Transcription of Garrett Temkiewicz for the show Lessons in Learning #154
Lisa Belisle: I am very lucky to have teachers in my life. As a doctor, I’ve had many teachers over time, my mom is a teacher, and today I get to sit across the microphone from a man known as Mr. T to his students at Thornton Academy. This is Garrett Temkiewicz who is a science teacher at Thornton Academy. Garrett was diagnosed with dyslexia in sixth grade which is informed his were both as a student and a teacher, and in fact that’s I think what we’re going to talk mostly about today, but we really appreciate your taking the time to come in and be with us.
Garrett: Yeah, of course, it’s no problem.
Lisa Belisle: First I need to ask you about this Mr. T thing. Did you actually understand the culture or reference?
Garrett: Yeah, no I pity the fool who doesn’t.
Lisa Belisle: Very good. Well, for people who are listening, you aren’t black and …
Garrett: No.
Lisa Belisle: You don’t have fun hair and …
Garrett: Zero gold jewelry.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, you’re pretty much is lily weight and blonde as they come. So I think it’s interesting and ironic that you get to be the opposite of what you look like.
Garrett: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: But it’s also something that’s kind of interesting because with this dyslexia, you’ve always had to plunge your way in the world in a different manner, is that so?
Garrett: Sure, definitely, and having a last name like [Tankuitz 0:38:43] with all the consonants and vowels, I almost failed kindergarten trying to spell it, but yeah I think that perhaps everybody makes their own different kind of way though.
Lisa Belisle: Well tell me about your journey a little bit. If you weren’t diagnosed with dyslexia until you were in sixth grade, then that’s a long time to be in school and not know exactly well why things weren’t falling into place for you?
Garrett: Yeah. I was always a poor reader, I don’t know if when you were young you had the reading groups but I was always in the slow reading group. I was always flat full of wind they would call on me to read out loud. But sixth grade is when you go learning to read, to reading to learn and that’s really where I started to have problems just because they’d give homework assignments that were reading-based and I just wouldn’t do them. I just didn’t commit so that was really when … And I had a bunch of other problems as well, I have speech impediments and a couple of other things, but yeah the sixth grade was when I really started to struggle because I wasn’t learning because it was all book-based.
Lisa Belisle: When you look at a page, what do you see that’s so different? I guess there’s really no way for you to compare, right?
Garrett: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to describe. I see the one I see on every page, I guess. The big issue that I have is I will mix words so if I have a word like friends and fiends, something like that, I might read fiends as friends or vice versa and spoonerisms are difficult as well, so if two words makes sense swapped, I will swap them in my head and that was probably the biggest issue, and it just takes me longer to compute. I mean if Kathy can read a book in five hours, it’ll take me a week, so it’s a real commitment.
Lisa Belisle: You’re talking about Katy Kelleher who’s the Managing Editor for Maine Magazine?
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: She was actually on our show not too long ago talking about the 50 people list for Maine Magazine. It is interesting that you ended up with somebody who really goes towards words.
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: This is her thing as words.
Garrett: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Your thing with words has got to be a very different relationship.
Garrett: It is. It’s part of how why I admire her as much as I do, it’s her ability to express herself in written word and that’s just something that’s always been out of my reach. So I like how much she reads. It’s encouraging how much she reads, and she’s never bugged me about how long it takes me to finish a book. So if she’s going to like two months to talk about a book, I think that that’s fine.
Lisa Belisle: You teach 11th and 12th grade students which means that you yourself not only had to complete high school, complete college, but have the ability to communicate with other people who were relying on you for information, and had to use books in order to do a lot of this stuff. That’s a big deal.
Garrett: Yeah. It was difficult especially in middle school and high school but once I got to college and professors starting to put their lectures online, I could just go to the PowerPoint two or three times and that would definitely get me passed. Any questions that I had, I could ask other students or the professor. I really did avoid reading in my education for a really, really long time just because it’s hard and I don’t get a lot of information from what I read so I can’t pick up the facts or something like that but once I got to college it was okay. After college, a lot of my hunting has been done on YouTube, so like Khan Academy and other YouTube things. If I’m having a physics problem that I can’t figure out, I’ll look online and it’s not a lot of reading. It’s almost a reference book so that’s kind of how I got by and where I am today.
Lisa Belisle: What subjects do you teach?
Garrett: This year I taught astronomy and physics and biology, and then next year I’m just teaching biology and physics.
Lisa Belisle: Your mind really relates more to the scientific realm?
