about US
The Journey to HelpingChildrenToRead.org
I struggled to read myself.
One of my earliest memories was 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, having always avoided it. I almost switched to studying fine art by the end of my first year of uni.
Then my sons struggled too.
I had really forgotten all about it until I taught my sons to read. I was less good at dealing with my exasperation than my mother had been! What should have been a fun time together ended up very stressful. So I started researching the basis to learning to read.
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 majority of prison inmates cannot read, but some can. So we used them as tutors, because they all had time on their hands.
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. So I resolved to try to fix the problem they had faced back when they were at school.
Understanding the neurology was the key to the castle.
How are you reading this? 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.
So I started to look at this magical 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 love all of the little chemical processes that give us what we feel in our brain. Frankly it is beautiful and magical. I gave myself most of a degree-level foundation in neurology, at least in the bits that seemed to matter to reading. But that is most of the brain!
Over two decades later…
We now have a reading intervention process that has a 100% success rate. The key is simple: you must understand why someone is struggling before you try to help them. If you can do that, then the solution is generally quite simple to apply.
– David Morgan
Founder of the Shannon Trust, All Aboard Learning and Helping Children to Read.