Lesson learned: Change takes time. It just does.

I love first grade in the spring. The kids are chatty as all get out but I love seeing how far they have come since the beginning of the year, especially in reading.

There's a kid in my class who started out the year at about the level of a preschooler. He only knew a handful of letters and their sounds. Throughout the year, I have worked with him quite a bit, trying to help him catch up, or at least make some decent progress.

At the end of each week, I monitor his progress and the data gets entered into a graph. If I were to zoom up and look at the progress made from one week to the next, I wouldn't see much improvement and it could be discouraging, knowing all of the effort my student and I have put into improving his reading. Some weeks he improves by just a bit, other weeks he makes major jumps, some weeks he stays exactly the same, and some weeks he gets worse.

However, when I look at the big picture and compare where he started at the beginning of first grade to where he is now, I can see that he has improved. A lot. He still is way behind where he should be at the end of first grade but he is a better reader now than he was in September. 

The interesting part of all of this is that, the other day, I asked him if he thought he was a good reader. He told me no. I'm pretty sure he is comparing himself to the other students and he knows he still can't read as well as them. To help him understand really how much progress he has made, I showed him his graph, told him repeatedly that he really had improved a ton, and showed him exactly how much more he could read now than back in September.

From his perspective, he was behind in September and he is behind now, which probably doesn't feel like much progress has occurred. 

From my perspective, he has come so far.

As I've been going through this process with my student, I realized that learning to read is very similar to the process of making a major change in your life. Just like reading, change takes daily effort but the effects might not be seen on a daily basis. Change usually happens slowly over time. It just does. It involves changing your mindset, changing your habits, changing your surroundings, and changing your attitude. And it involves patience as you take two steps forward, one step back, three steps forward, one step forward, two steps back, and then another two steps forward.

It's also necessary to remember that we cannot change all by ourselves; we need the Lord to be our Teacher and to help us change completely. Gérald Caussé (First Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric) said, "If we rely only on our personal abilities, our progress is and always will remain limited. However, when we move forward in the strength of the Lord our potential for progress knows no bounds." (Read the rest of his super fabulous devotional here.) Just as my student would have made little, to no progress without working with me on a daily basis, our progress will be severely limited if we do not frequently ask the Lord to work with us as we are trying to change.

And remember, just because you can't see the change, doesn't mean it's not happening or that Heavenly Father isn't noticing your efforts. It might mean that you are checking your progress too often, comparing to others instead of to yourself, or forgetting that there needs to be consistent effort. Or it might mean that you need to ask your Teacher to let you see your graph.