It was hot, and the garage smelled of gasoline. Trent, a lanky 17-year-old with a square patch of five o' clock shadow on his chin, squatted to look at a book. He and his friend were working on a Honda Hatchback, and Trent needed to read instructions from the manual.  He stared at the page for a long moment. Then he looked up through his bangs, grinned a chipped-front-tooth grin and laughed, like the joke was on him. He couldn't read the book.

This wasn't a new problem. Trent had spent many hours in middle school letting his eyes wander off the pages of countless books and around the perimeter of classrooms while supposedly engaged in a ritual known as SSR – silent, sustained reading.  In high school, Trent intentionally lost his To Kill a Mockingbird book, twice. His friends told him the plot, but he failed the test anyway because he couldn’t quite read the questions.   Trent knew he was having trouble, but he blamed it on his own stupidity. It was one of his favorite jokes. "I'm so stupid," he'd say, and laugh his infectious laugh and grin his chipped-tooth grin.

What Trent didn't know was that, as a high school senior, he was reading at a fourth grade level, at best. When he looked at words, he could often make out what they were, but piecing them together took him a painfully long time. In Trent's school district in Eugene, Oregon, a 2005 study of incoming ninth graders showed that 20 percent read poorly enough so that they had trouble with high-school level work.  Many were casualties of legislative cuts to school funding so severe that 35- to 40- student middle school classes had become the norm.  Low reading levels were exacerbated by long-standing controversies in the educational research and teaching communities over the best ways to teach reading. Struggling readers had been shuffled between programs, with little continuity or coherence, and deprived of the individual attention they needed as they competed with too many classmates. Like Trent, many of them entered high school believing they were stupid, and that reading programs could not help them.

Trent figured he was stupid about school, but he knew he wasn't dumb about cars. Since he was a child, he'd been good at taking things apart, like televisions and computers, and fixing them. Trent had spent a lot of time in his friends' garages, and he liked both the intricate mechanisms in small engines, and the way an engine from a diesel truck could take up most of a room. He knew the vocabulary of car mechanics –  pistons, cam shafts, brake shoes, volts, amps -- so these should not have been hard words for him to read. Maybe that's why he decided to get help soon after the day that he’d been unable to read the manual in his buddy’s garage.  Maybe it was because he was 17 and about to start his last year of high school. Maybe it was because he had decided he wanted to be a mechanic. Maybe it was just a good day to enter the warren of counseling offices at Churchill High and ask for help. In August of 2004, that's what he did. He also signed up to take a mechanics class at the community college.

Trent was motivated to read because he wanted to work on cars. But he was also motivated by something much deeper and stronger:  He didn't want to end up like his brother and his Dad, unemployed and on drugs. Trent wanted to be dependable like his Mom.  For Trent, learning to read meant making himself employable.  Enrolling in a program called Read Right meant taking a step toward becoming the man he wanted to be after he graduated.

The guidance counselor to whom Trent spoke was surprised when he walked in her office.  Amy Adams, an organized woman who reminded students of Martha Stewart, had recently spent hours with the vice principal scanning class lists, deciding which students should be required to take Churchill's reading class in the Fall. At the beginning of each school year, the students selected often protested that they shouldn't have to take a class their friends said meant they were dumb.  It didn’t matter how many times Amy or their teachers told them that reading skills and intelligence were different things, they listened to their friends. This Fall, Churchill was about to start an expensive and controversial reading program, one the school had adopted not because it fit into a particular reading theory but because it showed results.  Researchers didn't love the program.  It didn't tend to fit into their understandings of how the mind broke words into parts. Students, it was advised, might not love it at first either because it was quite regimented.  But everyone would appreciate it in the long run  -- because it worked. Of all the reading programs in the nation, Read Right appeared to boost the reading levels of middle and high school students the best.  Amy Adams had to decide which students should enroll. To have a senior boy walk into her office and ask for help, propelled by his own desire to learn, was a gift.       

In September, Trent started back in school. Like most high school boys at his school, he usually wore jeans, t-shirts and white athletic shoes with the laces untied. His pants often sagged under the weight of a silver-studded black belt, and a hoop earring in his left ear made him appear confidant about his style. Every day after first period, he walked across a parking lot to the Read Right portable. Toward the front of the doublewide trailer, students sat in desks in rows and looked at books or chatted.  Behind them, teachers read with students in small tutoring groups. In each group, a teacher sat in the crook of an 'L', formed by two tables scooted together, and students sat around the outside. Trent started the period in one of the groups and switched places with students at the desks halfway through.

