Cancer, Courage and Reading

For all of you who may be wondering why the blogosphere has been suddenly blessed (?) with my presence. Let me fill you in on a few things. In July of 2008 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first I was told that it wasn't too serious. The tumour was small and all I would need was a lumpectomy. Well, as is the case with this sort of thing, it wasn't quite that simple. The surgeon told me after the lumpectomy that instead of stage 1 cancer, it was stage 3 and that it was not the kind of cancer they had first thought it was and it was also attached to the muscle on the chest wall. On Sept 4,2008, I had a full mastectomy of my left breast and opted not to do chemo or radiation or hormone therapy or anything elso that was guaranteed to harm my body. I did, however, find a more natural way to prevent the cancer from returning. It is now January 2010 and I am still here and kicking. (Some would say literally!)

Now you may be asking yourself why I have chosen to share all this with you. The answer is that this event in my life has created such a sense of urgency within me that I can no longer keep my mouth shut about issues that I feel are affecting a great percentage of our poplulation. Nothing is scarier than cancer. So if I can beat it, how scary can it be to write this blog about a subject that is near and dear to my heart?

As I stated in a previous post, I have been teaching people of all ages to read for the past sixteen years and during those years I have met the most extraordinary people. I met a man who was 45 years old and had graduated from high school, but still couldn't read above a kindergarten level. He was brilliant with mechanics, but couldn't read. I ended up teaching, not only him, but his step-daughter and step-son. All of their lives changed. I met a young man who told me he didn't need to read because all he was going to be was a farmer like his father. After he discovered that he could learn to read successfully he shared with me that his real dream was to be a veterinarian. I met a teen-age girl who had been "diagnosed" (There's those quotation marks again. You just know I have more to say on that subject) with ADHD when she was 7 years old and had immediately been put on Ritalin. At the age of 12 they had to take her off of it because she had become anorexic. When I met her she was 14 and hated herself, the world and everything in it. She wore nothing but black and didn't care about her personal hygiene. She constantly fought with her mother and school was something she endured. After testing her I discovered that she did have some perceptual distortions that were easily dealt with. Her mother drove two hours once a week so she could attend two one-hour sessions. Within weeks of starting she became a different kid. She was clean and neat and wore pastel colours. She started to care about herself and others around her. She even began to organize my sticker box because, according to her, it wasn't organized enough. Oh and her reading also improved. There are so many more stories that I could share with you, but the point is all these people had fallen through the cracks. The system had failed them and because the sytem had failed they were failing at life.

Please remember I am not condemning all teachers, I am condemning the system they work under. Speaking of teachers, I invited a friend of mine, who is a retired teacher, to visit my blog. Her response was to give me an English lesson (the their/they're thing and the difference between was and were). Then she informed me that they weren't teaching Whole-Language in the schools any more and that it had been done away with years ago. My answer to her was that they may have changed the name, but the methods and the results were the same. I can tell you within five minutes whether a child has been taught with Whole-Language ( or whatever they're calling it now). When I start with a new student I have a list of words that I ask them to read. The child who has been taught with W.L ( I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of writing Whole-Language so from now on I'll just use the initials.) will rip through the list until he/she comes to a word he/she has never seen before, then it's full stop. They've never seen the word before and they have no idea how to figure out (decode) what it says. (By the way for those of you who believe that "Phonics" is better your turn is coming.) They usually want to stop at that point because the frustration level is about to go through the roof.

Another teaching I just love, (Can you sense the sarcasm here?)which is really popular with speed reading programs, is little words aren't important. My way of disputing this theory is to ask the question: ( I used to love doing this when I lived on the prairies and it was 40 below outside)Is on the house the same as in the house? I don't know about you, but I'd rather be in the house on a cold winter day. The point is there is only one letter difference between the two words, but what a difference that one letter makes.

Let me give you an example of how detrimental this can be to a person's ability to read and comprehend. Quite a few years ago I was introduced to a young man who was in his third year of university. He was struggling to get through and, indeed, had given up because he couldn't keep up with his studies. When I tested him it quickly became apparent that he didn't pay attention to little words. To demonstrate this to him I wrote two sentences on the board. One said, "I got some money from Don" and the other said, "I got some money for Don". I asked him what the difference was between the two sentences. After studying them for some time he announced that one of them had a period and the other didn't. I informed him that was not the correct answer. I then circled the from and for with red marker and repeated the question. He still could not tell me the difference between the two sentences. I literally had to explain to him why the two sentences were different and the meaning of the words for and from. Now please understand this young man was not lacking in intelligence by any means. His brain had been so programmed that it could only do what it had been taught to do. After realizing why he was struggling to read he decided to attend sessions with me. In about five months he went from reading at a grade six level to a university level and he went back to university the following semester.

I am not sharing these stories to make myself look good and to pat myself on the back. (Although I must admit, in all honesty, that it does feel good to think about all the lives that have been changed.) I am sharing these stories because I know for the hundreds of people I have met and whose lives have been improved, there are thousands more who are struggling with no help. As I stated before this blog is for them and for anyone who knows them. If you appreciate what I've said (or even if you don't) or you can relate to it, please let me know. I think it's important to start a dialogue on this and so many other subjects. So bear with me and let's see where we go from here.