Local Press

 

READING: My Struggle
By William G. Schiemenz

Sacramento LD Newsletter, October/November 2004


Reading is probably one of the most complex and important skills that anyone will ever learn. Educational experts all over the country agree that this is the case. So, why is it that the general public is so hard on those who haven’t gotten the hang of it yet? English is one of the most complex languages in the world. It is a collection of words from its own earlier incarnations, as well as French, German, Greek, and Latin. The rules (such as they are) vary from word to word. There is no one “right” way to use the letters of the language. We in the English-speaking world are truly blessed with one of the most difficult languages of them all. Those who try to learn English after growing up thinking in a more logical language will tell how difficult a language it is. On top of all that, there are unfortunate members of our society who have neurological difficulties with learning and language; people who have greater difficulty learning to deal with our language no matter what they try. I am one of those people and this is my story.

It’s amazing to me how so many people take reading for granted considering how important it is to life in our society. Reading is one of the most vital skills in life. What would it be like to walk down a street without being able to read the signs around you? How would it feel to talk to people who didn’t have to ask what the signs said? What would you feel standing next to those people who could decipher those strange symbols in seconds when it would take you minutes to come up with a guess that might not even be right? I’ll tell you what you would feel: shame, worthlessness, anger, and fear. You would be afraid that that person standing next to you would find out. That they’d know your secret. You wouldn’t want anyone to know that you couldn’t read. I know because I didn’t learn to read until I was twelve. It may not seem like much, but it is. Some of you are probably thinking something like “Big deal. He was just a kid. It’s not so bad for a kid.” And, they’d be right—almost. The older an illiterate person gets, the harder society is on that person no matter the reason behind the inability. I started to feel it around seven or eight years old and it only got worse over time. No matter what I tried, I wasn’t able to figure English out.

Most of my early school career is fuzzy looking back on it now. I don’t remember many specific incidents from my days in public school. I was pulled out of what might be best described as educational purgatory. I was spinning my wheels five days a week from nine a.m. to three p.m., excluding lunch and recess. I was having extreme problems progressing in the classic basic skills, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I could make no progress in reading although the exercises did teach me some other tricks. (By the 4th grade I’d figured out how to get my teachers to do about half the reading exercise for me.) Math was an uphill battle where every so often I’d fall back down the hill since I didn’t seem to be able to remember anything over a long period of time. Reading might as well have been an impregnable castle wall surrounded by a mote of fire and guarded by a great dragon for all the progress I made with it. Writing was inside the keep in the castle with the wall, mote, and dragon. It still boggles my mind that the teachers expected me to be able to write something when I couldn’t read.

On the other side of castle that is school was all the interesting stuff, at least to me, like science, art, history, and the like. All the classes that were interesting required reading. Now I’m a good listener. I pick up and keep stuff I hear very easily. It’s how I get through college classes most of the time. I wasn’t even allowed to sit in to listen to the other side of school. I sat in the Special Ed room getting nothing done while the teachers pressured me to keep working, or, worse to “Try harder.” I was trying hard. I was trying so hard to learn to read that I had to go to therapy from the stress. Think about it, a little k-5 grade kid needing therapy from the pressure to perform in school.

I could fill a book about my experiences in public school and what they did to me, but I’m not going to. Others have and have done so better than I could. I was only in public school for six years. But, if there is one thing that I want people who read this to take away, it is this: “Everyone wants to learn. Every child wants to succeed in school. Kids who fail in school don’t do so from a lack of trying.”

Staring down the barrel of the changeover to a middle school with inadequate services and a bad reputation, my parents, thankfully, chose to pull me out of public school and home school me. At first, mostly, home school for me consisted of watching the Discovery Channel, PBS, and the like. I needed to get rid of the stress I’d been carrying around from public school. Not that we gave up on reading, we tried many programs to get me reading over the years. Nothing really worked until Lindamood Bell.

We moved to California in 1992. I was twelve years old. Back in Texas we’d heard good things about Lindamood Bell so we checked it out. From the start we knew it was something special. Placement testing usually left me grumpy, tired, and generally not in a good mood. Lindamood Bell was different. I came out smiling and they said they could help me. They could even say why I’d had so much trouble learning to read. I couldn’t distinguish the sounds in the middle of a word. I could tell you the beginning and the end but nothing else—phonemic awareness they called it. For five and a half weeks they taught me to tell the sounds in the middle of words apart and brushed up on my phonetics. It wasn’t like magic, I couldn’t suddenly read after the five and a half weeks, but they assured me that it would come in time.

It started simply. I was able to read street signs. Next came comic books—granted comic books don’t take much reading, but from being unable to read anything but the shortest words, anything was an improvement. Eventually, I read my first real book. My choice might not have been the best, but I wanted to know what happened. Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov was the only part of the Foundation series not released on audio book so I dove into the 494 pages of hard science fiction with a propose, to find out what the heck happened next. It was slow going. I’d only go a few pages an hour. Eventually, I finished the thing and realized that I’d done it. I’d read an adult-level book from cover to cover. I was finally a reader. I dialed back the intensity and stuck to young-adult books for a while, but from that point on I felt better about myself.

The rest came over the course of about a year. I read anything I could get my hands on and slowly my speed increased. I went from being illiterate to being an avid reader. To this day, I spend far more time reading than watching TV or playing video games. Mostly I read things on-line now since it’s free whereas books are seven or eight bucks a pop these days. I consider learning to read the single biggest achievement of my life.

Writing came even more slowly than reading. I didn’t have any noticeable headway until around college. That was when my spelling finally got good enough for a computer spell checker to figure out what I’d typed in. Now I regularly write A and B papers at the college level. I think I’ve done pretty well for myself considering there were some experts who told my parents when I was six that I’d never be able to read or write.


Will Schiemenz graduated with honors with two Associate Degrees from Sierra College in Rocklin, CA. He is currently a student at San Francisco State University.