A carpenter needs a saw, a surgeon needs a scalpel and a teacher needs a blackboard. Cheryl Hodgkinson is a special kind of teacher, and as such she has special tools including a pair of shop glasses with infrared sensors.
She’s not a shop teacher. Hodgkinson is a reading specialist at South Summit Middle School. In her 24 years of teaching she’s found that most reading problems can be solved with eye tracking.
As you read this sentence, your eyes might pause on a word, or they might they might go back and look at the word twice. They might even skip a line. All in all, the average reader doesn’t do these things enough to impede comprehension or the speed at which they read. But what if they did?
Hodgkinson holds up the pair of safety goggles like the kind used in middle school wood shop. Where the flat plastic “lens” used to be, are circuit boards.
She can place these goggles on a student, adjust the circuit boards to align with the pupils, and then hand the student something read. The goggles plug into her computer where she has a program called “Visagraph.” As the students read, the goggles track what the eyeballs are doing and where they’re looking on the page. Each type of wandering has a technical name, and Hodgkinson has the tools to address it.
“The brain is like any muscle and any muscle you use gets stronger,” she said.
In two places in her room she has a rubber ball tied to a string hanging from the ceiling. During her time with the students, she’ll sometimes have them lie underneath the ball and stare at letters she drew on the bottom. She then swings it back-and-forth or in a circle to improve their eyes’ ability to focus on letters.
Perhaps because of the eye wandering, or maybe the other way around, many of her students have trouble focusing. They’re also prone to be more right-brained than left-brained or vice-versa. To help them practice focusing while aiding brain development, she has the kids stand on “balance boards.”
The boards are on rockers which can be angled to increase difficulty. She times them at various fun activities while they stand on the board. Whether it be swinging a stick around behind them or trying to balance blocks, the children giggle as they focus on one activity longer than they might have on anything all day. Meanwhile, their brain is forced to use both sides of the brain as it keeps the body balanced on the board.
“I hear that after these exercises they can pay attention better on homework that very night,” she said.
In a computer lab next door, the students use a program called “Reading Plus” that presents sentences and passages in a way that improves weaknesses in their reading.
If a student has trouble re-reading words, the program will present passages with a bar moving from left-to-right covering up words already read.
Hodgkinson said the program helps students develop fluency, short-term memory and word decoding (spelling words out) as well as other reading skills.
Many adults suffer from the same learning problems as these children and struggle their entire lives, she said.
With her shelf of tools, she has the power to improve children’s confidence in themselves and their intelligence. She has the ability to better equip them for the workforce than they would have been if allowed to just squeak through their classes.
“Anything we can do to help them, we need to try for the students,” she said.
A soft-spoken woman who is quick to smile, Hodgkinson said developing a rapport with the students is the key to her success.
“I’m asking them to do something that is hard for them and is something they’ve failed at,” she said.
When asked if she had any other tools, she smiled and held up her pen.
“Pencils, markers, chalkboards,” she said.
Despite her 24 years of experience working as a specialist, Hodgkinson is still just a teacher who spends the majority of her time teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.
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