The serendipity of discovering that I did not know how to teach reading, that there were reasons that children had difficulty learning certain kinds of skills, and encountering the Reading Clinic in San Rafael helped me make the decision to leave my teaching job in that small Northern California school to apprentice and work at the Reading Clinic. I was assigned to the care of Alice McKenna, one of the most talented diagnosticians and teachers I have ever known. Still, some 35 years later, she remains a beacon. She died quite a few years ago, in almost complete anonymity, but she remains present in how I have formulated my vision of education.

Alice taught me what was known at that time about visual processing and visual memory and how critical they were to acquiring reading skills. She showed me how to use a tachistoscope to flash sequences of numbers and words—we believed that we could speed up the student’s ability to visually scan and remember information. She also introduced me to the use of the metronome to pace a student’s reading; she provided me with lists of words to become sight words, taught me the Slingerland Method to teach reading (a multi-sensory approach to learning to read and write), and tutored me in the administration of and how to analyze the results of the tests of cognition and learning available at that time. She introduced me to the huge closet of games that helped students to develop their visual processing and guided me to ask, “What does this task tap?” She made herself always available for questions, taught me to crochet, a skill others failed at because of my very left-handed approach, and guided me to pay attention to details.

Years later, I was inspired to contact all those great mentors in my life, and I discovered that Alice was retired and living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, not far from where my children were attending boarding school. I was able to get an address for her and went to visit her on a fall afternoon when I was east for a Parents’ Weekend. I was stunned to find Alice living in a small one-room apartment. Her kitchen was a hot plate and a sink, her bathroom a curtained corner, and her narrow bed was tightly made and served as her couch for day use. The walls were yellowed from her cigarette smoke and her dark wooden bookcases bulged with books. Her small desk, oriented so that she could look out of her one window, had neat stacks of lined paper and two aged fountain pens. She would later write long letters to me in her even italic print on that lined paper. I wondered how such a talented teacher and so large a spirit could end up, alone, in near poverty, when she had touched so many lives. I visited her regularly when I went to see my children, and she continued to share her wisdom, humor, and elegant turns of language with me until her last week of life.

When I began my apprenticeship at the Reading Clinic, Alice was responsible for my training. Then, like a new waiter in a restaurant, I followed and observed a trained and skilled educational therapist for an extended period of time. Alice determined when I was ready to see my first student. It was a warm summer morning when I went to meet Pauli. Alice had tested him and was there to introduce him to me and to guide my first day. He was a small 6-year-old who was having significant difficulty learning to read. Alice brought him to my studio. Pauli was wearing a cowboy hat, had 6-shooters holstered on each side, a plastic sword tucked into his belt, and a compass in his hand. Alice winked at me and said, “Pauli has come prepared to defend himself, and if need be, find his way home.” She knew how frightened he was and was cueing me to be aware of that as I worked with him. I have encountered many Paulis in my years of teaching, tutoring, and testing. Most of them have invisible protection shields and conceal their weapons, but the anguish, frustration, defeat, and fear is palpable.

Alice guided me through that first intimidating day with Pauli, and when we later reviewed how the tutoring session had gone, she pointed out that most of the time I was teaching beyond Pauli’s level of understanding. Alice advised me to “Back up, back up until the student gets that gleam in the eye that lets you know they get it. Then you’ll know where to begin.”

Years later, when I was teaching master’s students in education, Alice’s words were still being heard. I told my students that there is a great temptation when a child says, “I don’t get it” to respond with a rapid, confident, “Oh sure you can. This is easy. Just let me show you.” And then when the student’s eyes gloss over, it is easy to think to oneself, “If she would just focus in…she could get it!” I explained to them, as Alice did to me, that it is precisely in those moments that backing up until you see “the gleam in the eye” is what is needed.

Pauli was struggling to learn to read, and backing up far enough to find “that gleam in the eye” was a real challenge. The remarkable development of the written symbol to communicate verbal information is predicated on our ability to see particular configurations, to associate them with the world of sound and meaning, and remember them. It is a complex process developed late in human history, but of almost immeasurable significance in the migration of the human experience. At its simplest, but often most pleasurable, reading brings the storyteller into our presence whenever we want him/her. Its more complex contributions are in effect in nearly everything we eat, drink, wear, drive, reside in, communicate with, recreate with, etc., and it is the medium of disinformation at its most potent. Learning to read is essential to full participation in our society, so Pauli’s struggle, as that of Charlie Williams, was a critical struggle.

