Review: Thank You, Mr. Falker

Polacco, Patricia. Thank You, Mr. Falker. New York: Philomel Books, 1998.

Thank You, Mr. Falker is a wonderful book about Trisha, who is motivated and excited to finally start school and learn to read. However, she realizes fairly quickly that this task is shaping up to be a bit more difficult than the other students make it look. When she tries to read words out loud, the texts gets all jumbled up in her brain and she cannot form complete words. Other students begin to make fun of her attempts and she becomes more aware that she is not progressing while the other students are surpassing reading expectations. In the book, it states that “Trisha began to feel ‘different.’ She began to feel dumb.” Trisha becomes more frustrated when she realizes that the same problem happens when she tries to do math as well. To make matters worse, other students call her “baby” and “dumb,” which leads Trisha to spend her free time in hiding, crying. Soon she starts to find reasons to avoid going to school at all… Until Mr. Falker, her fifth grade teacher realizes what she is up against and spends his extra time schooling Trisha on the basics of reading. Over a period of time, progress was made until Trisha could finally read a full paragraph. In the epilogue, Trisha encounters Mr. Falker again and when he asks what she is doing now, she tells him that she is now a children’s book author.

What is very important to know about this book is that it is an autobiography of Patricia Polacco herself, which makes her an insider to the learning disabilities community. She wrote this book because it was a tale she knew best and wanted to show how one teacher “unlocked the door and pulled [her] into the light.”

I like this book because it describes the experiences she went through and puts it into context for the uninformed reader, like how instead of words looking like a string of letters, they look like a bunch of fuzzy squiggles that are illegible. This story is accurate and authentic because it is based on her experiences. She defers the stereotype that students with learning disabilities are stupid, although according to her, many people assume. I would definitely use this book in my classroom in the future as it is very relatable and can impact those with and without learning disabilities.