Sold A Story - The Podcast

 If you haven't heard of Emily Hanford then you haven't been around the reading instruction/dyslexia world long enough. Emily Hanford is one of the reasons that the Science of Reading is such a big conversation right now. And...she's a fabulous journalist and weaver of stories. Not fictional stories, but the real horrifying truths about reading in the US. 

You may have seen on my Educate Yourself page, the link to APM Reports. Originally, that was a link to the series Hard To Read and now it is also a link to Sold a Story. In fact, you can listen to a whole series of stories by Emily Hanford that will be enlightening, disturbing, and anger-inducing - whatever your emotion is, it will be provoked by these stories.

A connection

You know, I started work at the University of Oregon in February 2004. My then-fiancé was still overseas and I was deep into planning my wedding. My first day on the job? An Institute on Beginning Reading (IBR) that was being held at a Jantzen Beach hotel in Portland. It was the first of several IBRs that I would attend over the next few years because I was the event planner for the Oregon Reading First Center (ORFC) and the Western Regional Reading First Technical Assistance Center (WRRFTAC). 

If you've been following Sold a Story, you may know where this is going. 

I was 28 years old. I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing. I was about to get married. I was planning to start a family (as soon as my soon-to-be husband was out of the National Guard). And I knew absolutely NOTHING about teaching reading, how kids learned to read, or that there were different camps of belief in how to go about that teaching. It would be much later that I would connect my own slow, laborious reading with dyslexia. 

It turned out that I didn't need to know any of those things to do my job. But as it happened, my job was really pretty much done once people were settled in their seats and listening to presenters. That meant I could sit down and listen if I wanted to as well. And I absorbed information as the years passed - listening to people like Anita Archer and Jan Hasbrouk talk about good instruction and assessment.

Sidebar: if you haven't ever heard Anita Archer speak, I encourage you to find some of her presentations online. She's wonderful. Here's a quick video that you can watch.

A shift, but still in the reading world

As Reading First (RF) started to implode nationally, I was on to thinking about having another baby, our first being born in 2006. The funding for RF was going to end and I was going to have to find another position. But, because I knew I was planning to get pregnant again, I didn't think I wanted to change departments. The director of ORFC was also changing positions. She was starting a little free reading clinic right there in our department and she needed an assistant. She told me that the job was mine. That it would not be challenging and I might even find it boring, but I could keep my .8 FTE Schedule. Since the first task was to build a website for the new clinic, I decided I was in. 

So there I was, in 2008, helping to start a reading clinic that provided reading instruction one-on-one to students in Kindergarten through 5th grade. We did a soft launch with flyers in schools. We had more than 100 kids on our waitlist before we even got started. I think we started by serving 16 kids...I can't remember, but once we got going, we served 30 kids every term. 

Originally the idea for this clinic was to bring kids up to grade level and send them on their way. We discovered in that first year that proving good instruction for 45 minutes a day, twice a week wasn't going to do it and we continued to have a growing waitlist even though we didn't advertise. So, we put a cap on it and served kids for up to 5 terms.

Maybe this should have been a glaring red flag to me that reading instruction was broken in our area, but remember, my only experiences with reading instruction was LITERALLY with the people who wrote the Direct Instruction programs that are talked about in Sold a Story.

I said nothing

By the time my oldest son was in kindergarten, I had a pretty good grasp on what good reading instruction looked like. He participated in the summer kindergarten readiness camp that our Reading Clinic put on and he was in one of the highest groups for the pre-k kiddos. Now I know that he was just really good at sounds in isolation, but that word level reading is very difficult for him. 

So, when I went to curriculum night at his elementary school and the kinder teacher said, "I have a reading curriculum, but I don't use it. We learn letters organically." I was VERY suspect, but I remember looking around the room and watching all these moms just nod their heads and I was like...oooookaaaaayyyy? So, I said nothing. I continued to say nothing as my son spent kindergarten making belts and stitching bags. I think his sole reading experience in K was story time. At home, we read CONSTANTLY. He loved dinosaurs and lizards, alligators, snakes, and crocodiles. We would read him literal textbooks about lizards in the Northwest. But as kindergarten was coming to a close, we decided that we probably needed to do some reading instruction at home.

By this time, the reading clinic had shifted. We were hemoraging money because we were a free clinic, so as our funding dried up, so did our options. We moved the clinic out to the Bethel School District. Bethel supported this by providing food for the kids who stayed after school and bussing them home when tutoring was over. But what this meant for me, was that my son didn't have access to our wonderful Reading Clinic. 

So, we did Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons which was recommended to me by my boss. And, because we understood the score at this point, we also did this with our 4 year old who was interested in anything that his brother got to do. 

I had visions of a miraculous change in understanding how to read. Like some lightbulb would go off in his head, which is what they say in school you know, but obviously that didn't happen. This really brings us up to the rest of this story, which you can find in the Our Story section of this website.

In the trenches since the beginning

What I'm getting at, in my very longwinded way, is that I've LITERALLY been in the Reading Wars almost since they STARTED! And I didn't even start out with a kid who had dyslexia! 

A funny little anicdote - several years ago as part of the National Center on Improving Litearcy, we went to Washington DC and had a Dyslexia Techncial Work Group gathering with some very big names in dyselxia and reading instruction (Jack Fletcher, Nadine Gaab, John Gabrieli to name-drop a few) and on the first day, I can't remember what the group was talking about but I expressed my opinion using my own experience with my son. Later, Dr. Gabrieli and I were chatting and he asked if I sought out the National Center or if it was just serendipitous that I happened to end up working to help give students better access to appropriate reading instruction. I told him it was a complete accident. #acidentalliteracyadvocate.