On the day a third-grader named Matt sat down for his first private lesson in sounds and letters, Kay Kaplan's career had, in a sense, come full circle. This little boy—who couldn't read a single word despite doing first grade twice—had, quite unexpectedly, brought her back to the professional goal she cherished, but lost, some 20 years before: to teach gifted children.
Matt had an IQ that hovered in the rarified realm of genius. But his brilliant brain wasn't wired for the printed word. After two decades of work with dyslexic children, Kaplan knew just what to do to help this child fulfill his huge potential.
But there was a time when she hadn't known what to do.
Her first assignment in a "really bad district" in New York was to teach language arts to the lowest-performing eighth-graders—the "bottom of the barrel," Kaplan recalls. The staff called them the "eight/nines," a reference to their abysmal reading levels on standardized tests.
"Here I was, ready to teach plot, and most of these kids were at the first- and second-grade reading level," Kaplan says, sipping tea as she reminisces in the English Tudor home she shares with her biophysicist husband in Old Portland. "I had no clue what to do. They couldn't spell, they couldn't write, they didn't know the alphabet, so they couldn't even put the spelling words in alphabetical order."
After a few months of frustration, she rummaged through her students' records looking for clues. What she found stunned her: The worst readers and spellers in the bunch had the highest IQs—normal and above.
But it wasn't until she returned to her hometown of Portland a few years later that she finally, serendipitously, came upon an answer to the enigma. A young woman sitting beside Kaplan on a city bus told her about a teacher named Dorothy Whitehead in the Beaverton School District who was getting great results with LD kids using a method called Orton-Gillingham (see the sidebar). After volunteering at the school for a year, Kaplan joined Language Skills Therapy, a Portland-based group of professional tutors founded by Whitehead. Today, Kaplan coordinates the nonprofit organization—the first of its kind in the country—which employs 25 tutors.
When Matt's frantic parents found Kaplan, the child was enrolled in the Talented and Gifted program at one of Portland's top elementary schools. Yet, the third-grader's only literacy skill was the ability to write his name. But under Kaplan's tutelage, he "just soaked it up—he was like a sponge," she recalls, relishing this story of student success. In fifth grade, despite being unable to memorize his times tables, Matt got the school's highest math score on the district standardized test. "He could read the math problem and look at the four possible answers," she says. "His reasoning was so good that he could just estimate what it was."
Matt earned straight A's in middle and high school, and went on to graduate summa cum laude from California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, where the boy who couldn't memorize his times tables not only received an award in math, but was voted "most likely to succeed in marine architecture."
Kaplan ran into Matt's mom and dad not long ago. Her face lights up when she shares their news; to her, it feels pretty personal. "Matt," she says, "wants to teach."
Sitting in her elegant blue-and-white living room, surrounded by the Japanese art she collects, Kaplan tells the story of the career she has dedicated to dyslexic kids.
NW EDUCATION: What did you do in those early days to try to help the "eight/nines"?
KAY KAPLAN: I went to the reading specialist in the district and asked her about them, and she said, "Oh, they come from bad homes, or they're not very smart." She just basically dismissed them. About January, I looked up the IQs of these 15 kids—they were all boys—and it was an epiphany. It was this life-changing event, because what I discovered was that my two star students—the ones who read the best and wrote the best and spelled the best—were in the 80 range for IQ. And the worst students had average or above average IQs—in some cases, quite high.
NW: So what did you do then?
KAPLAN: I went back to visit the reading expert and tossed this information at her, and she looked at me as if I were totally crazy—as if to say, "What are you talking about?" I was trying to get her to explain what this meant—why is it that the lowest-ability kids were the best readers? She just absolutely blew me off. But it was the question that stuck with me from then on.
NW: So you felt that the school was making no effort to understand or help this group of kids?
KAPLAN: I had a boy in my eight/nine class named Dennis. He was one of the better-behaved little boys in the class, and I liked Dennis. One day, some of the other teachers were sitting in the teachers lounge talking about the eight/nines—one of the teachers had them for social studies and one had them for math. They were talking about what a sorry lot they were, and they said something mean about Dennis. I said something in his defense, and they said, "Well, he's a vegetable." I was so, so horrified. And they said, "Well, have you gotten any work from Dennis—anything besides a piece of paper with his name at the top?" I had to admit that I hadn't.
NW: What did you do then?
