What’s This Word Say?
Possibly my favorite entry from my old blog, once again about my daughter. Originally published on August 14th, 2010.
For the past 14 years (wow, time flies!) I’ve worked professionally in the arena of educational software. The vast majority of that work has been focused on helping kids with reading difficulties overcome those issues (things like dyslexia, ADHD, low vision,etc.). I really love what I do for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I get to work with some really interesting technologies. But the thing that’s kept me going all this time, the thing that makes me get up in the morning and want to go to work, is knowing that I’m helping some kids have a better life. In years past (for example, when I was a kid in school…) a lot of these kids would have been preordained into a life of illiteracy, which comes saddled with an incredible amount of stigma, struggle, and even implications for how likely they are to spend significant parts of their life in jail. Literacy changes lives, it gives people the ability to explore new ideas and learn anything they care to. Coming from the socio-economic level I do, and I suspect most people reading this do, it’s hard to imagine what a life of illiteracy is really like. Consider yourself very lucky if you fall into this group.
Yesterday was a really significant day for me professionally. Ten minutes before I left for the weekend, I dropped a single DVD in the mail. That DVD was the culmination of 18 months of work by a team of software developers, testers, and professional educators. That one DVD will go off and generate an impressive sum of money for this company, and rightfully so. But far more importantly, that one DVD will change lives. I truly believe this and have done so for a long time, and was thinking about what that DVD would do as I sat in the shipping room alone in the late afternoon printing a UPS label to slap on it. Today I’m happy and content, thinking we’ve done something that will, in a small way, make the world a better place. For some kids that one DVD will make the world an entirely different place, one in which there’s hope, and success, and a world of new ideas and thoughts. Maybe some of those kids will change the world themselves someday as a result.
Shortly after dropping that DVD in the UPS pile, I left for the weekend to pick up my daughter from her day camp. She’s 6, and about to start first grade in a couple of weeks. As we sat at dinner (at a little outdoor café since the weather was stunningly perfect), she looked me straight in the eye and said “I can read now you know.” She’s been “reading” for a while in that she can pick out a few words here and there, and do the typical little-kid trick of memorizing a few pages from books that I read to her over and over. Like most 6-year-olds she’s also convinced she knows everything and doesn’t need to bother with that pesky learning process. But something was different this time. She really seemed proud of herself, and more than that, really wanted to show me that she could do it. So I suggested we head to the nearby Barnes & Noble after we finished dinner to look for some books that she might be able to read all by herself, and she enthusiastically agreed.
After dinner I started driving over towards the bookstore and she excitedly asked if we were really going to Barnes & Noble. I assured her we were and thought it was funny that she hadn’t forgotten (6-year-olds can have a pretty short memory at times, although this particular 6-year-old never seems to forget a thing). As we entered the store she asked if we were going to the kids’ section, which I assured her we were and asked her to lead the way. She poked around a bit and I asked her a few leading questions, like what sort of things she might like to read about. She decided she wanted a book about puppies, and we pretty quickly found an appropriately-leveled book about Mudge the Puppy, and another about Barbie and her horse-training camp. She sat down on a nearby kid-sized bench and proudly started reading me excerpts from the Barbie book, stopping occasionally to ask me what a particular word was (much of this was captured by the video camera on my iPhone for posterity). We picked another book to read together at bedtime (a slightly more advanced tome about a princess and a unicorn, since I’d be the one doing the bedtime reading), paid for our selections, and left.
The second we walked in the door she was begging to break out the books, and I happily obliged. She admitted in the store she had the same Barbie book at her mom’s house, but the Mudge the Puppy book was totally new to her. I was happy to see her go for that one first, plop herself down on the sofa, and ask if I wanted her to read it to me. I really regret that I didn’t think to pull out my iPhone to record it now, but she sat there and read the entire book cover-to-cover for me. Sure, there were a few little hiccups, but she did it, sounding out the words she didn’t know and looking very proud when she got one right. It was truly magical, and that was when it hit me.
My daughter is learning to read as most kids around her age naturally will. She’s doing great, and more importantly is proud of her own progress and is building her self-confidence. The fact that I realized she can read more than just a couple of words on the same day I dropped that little DVD full of software in the mail was a pretty interesting coincidence, and has really renewed my enthusiasm for what I do every day. If I can help one kid out there feel the way my daughter did today, and help one parent feel like their child is on the road to a better life as a result, that is just incredible. I’m truly grateful to be able to play a role in that story.