On My Soapbox from Michael Wallis | May 2025

Michael Wallis is the Student Learning Consultant for The Washington Center. His collaborative services are available to faculty who wish to improve the equity and student learning focus of their curricula.

I’m swiftly approaching the home stretch of my 20-year educational journey, and this reality– that of being at the tail end of a master’s degree in teaching– has given me no shortage of time to reflect on the systems I’ve navigated through for the great majority of my life.

In gradeschool, I was what they called a ‘gifted student.’ I carried that reputation with me through high school, with all the trappings: the most advanced classes the school could offer me adorned my schedule year after year. The factoid that impresses people most about that time in my life is my trajectory through mathematics. I was privileged to live in a district that could offer advanced coursework in math at the middle level– my graduation requirement of algebra 2 was completed by the 7th grade, and I progressed from there to geometry and trigonometry, pre-calculus, and then AP calculus by my sophomore year in high school. At that point, it might have seemed to an outside observer that I had simply been born with a highly capable mind for math. That isn’t the case. In truth, I’ve never been a particularly confident mathematician, nor do I possess some innate computational skill.

What I actually had was an advanced reading level.

You see, that was the flipside of my advanced schooling: I burned through books like a coal furnace, much to the chagrin of teachers who didn’t know how to differentiate for a kid who would read the class text in 3 hours rather than the 3 weeks they’d planned. I’m still not sure exactly what factors added up to create this intuitive skill for language at a young age, but I do know that I advanced to a very symbolic and analytical understanding of the written word long before I was expected to do so.

This skill has by far opened more doors for me than any other in my life. It also forced me into an archetype, a role that I was happy to accept: the nerd. My classmates’ perception of me, my teachers’ perception of me, my parents’ perception of me, every aspect of my life has been touched by the expectation that I would excel in everything that I did, mostly because of my ability to read.

Part of the learning I’ve done in my master’s program has been about issues of status among students. The research unequivocally shows that students have a keen sense of academic and social hierarchy, and at the top of the academic ladder are the students with the highest scores in reading.

Why is that?

Here’s the epiphany I had about it: I was never very good at math. I knew that the whole time, but what I didn’t know is why I kept succeeding year after year in the advanced classes. Until I wasn’t– AP calculus was the end of my career in mathematics, with the gradebook reflecting I had passed the class 0.03% above failing– I still believe that my teacher had passed me to protect my academic pride more than any other merit-based reason. AP calculus was the end of the road for me precisely because of my reading skill. I wasn’t good at math, but I had unparalleled access to the information. It wasn’t until the challenge of the mathematical skills outpaced my ability to understand the problem linguistically that I began to struggle. I had totally failed to develop any actual high-level math skills my entire career, relying mainly on my analytical reading skills (which included logical and process-based thinking, pattern recognition, and decoding unfamiliar words, phrases, or passages).

With the benefit of hindsight, I get to apply this insight about myself to my future teaching practice. I can understand that not only was I an exceptional reader, but that my experience of having an extremely low barrier to entry in almost any classroom because of that skill is not universal. An analytical and intuitive understanding of language is one of the main skills we expect students to still be developing even after graduation, let alone during their career in gradeschool.

So my emphatic argument to you is this, whether you are an educator in the field of algebra, or chemistry, or psychology, anthropology, philosophy, whatever: you need to make sure your students know how to read your subject. Their comprehension is equivalent to their access. Consider how you are teaching the acquisition of language skills related directly to how your textbooks are written– a calculus textbook demands a very different set of skills to a literature or history text, and I can nearly guarantee that your students haven’t been directly instructed in the difference.

And, sure, maybe you don’t feel like you need to worry about this. After all, you’ve seen evidence that students can pick up the discipline-specific flavor of language intuitively. Students like me. Just be careful, because some of those students might be hiding some pretty significant gaps and dry-rot in the floorboards of their knowledge beneath a fluffy shag carpet of reading skills.

Going forward, I hope you’ll join me in looking for ways to interrogate the steps we took to arrive at expertise.