How Having a Private Tutor can Transform Lives

I am always honoured to be invited into the homes and lives of my students. The connections we create and memories we make are precious to me. One such student, who we will call Joel, was ten years old when we first met. His distrustful gaze and closed off demeaner broke my heart even more than the stories his parents had told me of his horrendous experiences with teachers and peers bullying him due to his inability to read out loud or spell words at his grade level.

Joel had pretty much decided that he was done with literacy, and had convinced himself that it was not a necessary skill or one that he wanted to learn. My work was cut out for me, and I was up for the challenge!

Meeting resistence like this towards literacy from a young person, ignites a fire in my soul! He has been wronged by the systems and grown ups who were tasked with teaching him, and I was determined to make it right.

Over the next few weeks, Joel and I slowly built a connection, and I watched closely to nurture each little spark of curiosity, and created games and lessons that built upon his strengths and interests, so that, incrementally, he could feel what success and safety felt like during our lessons.

Joel surprised me with a keen skill of pattern recognition, which is quite common in people who are dyslexic. When I offered him a game of Connect 4, and he beat me the first time, a light went on in his eyes. We both realised that he was really good at this game, and it became our thing. I did not go easy on him, and he beat me almost every time! Of course, the game was a literacy game, which I created using words and phrases and comprehension questions from each lesson. It was not only a learning tool, but a really fun way to authentically connect with each other as humans and have some competitive fun.

It's been three years since I met Joel as an angry, defiant preteen. He has gone from reading at a grade 2 level and spelling at a kindergarten level, to excelling at both. We still have to use our strategies when decoding and encoding unfamilliar words, because dyslexia does not just go away. But Joey is thriving in his academics now, and most importantly, he has learnt that some adults can be safe; that his self worth is not defined by his literacy ability; and that his neurodivergent brain is a beautiful thing.