From Our School to Law School

Max’s parents were worried about his future.  He was an intelligent kid who loved learning about history and current events.  He was social and had strong relationships with his family and friends.  His grades were mediocre, at best. He could not write a legible essay with grammatically appropriate sentences and correct spelling, and he did not test well on exams like the SAT and the CAHSEE. Max wanted to go to college, but how was that ever going to happen?

After completing a battery of tests, we pinpointed Max’s learning problems.

He was a freshman who was reading at the 5th grade level. He hadn’t mastered the rules for phonics or breaking words into syllables, so his fluency was very choppy.  He put so much energy into sounding out the words that he couldn’t concentrate on comprehension.  With his limited comprehension, he couldn’t take effective notes and, therefore, he didn’t have the study skills to prepare for tests.

Max’s writing was also a problem.  He was an enthusiastic writer who loved composing creative stories and writing summaries about history.  Unfortunately, he omitted words and word endings and confused the syntax. He forgot to include periods and capitals, so his writing was composed of run-on sentences.   He spelled words without logical letters.  Nobody could read Max’s writing including Max himself.

Another challenge for Max was language processing.  His ability to listen to lectures and pick out the main ideas and supporting details tested at the 7 to 8 year old level. This was a boy who was already 13 ½ and in 9th grade.  No wonder he was struggling in class!

We enrolled Max in our literacy program 4 hours a week. Our goal was to help Max catch up and GET AHEAD in school!  He had the motivation and intelligence, and we had the expertise!

We started by re-teaching Max the rules for phonics and syllabication.  We began with the sound-symbol relations, but this time we used  tactile cues like sign language to beef up his shaky knowledge of the letters and sounds.

Then we taught him the rules for syllabication—knowing where to break words into syllables. For example, the word “master” is separated between the 2 consonants in the middle, the ‘s’ and ‘t’…”mas.ter”.  The word "washer” is separated between the ‘h’ and the ‘e’,  because the ‘s’ and ‘h’ are “married” and cannot be divided…”wash.er”.   And if you know the various rules for phonics and syllabication, it’s a piece of cake to decode a word with 4 syllables like “intermittent: …”in.ter.mit.tent”.

More importantly to Max, we dovetailed our instruction with his high school literature class. He and his literacy specialist, Kathy, read John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. Kathy first made sure Max could sound-out all the words.  She choral read with Max and syllabicated the words with him and taught him instant recognition of those words (sight words) to build his fluency.

Then she asked Max to describe his visual imagery.  He described the pictures in his head, explaining details of the scenery and the expressions on the characters’ faces.  Once Kathy knew that Max’s images were accurate, she asked him to think critically about the content; did Max think Steinbeck’s Lenny was going to hurt the puppy or would Lenny realize the danger of his physical strength and stop squeezing the puppy so hard?

To make sure Max remembered the key characters and events, Kathy helped Max write notes in the margins of the literature and summary sentences called “sequence boxes” at the bottom of each page.  Those sequence boxes helped Max summarize the plots of each chapter and, finally, the entire book.

We needed to help Max write more effectively too.  Kathy and Max practiced writing summaries of the chapters and then editing those summaries for clearly written sentences with rich vocabulary, appropriate grammar and logical (and oftentimes correct) spelling.

Max started to interact with the text, and he got into it! He and Kathy discussed the depth of the characters and their complicated relationships. 

Max began to relate to the characters and couldn’t wait to learn what would happen next.   He started participating in class discussions and began to receive recognition from his teachers and classmates.

We lost track of Max until earlier this year.  We received an email from him at San Francisco State.  He was writing to thank us and especially, Kathy, for our help.

He mentioned that he would be graduating from college in the spring and heading to law school the following fall.

“I used to be a student of Kathy, and I just wanted to say how grateful I was to be tutored by her at Jodie K. Schuller & Associates. I am currently at San Francisco State, majoring in history, and I am planning on going to law school. Without the help of Kathy, I don't think I would have appreciated reading as much as I do. She made me a more confident reader and writer.”

WOW!  That email made our day!

These stories don’t occur every day, but they do happen frequently to kids who attend our program.  If you would like more information about our speech, language, literacy and college prep programs, please call us at 858.509.1131.  It is never too early or too late to begin.