I can help you with that . . . .

Several years ago I visited a cemetery in one of the mountain counties. There, carved on a nearby gravestone, was the epitaph, "She's with the angles". My thoughts were certainly not befitting of the occasion: congruent, acute or obtuse? Or is she a circle that somehow went to the wrong place?

I was reminded of this when I went to a school system office this week. I have been doing contract work for a nearby school system for the last three years, and they recently had to cancel my contract due to lack of funds. I went to the district office to fill out some paperwork, and they had one of those security systems where you sign in via computer. They take a most unflattering picture of you, determine where you are going, scan your driver's license, and then issue you a badge. When I got to the point of telling the computer my destination, I saw that one of my choices was the Cirriculum Department. I almost lost it. I wanted to tell them, "You know, you might want to keep me on. I can help you with that."

So, just in case anyone from that school system is reading, here's the rule: when c is followed by e, i, or y, it generally says /s/: circus, century, cyanide. When g is followed by e, i, or y, it usually says /j/: gentle, gist, gym. It's called the soft sound. When they are followed by a consonant or a, o, u, the c and g will have the hard sound: /k/ and /g/. There are a few exceptions, but it's a pretty safe rule in general.

And maybe, just maybe, systematic, phonetic spelling instruction needs to be part of your curriculum.

Savvy, my new favorite book

What do you do when you have a really bright kid with a low reading level who hates to read? A good book is often the answer, and I like to spend part of every session reading aloud. Generally I have the student read a page and then I'll read one, alternating for the allotted time. This makes it less onerous for the student, and it lets me model fluent and expressive reading. But finding the right book is key.

I was talking about this with my friend Summer when she jumped up from the table, ran upstairs, and returned with the book Savvy by Ingrid Law. Published in 2008, the book is a Newbery Honor Book and spent some time on the New York Times Best Seller List. Savvy is written for a middle school audience, but it's a compelling read for older readers too.

Mibs Beaumont anxiously awaits her thirteenth birthday when she will receive her savvy, a special ability that arrives to those in her family at their thirteenth birthday party. Brother Rocket is electrical, brother Fish causes hurricanes, Grandpa creates new places, and Momma does everything perfectly. Only their Poppa is without a savvy, and the two younger siblings have not received theirs yet. Adolescence is spent learning how to control one's savvy, which can have devastating consequences if unharnessed. Mibs dreams of what hers might be, though Rocket warns her that boys get all the really good ones.

But two days before her birthday, Poppa is in a terrible wreck and taken to the hospital several towns away, where he remains in a coma. Momma and Rocket go to him, Rocket blowing transformers and street lights all the way down the highway. Mibs is convinced that if she could get to him, her savvy will be the one that will wake him up. But her plan goes array and she ends up traveling in the wrong direction with two of her brothers, the preacher's kids, a pink Bible salesman, and a down-on-her-luck waitress, all with stories, difficulties, and gifts of their own. When Mibs finally gets to her father, she finds that her savvy is not what she hoped it would be, and the family gathers around Poppa's hospital bed to say goodbye.

The book ends well, but not conventionally. There is a sincere sense of acceptance for those who are different and an understanding that we all have exceptional gifts, whether they are savvies or not. I especially liked the fact that the teenage years are portrayed as scary, difficult and wonderful, with gifts that require learning self-control in order to become sources of joy rather than destruction. The author uses the language in a rich, rollicking way that is fun to read aloud.

I'm reading this with two of my sixth grade girls. It would also be great for a book discussion group. I have a feeling I'll be needing to buy Summer a new copy.

Brain Training Dancer

You may wonder why there is a spinning woman on my blog. This image ostensibly tests whether you use your right brain hemisphere or your left brain hemisphere more. When I got this in an email, the caption said, "Clockwise dance belongs to right hemisphere users. Counterclockwise belongs to left hemisphere users. Try to reverse dancer rotation for training the other part of the brain."

Is this true? I have no idea. I am, however, fascinated with brain research and what it tells us about learning. One person's explanation can be found at http://thebraintrainingblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/right-brain-vs-left-brain.html

And I have no clue whether he knows what he's talking about or not. But it's fun to think about. And it's fun to try to make her switch directions.

You are not the one who failed

My favorite students are those who are failures. They come to me with no hope left. No matter what's been tried—Reading Recovery, resource help, extra teacher time, learning centers—they still aren't reading and they have accepted the fact that it's their fault. Here they are again, going through reading assessments that spotlight their weaknesses, with another stranger who will eventually give up. No wonder they have bad attitudes.

The first thing I tell a new student after I assess her is that I know she can learn to read. It's just that no one has taught her yet. "It's not your fault that you learn differently," I say. "I WILL teach you to read. And if I can't, it's MY fault, not yours, and I will help your parents find someone who can. But I don't plan to fail and I will teach you." I love the look of puzzled surprise I get after I say that. They may not believe me, but they are intrigued. No one has ever said it's not their fault, and whether they can verbalize it or not, they believe it is.

I want my lessons to always feel a little too easy for a student like this, and I tell them so. I compare learning to read to building a house. "When you build a house, where do you start?" I ask. The bottom, they reply. "And if there are holes in the bottom, what happens to the house you are building?" It falls. "There are holes in the foundation of your house. We are going WAY back to fix those holes and then we will keep going up. And with every brick, you will be a better reader."

And so we go back to short a and a few consonants like s, f, r, and m that blend easily into that a, along with t and p to put at the end. Soon they are reading sat and fat and maybe even map. And then I can say, "Now you can read. The rest is just learning more sounds." That's usually enough to get them back for a second session.

Sometimes a student will ask, "Why didn't my teacher teach me?" I always emphasize that it's not the teacher's fault either; no one taught him how to teach students like this. And until we change how the universities teach reading methodology, there will continue to be failures.

I love the failures. But I wait for the day when there aren't any because the schools are able to hire teachers who can teach children who learn in all different kinds of ways. Though there will always be kids who need one-on-one help, we can significantly reduce that number with proper teacher training. It's time to look at who the real failures are and address that problem. There are holes in the foundation of our teacher training programs. We need to go back to the bottom and fix them.

I may love the failures, but they don't love failing. And they are not really the ones who are failing.

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!