What's a Renegade Teacher?

I am a reading tutor out of penitence. I have a BA in English and was certified in Reading, but in all my coursework I was never taught how to actually teach reading. I was taught how to test a child to see how poorly he read, how to arrange my class so he'd want to read, how to determine the reading level of a text, how to teach finding the main idea in a passage, but never the mechanics and structure of the language and how one imparts that. The thinking seemed to be that if I did all these things, my students would just pick literacy up like a dropped item on the floor. Learning to read was an act of will. And if they didn't learn, well, maybe they just weren't trying hard enough or their parents weren't sufficiently involved.

Whole word was the method I was taught, with an emphasis on looking at the pictures and using context clues to guess at words. Phonics? The only lesson I remember about that was when the reading professor wrote the word ghoti on the board. "If phonics worked," he said, "that would say 'fish'." We stared blankly. The punch line came triumphantly: "gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. Phonics doesn't work."

And so in 1977 I became a Title I reading teaching for 9th and 10th graders in a North Carolina mountain high school. I went in with high aspirations and a desire to change the lives of these kids. My students never learned to read. I worked hard, I arranged the room just so, I exposed them to the very best literature I could find, but these kids just didn't learn to read. And no one, not their parents, not the administration, not the Title I supervisor, no one was outraged or even surprised by this.

After four years of that job, I took a position teaching English at a private Episcopal boarding school in the foothills of North Carolina. This school had a language therapy program for dyslexic students. I didn't pay too much attention to it; two very nice ladies took students and worked with them on their reading and helped them with the papers I assigned. Dr. Lucia Karnes was the school psychologist and she ran a six week camp for dyslexics at the school during the summer break. She hired me to teach composition at camp and asked me to provide language therapy for one student. I underwent her three day training with such skepticism I could hardly stay in the room. She used the Orton-Gillingham method, indeed had trained with Mrs. Orton, and it was heavy on the phonics. And I knew phonics didn't work.

The student I was assigned was bright, but was having difficulty in reading and spelling. I dutifully if unenthusiastically went through her program with this boy. When she did post testing with him at the end of the six weeks, he had gained two years in his reading and spelling.

My world was rocked. I was stunned, but most of all I was furious. If kids could be taught to read, why had no one taught me how to do it? What had I done—or not done—to all those kids who had come to me full of hope? I grieved for all the students I had failed, but there was no way to put things right for them. A famous Mother Jones quote says, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." And that's what I determined to do.

When I moved to Chapel Hill and first started tutoring, all I had was Mrs. Orton's little yellow book, A Guide to Teaching Phonics. But I devoured it and anything else I could find and soon became a proficient reading tutor with successes of my own. I decided I would be a renegade teacher.

The dictionary defines renegade as "one who rejects a religion, cause, allegiance, or group for another; a deserter; an outlaw; a rebel." And that's me. I rebel against bad teaching and bad methodology. I no longer owe allegiance to the instruction I received that did such a disservice to so many children. I found a new cause. I am a renegade teacher. Watch out!