Dignity Gap

Sixth grade was a hard year. The start of middle school. New place, lockers, lots of new teachers. It was hard to make new friends. We go to classes, back and forth. My classmates would follow each other in a line like ducklings. 

Not me though. I wasn't ‘normal’. I had to go tutoring to learn how to read. I could read… just not well. My classmates would ask where I went. I was ashamed. I wasn't ‘smart’ that's what I told myself. It didn't matter what I was good at. I felt like a child when it came to reading. 

I wouldn't pay attention when the class read. I would count people. Then I knew what paragraph was mine. I would read that one paragraph a dozen times to myself. When it was my turn to read, my heart stopped. I stuttered. My face became a burning pepper. I tripped over the words and finished my turn. Deflated. Back to counting. Embracement. 

Being a teenager is hard. Being a person is hard. It's human nature to go with the flow. But when the flow leaves us behind, what do we do? 

A child with a reading disability is left far behind their peers. Many don't catch back up. Not on a reading level anyways. We come up with ways to hide the fact we are bad at reading. This is called masking. 

Why do we do this? It's embarrassing to be bad at reading. We are treated like children that can't do anything. We are put on crutches for babies. “The cat sat on the mat”. My friends or peers are learning chemistry, and other exciting things. We want to be good at reading. But there is no way I'm reading that baby book. Babies do that so ‘I must be dumb’. Masking comes into play. We figure out how to get out of this childish thing. 

Small children like bold colors. They like silly rhymes. These things do help the brain learn to read. But they are also like a red hourglass on a spider to teenagers. They see it and think they are too old for that. 

How can we teach young teens to read? No bold colors, no silly rhymes. ZenRead is minimalist and mature. We take them through an epic poem, not a silly rhyme. We respect the science of learning but also the dignity of the user. 

The answer is not to force a triangle into a square world. The answer is to build a world for triangles. 

That is ZenRead. A reading sanctuary. A place where the path is lit by a warm glow and the words are an epic verse. A tool built by a founder who has walked this same road.

It's time to chart a new course.