because I didn’t have the supplies, my parents would not force me.
The missed school days would eventually lead Shihab to fall behind in all of his subjects. Jakiya Ferdous, an education facilitator, has seen many students struggle with English: “Learning two languages at the same time can be daunting. We usually focus on improving students’ abilities in the language that they struggle with more.”
He connects language excelling to provide them with activities and eventually builds their confidence - “With Shihab, it started with providing him with the workbooks that would help him decipher letters. When he became more accustomed, we knew he’d be more inclined to go to school.”
Jakiya believes that speaking to parents decipher the way forward -
We visited Shihab’s house a few times to see where our support begins and his parents’ begins. While we provided the workbooks, they were able to focus on other supplies like pencils and notebooks.
He says that these little gestures show students that they have a support system in place:
When Shihab’s mother, Swapna Begum, understood our determination to bring him back to school, she felt motivated because she knew she would not be doing it alone.
Shihab was receiving the extra attention he needed in remedial classes. He says, “The teacher, Md. Mahabub Ul Haque, broke down the alphabet and sentences into smaller steps which helped me make sense of them. Now, I can write letters, read small words, and make sense of English.”
Shihab’s only focus is putting lines together in his notebook during English class these days. He wants to be able to write more because language is now a form of expression -
When they asked us what we wanted to be the other day, I was able to write - I want to be a police officer to serve my country. It felt good to be able to voice my future.
