Friday, December 17, 1999

Teaching is what she loves to do

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        In sixth grade, she wrote a spelling textbook. OK, so it wasn't a real textbook. And she misspelled comma as coma. But the point is, Betty Porter, even before junior high, knew what she wanted to do.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        She loved textbooks, even the feel of them. She loved school, everything about it.

        “I think every person does have a purpose,” she says, sitting beside her Christmas tree in her Mariemont apartment. “And I think you can pretty well discern it early. It's what you love to do.”

        Betty Porter loves to teach.

        She has been a teacher for more than 20 years. She has taught elementary, junior high and high school students, and has fond memories of many of them.

        She remembers one boy in particular, a fourth-grader. He was one of her first students. His name was Jimmy.

        Jimmy couldn't write, because he couldn't sit still.

        “You can do this if you just try,” she told him.

        She knows now it was the wrong thing to say to someone who wanted to do well, but couldn't. She had never dealt with anyone like Jimmy. She didn't know how to help.

        “I was so hard on him,” Betty says. “To this day, I have a guilt complex about it.”

        A few years later, a friend told her about a new program dealing with learning disabilities. It was an eye-opener, and eventually led Betty back to college where she became certified to teach children with such disabilities, as well as attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

        She learned that children with such disorders might have difficulty concentrating; that they might be easily distracted, or act before they think, or have difficulty staying seated.

        Today Betty knows how to help. She works for the Forest Hills School District, and splits her days between Mercer Elementary and Immaculate Heart of Mary, working with students in groups of three or fewer.

        “They need a lot of consistency,” she says. “Somebody they feel is really in their court.”

        Some of her students think they're stupid. “Why can't I get this?” they say.

        In fact, Betty says, many kids with learning disabilities are gifted, with higher-than-average IQs.

        “But they learn differently. That's why I hate the word "disabled.' What I try to do is find their learning style.”

        Some learn visually. Others learn by touching, or listening.

        Near the end of the school year last spring, Betty began working with a student named Jennifer Martin, who was having trouble reading. Frustrated with school, she often complained about stomach aches in the morning.

        One day, the 9-year-old came home and announced happily to her mother, Teresa Martin, “Mom, Mrs. Porter figured out my problem.”

        Betty found that Jennifer needed to learn by hearing things out loud. Together, they worked hard on sounds; simple sounds, then clusters of sounds. With Betty's help, Jennifer switched sounds around and put them in sequence within words.

        And for the first time, Jennifer no longer had to guess at words. She was actually reading them.

        “Betty has been a wonderful inspiration to Jennifer,” Mrs. Martin says. “She has given her a lot of positive reinforcement.”

        Mrs. Martin has seen Jennifer's self-esteem rise dramatically. “Now, she's reading to her younger brother. Today, she came home and did her homework by herself, something she has probably never done before. She still has a long way to go, but it's working.”

        In her teacher's bag of tricks, Betty Porter packs the usual educational strategies, along with patience, and a belief that every person was created for a purpose.

        “Before you can ever make a change in somebody, they've got to know that you love them,” she says. “Love for those kids is not based on performance. I love them because they're so unique.”

       

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