Amos Bokros, the author of the touching story below, lives in Bradenton, Florida, and has been a TeleRead supporter for years. You can reach him at amos.bokros@verizon.net.
They’re called the VE kids, short for “Very Exceptional Students”–with a hodgepodge of learning disabilities and emotional problems. Some must take powerful drugs to control their rage, or have threatened to bring guns to school.
Not the kids you’d expect to love electronic books. But I know better as a substitute teacher in Sarasota County, Florida.
In fact, I myself am a VE child grown up, and e-books and related technology have already changed my life. I scan the books with special software and then simultaneously hear them and read them–with the computer highlighting the words. Even better, as a disabled person, I can legally download best-sellers from Bookshare.org and skip the scanning process, saving me hours and hours. Same for Project Gutenberg books–free to everyone, disabled or not. I’ve even turned into a bit of a speed demon as a reader, cruising along at up to 450 words per minute. You can think of the technology as like eyeglasses. I’d rather be able to do without it, but with it I can actually read faster than many people without my combination of attention deficit disorder, dyslexia and other challenges.
Now I take my laptop into the classroom and, at every chance, share the technology with my students.
I’ve had the joy of watching students who would rather die than have to read, being captivated by a story of Greek mythology. The students are amazed that they can read a story by themselves 20 or 30 pages long without taking a break. These same students could not or would not read a paragraph by themselves. The students are amazed that they enjoyed and comprehended what they read. I have been particularly happy that many of the most pugnacious students have found this technology a breakthrough–a way to develop both their minds and their self-esteem.
One young African American girl worried at first that her father would tell her that the technology was for “dumb people.”
“What’s dumb,” I said, “is not taking advantage of technology or anything that can help us to learn.”
Let me tell you about an incident that happened recently. I was called one morning to go to a school for students kicked out of other schools or even in trouble with the law. Another teacher and I were to teach a class of three students, and I asked if they would give me any problems.
“No,” she said. “They’ll most likely be sleeping. As long as you don’t wake the students up, they won’t bother you.”
Sure enough, when I got to the class, two of the three students were sleeping. I spoke with the other teacher in the class, and basically she explained the game we played in this school where kids come to this school because they have to and are just waiting till their 18th birthday and no longer need to be legally in school. She reassured me that we were in no danger because the really bad kids had recently been sent off to prison.
I tried talking to the one student who was awake. He apparently tried to shock me with his extracurricular stories which were not appropriate for school. I quickly gave up trying to talk with him. About a half hour later, one of the hall monitors who looked like a bouncer in a rough bar woke the students up and told them it was time to go to gym class. We walked to gym class and the two students who slept in the class room proceeded to continue to sleep during gym. There were other students from other classes in the gym. A few of them started talking with me. After a few minutes it became clear they were all also trying to shock me with all sorts of inappropriate drug and sex talk. I realized that this was going to be a wasted day, but at least I was going to be paid for it.
During a break, I went to my car and got my laptop. When I returned, I set up my laptop with my ear phones and proceeded to do some work.
One student woke up and began staring at me.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I kept tapping away on my laptop while the student watched. He started to talk with me, and we discovered we shared the same birthday and were both from Pennsylvania originally. I was happy that at least the conversation wasn’t about drugs or sex.
He looked at me and said, “I don’t like computers.”
“Why not?” I asked.
His reply was, “Well, for one thing, I can’t read good.”
I looked at him and said, “Would you like to try something?”
He said, “I guess so.”
I got up and asked him to sit in my chair, and I placed the headphones attached to my laptop on his head. I then switched text on my laptop and went to a section of short stories. I explained to him that this was a digital reading program, and that he was about to have a computer read a story to him and highlight the words as it did so. I adjusted the speed of the story and told him I could make the computer read faster or slower if he desired. I also explained that he could stop the program at any time, then resume where he’d left off. He could also have varied the pitch.
He read the story and asked, “Can I read it again?”
“Yes,” I said, and he proceeded to do so–before going on to another story.
I had him reading for about an hour.
He told me that usually when he is confronted by reading he becomes blinded by looking at a sea of words. But here he was able to concentrate on the story and able to read words which were ordinarily difficult for him to comprehend. Another student joined us as we were talking. I talked about my own problems with reading and how I suffered terrible humiliation in school because of my learning disability. He asked me how I was able to go to college if I had a reading disability. I explained that it was difficult and I had to work very hard.
I also explained until recently this type of technology was unavailable–but, had it been available when I was his age, my life might have been substantially different. I’d have spent years and years as a teacher by now rather than having to work in nursing homes and at Wal-Mart. Now scanned books had opened up a world of possibilities.
“Look,” I told both kids, “school basically sucks, but reading can be a lot of fun if you are willing to try.”
He looked at me skeptically, and frankly I wondered if I had helped him. I wrote down for him the names of Bookshare (as a source of electronic books) and TeleRead (which for years has advocated e-books for people in general–but especially for those with learning disabilities).
The school day was coming to a close and I said goodbye to my student and wished him well in his endeavors. He told me he would think about what I had introduced him to. As I left the school that day and went home, I wondered how much effect I had on any students. I hoped that may be I had made a difference in at least one student’s life. But one thing for sure: I’ve never had a more satisfying day of teaching.
I just hope that our schools can catch on to the potential of this technology and others related to electronic books. During World War II the initials “VE” stood for “Victory in Europe.” But maybe, with the right hardware and software available, they can take on another meaning for many special kids: “Victory in the Classroom.”
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The TeleRead take: Needless to say, experiences like Amos’s are exactly why I’m so gung ho on the creation of a Universal Consumer Format that works well with assistive technology. How much better e-books are in many cases than the alternatives! Amos, at least, finds that books on tape require much more of his time than does a mix of synthesized speech and highlighted words. What’s more, in his opinion, books on tape don’t encourage as strong a relationship between written text and cognitive thinking.
Amos also notes the treadmill effect–the speech pulls the students along. Does this mean that read-as-you-see-highlighted-words should replace other forms of reading instruction for special students, including those in the early grades? Of course not. Some educators might even argue that synthesized speech could confuse the children without the proper inflections and other nuances. Still, what do you do when other methods have failed? If nothing else, although reading is the single most important skill in school, do we really want to condemn future Amoses to menial jobs? Better to make assistive technology available–so they can pick up knowledge in subjects ranging from history to science–or maybe even advanced calculus or networking protocols.
And who knows, maybe even people without his disabilities could experiment. The synthesis-highlight combo might even be a standard option in the future with e-book reading software and PDAs.
In case you’re curious, Amos uses Wynn Wizard to scan and read books, as well as read material from the Net. Two other possibilities are Open Book and Kurzweil 1000. Also check out some background from Benetech, the Silicon Valley nonprofit behind Bookshare.– David Rothman
