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The 25 Year Journey to Hector
I struggled to read myself.
One of my earliest memories is my mother’s exasperated face as she tried to help me to read. My brother and sister had both found it easy. But not me.
It was still a problem in my teens and I ended up applying to study engineering as a result.
Somehow, in the gap between school and university something clicked and I became a passionate reader. I almost switched to studying fine art by the end of my first year of university.
Then my sons struggled too.
I had really forgotten all about it until I taught my sons to read. I was much less good at dealing with my exasperation than my mother had been. What should have been a fun time together ended up very stressful. I feel bad about it to this day.
So I started researching the basis to learning to read, just to try to get better at helping them. At about that time I helped establish a charity called the Shannon Trust. We were getting prison inmates to teach each other to read.
The interesting thing for me was that the inmates were learning to read fast! Lying in my bathtub in 1999, I was pondering this. The engineer in me asked myself why they had not learned to read the first time around.
There was clearly no innate reason. And back in 1999, the level of scientific understanding of reading in our schools was very, very low. So I resolved to try to fix the problem.
It was a slightly mad Millennium moment, but 25 years later we have learned some interesting lessons and we are seeing some very exciting results. Results that can change lives and change society.
Understanding the neurology is the key to the castle.
How are you reading this? We don’t really think about it do we, any more than we think about how we walk down the road.
Well, your eyes are perceiving the shapes of all these letters and they pass that information to your visual cortex. Then, through a magical sequence of neural links, you can hear the words I have put on the page and understand them.
So I started to look at this neurology of reading. It is surprising, but most educational theorists were not that interested in the nitty gritty of neurology at the time. But I found that I just loved it! I worked through the entire course book for a neurology degree while lying about on holiday in Italy one summer.
I love all of the little chemical processes that give us what we feel in our brain. It is beautiful and magical.
The End Result
We now have a reading intervention process that has a 100% success rate.
We call it a smart reading intervention because it adapts to each student.
The key is simple: you must identify why someone is struggling before you try to help them. If you can do that, then the solution is generally quite simple to apply and the results are much, much faster. Our record so far is five years of reading age gain in one month of intervention.
– David Morgan
Founder of the Shannon Trust, All Aboard Learning and the Hector Trust.