The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Layoff spurs man to learn to read
Chicagoan finds out he has what is known as phonological dyslexia.
‘ He has found in me somebody who understands, somebody he can trust. He has learned that his 50 years of struggle had nothing to do with his intelligence or ability to learn.’
Karen Wadden Mueller Learning- disabilities specialist and dyslexia therapist
For all their deprivations and frustrations, these locked- down days and nights have given some people the time and opportunity to fulfill their dreams and desires.
Months ago, when al l t hi s began, a 57- year- old man named Andre was laid off from the job he had for years toting bags at a downtown hotel. He decided that his goal would be to “exercise more.” He also decided to tackle something that had been troubling him since he was a small child.
“I wanted to learn to read,” he said. “I want to be able to read a book before I die.”
He said that since he was 7 years old, “I knew that I couldn’t read, and there was no one to help. I tried, but I had one teacher tell me, ‘ Well, maybe you’ll just never know how to read,’ and that hurt me.”
He is open to talking about it. He told a woman named Karen Wadden Mueller, “I want to read a book before I leave this earth.”
“And those words captured my heart,” says Wadden Mueller, a learning- disabilities specialist and dyslexia therapist. She was drawn to her profession due to having family members with dyslexia. She attended Sacred Heart Academy and later earned degrees in learning disabilities and behavioral therapy from Northeastern Illinois University.
There are many types of learning disabilities. Andre has what is known as phonological dyslexia, which makes it difficult to segment individual sounds from printed language and to spell those sounds into print.
Wadden Mueller explained this to him, telling him that they would “have to go back to the very beginning, the basics. I did this knowing that there is such a sense of shame and embarrassment in this, so many emotions involved.”
She offered to work with Andre for free. But he refused any pro bono arrangement. They settled on a relatively small fee for three hourlong sessions a week.
They work r e motely. S he employs what she calls “a multisensory reading technique,” which involves finger- tapping each sound to feel where each sound falls in a word in order to “see, hear and feel the words.”
“S o undi ng t he words out becomes the key,” she says.
It makes for slow going, but both are enthusiastic and unflappable.
Over the course of their work, she has unobtrusively learned much about Andre and understands that except for certain specifics, his story is not as unusual as one might imagine.
Born and raised on Chicago’s Far South Side, he was the only child of a single mother. “Her name was Jackie, and she worked two jobs to make a life for us,” he says. “She was always good to me and helped protect me from the gangs and from any real trouble.”
He attended the neighborhood public school, where he “felt that something was wrong but didn’t really know what it was. I was able to grab a word here and there. I learned to write my own name, and I knew my address and phone number.”
Teachers mostly paid him little if any attention, and he went on his solitary way.
All along the way since then, he has coped as best he could, part of the 32 million or so adults in the United States who can’t read. He’s coming along, and quickly. “I so admire him,” Wadden Mueller says. “He has come to understand what the challenge is and to accept that. We are using a key to open a door, and he can be in a place that is comfortable and safe. He has found in me somebody who understands, somebody he can trust. He has learned that his 50 years of struggle had nothing to do with his intelligence or ability to learn.”
He says, “I’m not ashamed anymore.”