Twenty-one years teaching special education. Three reading classes a day, every day. This is the same work, without the building.
I've spent my career with the kids the regular plan didn't work for. Most recently seventh and eighth grade — the age where a reading gap stops being something a child is struggling with and becomes something they believe about themselves. By thirteen, a kid who can't read well has usually decided they're stupid, and has built a whole set of strategies for hiding it. Undoing that belief is part of the job, not a side effect of it.
My degree is in history, which is why we end up reading about Everest and the Berlin Wall instead of worksheets. I didn't plan that as a method. It came from watching which pages a reluctant reader would actually turn.
Inside a school system, the constraints are real: caseloads, paperwork, a schedule built for thirty kids and not for one. I wrote the accommodations that finally let a kid show what they knew. I found the one thing that unlocked a reader nobody else could reach. I also watched kids wait months for help that should have taken a week. Working one-to-one, online, I can give one child the thing that took me twenty-one years to learn how to find, and give it to them this month instead of next term.
Every kid is their own little puzzle. You struggle with this in reading, you struggle with that in reading — how do I solve it differently for each of you? That's the part I've loved for twenty-one years. Shaun Keller
After every session you get a short note: what we did, what moved, what to practise. Not a progress portal you have to log into, not a report at the end of the term. If something isn't working I'll tell you before you have to ask. And if I think your child needs something I can't provide, you'll hear that from me first.
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