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Masons' Free Learning Program Raises Children's Self-Esteem
Sunday, August 22, 2004
By Roger Schlueter
Belleville News-Democrat [IL]
| Normally, birthdays are a time for getting presents. But when Weston Hock turned 11 last summer, he gave his mother one of the best gifts she can remember. "We were out in the patio and Weston was opening up his cards --- and he started reading them!" said Kathleen Hock, unable to contain her joy even a year later. "Before, somebody would always grab his cards and read them to him, but here he was sitting and reading his cards to himself. I was like, `He's reading his cards!!'" |
| To many parents, it would hardly seem noteworthy, but for Ed and Kathleen Hock of Belleville it was a major achievement. Through the third grade at St. Augustine School, Weston had seemed like a bright youngster but he had difficulty reading and recognizing letters. Don't worry, his teachers said, it's a boy thing --- he'll outgrow it. But in the fourth grade, school became too difficult for Weston to fake his way through on his listening skills alone. Mom would spend hour after hour at night drilling her son, and still he would come home with F's on his weekly spelling tests. Reading was laborious. Her frustration was reaching a breaking point. "He was like, `Mom, I'm doing my best!'" she said. "And, I'm like, `Well, apparently you're not! Look at this F!' So as a family, it was really tough because we felt like he wasn't putting forth the work. I would cry all the time." Now, she feels guilty because she knows her son was trying. It was just that nobody saw that Weston was battling a problem believed to have affected Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Leonardo DaVinci --- even Albert Einstein. Weston had dyslexia , a neurological disorder that hampers a person's ability to acquire and process language. Help for Weston Two years ago, Hock met Brenda Hunter. At the time, Hunter, a veteran educator, had just been hired to head the latest effort by area Masons to aid children: a Learning Center for Children with Dyslexia at the Scottish Rite Temple in Belleville. Using a well-recognized approach that employed hearing and touch as well as sight, the center would provide intense one-on-one instruction to help children spell, read and write. And, like care at the Shriners hospital system for children, the instruction would be free. At the time, Hunter was the lone teacher; Weston was her third student. Now, two years later, Hunter runs a program with nine tutors and trainees who provide hour-long lessons twice a week to nearly two dozen students from as far away as Red Bud and Bethalto. And, soon to start his third year in the program, Weston Hock not only has improved his scholastic performance dramatically, he also has become one of the center's most celebrated spokesmen. "I improved two grade levels after six months of tutoring," Weston proudly told 1,000 Masons during their convention last fall at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, his face flashed up on a giant TV screen. "This year, I'm earning A's an B's. That's because I have a great teacher --- Mrs. Hunter." "And, not only has it helped him in school, it has helped us as a family," his mom said. "I mean, it has changed his whole life." A center for Belleville That was the late J. Phillip Berquist's goal when he began developing the idea for a series of Masonic learning centers more than a decade ago. A past grand master of Masons in Massachusetts, Berquist knew that an estimated 15 percent to 20 percent of Americans struggle with some degree of dyslexia . If they could be helped early on, children might be saved from a lifetime of scholastic frustration and an inability to read, write and even add as adults. So, since 1994, the 32nd Degree Learning Centers for Children Inc. has opened 47 centers in 15 states with six more expected to open this fall. Headquartered in Lexington, Mass., it has trained more than 750 instructors and taught more than 5,000 children --- all at no charge. After watching the program develop, Gary Alves decided in 1998 it was time for Southern Illinois to get on board. Now, Belleville's center and one outside of Chicago are the only two in Illinois. "I felt there was a need for this primarily because my wife is a teacher and we realize that school districts can't treat every problem," said Alves, the executive secretary of the Valley of Southern Illinois Scottish Rite Masonic Bodies. "And, we had the facility," said Alves, who chaired the center's planning commission. "So, I said, `Why not make use of it and do something good for the community, for the kids, for the southern region,' and they agreed. Now, it's amazing to see the type of progress the kids make." A problem with perception When most people hear " dyslexia ," they usually think of letter reversals, Hunter said. Accidentally say "god" instead of "dog" and people may joke that you're dyslexic. But the problem is much more complex than that. "People with dyslexia have a perceptional problem," Hunter said. "It's a neurological difficulty. Their acuity is good with their eyes and their ears, but they perceive things differently than we do because of the way the nerves run through their brain." In other words, Weston could see words just fine, but they wound up as a jumbled mess by the time