At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

Summary

Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now. Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well. "There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost." Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text. Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory." Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be? Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know. Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn." No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets." Molly Woodworth (left) with her aunt, Nora Chahbazi, outside the Ounce of Prevention Reading Center in Flushing, Michigan. Emily Hanford | APM Reports Woodworth, who now works in accounting, says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did. That's why she wa...