Trent liked his Read Right instructor, Henny Buditjahja, from the beginning. She was a small, Chinese-Indonesian woman who leaned her head toward him to listen and looked right at him before she made notes on her clipboard. She moved fast and, as Trent liked to tell people, "got it done." When he showed up to class early, Henny talked to him about what he was going to do next year. It was a tough job market, she'd say, and Trent needed to read well to succeed in it. Once Henny said Trent should get a two-year degree at Lane Community College and finish at the University of Oregon. The University of Oregon? Trent hadn't considered going to college until he met Henny. But Henny said she thought he could do it. And Henny didn't mess around. When the bell rang, she got down to business, and so did Trent.

Trent started each tutoring session with a book on the table in front of him and black headphones on his head that made him look like a radio announcer. The headset was attached to a vintage tape recorder with big buttons. For the next forty minutes, he alternated between reading along with the audiotape, reading the same sections aloud to Henny and reading different passages to her as she coached him. The Read Right method relied on the idea that the brain builds neurological connections that increase reading ability when people force themselves to read fluently.  Henny checked to make sure he was reading “excellently,” which in Read Right jargon meant paced conversationally. Every time he read a section aloud, Trent told Henny if he thought he had read it excellently or not, and Henny agreed or disagreed with him. If she disagreed, he had to listen to the passage again on the headphones and then read it aloud again. Throughout the tutoring session, Trent's right foot bounced under the table. Otherwise, he kept his eyes on the book with his head bowed.

After forty minutes of tutoring, Trent switched places with the students sitting in the desks at the front of the trailer. Sometimes Trent read to himself but mostly he joked around and chatted like the other kids. His jokes included plenty of stories about the stupid things he had done, from forgetting peoples' names to falling out of the back of a pickup truck. Kids laughed when Trent delivered his signature line: "Oh my God, I'm so stupid."  Now and again, an instructor looked up from a tutoring group and said "quiet down." And they did, Trent especially. He'd always been a polite kid, and his teachers had often told his mom how nice he was, which may have been one of the reasons they hadn't noticed he read at a low fourth grade level until he was a senior in high school.

With Henny, Trent started out reading children's picture books. In the first book he read, photographs of hikers filled more than half of each page, with a single sentence like, "Some people like to camp in the woods," under each picture. Trent hated reading this book. He kept thinking he'd read it excellently, but Henny kept saying he hadn't. Trent shook his head in disbelief and put the headphones back on.

Every other day after Read Right, Trent took the bus to Lane Community College, where he attended mechanics class. In mechanics, the instructor wrote on the board and Trent tried to keep pace in his notes. Every week, he was assigned a chapter from a heavy book with tiny print.  It had charts and graphs instead of photos.  For homework he had to answer a long list of questions based on the reading.  After class, Trent took the bus to the small home he shared with his mom, his sister and their eight dogs, where he spent hours reading and rereading the chapter and tackling the questions.  Often, he didn't get to sleep until one or two in the morning.

For the next two months, Trent pushed himself, and it worked. He progressed from puzzling through each word, one by one, as he read, to thinking about what the author of a book was trying to say to him. He finished the camping book, excellently, and then started tackling books with more writing and fewer pictures. He learned to read ahead when things didn't make sense and to let punctuation help him understand the way sentences were supposed to sound. Soon he was able to read each chapter of his mechanics text one time through and get most of his comprehension questions right. On his midterm test, Trent scored 87 percent.  He displayed it on the refrigerator. By late October, he and Henny were agreeing on whether or not he'd read excellently almost every time. Henny said he was ready to try testing up into the next level of books. But she wanted to wait for a trainer from the Read Right company to visit in a few weeks.  The program was new.  She hadn't tested a student before.

Then Trent got sick and missed classes for a week. For his reading test, he was pulled aside to sit at a table with Henny and the visiting  trainer. Trent was nervous.  He read fast. The trainer said he rushed and wasn't ready to move on, and Henny agreed. Reading had to sound natural, she reminded him. Slow down. For two weeks Trent worked on slowing down, but he chafed at it.  He'd worked so hard learning to speed up.    

The first week in November, Trent received two job offers at auto body shops and one at Wal-Mart. He told Henny, his girlfriend, and his mom about them, and they were proud of him. But deciding which job to take and how to juggle it with his high school and community college classes was harder than he'd thought. Trent wanted to make the choices that would give him the least chance of becoming like his brother or his father. But calculating how to grow up different from someone is harder than figuring out how to follow in his footsteps. Sure, Trent had his mother, a woman who sometimes worked 14-hour days besides taking care of his sister, who had Lupus, and keeping the house going.  She worked hard to survive, and from her Trent learned to get up and keep trying when life got him down. Trent listened to his mom, but Trent was also a boy who needed a male role model, a kid who wanted to drive big trucks through the mud and dirty his hands on engine grease.  Male friends of the family would let Trent help them in garages and go four wheeling with them.  