they reached the brain. B's might look like d's. O's could turn into e's. X's might be x's --- or they might become y's. Dyslexics may not know how to break words into syllables. Weston's mother found this out when Hunter showed her a sample of how dyslexics might perceive "Mary had a little lamb." To Hock, it was gibberish. "I started crying," she said. "I'm like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. No wonder the poor kid couldn't read, and here I am fussing at him. He would see words totally differently, but I couldn't relate to that." Originally referred to as congenital word-blindness, dyslexia entered the medical lexicon in 1896 before Dr. Samuel Orton dramatically changed how people viewed it in 1925. Rather than just a problem with reading and writing, Orton suspected the problem extended far beyond. He was right. Doctors now know that math skills may be impaired as well; adding 7 to 5 may result in an answer of 21 or they may have difficulty memorizing multiplication tables. They may have trouble following instructions in order or adding a row of numbers. In addition, dyslexic children may have trouble copying from a blackboard (DaVinci is famous for his backwards writing), understanding jokes (especially puns) and even telling right from left and east from west. Often, it runs in families. Hock says her husband, now a Belleville alderman, realizes he, too, struggled with it, but he "muddled through." "Obviously, if you have trouble with how your brain interprets what you see and hear, it's going to affect your comprehension when you're trying to read," Hunter said. "If you're stumbling on words constantly, then your comprehension is going to be poor because you didn't get the information right in the first place." The disorder likely arises even before a child starts school. Young dyslexics seem to have a problem with phonemic awareness --- the ability to recognize, think about and manipulate the individual sounds in words. For example, they may be slow to talk or be unable to deal with rhymes. Once they start school, they have difficulty learning letter names, writing the alphabet, and figuring out to pronounce (decode) even simple words. Like Weston, they might work their way through the early grades by their listening skills. But without help, their problems are sure to mount. Getting that help, however, can take years. For starters, children with dyslexia assume their friends see the world in the same messed-up way they do, so they either feel no need to ask for help or may be reluctant to ask for help. Adding to the confusion, even young nondyslexic children may reverse their letters at times. Recognizing the problem Pam Robinson of Millstadt suspected her son, Tyler, might be dyslexic even before he started kindergarten, but teachers told her to wait until at least after the second grade to do the special testing needed to diagnose the problem. In the third grade, he began raising eyebrows. "His teachers finally agreed with me: This is an intelligent child, but we're not reaching him somehow," Robinson said. It wasn't until the fourth grade that a teacher spotted Hunter's ad in a magazine looking for people who wanted certification in teaching dyslexics. Since February, both Tyler, 11, and younger brother Thomas, 8, attend the Belleville center after school for an hour twice a week. "It's phenominal," Robinson said. "It really is. I can't say enough good things about it. It helps children see they're not `learning disabled,' which, to a kid, is not a nice term. At the learning center, they're told, `You're not slow. It's not that you're not bright. In fact, you're very intelligent kids. You just don't process things the way everybody else does.'" Reading is a ton of fun Everything in the center is designed to either boost self-esteem or the idea that reading is fun. On one wall of the large downstairs room, an elephant sits next to the message "Get into some heavy reading" and "Reading is a ton of fun." A photo of a parachutist reminds kids "You never know what you can do until you try." Bookshelves contain a wealth of age-appropriate reading, from fairy tales and Animorphs for the youngest to "Black Beauty" and, of course, Harry Potter. There are stuffed bears on top of storage bins, sunflower and butterfly decorations to brighten things up and chairs and tables where children can sit down at and start enjoying a book. Along one long end is where the real work goes on --- nine small rooms in which teachers and students engage in lively, fast-moving one-hour sessions. Lessons are based on a concept developed by Orton the neurologist with Anna Gillingham, an educator and speech pathologist. "We use a multisensory approach," Hunter said. "For example, a teacher will ask, `What says "duh"?' The child will put his finger in the sand and trace and say the letter `d.' So we're trying to use diferent senses to get things into the brain --- touching, hearing, speaking, reading." Students are carefully chosen to make sure they fit in the program's guidelines. Emotional or behaviorial problems such as attention deficit disorder or oppositional disorder also may cause reading problems, but they fall outside the program's limitations. "Basically we compare IQ with reading ability and see if there's a difference," Hunter said. "If there is, then most times they can qualify for the program." Teachers