Garrett: Yeah. Math and science have always been a really strong point for me, strong subjects, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m dyslexic or because I’m male, or because I just like them. It’s hard to kind of attribute that to one thing or another, but yeah I’ve always had a tendency toward science and math.
Lisa Belisle: Was there a history of dyslexia or any other learning disabilities in your family?
Garrett: I don’t know. I don’t think that my parents have ever been tested and my two brothers are not dyslexic, so I could be the first in piling away.
Lisa Belisle: How does that feel to be within your family the only one that have this issue and have to work twice as hard as anybody else to make it through?
Garrett: Honestly I never thought about it. Our family is competitive but not academically. Academics weren’t really something that our family ever talked about so it wasn’t a huge deal growing up. Now that I’m older I’m a little bit embarrassed because my little brother will power through six or seven books in a vacation and I’ll be struggling with one book, and he’ll ask me if he can read it and I’ll have to say no because I’m not done with it yet. It’s a little bit embarrassing but only until recently.
Lisa Belisle: You talked about being competitive but not academically, so were you more athletically competitive or?
Garrett: Yeah, definitely athletics. We had a couple of neighborhood kids and we played football and baseball we played at school and just in almost every other way we fall a lot and I’m just fighting with my brothers but yeah, so competitive in other ways.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like you not only learned through visual because you talked about YouTube, but you also have kinesthetic sense, a body learning that you do?
Garrett: I excel at labs and things like that where I have to use my hands and see what happens, and I can actually see the processes. For some reason that stays with me better than if I just read it in a book.
Lisa Belisle: How are you using this information to help teach students who may have a learning disability or may not have a learning disability but may just learn differently? How do you use what you’ve gone through to help your own students?
Garrett: I try to be really open about it. I’ll make errors while I’m typing on the test or grading a paper where I’ll make a spelling error or I’ll switch letters in a word or something like that and I’ll just say, “I’m badly dyslexic so when you see a spelling error, let me know and I’ll fix it.” And I think that being open about kind of my issues is important and maybe helps them come out of their shells and admit it. Everything is embarrassing when you’re a kid, everything, and it’s hard to kind of admit that you have problems but if there’s adult that you respected, hopefully it’ll be easier for them.
Lisa Belisle: Have you had kids approach you and say, “I am having some issues myself and I need some guidance with this,” or have you been able to help anybody that specifically had problems that you noticed?
Garrett: I don’t think it’s ever come out in that way. I don’t think they’d ever come up and said, “I have problems reading. What should I do?” It’s more, “I’m having trouble in this subject. Can you help me?” Or “I’m having some problems in this topic. Can you help me?” In that I think perhaps I can be helpful because I’ve been so open, but no one has ever come up to me and said, “I’m dyslexic too, we should hang out.” So it doesn’t quite work out that way.
Lisa Belisle: What is an interesting age group for dealing with 11th and 12th grade, or should be dealing with high school, or should I suspect you’re right, that’s not something that generally people want to use as a badge of honor I guess at that age? Why become a teacher? Was there a pivotal moment where you said, “Okay, I really want to do this thing, let’s go and help other kids maybe in a way that I would’ve liked to be?”
Garrett: Yeah, I think so. In high school I really wanted to be a teacher because I thought that my teachers weren’t doing a great job of it and now looking back, they were. They were incredible people, but at that time I thought, “I could do way better than they’re doing.” Like most teenagers, I thought I can do everything. Then I graduated and I actually worked as a scientist for seven years before switching. In college I started learning and I really appreciated my teachers and I was inspired to go into lab, science, and I tried it out and I actually really liked it. Then the business I was working for went under during the recession and suddenly it was time for a change, I want to try it out, and it was great and I love it. So there wasn’t necessarily a single moment but it was kind of like a culmination of my life and what I wanted to do and I’ve always liked teaching.
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Lisa Belisle: If you were working as a scientist, how does that contrast with the work that you do now as a teacher?
Garrett: My problems as a scientist were very linear. I had some issues that I had to solve or some problem that needed working and I could do that and I could go to work every day and try to solve that same problem every day and that was nice. It was nice to know what I had to do to accomplish something where as a teacher my problems are varied. Every day it’s a new issue and that every day it’s some student not getting something or there’s a fight, or there’s something. Every day is different and I really liked that too.
Lisa Belisle: Having brothers and fighting with your brothers, did that give you some insight into the social aspects of children?