Had we no eyes, reading as we know it would not exist. It is that obvious fact that led us to believe, in those early days, that reading was almost singly a visual task. Now, with the explosion of understanding about the roles of auditory processing and auditory memory and the understanding of the integrative nature of reading, the working on and the developing of visual processing skills, especially for symbols, has become less important. But the role of visual processing continues to plague those of us who are trying to teach children to read.

Some children have notable difficulty “visually stabilizing” those confusable and confusing symbols which have meaning only relative to the body of the viewer. In fact, more than half of the alphabet is confusable—b, d, p, q, g, h, y, t, f, m, w, n, u. The ability to stabilize a “b” relative to one’s body and to the other symbols surrounding it allows the student to recognize the word “dog” as “dog” rather than “god” or “bog” or “gob” or “pog,” etc.

Why it is that some of us achieve this stability easily and others struggle so mightily remains a mystery. Our tests of visual processing can demonstrate that a student has difficulty with rapid visual discrimination or visual figure-ground, or different types of visual memory, but they do not help us to understand why or how to fix it. My many years of contact with students struggling with this very difficulty and the absolute continuing lack of a cohesive program that remedies this difficulty leads me to believe there is no silver bullet. Larger font helps, consistent font helps, color changes sometimes help, having an auditory component (such as being able to listen while reading) helps quite a bit (in the short term), and practice and more practice also helps. But for those individuals who struggle with this problem, my experience is that it remains as a vulnerability always. The number of errors decreases perhaps, but pressure and stress will cause them to re-present at unanticipated times and in unexpected places.

For example, an adult student told me the following story. She was driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, the famous bridge on which a section collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. There was considerable ongoing work to retrofit the bridge for earthquake safety. She was driving in the right-hand lane and noticed an orange sign above the lane a short distance before the bridge connected with Treasure Island.

This is what she read—
New Morning Drive

She explained that she had the following dialogue with herself before she looked at the sign again. Needless to say, in real time this took only seconds. Her internal dialogue went like this, “They must be exiting the traffic to the right because of the earthquake retrofit…I don’t think there is a right-hand exit. There is a right-hand entrance, but not a right-hand exit. There is only a left-hand exit. New Morning Drive…hummm…there’s no New Morning Drive on Treasure Island. I’ve been all over that island, there’s no New Morning Drive!” That internal dialogue caused her to look again.

This time she read—
Men Working Above

Context and her experience helped her correct her visual processing errors. The sign was orange, signaling that it was a temporary sign. She had been over the bridge and onto Treasure Island numerous times, so she knew there was no right exit and no New Morning Drive. But if she had come from a place where street signs were orange and/or she had never been on the bridge or Treasure Island before, she would have had no reason to question her first read and she could find herself confused and lost without knowing why or how.

New Morning Drive
Men Working Above

The mind strives to make sense and order. All of her brain’s capacity to make sense was at work—structuring and restructuring the symbols to create a recognizable order. Her early difficulties with stabilizing letter and number symbols reappeared. It happens to all of us, but for some of us the degree is greater and the frequency more often. It can negatively impact reading speed and comprehension and is one kind of dyslexia, if you continue to be a person who needs a label.

As I struggled to help Pauli with this very problem, I felt that if he could just learn to tell his right from his left side, his problems with confusing “b” and “d” and other letters and numbers would end. I could remember my childhood and how I managed this confusion by visualizing the dining room table and remembering that the fork was on the left. I could feel myself picking up the fork, and it helped me remember left from right—but, of course, I could visualize it, feel it, and remember it. There are those among us who struggle all their lives with this confusion—can’t visualize it, can’t feel it, and can’t remember it. I have a dear aunt who, to this day, at 85 years old, gives driving directions by saying, “turn driver, turn passenger,” depending on which way she wants you to turn left or right.

There are other less obvious and perhaps more insidious visual problems that can impact reading comprehension and learning in general. One of them came to me several years ago. A family asked me to evaluate their high school-aged son for learning disabilities. They believed that he was “very bright…and very observant of details,” but noted that he was not doing as well in school as they imagined he should. When asked to describe his difficulties they stated, “He doesn’t seem to be able to go deeply.” It was an unusual statement, and it stuck with me as I interviewed the parents, the young man, conducted the evaluation, and analyzed the results. The parents also shared that as a toddler and young child, he was “very difficult,” high-strung, and mercurial in his moods.

