If You Don’t Know Anything, What Would You Think About?

 

The title is the question posed by a retired SPED teacher on Twitter. 

My Answer After Teaching 80+ Smart Kids Who Couldn’t Read"

@SciAdapt, Spot on! The big picture is just a series of small steps—and when we teach those steps right, the rest often falls into place.  I’m an accountant, not a trained teacher. Years ago, I started working with a bright boy who had finished kindergarten + Grade 1 but still couldn’t read a single sentence in English. I knew nothing about phonics, so I grabbed a set of Peter and Jane books. I read a sentence, he repeated it after me. We did this for six months until he could read on his own. Then we flipped it—he read while I helped only on tricky words.  That success made me curious.

I took on more “research” students—smart kids who, despite good English speaking skills, couldn’t read. One girl refused to say “fox.” She would happily say “ox,” but when I added the “f” she stared at me and shut down. Her teacher had taught her that F says “fuh,” so to her the word should be “fuh-ox.”  That moment was my light-bulb: these intelligent kids weren’t failing because they were “dyslexic” or lacked ability. Their logical minds were protecting them from what felt like nonsense.  I’ve now personally taught more than 80 such children. The pattern is clear: most shut down the moment consonants are taught with extraneous sounds (“buh,” “fuh,” “luh” instead of pure /b/, /f/, /l/). Once we remove that confusion and use pure sounds + small, systematic steps, fluent reading appears almost magically.  The same kids who struggled in English read fluently in Malay or Romanized Mandarin because those are taught cleanly. 

So, to the question “If you don’t know anything, what would you think about?” — this is what I thought about: Why can’t these obviously intelligent kids read?

Mother Nature gave me the answer many educators still refuse to accept: it’s usually not the child. It’s the initial teaching. Fix the small steps at the beginning, and the bigger picture takes care of itself.  Full stories and method on my blog: dyslexiafriend.com