When David Bodner was a child, trying to read was like trying to watch an unfocused movie. The words trembled on the page and gave him a headache. It was even worse for his brother Steve: The letters would seem to spin around and fly into the air. He pressed his hand on the page to keep them still.
”Teachers thought we were stupid,” said David, 14. Often, they punished him by making him sit in the corner of the classroom. Steve, who would spend hours each night trying to read just a few lines, suffered from ulcers, migraine headaches and night terrors-a rare and extreme version of nightmares. Finally, David`s mother pulled him out of 4th grade and taught him at home. She also sent both boys to study one-on-one with Marilyn Kay, a learning-disabilities teacher who heads the Reading Group, a not-for-profit reading clinic in Urbana for people with dyslexia and other reading difficulties.
Now, six years later, David is a straight-A student at University High School in Urbana. Steve, 21, winner of the National Scholastic art
competition, is headed for graduate school.
These are only two of the many successful graduates of the Reading Group. Students who couldn`t count to 10, who couldn`t read their own names, have worked with Kay and later moved to the top of their classes and even into Ph.D. and medical programs.
Kay has helped more than 700 children and adults cope with dyslexia, a reading disorder that affects an estimated 1 in 10 people. In her 22 years as a teacher, she has developed methods that make her program unique in the nation, a program that has prompted some students to drive two hours to see her each week.
Unrelated to intelligence
Dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence. If anything, Kay`s students tend to be highly creative and artistic, many of them being architects, sculptors and painters. Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Hans Christian Andersen and many other historic figures are believed to have been dyslexic.
Recent studies suggest that dyslexia is a neurological phenomenon stemming from abnormal brain development. Dyslexic boys outnumber girls 4-1, Kay said, noting that the disorder seems to be passed from father to son.
Parents often blame the child for his dyslexia and accuse him of not paying attention in class. Some of them are shocked when they learn that Kay herself is dyslexic.
”Their eyes bug out,” Kay said, striking a mock pose of indignation:
” `What! This woman is supposed to be an expert!` ” But, as she emphasizes later, ”my failure to learn to read during my childhood has been an asset in my work.”
Kay uses the ”multisensory method,” linking letters to concrete objects that a student can see and feel. Her methods come from her own experience and from a combination of techniques other professionials developed.
In the corner of one room of her clinic is a box of stuffed animals and toys. Each item represents a different letter to help students pick a word apart and see each component. In front of one freckled little boy is a salt shaker, a bundle of nails, a plastic apple, a china cat and a felt kite.
”Sssss-nack,” he says, and he writes the word in his notebook. Later, he traces a word with his finger on the surface of a tray of cornmeal, shakes the tray, and traces the word again. He is etching the word into his memory.
Feeling letters
This is an exercise Kay urges students to do at home, feeling the shape of letters. In addition, she casts numbers and letters into plays, giving
”4” a nose and turning ”6” into a bashful creature to help students see them in the right position. There`s also the story of the five toy monkeys, each of which wears a bib with a vowel on it. ”E is usually shy and silent,” Kay says, holding him up. ”But it`s noisy when it sits next to A. . . .
” She bares her teeth and squeaks ”E-E” as she crowds the toys together.
In another room of the Reading Group, a student can read a story on a computer screen. If he sees an unfamiliar word, he touches it with a computer light pen, and the voice synthesizer says the word. The talking computer can also define words, summarize sentences, and discuss literary techniques, such as similes and metaphors.
”This is an attempt to use the computer to get past bottlenecks in reading,” said David Zola, a University of Illinois professor in educational psychology who helped program the software. ”It empowers students to understand the ideas without having to seek out adults for help.”
Kay is probably the only person in the nation who combines one-on-one dyslexia instruction with computer reading tutorials, Zola said. Developed in 1985, the computer program is now used at four sites, and Zola said ”only half a dozen people” have similar programs for people with reading disorders. Many former students credit Kay with changing their lives. One is Susan Butts, a U. of I. anthropology major. When she was 5, her eyes would jump from line to line when she tried to read. She wrote her letters backward.
