No. Think of how you’d feel if day in and day out you were frustrated. How do you act when stress is relentless, when you always feel overwhelmed, when all you expect is failure? How will this affect your mood, your optimism, your willingness to try? Chances are you’d get angry, get depressed, try to escape. Children are the same.
Morally, schools should help children, not harm them. But requiring children with reading disabilities to read lots of materials they can’t read, they can’t understand, they can’t escape from, and demanding that they succeed with these materials, harms them. It stigmatizes them. It tells them they’re failures. It creates emotional and motivational problems. It impedes progress. It creates animosity. Here’s what Lauren Leslie and Joanne Caldwell, two renowned literacy scholars, warned about frustration level materials: Avoid them.
