When my wife her son into our family, he was having trouble reading. When I met with his teacher, I brought up “phonics” (a way of teaching reading). The teacher said, “I tried phonics, but it never worked for me.”  Her statement blew my mind, but I kept quiet.  I knew almost nothing about teaching reading at the time.  The only thing I knew for sure was that, logically, “phonics” was certainly the most promising approach to reading instruction.  My face probably showed my dismay.

Without going into all the details, typical phonics programs aren’t as strong as they could be.  Mediocre phonics programs do tend to get better results than “whole word” reading programs.  In Georgia, 51% of third graders are reading below grade level when they’re tested just months before fourth grade.  Most Georgia schools use “balanced” reading programs.  These programs “balance” a mixture of word memorization and poorly taught phonics.

I can often detect traces of early instruction in a student’s memory.  For example, a child who was forced to memorize the word “was” before he knew how to read from left to right might say “saw” instead.  What’s really scary is the child who sees y-o-u-r, and says “I.” Mistakes like these are mostly caused by misguided attempts at word memorization before letter sounds are known.  This mistake pattern can often be detected in adults and degrades comprehension.

Anyway, I hadn’t met my stepson when he first fell behind in reading.  He was a six-year-old Mexican immigrant at the time.  I wasn’t there when his mother was given perfectly awful advice on how to help herson.  My stepson is pretty successful these days, but all the credit for that belongs to him and his mother, not me or his school.  I did try to help, but as a friend of mine said, “a curriculum is not just a notion.”

I did better with my stepson’s daughter.  By the time she needed help, I had begun the research and development that led to Reading On Rails™ .  The program was a faint shadow of what it is today, but it was good enough to set my granddaughter on the right track.  She was very young, really worried, and secretly frustrated.  At first, she was very reluctant to work with me.

As I led her over to my computer, I tried to calm her down.  I told her we were going to work on easy words first.  She said, “Oh no, not the EASY words!”  Today it’s an amusing story, but you should have heard the anguish in her voice.  She wasn’t joking. She was close to tears.  A few days earlier, there had been a scene at her school.

I visited her school with her grandmother, my wife.  Modest politeness was all I could manage.  I had been reading about our schools throughout my life:  I had a pretty good idea of what went on after parents dropped off their kids—and I didn’t like it one bit.  My granddaughter was having reading trouble just like her father had.  I stood and listened as the teacher and my wife beat around the bush cautiously.  They circled each other like verbal prize fighters.  During a lull in their polite conversation, I looked at the teacher and said, “I’m going to teach my granddaughter how to read and I’m not going to show her a single sight word.”  The teacher went slack jawed and wide eyed.  She said nothing.

It was a brash vow, but fortunately my granddaughter had a fairly high reading aptitude.  Today I often work with students that have very low reading aptitudes.  I can do that because I have far more experience and my reading program is far more advanced than it was back then.  I worked with my granddaughter twice every weekend for two months or so.  Eventually, I heard through the grapevine that things were going much better.  My granddaughter had given me the credit.

Every year, about four million new U.S. students enter kindergarten or first grade.  Within about 2 years, around 1.5 million of them are just as upset about reading as my granddaughter was.  With time, we can change those numbers a lot.

During the reading programs development, Greg was guided by the memory formation theory and feedback from real reading students at a small private school. The students had a wide variety of talents and challenges. Rather than blame the students when things were going well. Greg focused on designing extra reading exercises that would solve their reading problems. The reading program was reaching into higher and higher grade levels. So, Greg gradually came to see reading instruction as a kind of ladder. Students started at the bottom and began climbing toward fourth grade skill levels. Some students were remarkably tall and strong. These could stand on a low rung stretching to reach the next step on the ladder, then haul themselves up to it. Other students were shorter. They couldn’t reach the next ladder rung without one or two intermediate steps. Most of the increase in the ladder’s rung count was soon coming from the intermediate ladder rungs Greg added, in response to typical student challenges. He was making it easier for average students to climb the ladder, so they were climbing faster and faster.

The private school was too small for a good controlled study. But, Greg’s student records show he was onto something. Since there weren’t enough students at the small school to form two groups for comparisons, Greg moved to an inner-city public school. There, he collaborated with the principal to measure skill growth over the course of two years.

When his students were compared to students using ordinary reading curriculum, huge changes were seen, especially among students who were less attentive. Many of those students were seeing tenfold increases in their learning rates, essentially confirming Greg’s theories and his records from the smaller school. Memory, he says, grows as two kinds of fractal. (A fractal is a mathematical shape that looks like itself… some of them are pretty.)

Anyway, he says, the neurons follow simple mathematical rules to unite related phenomena by strengthening connections between the neurons that detected the relationship. He says he can explain what’s happening at the level of individual neurons in terms of ion transport across neuronal cell walls. Knowing that his original students came from a private school with selective student admission policies, Greg was not surprised to find that the students in his comparison studyshowed smaller benefits overall, learning only seven times faster than students in the control group.

The only surprising outcome of this study was the exciting reaction of the less attentive students. He realized that his method of displaying words for pronunciation one-at-a-time was repeatedly attracting the gaze of easily distracted students. Some of these inattentive students were learning 50 times faster than similar students in the control group. Greg cautions that such figures can be misleading because they’re based on comparing students who are learning slowly with students who basically weren’t learning at all. (A car driving five miles per hour is moving infinitely faster than one that’s parked.)

He says further study is needed to confirm some conclusions and find out what happens to the least attentive students over the long run. Even though Greg was pulling students out of class for only 15 or 20 minutes at a time, his students knew twice as much about reading by the end of the two-year trial.

When Greg worked with students one-on-one instead of his usual reading groups, he found he could help students that other teachers were writing off. He says many students are being “warehoused”.  He explained that these students are sometimes left in corners and ignored, even though they are perfectly capable of learning to read. He notes that the sharpest students get held back by the slower students, even in small “leveled” reading groups. For maximum benefit, sharp students also need one-on-one instruction.

Greg says he has been asked about adapting his methods and theory to math curriculum design. He says he hopes to work with a math expert someday.

“The Bristol Standard curriculum development method is certainly applicable to mathematics. But developing a math curriculum would be no easier than developing a reading curriculum. Sound curriculum development takes time and student feedback. Besides, I’ve forgotten 80% of the math I ever learned. To develop a math curriculum, I would want to work with a truly gifted mathematician. I actually taught myself reading over the summer after first grade. I couldn’t have done that with math. Besides, there are 181 school districts in Georgia. That should keep us busy for quite a while.”

Greg notes that only 51% of Georgia’s third graders read on a third-grade level when tested in late third grade.

“That’s an average, which means that some schools are doing substantially worse. Some don’t catch up – even by eighth grade. One principal told me that only 11% of his fifth graders were reading on a fifth-grade level. Just imagine how the other 89% of his fifth graders feel when the teacher asks them to read in class.”

Greg says his goal for Bristol Standard is to change how reading is taught in Georgia so that more students become strong readers. He plans to expand his tutoring services by contracting with many tutors and relentlessly pursuing small school districts all over Georgia. He says, “If we conduct curriculum comparison studies in every new school district, we will eventually catch the attention of the largest school districts.”