are rigorously trained as well. On their own time, they must complete 45 hours of classroom instruction followed by 100 hours of working with students. And, that's not counting the time it takes to prepare the individual lessons for each session. It can take more than a year to earn teaching certification. Once a student is accepted, he may have to start at the beginning. Even for the one 17-year-old in the program, they made sure she knew that a short "a" sounds like the "a" in cat. "We take them back to the beginning to see what they know because the kids who come in here probably have a lot of holes in their development order," Hunter said. "We try to plug up those holes --- and we've been having a lot of success." Getting down to work Week after week, teachers slowly go step by step from short vowel sounds to diagraphs (two consonants making a single sound) to sounding out nonsense words to vowel teams. "I think it works wonderfully," said trainee Mary Borrenpohl, a special education teacher at Belleville West High School who hopes to finish her work by May. "I worked with children with dyslexia , but I was never quite sure what dyslexia was. So when I learned the center was going to tutor trainees how to teach dyslexic children, I really jumped at the chance to do that. "I hope to introduce some of this into my reading class (at West). Because if they miss it in their primary years, then they just struggle with it all their life." Late one afternoon recently found Borrenpohl wrapping up her six-week summer session with Tyler Robinson. "You sound good --- is your cold going away?" she greeted him. "Yeah, I think so," he replied, pulling up a chair to the desk. What followed were a series of drills to review old work and move on to the lesson of the day --- learning ai and ay. First came a simple drill of sounding single and double letters shown on flash cards. Then, Tyler had to pronounce each sound in a word --- shr-i-nk, example. Tyler breezed through. "Can't fool you --- very good," she said in encouragement. A test on the letter y followed to see if Tyler could pronounce it correctly whether it was a short i sound (lynx) or a long i (satisfy). He remembered how "magic e's" made normally short vowels long (Tim vs. time) and how "rabbit words" like "tunnel" contained a double letter with a single sound. The "red word" drill --- words that fail to follow normal rules --- had Tyler pronouncing the various sounds while tapping his fingers down his arm. Next came the ai-ay lessons, requiring Tyler to underline the pairs on a page, say them, spell them and write them in a tray of sand. Finally, he was given two short stories to read before being asked questions on the material. For the most part, he sailed through, making only a handful of minor errors such as mistaking "stray" as "star" and "not" as "no." The lesson was cut short so Tyler could dive into the last-day pizza. He'll pick up when the fall session begins in September. It's working "This is such a great improvement," Borrenpohl said. "During regular school, they don't get enough time to make that sound-symbol relationship. Here, we'll do it over and over and over again until it finally clicks." Generally children remain in the program for about two years, although Hunter may allow a third year if she feels the child is still benefiting. After that, she needs approval from the Massachusetts headquarters. Only Hunter's very first two students have "graduated" so far. One girl, for example, gained three years in reading skill in 17 months and is now five years above where she started in "decoding" skills. "So she was way above grade level in sounding out words, but her intelligence wasn't there yet, so it was time for her to graduate," Hunter said. "So it's different for each child. If you get a child at a very young age and you get him up to grade level or above, then it's time for them to graduate." Do students retain their skills? Because the centers are so new, there's no definitive answer yet, but the Masons are carefully tracking students to find out, Hunter said. The organization is considering offering short-term refresher courses if needed. Because the center can help only a couple of dozen students at any one time, Alves is hoping to train more teachers, who, in turn, can help students in schools elsewhere. (The Belleville center probably won't be able to accept new students until next summer.) "It's just not feasible for students in Chester and Mount Vernon to come here twice a week, so we would take the program to them," Alves said. "All the schools would have to provide is the space and the tutors." The training method may change, too, as modern imaging techniques continue to reveal what exactly in the brain of dyslexics is different. Past research has hinted at anomalies in the thalamus and cerebral cortex, which may distort the information sent to the brain. Already, one new avenue of research is giving dyslexics exercises that stimulate the cerebellum. But no matter the technique, the center's goal will remain the same: helping dyslexic children reach their potential. "I've worked with four different kids, and the biggest thing I think I saw that changed around was their self-esteem," Hunter said. "To me, even if you change their self-esteem, it's going to make a big difference in their life." |
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