Flashback to the second grade. After spending my first grade year choosing to write numbers beyond 30,000, and foregoing reading time, the teachers determined I wasn’t very good with words. They were right. I couldn’t read. During reading time in second and third grade I was sent to the special education wing to be tutored (this while during math time I’d go to the gifted and talented wing with the other math “geniuses”).
Even though I was going to special-ed I still wasn’t learning how to read. No matter how many times we did reading exercises I couldn’t do it. I was good at faking, I still managed to pass vocabulary quizzes, and could fake a two paragraph paper on whatever assigned reading we had. It wasn’t until I decided to teach myself that I actually learned to read.
How I Taught Myself
Simple. Reading, sentence structure, spelling, they were equations. I used my skills in mathematics to memorize how many letters were in words. When I went to write the word I did the “does this look right?” test. I also formed sentences like I would a math problem. Noun plus adjective before it, with some action equals sentence.
Once I stepped back and realized my reading problem wasn’t due to lack of smarts, it was the way I was being taught, everything started to click. I ended up graduating high school with more English credits than anything else. Once I taught myself the way my mind worked, it all opened up.
Applying This Lesson
This lesson isn’t something special. We have things going on in our lives everyday that we want to excel at. Some of those things don’t make any sense to us. Sometimes we want to learn something but no guidebook exists.
When we understand how our minds absorb information, we learn how to teach ourselves. We learn the tasks we need to start doing in order to achieve our goals. And we know the tools we’ve already developed to start building a solution.
Yes, reading comes easy to some people, and can be taught to others using standard methods, but without my math knowledge I never would’ve learned to read. It took one tool to build the next. My parting advice: Use the tools you have today to achieve your next step.