Garrett: Strangely I wish that I had had sisters because I don’t get younger also. I just don’t get it, the way that they behave, the way that they act, it doesn’t compute. They’ll come and speak with me about something and I’ll say, “Do this,” and they’ll be like, “Well I’ve already done that. Duh.” I’m like, “Okay, then why ask?” But yeah, so brothers are good but I do wish that I had a sister growing up.
Lisa Belisle: Well, that’s actually I’m laughing over here because you’re not the first person who has said that they have a hard time understanding girls and it is really interesting because we’re talking about your brain and how your brain processes words differently and how your experience has helped your brain process things at certain way. But you’re right, having never experience the way that girl’s brains process things, that is a whole new realm for you to struggle with.
Garrett: Yeah, and I think that’s how I feel about dyslexia, trying to describe it, I can’t. I can’t relate to what you see in a page. I don’t think that way and that’s okay. I think that I have been pretty successful as an educator, as an academic and as a scientist but it’s difficult when people ask, “What does it like?” It’s difficult to describe.
Lisa Belisle: Of course if you’ve never had it in any other way.
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: It’s kind of like asking somebody who is blind, “What does it like not to see?”
Garrett: Right, exactly.
Lisa Belisle: Well it does speak to something that I think is really interesting which is that you may have dyslexia and it’s something that we can say at least to this point we know more about it than we once did. At one point we just would call people who had dyslexia, we would just say that they weren’t smart.
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: There was just something wrong with them.
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: I think we have the advantage of just saying, “Okay, there’s something in your brain that isn’t working quite the same.” But I think all of us process information in different ways.
Garrett: Certainly.
Lisa Belisle: I mean, what you’re doing as a teacher is whether it’s boys or girls, whether people are visual or auditory, or tactile, or kinesthetic, whether any of these learning styles, we’re all trying to figure out how to communicate with the people around us and how to process information.
Garrett: I agree. I agree completely. I think that I don’t get a sheet that says this student is dyslexic. I might get a sheet that says this student needs more time for reading assignments or this student needs more time for assignments in general, but that doesn’t just tell me what their particular learning disability is and I like that. If I knew, I might be tempted to change something for a specific student and I think that’s a dangerous road to go down. That’s a slippery slope because I have 150 students. If I try to change every lesson for every student, I couldn’t. I’d be overwhelmed and I’d be ineffectual as a teacher. So instead I think maybe just review and revisit things in different ways and I think that’s probably the way that I go about trying to deal with students that are dyslexic.
Lisa Belisle: It is also important because as much as we would like to be all accepting of various learning styles, in the end we’re a very test-driven society. I mean, it’s all about the standardized tests, so simultaneously we want to respect or help people learn and make it possible for them to learn and that’s extremely important but we also need to help them adopt to the larger system which is at this point is setup in a very specific and linear as the word you used, linear way.
Garrett: Yeah, and standardized tests, Thornton just got graded on our SAT scores and I feel okay about it because science isn’t on the SAT at all. So judging what I’m doing it’s difficult in standardized tests but again they don’t shorten the length of those reading sections for people that are dyslexic so they’re calling at two minutes and I’m flipping through the last five stories, there’s a lot of stress and I don’t know how I feel about that. I don’t know a better way though. That’s I guess the big issue is, I don’t know a better way.
Lisa Belisle: I think that you’re right that that is the thing, is that it’s not ideal. It’s what we have and hopefully in the future we’ll work towards something. And I know that in some standardized testing situations, we do allow for more time and there is more way to make things up but it’s an interesting place that we’re in now. We finally come to the realization that not everybody is the same amazingly enough.
Garrett: Right.
Lisa Belisle: We’re just trying to kind of work through it, kind of like scientists.
Garrett: Yeah, step by step.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve got some issues, step by step, exactly. Look Garrett, I appreciate your coming in and talking to us about your experience. I appreciate you being a teacher.
Garrett: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: Teachers are very important, especially science teachers. I had a number of very good science teachers going through and I think what you’re doing is quite valuable. So thank you for being a teacher as Mr. T at Thornton Academy. We’ve been speaking with [Garrett Tankuitz 0:55:17] who is a science teacher at Thornton Academy. Thanks so much for coming in.
Garrett: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: You have been listening in to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 154, Lessons on Learning. Our guests have included Margy Burns Knight, Anne Sibley O’Brien, and [Garrett Tankuitz 0:55:33]. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit D-O-C-T-O-RLisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as D-O-C-T-O-RLisa and see my daily running photos as bountiful one on Instagram.
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