Kurt’s Reading Clinic

Clinician Magician

After graduate school at Illinois State University in 1976, at 23 years old I moved to California with my MA in English to begin a new chapter.

Looking for a source of income to tide me over in Los Angeles until a plan could form, I spent six weeks searching help wanted in the LA Times, taking several day trips to the city to see about work as a technical writer in a firm, not the first choice for a guy who wanted to be a poet.

LA seemed like another planet; I didn’t get a single callback. Then I happened to see an ad in a newspaper for a private reading clinic offering one-on-one tutoring in reading and math. I probably could tutor.

Kurt Jones, an impressive middle-aged man who dressed in impeccable suits and fancy ties, the owner and founder of the clinic, answered the phone when I called one morning about a job.

He was skeptical—all of his tutors were credentialed elementary or middle school classroom teachers who tutored in the evenings, typically sixteen hours per week. I had never taught a child anything, really. I did know what happens when two vowels go walking.

I didn’t have a teacher credential. But I had undergraduate and graduate coursework in linguistics with a fairly good understanding of grammar and syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, pragmatics, and historical changes in the English language.

On the phone Kurt invited me to visit the clinic and observe; then we would talk. He had built a clientele of 300+ students and was thinking about hiring a partner to open another clinic in Pomona.

My visit in the calm morning time didn’t prepare me for the traffic and hustle and bustle that took place beginning around 3:30pm. The place was crawling with teachers and children. The clinic ran like clockwork.

Kurt and I liked one another immediately. He left no doubt that his primary objective was to make money, but he was serious about helping struggling learners and had created teaching and assessment protocols that produced good results.

Kurt believed that money followed good production, and he had done his homework. A core element in his approach was to observe student behavior carefully when a student encountered an unfamiliar word reading aloud.

His teachers kept detailed records of these words, using a note-taking system to document specific behaviors, and revisited these words over time, painstakingly building sight vocabulary, using these words as teaching tools. I’ll write more on this topic in future posts.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Kurt was tight lipped about revealing the sources of his expertise. But he taught me well to employ his methods.

Kurt found great joy in teaching very young children. Even then, the sort of parent who had designs on Harvard for Junior were around, especially in the swanky outposts of White suburban Southern California with their “woopdy doo schools” as John Sheffelbine called them, and word had gotten out that Kurt knew how to teach preschoolers to read.

He was able to fill his schedule in the mornings with such children. For three weeks I watched him teach every morning. In the evening I applied his techniques with children in the primary grades. I also observed several of his star teachers.

One day Kurt asked me to work under his supervision with a new student, a boy named Donny, four years old. Donny’s parents told me that the child had been reading since he was 28 months.

Kurt and I used common formal and informal clinical intake assessment methods (I later discovered) for the times—Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) for word reading and math, informal inventories for letter-sound knowledge, Dolch sight words, Gray Oral Fluency assessment, basic phonics knowledge, standardized vocabulary and silent comprehension test, and spelling.

Donny scored generally at a fourth grade instructional level (more on this concept in future posts). I have vivid memories of Donny reading passages from the Los Angeles Times aloud.

The experience of working with Donny in the morning was a sharp contrast from what I experienced with the older children in the evening who often struggled with first grade reading material.

As I reflected on this contrast, I found myself at a loss to explain it. A question started taking shape that ultimately drove me to begin a regimen of reading research in the field of reading and years later begin a doctoral program.

I opened and managed a satellite clinic in Pomona as a salaried partner with profit sharing. For eight months I worked to build the clientele until I reached 100 students. The writing was on the wall.

If I could do this for Kurt, I could do it for myself. One day I left Kurt’s clinic, moved north to Napa, and opened my own, which I ran for two years. The clinic was profitable; I might have kept it running for my entire work life.

But it became all consuming. I scheduled students from 9:00am to 8:00 pm M-F and 8:00am-3:00pm on Saturday. To survive, after two years I closed the clinic and hired on as a part time English instructor at two community colleges—one of the infamous freeway fliers teaching 20-25 units per week.

Thus began a whirlwind of academic activity that kept me constantly searching for ways to help these young adults, many of them poor and minority learners.

More on that in a later post. Suffice it to say I worked as a reading teacher in a non-credit-bearing reading clinic at Solano Community College and became an influence on its direction for six years. At Napa Valley College I taught a bazillion remedial writing courses as well as a heaping helping of Freshman Composition courses during the upcoming six years.

Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed.