He was always the one to volunteer for trouble.
There were times he got so frustrated by reading that he literally ran out of the room mid-sentence. He morphed into the class clown — always the one to volunteer for trouble because everyone laughed at him anyway, so why not? His behaviour was shocking and his marks were dipping. Fast.
His reading skill was practically non-existent.
His parents hired tutors and signed him up for the resource room, but there was no change. When he came for an eval at age 11, his reading skill was practically non-existent. He was confusing the order of letters in words, mixing up similar-looking letters, and breaking words in seemingly random places. In short, he had dyslexia.
He just became his school’s baal koreh.
We worked on creating a new syllable system that he could understand and retain and — over the course of two years — he built his reading up from there. When he first started sessions, he had no plans for his bar mitzvah. He didn’t want an Aliyah — it was too embarrassing. He didn’t want to say a dvar Torah — it was too hard to learn. By the time he turned thirteen, not only could he layn and learn, he could do them both beautifully. He had a typical bar mitzvah, something he never expected, and a few days later his mother called with an update: her son, the one who struggled to piece together letters and never thought he’d read in front of a crowd, he just became his school’s baal koreh.
