When Randy came the first time I knew that I had a ‘hard nut to crack’. He was 14 – a difficult age in most cases. He had had special lessons all his school life and was tired of being ‘dragged’ off to another one of these people. My gut feeling was, that his mother was getting tired of it too and had decided that this was the last time she was going to try again. There he sat – surly and sour and I felt the daggers being thrown at me without mercy, from his eyes straight to my heart.
There was a duel between us. Randy on the one hand who was going to prove once again that no one can help him and that he really hasn’t got a problem and this inner being of mine, rearing its head and quietly saying, lets see if we can deal with the challenge and then another voice reminding me that I have to use all the tricks of the trade to keep him coming long enough, so as to be able to discover the ‘problem’ and I dare not lose him after the first meeting – all these thoughts were racing through my head at the same time.
Randy’s intelligence seemed to become a stumbling block for him as far as his reading was concerned. From an early age he could gather 80% correct information from a text by just reading part of it. Listening to his reading, my first reaction – and mistake – was to say out aloud. THIS KID IS A READER, IF HE WOULD HAVE RECEIVED THE RIGHT INSTRUCTIONS AT AN EARLIER AGE HE WOULD BE A REAL BOOKWORM. Because of my own anxiety to end the session with Randy agreeing to come again, I had wanted to give him a feeling of success but had actually forgotten that they had gone through endless reading therapists. The look between mother and son reminded me that this was “the last station’ for them and I had made a serious mistake. I then decided to stop with the reading as I had the beginning of a theory about the way he looked at the written word. There was no accuracy in his reading. He just scanned the page making many mistakes. He would see a word and guess what it said without reading it. The result of all this was that the content would become a text that he was writing and not what was really written. Reading became a bore after a chapter or two. The story made no sense and that was the end of another book with the statement of ‘it is boring’. I was beginning to form an idea in my head what to do about his reading and needed to find out his mathematical skills and so we went over to things that he enjoyed and was good at.
Next lesson: Because of Randy’s intelligence I decided to try make him understand what he was doing. I first prepared a page of mathematical problems with answers. Part of these answers were incorrect. I asked him to find my mistakes, mark the exercises and correct them. He was delighted to find “the teacher’s” mistakes and put a big cross next to the wrong answers. My remark to him was ‘but the answer is almost correct’. I wrote 22 and you corrected it to 21, its not so wrong!. Triumphantly he said, it is close but it is wrong!
That is what I needed from him and was praying that the next part of the lesson will go down the way I had planned. I had typed a short story from a book but in every row had changed one word. I gave it to him and told him what I had done and asked him to find the mistakes. The first three sentences were challenging for him as he had to read each word and not just skim as he was used to doing. By the fourth sentence he was beginning to be irritated and angry and then he shouted “HOW CAN I UNDERSTAND ANYTHING IF THE WORDS ARE INCORRECT!!!!!” That was exactly what I wanted. I wanted him to notice how frustrating it is to understand a story when the words are incorrect. “But that is how you read,” I said, “only this time I was the one who changed the words according to my story. When you read you decide which words to change and you are actually rewriting the book and at a certain stage you get confused between your story and the authors. It is like the maths that you corrected. Words too have to be exact to understand the text.
We had our first agreement and understanding between us.
The next challenge was to note which words were being changed and why. Randy does not want to deal with hardships. But on the other hand, he was willing to go into a mode of proving to me, (representing teachers) that he could read and understand. He read slower, effort was put into the “true understanding of the text’. And it worked!!! It took quite a bit of questioning until he was willing to admit that he had made ‘an effort’. But it was an important admission because we then spoke about learning to make the reading effortless, efficient and enjoyable. Once he knew that he could read and what the problem was he came to the lessons motivated to ‘learn as quickly as possible’. It took another 8 lessons to get rid of old habits and take upon himself new ones and to become an avid reader and a true book worm!