How I Became an Orton-Gillingham Practitioner

My father did not give me a birthday card until I asked him to give me one for my 21st birthday.

I remember standing on the corner of 25th street and 7th avenue, on a balmy May afternoon. I tore open the envelope and a golden fist, spring loaded by kinetic pressure, lept from the card. It reflected the loaded rays of the sun. When I opened the card, there were four sentences fighting for space neatly, yet somehow haphazardly, as if they were forced onto the page. He wrote a capital letter “D” backwards in the second word of the first sentence which was “and”. The letter a’s became o’s and the word I cried the most reading was “prrud” because he attempted to write the sentence “I’m so proud to have a daughter like you”. Until that moment, I hadn’t seen my father’s handwriting. For a long time, I thought my father did not want to expend the energy to read my work in elementary school, to write a message for my yearbooks, or to express his thoughts in a card. When he wrote those words on the card, those four sentences exposed my father’s vulnerability. They also inspired me to help people like my father. 

Discovering the depth of my father’s dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia led me to ravenously devour any resources I could find. First I read Starting Over: A Literacy Program by Joan Knight. The cards in the tiny rectangle green box that I still use today are phonogram cards, led me to the OGA and allowed me to pursue my certification. After graduating from college summa cum laude (during the pandemic), I enrolled in an Associate level course.

Recently, I chatted with my student's grandmother and she told me that the student had written her a Christmas card. She said, “There were mistakes but he never tried to write before. He was just afraid”. I want to help people like my father out of isolation and into empowerment. I feel incredibly fortunate to have already helped many students who have excelled as a result of this intervention, and I hope to help many more students on their literacy and interpersonal journeys.