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Anyway, to cut a very long story
short, over the following years, largely in my own time, I pioneered evening
classes for adult dyslexics, evening classes and Saturday morning classes for
children with dyslexia, classes for adults with 'special needs', day-time small
group tuition for political refugees from Sudan, and evening and weekend courses
for parents. And, of course, another very big influence on my thinking were the
reactions of my own two young children, Jenny and Tim - and my wife (now a
primary school teacher, working with six- to seven-year-olds).
The following Newspaper Cuttings are in the DOWNLOADS section:
90: The Standard,
Chester (E)
92: New Teaching System (E)
92: Chester & District
Standard (E)
92: Chester & District
Standard (E)
The following Articles are in the DOWNLOADS section:
90: Some Letters About Children
92: Happy Lion And His Friends (E)
92: Reading for Everyone (E)
92: Some Letters from Adults (E)
92: Letter from Psychology Students
(E)
Hilary, my wife, has always been a great sounding-board and has contributed, in
no small part, to almost every initiative and resource. Not to mention, as a
partner in Writetrack, my partner in crime in the publication of the Simple
Steps Pack and the 1992 and 1994 versions of THRASS.
Hilary now works, and has done so for quite a few years, for THRASS (UK) - as manager,
trainer and company secretary. To
give me the time to develop THRASS, I resigned from the West Cheshire College.
Worked as a volunteer, one-morning-a-week, teaching basic
literacy skills to adults who had cerebral palsy (at a Spastics Society Centre/Scope
Centre in Chester) and one-day a week in a school for children with epilepsy; found out how hard it is to earn money when you don't have a job, went
back and worked part-time teaching Psychology at the
West Cheshire College, and then got a lucky break.....via a member of staff at
the epilepsy centre, who got wind of the fact that the government were giving
universities money to sponsor educationalists with good business ideas. I
worked, as a teacher trainer and in-service course provider, for four years, at the Manchester Metropolitan
University, supervising tutor groups on placements in the heavily industrialised
parts of north Cheshire, and running THRASS courses, across the country, as a
commercial enterprise - to generate my own salary as a Senior Lecturer in
Education.
To digress slightly, I called the first publication, the Simple Steps Pack (first
published in 1989), but people didn't know what it was the first simple steps
towards! So, when it came to the next one, I was determined to make sure that
all aspects of the programme would come up on a library search - Handwriting,
Reading And Spelling (HRAS). In 1992 and 1994 the 'T' stood for 'The' but in
1992 the last 'S' in THRASS stood for 'System' and in 1994 the 'S' stood for
'Sequence'. Both the 1992 and 1994 versions of THRASS were sold in British high
streets, in WHSmiths (though, as some of you will know, this is not quite so
grand, from a commercial point of view, as it may sound to the commercially
uneducated!).
When at Manchester Metropolitan
University, I met Australian Denyse Ritchie, an exhibitor at the Birmingham
Education Show - who had a secondary-age son who "Hadn't jumped over those steps
of getting rid of that one letter makes one sound method". I worked with Denyse
to produce a 'special needs' version of THRASS (see THRASS 1996), which was
requested and published by Collins Educational (this time the 'T' stood for
'Teaching' and the 'S' for 'Skills' - and has remained the same to this day!).
Denyse originally came on board to help me as a literary agent, to get THRASS
published with a big American publisher. What a find she was - fantastic with
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Pagemaker software, a great sounding-board (having
produced and published a good number of black-line-master copybooks) and we
produced lots of good high-quality resources together.
96 March: Support home-grown reading
(look for '96 March: Support')
In August 1996, I replied to a debate, in the Times Educational Supplement
(TES), about teachers being “unable to identify the correct number of
sounds/phonemes in even the simplest of words” and stated my concerns about,
“newly-qualified teachers being brainwashed by teacher-trainers into using the
One Letter Makes One Sound Method (OLMOSM) to teach reading and spelling”.
96 August: Wrong not to link reading
(look for '96 August: Wrong')
However, as the Manchester Evening News (25 Sept 1996) put it, under the
headline Lecturer Blasts Colleagues For Reading Skills Boycott, “Some colleagues
stung by Mr Davies’s criticism of traditional methods wrote to a national
newspaper. They claimed the variety of approaches they use lead to ‘balanced,
thoughtful and successful’ teaching methods”. To the MEN’s credit, they did
quote one of the students, “I don’t feel confident to go in the classroom and
teach reading, and I’m astounded we have not been told about THRASS.”
96 Sept: Soundings on literacy debate
(look for '96 Sept: Soundings')
The original contract with the univeristy was for three years
but, in consideration of the income I brought in, I had been retained for four,
as tutor and in-service course provider.
At the end of the academic year, I left the university and set up my own ‘in-service course provider’
business.
The demand for THRASS courses and resources really started to grow, including in
Australia. As a consequence, (mindful of legal considerations) THRASS started to
compete against a well-known literacy programme, also published by Collins
Educational. THRASS got much less attention than it deserved.
A year or so later, after much legal wrangling, desperate financial measures
and, finally, coming up with a very large some of money, we got the rights back.
THRASS (UK) Limited and THRASS (Australia) Pty Ltd, educational publishers,
began trading at the beginning of 1998.
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