I’ve spent ten years as a special education teacher finding that I consistently gravitated towards one particular type of learning style.  My passion lied in the students who were extremely intelligent in conversation yet struggled at a deep level with reading, writing, and spelling.  I couldn’t accept that these kids weren’t intelligent.  I knew they were.  I didn’t realize at the time, but now know, I saw myself in each and every one of these kids.  I became a National Board Certified Teacher in hopes that the rigorous process would shed some light on teaching students with dyslexia.  When that didn’t work, I paid for my own dyslexia trainings all while working as a learning specialist for a public school.  It wasn’t until I took a week-long training on how to identify students with dyslexia that I realized I could check all of the boxes on my own warning signs questionnaire.  I am dyslexic.

                  Eventually I left the classroom to become a full-time tutor because I simply knew too much.  I could no longer stomach the conversations I was being asked to have.  I was indirectly asked not to say “dyslexia” and again and again not given the resources to meet the needs of my students, even though I had the knowledge.  

                  I joined the board for Decoding Dyslexia, Oregon and became a certified Barton tutor.  After teaching using the Barton system for four years I continued to run into a number of shortfalls within the program. Many of my students were becoming more proficient readers, but their spelling was not improving in the same way. The Barton program was great for a set of isolated words specially curated from the Barton book, but weren’t being applied to reading and writing outside of the controlled text. The “sight words for spelling” portion offered no supports other than rote memorization. If rote memorization was a skill my students had, they wouldn’t need tutoring in the first place! This was supposed to be the ‘gold standard’ for teaching kids with dyslexia, but I found it fell short in a lot of ways.

                  In March 2018 I attended a conference on Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) hosted by Gina Cooke and Pete Bowers.   Gina and Pete offered a new understanding; the primary governance of spelling does not reside solely in phonology.  I learned that the ‘write what you hear’ strategy that Barton was offering was is not based on a scientific understanding of how English has evolved.   SWI offered a meaning first approach that didn’t hinge solely upon writing what you hear. Structured Word Inquiry understands that English is a morphophonemic spelling system. Morphemes are the units of meaning in a word (free bases, bound bases, prefixes, connecting vowel letters and suffixes) and they carry more weight in the spelling of a word than phonology. That is not to say that phonics doesn't play a role. It certainly does. Just not as big of a role as Orton Gillingham programs (such as Barton) give it credit for. That’s the day the house of sound came tumbling down for me.  The Barton method offered tricks when what my students and I craved was truth

                  Every step along my path has brought me to this point in my career.  The fact that I am able to help students who are walking the path that I have walked brings me joy beyond compare. This work brings me light. This journey has made me feel whole.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  The work that I am privileged to do is personal.  I have walked in my students’ shoes.  I am walking along side in their journey. 

I know what it feels like to feel broken.  I also know the liberation in finding answers to our questions.  We are in this together.