Along the way, he had made some good choices, among them the decision not to take drugs. He wouldn't even take aspirin after he fell off the back of his friend's pickup, split his scalp open and broke his collar bone. When Trent was younger, his brother had thrown him against his mother's curio cabinet and then slammed his face into the floor with the butt of a rifle.  That’s where the chipped tooth came from.  Trent ascribed his brother's violent behavior to drug use. Years later, when Trent was about to enter high school, his sister needed a kidney transplant, and his dad donated one of his. But the operation left Trent's dad in chronic pain, and he started taking and later abusing prescription medication. Trent considered him the family's second drug addict.  Soon Trent's parents were divorced. He stayed with his mom, who found herself working three jobs to put food on the table and pay rent.  

Trent's brother stayed home getting high most of the time. Trent's father was on disability. He would not be like either of them, he promised himself.  He would stay clean and sober, and he would work, a lot. So in November of his senior year he didn't choose between jobs. He took all three.

One morning in November, Trent sat at a table in the musty portable, looked over a page in his mechanics book and answered questions about how electrons move through wiring and how to calculate voltage. He glanced at a comprehension question about the car's ammeter, found the answer from a quick skim of a page, and thought how much he liked being able to read well. Henny tested him again and this time he sounded natural and ready to advance. Soon, Trent started coming to school in new clothes, and grinning a new, permanent, kind of chip-toothed grin.  He held his head up and looked people in the eye.

But life was getting difficult to manage.  Being a student in two schools and working three jobs didn't turn out as well as Trent had hoped. His two garage jobs both offered him fewer hours than Wal-Mart, and both wanted him to work during times that conflicted with his hours at the superstore. Besides, Trent was itching to get his hands on cars, but both of these jobs only let him clean up after mechanics.  He dropped them and started working long hours at Wal-Mart,  from 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon to midnight, five days a week. Wearing a blue vest that said, "How may I help you?" in white writing across the back, he pushed lines of carts across a parking lot the size of a small landing strip.

It was too much.  He already had a history of coming late to his first-period class on tough mornings.  Now he was late even more often.  When he talked to one of his first-period teachers about how his midnight work schedule, the man said it was no excuse.  This class was supposed to be "real world," he said, and in the real world you can't show up late.  Trent thought, you can't get it more real than this, buddy.

He didn’t want to drop out of his class at the community college, but in late October, Trent was sick; in November he was working  three jobs, and by December, now working eight hours a day at Wal-Mart, he'd stopped going to class. Trent promised his mother that he would go back after high school and stick with it next time.

Trent did stick with Read Right. In December, for the first time in his life, he became so absorbed in a book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, that he didn't want to put it down. He got mad at a kid who took Harry Potter home for the weekend and didn’t bring it back to school for a few days.   Almost every day, Henny made positive comments about Trent with her number two pencil on the sheet against her clipboard. She told Trent she could tell he was improving. By the end of January, Trent was reading at a roughly seventh grade level, and Henny told him he was moving through the level quickly. Trent felt good about reading.  He'd set a goal, and got it done.  It made him think he might just be able to handle college. He knew he wanted to go back to taking classes at the community college in the fall and work into mechanics through a degree rather than cleanup jobs in a shop.

It was not just what Henny said about his progress that mattered to Trent, or the fact that he was moving through reading levels.  It was that, when semester grades came out, he had earned an 'A' in English class.  When he was called on to read aloud in front of a class of 35, he didn't hesitate. He wasn't even bothered when he had to read sections with people speaking as though they lived a long time ago, which would have made him shake his head and mutter an excuse in years past. Now he bowed his head over the page, read the words and looked for what the author was trying to say. He often volunteered to answer questions. When he went to the mall with his girlfriend, he not only bought her stuff, but hung out reading the back of CD cases and looking over titles in the book store. Trent told the same old stories about falling out of the back of a pickup truck and how he had failed tests in the ninth grade because he couldn't read the questions, but he didn't seem to have any new Stupid Trent Stories.  His life had stopped giving him material.

One day in January, it was cold out and the Read Right trailer smelled like dust from the heater. Trent leaned over a big, hard-backed book. He was sitting at a desk in one of the rows, and his legs were tired from pushing carts at Wal-Mart the night before. His square patch of stubble stood out. He'd fashioned his bangs into little spikes with hair gel that morning. He wore a skater shirt, his heavy black silver-studded belt and a pair of jeans. Around Trent kids joked, whispered and threw things. Someone said his name to get his attention. But Trent didn't look up.  He turned a page slowly, following the words from the bottom of one page to the top of the next, chasing after a story the author was trying to tell him.   He was the studious kid in the room, smart and a little boring. But he didn't mind.

AMY DUNCAN, a first-year student in the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon, is also a high school teacher. She thanks UO Education professors Tindal and Tromba for their help.