”Back then, people didn`t know much about dyslexia,” she said. ”It was 20 years ago. My teachers didn`t believe it was a problem. I just sat there, feeling hopeless.” Her mother, who sensed that something was wrong, enrolled her in Kay`s program. Butts spent hours putting letters in boxes and writing on cornmeal. She played ”hangman” on a computer terminal and circled words hidden in a grid of letters.
A novel in a day
Within a weeks, the I-Can-Read-Books that had seemed to be smears of dots and dashes became perfectly understandable. Butts started to read, not only for school, but for pleasure. By the time she finished grade school, she could read a novel in one day.
Kay lets her students know that she understands what they`re going through. ”Now let`s go with the assumption that most of this is boring,” Kay says in the hushed voice of a conspirator to a little boy who stares at the health textbook sitting between them. ”Boring, boring, boring!” Together, they take a deep breath, blow out slowly and wipe their foreheads. As he reads, she forces him to ask questions about the passage.
”The most important questions are the ones you ask yourself,” she tells him. ”You are your own best teacher. Do you know what I was like when I was in 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade?”
Kay slouches down in her seat and clasps her hands like an obedient little girl. ”That was me. I just read words. I didn`t ask any questions. But I do now.”
Kay grew up in Pettisville, Ohio, a town of 350 people. In 1st grade, she said, she couldn`t read the words on the blackboard. It was as if the chalk marks spelled out some code, some secret she wasn`t let in on.
No problem thinking
Her teachers noticed how quiet she was in class and assigned her to the lowest-level reading group. Her parents encouraged her to pursue art and singing, subjects in which she had talent. Other teachers recognized she had a writing problem, not a thinking problem, and they split her grade into components: A for content, D for spelling.
”It reassured me to know that at least 50 percent of me was OK,” Kay said. Kay`s older sister, the high school valedictorian, enrolled in Goshen College in Indiana. Marilyn followed, expecting to drop out within a year. But it was Kay who graduated and her sister who dropped out.
Although Kay read slowly, she learned by listening. She was attracted to students and professors who read a lot and talked a lot, because it was through them that she could absorb knowledge.
Upon graduation, she worked as a grade school teacher in Ohio. During her stint as a volunteer in the migrant camps of California, she met her husband, Dave Kay, then a Harvard student. He is now a professor of English at the U. of I.
In her first year of marriage, Kay said, she realized that her husband expected her to read. ”His walls were lined with books. And his friends and their wives all talked books.” Under his prodding, she started with a set of Charles Dickens. It took her a long time to finish, as she struggled at a reading speed half that of her husband`s. Then she read the works of Thomas Hardy and two thick volumes of Greek drama.
Hooked on reading
She was hooked. There were evenings when she would start a book right after supper and continue reading until daybreak. ”I needed that kick from my husband,” she said. ”It hurt at first, but it changed me from a mediocre reader to an avid one.” While Dave Kay worked on his Ph.D. at Princeton University, Marilyn Kay taught 2nd grade and saw a replay of her childhood.
In her class was a bright little boy, a boy who loved to sing and dance and listen to classical music. He could not read.
”He couldn`t remember words-even for a second!” Kay said. ”His parents sent him to a private tutor, and a few weeks later, he was actually reading! I was so disappointed that I couldn`t teach him myself. After a few weeks, I went to the clinic and asked them how they did it.”
At the clinic, the tutors introduced Kay to the multisensory approach. Shortly afterward, in 1966, she moved to Urbana with her husband and started working toward a master`s degree in education at the U. of I. She read more than 100 books on dyslexia and visited clinics in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
Her private practice began in 1968 when she tutored one child free in the living room of her house. News of her service spread by word of mouth, and her program grew. In a few years, her house bustled with children after school and on weekends. Kay now needs five file cabinets to keep track of Reading Group alumni from Champaign-Urbana, Peoria, Springfield and other central Illinois cities. The Reading Group employs six specialists during the school year and 19 during the summer, when 100 adults, teenagers and children come for intensive help.
”Sometimes I feel I should be paying my students,” Kay said. ”I have certainly learned a huge amount from them. I`ve discovered that people really learn best when they see themselves as part of the learning process, when they feel in control and grow on their own.”
———-
For information about learning disabilities, contact the Learning Disabilities Association of Illinois, 400 E. Sibley Blvd., Room 111, Harvey, Ill. 60426; 708-210-3532.