KAPLAN: A couple of days later, I had the students write paragraphs—a description of a place they loved. I parked myself right beside Dennis. He had written his name at the top of his paper, and that's all. I said, "It's really hard, isn't it?" He said, "I can't." I said something about writer's block. He said, "No, I can't do it." Finally, I said, "Dennis, you mean you literally don't know how to write?" He said, "No." He was in the eighth grade. So I said, "You tell me what to write, and I'll write it down for you." So he said: "I love to go fishing. I love the feel of the moist earth under my feet." That was not the work of a vegetable. I said, "Dennis, that's really descriptive! You're a poet!" A big smile came over his face. I taught for a few more years in New York and then in California, and I kept running into kids with the same syndrome—kids with a similar kind of profile. I just kept trying to figure them out.
NW: Had you received any training in college about dealing with learning disabilities?
KAPLAN: When I was in school for my education degree, I was specifically told there is no such thing as a learning disability. They called it a "wastebasket" term.
NW: Once you got into the tutoring program, however, things started to turn around for you.
KAPLAN: Dorothy Whitehead had adapted the Orton-Gillingham method—this great system for teaching LD kids—for use by volunteers. She was training people to use it at Barnes Elementary School in Beaverton. I drove out to Barnes for a year and worked with a little boy named Danny. It worked. He learned to read. It was such a wonderful thing finally to have a technique that would actually help these kids instead of just keeping them busy.
NW: Advocates point out that learning disabilities are neurologically based, yet the solution is educationally based. Does this put unreasonable expectations on teachers?
KAPLAN: Education changes the neurology of the brain for all kids, so teachers are doing that all the time. It's just that these kids have a somewhat different neurological makeup than others. I'm convinced that all of us have at least one learning disability. These kids just seem to have the anomaly that stands out the most. There may come a time when we can treat it by manipulating genes, but right now all we can do is help them learn things in a different way.
NW: But the teachers you ran into in New York, at least, didn't believe that these kids could learn.
KAPLAN: Very often, teachers don't have a good working definition of what dyslexia means. Often, they think the kids just aren't very bright—even though dyslexia is absolutely irrelevant to IQ. I've worked with dyslexic kids who have an IQ of 135, and I've worked with dyslexic kids who have an IQ of 80. There's no connection. Yet, many teachers see these kids as just being "low," period.
NW: And the kids tend to buy into this perception of themselves, right?
KAPLAN: What they think is that they're dumb. They tend to generalize their problem. It's often a huge leap for them if you can actually put a name on it and say: "These are the things that will probably cause you problems—for example, reading, writing, spelling. But in the other things—creativity, problem solving, thinking—you're probably better at it than most of the rest of us." You can honestly say that to them.
NW: What should schools be doing to catch these kids before they fail?
KAPLAN: In the ideal world, schools test kids for phonemic awareness in kindergarten, and then get a highly phonemic reading program that is tiered. If kids have problems, they get special help, up to and including private tutoring in a method like Orton-Gillingham or Alphabetic Phonics or Slingerland (see sidebar), one-to-one, if necessary. If we did this, we would save huge amounts of money. I look at the money the school district has spent on special education for students I tutor—thousands and thousands of dollars a year—and in many cases, if the school had done the appropriate thing in first grade, they wouldn't even qualify for special ed.
NW: Is there a body of research findings to back up this approach?
KAPLAN: What the National Institutes of Health studies on reading have found is that kids who struggle in reading need to be taught phonics directly in a systematic way. (For more details on these findings, see the 2000 report from the National Reading Panel titled Teaching Children To Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction.) This is the exact opposite of what most teachers have been taught to do. The whole-language movement that came in like a tidal wave several decades ago argues that because all normal children learn to talk by being in a rich environment of language, all children will learn to read and write in exactly the same way. You just surround them with wonderful literature. Because of this wonderful brain that these children have, this wonderful capacity for language, they will automatically learn to read and write. Wonderful things came out of this belief: "language experience," for example, where kids in kindergarten would tell you stories and you would write it down. Instead of these boring, dull phonics pages, there was a rocking chair and pillows and the carpet and the Big Books. And you had "guess and go" spelling. All of that is terrific. Kids with good visual memory for words and kids on the top end of the scale for grasping the phonemic code took off. But the other kids who were often just as bright—or even way brighter—who had weak visual memory for symbols and could not attach letters to the code were dead in the water. Still, people kept saying, "They'll get it—it's developmental, just like speech." I probably would have bought the whole-language thing had I not met the eight/nines. Because of those kids, I absolutely knew it wasn't true. 
Beginning nearly 80 years ago, researchers and practitioners have worked to devise methods for teaching language skills to dyslexic children and adults. Among the most widely known approaches are these:
|
This document's URL is: Home | Up & Coming | Programs & Projects: Northwest Education | People | Products & Publications | Topics © 2002 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Date of Last Update: 3/27/2003  |