When this young man was about 3 years old, a babysitter noticed a slight turn in one of his eyes. She brought it to the parents’ attention, and they took him to the ophthalmologist. He was diagnosed with amblyopia, sometimes referred to as “lazy eye.” The ophthalmologist recommended patching the boy’s strong eye to encourage the weaker eye to do the work it needed to develop the muscles needed to provide the child with converging bilateral vision.

The parents shared that they tried patching the boy’s eye, but he was so resistant to the patch that they decided to seek a second opinion. The second physician suggested that the boy would probably outgrow the problem and not to worry. The parents opted to follow the advice of the second physician in the interest of peace at home. He did not outgrow “the problem,” and by the time I saw him, he was functionally blind in one eye and had no depth perception. In his early teens, the young man tried on his own a short period of patching, but it did not produce any improvement.

When I tested the young man’s visual processing skills, I found them exceedingly weak. He had difficulty discriminating subtle differences in geometric shapes, especially when they were altered in any manner (enlarged, diminished, rotated), and he had particular difficulty if they were embedded in a complex field or had parts missing. These visual weaknesses stood out in his otherwise strong cognitive profile, and impacted his reading speed and consequent comprehension. These same visual processing weaknesses had been identified in numerous evaluations before mine. He had also been identified early on as having trouble learning to read and was described as a slow reader. He had an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) based on visual impairment, including reduced depth perception. As I sought to understand how his visual processing issues might have and continue to be affecting his learning, I ran across the following statement in Dr. John J. Ratey’s book A User’s Guide to the Brain: “Perception is much more than simply sensing stimuli from the outside world. It is a huge factor in personality development. Even the smallest perception problem can lead to a cascade of changes in a person’s psychological life.” (1)

I began to think about the descriptions of this young man as a “difficult toddler.” Depth perception results from the even convergence of the images from both eyes to be processed by the brain. If that convergence is not happening because one or the other eye is not picking up the information, or the brain is not processing the information, depth perception is impaired. I wondered about this young man as a toddler learning to walk and the ways in which his visual world betrayed him—missing steps, running into objects, the myriad ways in which his world must have seemed capricious and difficult. In part, maybe his irritability was born from the unpredictability of his visual world and the consequent constant surprises.

He had to learn about the world from the planes presented—his perceptions of substance constructed from learning the details of an object from every direction. His eyes and brain did not provide him with a sense of depth. His understanding of the world lacked the visceral knowledge that comes from depth perception, that there is meaning-filled matter between the planes. Like a page in a book, he could read the text on the front side of the page, savor the details, then turn the page and continue the story, but the meaning encapsulated in the paper under and above the text could only be raised as an intellectual exercise. The depth of the paper itself held as little meaning as the distance to the moon.

Pauli struggled with rapidly discriminating the subtle visual differences between the letters of the alphabet and the numbers, but that was not all. He also had difficulty with visual memory. Most of us are easily able to process the world of symbols, find no difficulty in rapidly discerning the difference between “b” and “d” or “field” and “filed,” and remember those differences. However, for those whose visual memory fades rapidly, a good deal of work must be done to commit this kind of decontextualized information to memory. For some individuals, visual memory fades so rapidly that they would be hard put, only minutes after meeting a person for the first time, to say what color hair the person had, whether they had a moustache or not, etc. Imagine the problems encountered when the police try to debrief an eyewitness who has weak visual memory. And if that person has to remember symbols which have very subtle differences, the problem is compounded.

Sometimes the visual memory weakness impacts the student’s memory for static information, such as remembering a science plate, or a graph, or the gestalt of a word. Sometimes the visual memory impacts visual memory for sequential information such as a mathematical formula, chemical reaction, the sequences of letters in a word, etc. Visual memory skills help us to recognize a friend walking toward us in a crowd, or to know a Van Gogh from a Rembrandt. They also help a student to remember the play pattern presented by the coach on the sidelines of the football game, or the pattern of motions that make up a karate move modeled by the sensei. And they profoundly impact being able to manage letter and number symbols, even when the person is totally intellectually capable.

In spite of the current disaffection with problems in the visual world as a significant contributor to problems of reading and calculation, there is no getting around that, except for Braille, reading is in large part a visual act. Were there no eyes, reading as we know it would not exist. And there is no program in existence that remediates these visual processing problems that I know of. If there were, we would all be using it, no matter what the price!! And the inventor would be retired and living the life of luxury in the Bahamas. Practice always improves, but the degree of practice needed for some is immense.

