For October’s National Dyslexia Awareness Month, veteran educator Kim Feller has a compelling story for Homeschooling Teen readers.
By Kim Feller
For years, I was the teacher parents thanked.
I worked as a reading interventionist in a large public elementary school. My job was to help the kids who were struggling the most. I had special books for them. I had strategies. I had training.
And everyone thought I was doing a good job.
But there was one student I couldn’t stop thinking about.
His name was Jermiah. He was a skinny little boy with buzzed hair and enough energy for three kids. He would burst into my room full of personality and enthusiasm, even though he was falling further behind in reading.
I would sit down with him and show him a carefully chosen book. Before we read, we looked at the pictures. If there was a pony in the book, I would make sure he knew the word “pony.” Then we would practice predictable sentences such as, “I like the dog. I like the cat. I like the pony.”
Jermiah could make it through the book. But I knew something was wrong.
The next day, he might not recognize “pony” at all.
He was learning how to use the pictures and sentence patterns to figure out what a word might be. He wasn’t learning how to read the word itself.
And I was supposed to be the expert.
I thought the problem was the student
For a long time, I taught exactly the way I had been trained to teach.
When a student didn’t recognize a word, we encouraged them to use clues. Look at the picture. Think about what would make sense. Look at the first letter.
We also asked children to memorize lots of words.
Some kids did fine with this. Others didn’t.
And when those students continued to struggle, it was easy to assume they needed more practice. Maybe they weren’t reading enough at home. Maybe they weren’t paying attention. Maybe they needed to try harder.
Eventually, I began to wonder whether we were asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with this student?” I started asking:
What if there is something wrong with the way I’m teaching?
That question changed my life.
The word nobody wanted to use
At the time, I knew almost nothing about dyslexia. In fact, teachers around me were discouraged from even using the word. But I kept meeting smart kids who had enormous difficulty learning to read and spell.
That combination confused me.
How could a child use sophisticated vocabulary in conversation, understand complicated ideas, build incredible things, create detailed artwork or solve difficult problems, but have trouble reading a simple sentence? Years later, I learned that this unevenness is common among people with dyslexia.
Difficulty reading does not mean difficulty thinking.
Dyslexia is a language-based learning difference. It can make processing written language, spelling and reading much harder. It can also affect things such as working memory and organization.
But it is not a measure of intelligence.
That distinction matters.
Especially if you are the person who has spent years wondering why something that seems easy for everybody else feels so difficult for you.
Your struggles can hide your strengths
Today I run Feller School in Madison, Wisconsin, a school designed especially for younger students with dyslexia.
One thing I notice constantly is how easy it is for a reading struggle to hide everything else a student can do.
I have taught children who struggle to decode very simple words but can listen to a story and discuss it with remarkable insight. They use sophisticated vocabulary. They remember details I have forgotten. They make connections between ideas. They solve problems creatively.
If you only handed those students a difficult passage and judged them by how quickly they could read it, you would get a completely distorted picture of what they know.
Think about that for a moment.
If reading is difficult for you, how many times have people measured your ability by something that is actually one of the hardest things for your brain to do?
And how many times have you done the same thing to yourself?
Sometimes you need a different method
Eventually, I discovered an approach to reading that was very different from the one I had been taught. Instead of asking students to guess words or memorize them as whole shapes, we taught them how written English works.
We taught sounds explicitly. We taught spelling patterns. We broke words into parts. We showed students how letters and groups of letters represent sounds.
We gave them a system.
That was especially important for many of my dyslexic students, because they often responded incredibly well when something had logic, structure and patterns.
Suddenly, instead of saying, “Just remember that word,” I could explain why a word worked the way it did. That changes the experience of learning.
There is a big difference between thinking, “Everybody else can do this and I can’t,” and thinking, “Nobody ever showed me how this works.”
One advantage of learning differently
If you are homeschooled, you may already understand something important about education:
There isn’t only one way to learn.
One of the great possibilities of homeschooling is that your education can be adjusted when something isn’t working. You may be able to use a different curriculum, spend more time on one skill, learn through a video instead of a textbook, listen to an audiobook while following along in print, or approach a subject in a completely different way.
That isn’t cheating. It’s learning.
Sometimes students get the idea that the “real” way to learn is whatever works for everybody else. I don’t believe that.
The goal of education isn’t to prove that you can learn something in exactly the same way another person does.
The goal is to learn.
What I wish more teenagers knew
Most of my students are younger than you. I work with children because I want to reach struggling readers as early as possible.
But there is something I wish I could tell every teenager who has struggled with reading, spelling or school:
Do not confuse difficulty with ability.
- Maybe you need more time to read something.
- Maybe spelling has never become automatic.
- Maybe you can explain an idea perfectly out loud and then stare at a blank screen when you try to write it.
- Maybe you remember everything you hear but struggle to remember what you just read.
Those things are worth understanding. If reading has always seemed unusually difficult, dyslexia may be something to investigate with your parents or another trusted adult.
But whatever the explanation turns out to be, struggling with one way of learning does not tell you how intelligent, creative or capable you are.
Jermiah taught me that.
I thought I was teaching him. Instead, he helped teach me one of the most important lessons of my career:
When a bright student keeps struggling, we shouldn’t immediately ask what is wrong with the student. Sometimes we need to ask what we could change about the way we are teaching.
Your brain may not learn exactly like someone else’s. That doesn’t make it a worse brain.
It just means we need to figure out how it learns.
About the Author
After decades of using standard public school reading curricula, Kim Feller realized her methods were failing struggling readers. She walked away from her classroom to found Wisconsin’s specialized Feller School and has released a new parent book, Your Brain Loves Patterns: A Parent’s Guide to Dyslexia and the Science of Reading. Her book demystifies complex “Science of Reading” data into clear, actionable advice, helping everyday parents of struggling readers spot instruction that is not working and advocate for their children.
Book Reviews: https://www.fellerschool.org/your-brain-loves-patterns
Published articles: https://www.fellerschool.org/media
