Enticed by the magic of books, a four-year-old spent long minutes under a white birch tree in the front yard with piles of books. One day he got it! The squiggles on the page started to make sense. He found connections between those magical runes and the pictures displayed alongside them. He saw that patterns of letters combined to make repeatable sounds. These sounds were the words that he had heard from his parents’ reading. He was in awe with books and with himself.

Then … he started school. He attended school (in the 60s by the way) when phonics was the reading instruction fashion of the time. He was excited by the instruction as his teachers made organized sense of what he had discovered randomly. He disciplined himself to learn the patterns and memorize the exceptions. He was really good at reading the words.

By third grade, however, he was moved to the back of the room with the slow reading group. He received specialized help using a machine that gradually covered the text as he read to encourage him to read more quickly. He read the words very well, and his teachers were proud.

But he found it necessary to read sentences twice in order to create images in his mind that once awed him under the birch tree. His teachers continued with their push for him to read the words faster, but he resisted because he sought the images not the sounds. He became discouraged.

The books beside his bed remained unopened because he was embarrassed to admit how long it took to finish them. By sixth grade, he figured that his reading skills were as good as they could be. He would simply take extra time to read things twice. He learned to get by with less sleep, a pattern he continued through high school, college, and graduate school. He was successful, earning academic acclaim throughout his educational journey.

He chose teaching as a career because he wanted to surround himself with learning and with books even though he did not read those books as well as he desired. Generally, a strong participant in discussions about shared texts, he avoided situations when those passages were read in the moment. He dreaded professional conferences when speakers gave five minutes to read a passage before breaking into small groups. To avoid embarrassment, he figured out ways to read ahead, so he would have time to complete the passage.

As a special education teacher, he discovered that lack of confidence and belief was the most significant barrier for his students to improve their reading skills. As he had done, his students resigned themselves to the level of skill in reading that they had achieved by sixth grade. As a teacher he set out to prove them wrong; they could improve! He created a reading strategy that specifically addressed lack of confidence.

Karen read the word “little” as “small”, and he realized there is a second source of data to help Karen with comprehension even when mis-reading the text; that source was her own mind’s images. She became determined to see that her son, “… will become a reader.”

He instructed Savannah that so long as she was understanding the ideas in the assigned passages, she need not pronounce all the words correctly. Savannah blurted with surprise and excitement, “You mean, I don’t have to fix my mistakes.”

He instructed Kristen to “read through” the word that she couldn’t pronounce, and when the word appeared a second time, she pronounced it perfectly with no hesitation. Kristen explained, “I figured it out while I was reading.”.

Student confidence rose dramatically as they “read through” their challenges rather than “sounding out” difficult words. He taught his students to pay attention to how their brains worked with the text, and they realized they understood more than they expected. Where focusing on words was frustrating, focusing on ideas was stimulating.

Lessons from the Story of a Slow Reader

This story is not an indictment of phonics, for phonics and other forms of word analysis have a significant place in reading instruction. The point of the story is that when working with secondary students (6-12 grades), it is essential to convince them to believe that improvement is possible.

Phonics instruction is hard work for those who did not do well with it in the early grades. They already feel like failures, and the oddities of the English language prove for them that reading will never come easily. They are beyond the days when there is magic in the runes. The magic now must come from ideas. When they witness the magic of image creation in their minds, they may be willing to do the hard work of phonics practice.

An essential component of the Read Through It Strategy is eye muscle development. By focusing on muscles, I had an excuse to use materials below grade level without insulting their intelligence. In all my years of teaching this strategy, I never had a single student discouraged by using lower level passages for reading practice. Additionally, and significantly, because I was working with muscles, skill growth was inevitable and obvious so long as they practiced. Muscles grow when they are exercised; they can’t help it. Once my students realized experientially that their skills could improve, they were more willing to practice other reading exercises.

Teaching of reading is challenging because it involves the coordination of so many different parts of the brain. Because each student is different with different areas of the brain developing without any particular synchronicity, we must pay attention to what the students brings to this phenomenon. Every error they make is a clue for us to assess their understanding. They may not comprehend what we expect from the passage, but they understand something. That something is a great place to start the discussion of what is to be learned.

We must learn to read the student as they read the passage.

Wade McJacobs taught special education for 31 years in the Tigard-Tualatin School District and is the author of numerous articles and two books on the Read Through It Strategy: The Read Through It Strategy: Building Confidence First Then Comprehension in Secondary Struggling Readers and Dare to Read: Improving Your Reading Speed and Skills. He is the founder of Student Empowerment Group, LLC. Wade lives with his wife in an empty nest in Beaverton. He can be reached at studentempowermentgroup@gmail.com.