I love it when my students surprise themselves and me by doing things which we didn’t know they would be able to do! This quote reminds not to limit what they may be able to accomplish.
My blog has been quiet for a week because I am in New York City with a group of ten high school seniors. My husband and I are organizing and chaperoning their senior trip.
I taught six of the students we have with us when they were in elementary school. Two of them were in a Kindergarten music class I was assigned to cover during one of my classroom teaching years. Those two plus one more were in a first grade class I taught. Five of the ten were in my mainstream classroom for their 5th and 6th grade years.
There is a unique and I think interesting perspective that comes from reconnecting years later with people whom you taught as children. It gives a chance to see the results of seeds planted by you and others along the path of each one’s journey into young adulthood.
We all want school children to get good grades; to memorize those spelling words, math facts, presidents, states and capitols; and to learn to turn in assignments on time. Parent Teacher Conference topics range from social skills to attitude issues to messy desks. All those skills and minor goals are part of reaching toward a loftier, more over-arching goal. We need to turn children needing our guidance and advice at every turn into young adults who are competent to stand on their own two feet and make good decisions, asking for help when they need it and able to navigate the difficulties and challenges which come into everyone’s life.
Yesterday my wonderful, map-reading, subway-navigating husband was down with a foul bug and had to stay behind in the hotel. That left me to take our group into the city for the day’s activities. Alone, I could not have pulled it off. But with me were ten capable high school seniors, ready to use their areas of strength to make up for my areas of weakness.
I am not up for the task of navigation, but I know two of the students have shown a keen interest in learning the layout of the city and how to read the maps. Map reading becomes their job.
I am not great at the subway, but one of the girls has made herself a student of the way subway stops work, and how to know when to get on and off. She tracks our progress and tells us when it is time to get off.
I cannot both lead the way and watch our backs, but the tallest guy is willing to bring up the rear of our group, shepherding the slower ones through heavy foot traffic of Times Square’s five o’clock hour and counting people at each turn to be sure our whole group makes it together. He makes sure we don’t loose anyone.
Others shoulder tasks and take care of each other during times of need. In short, this little group of seniors shows competence. They step up and do what needs to be done, and our entire group benefits. The day was a success, despite the challenges it brought.
I would say the seeds planted in these students by so many teachers and family members are flourishing. It is a beautiful thing to stand in the midst of this group of teens on a rainy New York City afternoon and think I may have had a tiny part in bringing them to this point. How glad I am to be a teacher.
“How long will this take?” is one of the first questions parents ask me when we meet to discuss starting their child in a course of study to improve the child’s literacy skills. My honest answer is always the same, I can’t promise a timeline.
A lot of factors go into the speed with which a child’s reading and spelling skills improve. The child’s age when lessons begin is a big one, with the level of confusion the child has about language following a close second. It is completely worth the time it takes to build a firm foundation for literacy, even if little outward progress can be seen while the structure is laid.
Ariel was seven years old when she enrolled in our dyslexia center. As with all new students, I evaluated where she was in order to plan lessons and chart progress. A child’s knowledge of the alphabet is important, because letters are the tools we use to code and decode our language. One of the first things I ask students to do is write me an alphabet and tell it to me as they point to each letter.
Ariel loves the white board, and showed me her artistic use of it as she wrote for me her version of the alphabet. Starting strong, she wrote the letters A – F, in a mixture of capital and lower case letters. Following that was a series of little pictures – smiley faces, stars, hearts and birds. She turned proudly and gestured toward her work, telling me these were her ABC’s. Curious, I asked her to read them to me. She confidently read A – F, pointing to each letter as she called it out. Without missing a beat, she moved right to the pictures, repeating A – F as she pointed to her drawings. Having a few pictures left over, she poked at each one and called them each Z. Beaming with pride in her accomplishment, she favored me with a little twirl and curtsey as her performance ended. The beginning point for her lessons was clear.
We started with learning letters and the sounds associated with those letters, dividing them into vowels and consonants. We traced letters on fuzzy boards, on sandpaper, in tubs of sand and mounds of shaving cream. We created flashcards with letters and a picture to represent the sound each letter made. Ariel’s mom faithfully practiced with her daughter each and every night. By Christmas, Ariel could write a correct alphabet and she could name the letters and sounds in order or if they were mixed up. She had mastered the basic tools for reading and spelling – letters.
This is where the philosophy behind Orton-Gillingham can collide with common school practices. “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must,“ is a mantra taught to me by my first trainer, Angie Wilkins, as a guide for how to pace tutoring lessons. It was purposefully vague, because each student learns at a different pace, and each student is to be our guide in how fast or slow they need to go. This does not fit into how schools operate, and is a lot of the reason dyslexic students who get no extra intervention flounder, getting further and further behind each year.
When a child moves forward without understanding previous lessons, the dyslexic child is trying to build an understanding of reading and spelling on a foundation of Swiss cheese – filled with holes in their knowledge base. Without help to firm up the foundational knowledge by filling the blank areas with firmly grasped concepts, the dyslexic child is highly likely to fail.
Ariel continued to need to move at a snail’s pace that first spring as we moved onto reading simple words and to training her ear to hear the individual sounds of language. It was a joy to weave the lessons into games, songs and rhymes because she took pure delight in knowing she was “getting it.”
It has been nearly three years since Ariel and I began our journey of learning together. Her family support has been unparalleled, her attitude sunny, and her progress astounding. Watching her gains this third year has been like seeing a rose bud unfold into full bloom, but it took the two previous years of achingly slow progress to build the root system and nurture the tender leaves of her language knowledge to get to the point of full bloom. Without the gift of that time, I feel certain she would have withered and collapsed under the weight of uncertainly and discouragement. What a pleasure it is to be a gardener in the lives of these treasured children, taking the time they need to flourish.
2019 update: I recently interviewed a group of the original 6 students who started with me when our Dyslexia Center began in 2010. Ariel was among those students. She is now a rising high school junior, and has plans to attend college, majoring in education with a proficiency in teaching dyslexic students.
~Dorothy Blosser Whitehead
| This quote sits in a frame on my desk at school. I try to look at it before I am pulled off on rabbit trails. I owe my students the best planning, the best lessons, the best visuals I can give them. That won’t happen if I give in and allow myself to while away my time on interesting but less important tasks. But why do second most important things seem more appealing than most important? |
Tales from the Dyslexia Center 