I had been working at the Reading Clinic for two years when I made a discovery that had the kind of synchronicity that seems like magic. I was working with a young teenager who was struggling with reading. I had already discovered by constant experimentation that having students read text in a mirror, so that the text was reversed, seemed to help them catch and identify those letters and words which were easily confused. I was set to introduce reversed reading to him and was explaining what was going to happen. He had difficulty grasping what we were going to do. He seemed confused, distracted, and unfocused. I thought to myself, “I have got to find a way to delimit the distractions, so that he can focus.” I decided to use our reel-to-reel tape recorder as a vocal magnification system. I would run my verbal directions through the tape recorder directly into his ear through the earphones, thereby shutting out other sound. I placed the earphones on his head and began fiddling with the machine. After a minute or two, I was ready to start. I looked over at the young man, and he was crying.

I was terrified! My first thought was that I had created some feedback that was screeching in his ears and had probably blown his eardrums asunder. I grabbed the earphones from his head, asking anxiously, “Are you alright?” He looked up at me with a tear-stained face and said, “It was so quiet.”

In that moment, I began to understand the profound importance of the auditory world and that there was also an auditory system that was working, well or less well, in the process of reading. I also understood, in that moment, that at the foundation of auditory processing was the identification of sound versus no sound. Not a week later, I received a flyer in my box announcing a seminar about the role of auditory processing in learning to read. Of course, I attended it.

What I discovered in the ensuing years about auditory processing is that it really has two distinct parts—the processing part and the memory part—and a student can struggle with one or both problems.

The impact of our growth in understanding about auditory processing as a critical part of learning was the introduction and teaching of phonemic awareness in early education. Now, routinely, elementary school curriculum includes programs in phonemic awareness, sometimes before introducing graphemes (the written visual symbols or the letters) or, at least, concomitantly with the introduction of letters and numbers. Even so, there are a fair number of students who struggle with the tasks that are designed to help develop this awareness. The student may have real difficulty getting the notion of a rhyme, or hearing how to segment a compound word, or struggle with separating an initial sound from the rest of the word, etc. When they don’t “get it,” they are sent to the resource specialist who practices these skills intensively, attempting to awaken the student’s phonemic awareness by following the developmental sequence as it is now understood. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the student just plods, getting it, forgetting it, and rarely using it spontaneously.

What is missed here is, “Backing up. Backing up until you see the gleam in the eye.” So many of the students who struggle with phonemic awareness have auditory processing skills that are not developed enough to identify sounds at the sophisticated level required to recognize rhymes, or the individual sounds of a word. Like the young man with the earphones, they may not yet have discerned the difference between sound versus no sound, or loud versus soft, or high versus low, or near sound versus distant sound, etc.

Then, there is the issue of auditory memory. How do we make our auditory memory better, stronger, more efficient? Parents ask me this question all the time. And I answer, “Well, practice improves almost everything, but the question is what is the cost/benefit ratio?” There was a study done to see if auditory memory could be improved. The idea was to determine the strategies that students with good auditory memory use and teach those strategies to students with weak auditory memories. A set of strategies were identified. Students with weak auditory memories were tested to set a base from which to measure improvement; then they were taught the strategies used by students with good auditory memories. Those students were re-tested and, Bada Bing! Their scores went way up! However, when they were re-tested again several months later, their scores dropped back to where they had been originally. Everybody was puzzled.

When I heard about the study, I just chuckled. I could have predicted the end results. Why? Because auditory memory has been an area of struggle for me. I knew from personal experience, observation, and years of working with students with different learning configurations that students with good auditory memories only have to use “the strategies” occasionally, but students with weak auditory memories have to use them constantly! It is not cost efficient and it is exhausting! It is simply easier to ask somebody or, for some people, to write it down.

And, oh, the woes for students with weak auditory memories as they ascend in their education. Holding onto the information in a lecture long enough to write it down, while more information is coming at you, is a major challenge. Remembering names, a phone number just given, directions, when you can’t write them down and/or they are not repeated sufficiently to get them into working memory, is a nightmare. On this account, cell phones have been a godsend for people with weak auditory memories. Now the number is automatically recorded or you are put through directly when you call for information. But not so long ago, when folks regularly used freestanding phones in booths across the country, the evidence of weak auditory memories was scratched into the metal or plastic, or written in ink or lipstick on every smooth surface. And before there were PalmPilots, the evidence was written in ink on our palms.

(1) Ratey, M.D., John J., A User’s Guide to the Brain, Pantheon books: New York, 2001, pg. 53.