About
He's the reason I do all of this — and the reason I'm certain any student struggling with spelling or reading can turn it around.
Where this began
Years ago, in my first teaching job, I had a Year 9 English class in Melbourne's outer south-east. One of my students — I'll call him Sam — had dyslexia and dysgraphia, and he worked harder than anyone in the room. One day I set a writing task and walked the rows, reading over shoulders. I reached Sam's desk and couldn't make out a single word on his page. He'd filled the whole thing.
When I collected the work, I asked him gently what he'd written about. He looked down at his own page, then back at me. "I don't know," he said. "I can't read it."
He was in Year 9. And he was not, by any measure that matters, a stupid kid.
I had no idea what to do for him, so I went looking. A chance professional-development day put me in a room with Lorraine Hammond — then an Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, a champion of explicit instruction long before its recent renaissance, and later the president of Learning Difficulties Australia. I showed her Sam's writing and asked what I was supposed to do. She said, "Exactly what I've been talking about today."
So Sam and I met every morning before school, half an hour at a time, for two years. We went right back to the foundations and built up from there. His attendance climbed. He started walking taller. He sat a national test he'd always found a way to avoid. He even admitted that the name everyone called him wasn't his real one — so we learned to spell that too, and he started signing it on everything.
Sam is the reason.
What I learned
They're wrong. But you can see exactly how they got there.
A child who can't read or spell like their classmates spends six hours a day, every day, in a room where the one thing being asked of them is the one thing they can't do. They watch everyone else manage it. And slowly they arrive at the only explanation that seems to fit: it must be me. I've watched bright, funny, capable kids carry that quietly for years.
Here's what's actually true: most struggling readers were simply never taught in a way that works for them. Reading isn't a gift some children are born with and others aren't — it's a skill, and skills can be taught. My own dad was a country mechanic who was taught to read as a grown man; he spent the rest of his life with a paperback in his hand and a real soft spot for Jane Austen, grease still on his fingers. Being taught late didn't make him slow. It just made him taught late.
When a child finally gets instruction that's clear, structured and paced for them, the change isn't only in their spelling. It's in how they carry themselves.
What it looks like when it works
I once asked a girl in one of my classes — a student who'd ranked near the bottom of her entire year level — how she was finding the work. She thought about it and said:
That's the whole method, in a sentence, from a fifteen-year-old.
Another boy started with me unable to read a recipe in his cooking class. We began at the very beginning — letter sounds — and built. Years later I ran into him after he'd left school. He was deep into the thirteenth book of a series, driving on his learner's permit, and he told me the thing that has stuck with me most: "I can read road signs now." The stuff the rest of us never think twice about. Later his father told my principal he didn't believe his son would have finished school without those lessons.
I'll be honest about the deal I offer. The work is slow, it can be boring, and plenty of kids grumble the whole way through. I tell them that's allowed — you can hate me all you want, as long as you learn to read and write. Not one student who has finished the program has ever told me it wasn't worth it.
Who you'll be working with
School and I didn't get along — but not over reading or spelling, which came easily to me. I was the disruptive one: the kid who couldn't sit and study for hours, and who blamed himself for it. (The ease with words, I'd learn much later, was the autism. The focus and the behaviour — that was the ADHD.) I wasn't diagnosed with either until well into adulthood, and when I was, a great deal of my childhood finally made sense. I wear both like a badge of honour now, partly because so many of the kids I work with share them, and they need to see there's no shame in it.
So when I sit across from a child who's quietly decided the problem is them, I'm not guessing at how that feels. The subject was different for me — but it's the same shame, and I've watched it lift the moment a child starts succeeding at the thing they'd written themselves off for.
And there's no mystery to how I teach. I don't believe some children just aren't wired for reading. Every student learns the same way — some simply need more repetition before it sticks. Everything I do rests on cognitive load theory: how much a brain can hold at once, how to build a skill so it never overwhelms, and how to space practice so it lands and stays. That's why it works when other things haven't.
I taught my own son to read in exactly this way, at home, in his first year of school. He has never once thought of himself as anything but capable. That's the whole game: teach it clearly, repeat it enough, start early enough — and a child gets to keep believing in themselves.
One honest thing
The honest answer is that I'm never quite sure enough. I've been refining the way I run these programs for years, and I still pick at them every single week — a worksheet here, the pace of a lesson there. I think that's the right way to feel about another person's child.
I am always plagued with doubt — and I hope I always am. It's what keeps the work getting better.
Every child I work with begins with a full diagnostic assessment — reading and spelling testing, a clear picture of exactly where the gaps are, and a conversation about what comes next. Comparable clinics charge $250–500 for this. With me it's included, because I want us both to know precisely what we're working with before you commit to anything.
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