Decoding Dyslexia
Carrie Wood had always wanted to be a teacher.
“It was my childhood dream. It was just always something in my heart; I knew being around kids and people and teaching was what I wanted to do,” she says. “And I love learning. I’ve never felt like a creative person; I’m not an artist, I’m not a musician, I’m not an athlete, but teaching is the one place that I can be creative, and it’s an art.”
Ten years ago, Carrie realized her dream when she graduated from university and officially embarked on her teaching career. Not long after, she and her husband welcomed their son Emmett.
Carrie’s love of teaching and years of experience was probably part of the reason why she wasn’t overly concerned when Emmett, nearing the end of Kindergarten, was beginning to show signs of having a hard time learning to read.
“At his school they had a home reading program. And when it started I remember thinking well Emmett is just going to be like every other kid and fly by,” Carrie recalls. “And we were doing those [very early stage] books, and when we weren’t moving away from them after three or four months, I started thinking, ‘Well this is weird.’
“And I just kind of brushed it off on like, well maybe next year will be better, and also he’s a boy, he has a later birthday; it’ll come.”
But it didn’t come. In spite of the fact that Carrie was reading to and with Emmett every day, doing all of his home reading, his literacy wasn’t progressing.
In Grade 1, she reached out to his teacher, who shared her concern, but this was where Carrie encountered her first roadblock.
“She said there was a chance that he could get into Reading Recovery, but she said there was another student who was struggling a little bit more than Emmett, and they would probably get the spot.”
She didn’t have too long to be frustrated about that shortcoming of the education system before schools closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and she was faced with having to teach Emmett at home.
“At the beginning, I went in way overconfident; on both my remote teaching abilities and my homeschooling abilities. I thought, ‘This is perfect; I have four months, I’m going to get him up to grade level. I have some tricks; I’m going to do it,’” Carrie says. “Nope. I was just reminded every day how hard it was for him, and how a book that would take another kid five minutes would take him half an hour. And then I would have this incredible guilt because he got three books that he was supposed to read and I only made him read one.
“At the end of the day I was just doing more of the same of what the school was doing, which was the leveled readers and a little bit of phonics training.”
By the Spring, her frustration had reached a boiling and she needed to go on disability leave from work.
“I was feeling like a complete failure as a mother, a parent, and as an educator,” Carrie says. “I felt like I had done a horrible job teaching remote to my students, and I also felt like I had completely failed my son. And that was heart-breaking and I didn’t know how to deal with it, or see a way out.
“I couldn’t figure out how to help him.”
In the second grade, Emmett’s school reached out to Carrie to let her know they had an opening with the school psychologist that could be given to Emmett. His assessments began over Spring Break, and in December 2021, he was officially diagnosed with dyslexia.
“I started reading ferociously,” Carrie says. “It was like seeing things in a whole new light all of a sudden, and also finally starting to see a road map for Emmett.”
In her research, Carrie discovered the Learning Disabilities Association of Manitoba (LDAM), and started to look into tutoring for Emmett through the organization’s Barton Reading Program. In February 2022, not only did Emmett begin working with a tutor at LDAM, but Carrie decided to volunteer as one too.
“It was about immersion, it was about giving back,” she says. “And I’m a teacher, I like doing this stuff, so why wouldn’t I? If I’m already going to be here, this is my wheelhouse, it just made sense.”
Today, Emmett is eight and will be going into Grade 4 in the Fall. He’s made significant progress with his reading, and will continue to receive tutoring at LDAM. Carrie – seeing what she and her son had to endure before getting support – is staying focused on advocating for major systematic changes to Manitoba’s education system, hopeful that one day students like Emmett won’t have to fall behind or slip through the cracks before they can access help.
“We’re all just doing the best with what we’ve been given. And unfortunately, we haven’t been given the tools to support students with dyslexia, or the knowledge,” Carrie says. “Teachers love kids, and we all want what’s best for our kids. So, I know that if they’d had the knowledge, and had those tools in their toolbelt, they would have helped him. They would have wanted him to succeed. But when we’re all trained on one way and our professional development is about one way of learning how to read, there’s a miss.
“He was being taught compensating strategies and guessing strategies, when he should have been being taught decoding strategies.
“It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day what side of the camp you fall on, we all know that teachers aren’t trained in those early foundational [literacy] skills. So let’s just start there. And we can argue about the philosophy another day.”