In this YouTube talk, Lois Letchford recounts the Lubbock, Texas chapter (1999‑2007) of her memoir Reversed: A Memoir. She explains how her family moved from Brisbane, Australia, to Lubbock for her husband’s job at Texas Tech, and how the transition forced her son Nicholas to repeat a grade and adjust socially. Despite these setbacks, Nicholas achieved remarkable academic growth, which Letchford attributes to nine specific factors—most notably a mindset shift, intensive reading practice through the Accelerator Reader program, and systematic listening. Letchford also describes her own professional pivot from physical‑education teacher to reading specialist, detailing how she began one‑to‑one work with a struggling student named Christian. Using “box lessons” and dramatizing books into plays, she engaged Christian, turning a non‑reader into an active reader within a summer. These successes led to a partnership with the local school district. Throughout, Letchford emphasizes that teaching children to read requires holistic, engaging, and individualized approaches, and she calls viewers to support literacy education.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, sharing my story of Reversed: A Memoir. Why did I write it? Why did I put the effort into writing and sharing my story when writing is such an enormous struggle for me? People ask that, why did I do it? Because my son's journey was totally unexpected and unpredictable. Because when a child fails first grade, the chances of achieving are very small. And yet my son defied the odds and graduated, as you see, in 2018. And this is my book, Reversed Memoir. This one, today's talk, is from 1999 to 2007. Our family, following my husband and his work, went to live in Lubbock, Texas. And this part of the journey fall— takes a number of categories. And falls into a number of sections. I titled this section of the book, The Spring in the Desert. Why? Because Lubbock is a desert, a total transformation from Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane is subtropical, lush, green, multicoloured, Bright colours of the subtropics, bright blue skies, and we left that to go to flat, brown, and boring Lubbock. Lubbock has a wind tunnel, which is why my husband was there, and it has Texas Tech University, and that's where he taught until 2007. The first thing you do when you go to a new place is find a school for the boys. And we went to school and the principal said, I think Nicholas should repeat again. Nicholas is in the middle of 5th grade. He's repeated once in 2nd grade and she is now asking him to repeat and go back from 5th grade to the middle of 4th grade. Because we also have the additional problem, schooling in Australia in the Southern Hemisphere runs from January to December. Every academic year. is one calendar year. In the Northern Hemisphere, that changes. They start at the end of the summer and go through to the next summer. So he's really going back in the middle of 5th grade to the beginning of 4th grade, 18 months. My husband's with me as we talk to the principal, and he said, won't he be old when he graduates from high school? And she said, hmm, Problem there? Yes, he will be old when he graduates from high school. But you know, we have this class in another district, in another area of our district, where we have grades 7, 8, and 9 in middle school. He can do 2 years in 3. And that's exactly what happened. The schooling was flexible for Nicholas. It gave him longer in the elementary school. He took more away from the classroom. We squashed middle school into 2 years and he's with his peers at high school. It didn't come without a price. There was a price for him. It was an enormous struggle for Nicholas to do socially, to do this adjustment and change classrooms, to lose friends and gain friends all the time. And as you know, Children who struggle with learning disabilities often struggle socially as well. Nicholas was exactly the same. He was struggling socially, and the teachers told me in Lubbock, in his school at Waters, that it took him almost 3 years to talk to another child in the playground. However, Lubbock really was transformative for Nicholas. And I identify 9 factors in my book that made a difference to him and his growth. And believe it or not, number one was mindset. He was no longer a child who was lost, but a child who could achieve. He could read, he could write, he could take away from the classroom. And he did. And he did. To such an extent that at the beginning of every year you'd notice his results in the high 70s, low 80s, and as the year progressed his results went up to the high 80s, low 90s, and then towards the end of the year Everything is in the 90s and even the high 90s. It was transformative to see how much Nicholas worked. And the other— there were, there were 9, I said 9 factors that made a difference in Lubbock. And certainly the next one was Nicholas's ability to read and the expectation that he can read and write and take a test. They did the Accelerator Reader program. I'm not going to promote it, but I will say it worked for Nicholas. And he came home and he said, I've got to read a book and take a test. He read for 2 hours a night, 5 and 6 and 7 nights a week, to achieve his goal of reading one book. And from there we started to listen. And listening, listening became a component of his world that was transformative, and it's also the foundations of my reading writing program— listening. Because listening, you've got to have the input before you can have the output. You're hearing the language of your peers at the same rate as your peers. That's another step towards being normal. Then you can go back and reread it. Are you reading the whole book? Or even a chapter. Whatever it is, you're reading, you're decoding the words, you're making sense of it, you're understanding the, the whole range of the book that is required to be done, and he's actively engaged in this whole process. So that was Lubbock, Texas, which was absolutely transformative in our lives, not only the life of Nicholas, But my life, and that's what I'll come back and tell you next about how living in Lubbock changed my life. This is only a summary of what I'm doing, of what I did and all that we achieved in our lives in helping Nicholas go from the bottom to the top and allows me to stand here as an expert to say we can and we must teach children to read. I hope my journey into literacy as a literacy teacher came from teaching the child who was diagnosed as the worst child I've seen in 20 years When you teach children who are on the extremes of the population, you can't get one or two things right. You have to get everything right. And that's why I'm here. And I'm in my journey. We are in Lubbock, Texas. My husband has taken a job there. Nicholas has moved from 5th grade down to 4th grade, and he's happily settled into school. Me? I'm now a trailing wife finding my way in a new place. I had completed my studies in Australia, so I'm going from a physical education teacher to a reading teacher, and I had my undergraduate teaching and now the specialty of reading with a graduate diploma in reading, and I just completed that before we left. So with that, I was looking for work. My 2 boys are in school and Nathaniel was staying in Australia for the time being. And it was during this time that I met a group of mothers and one lady said, asked me what I did and, you know, you say what you have to say, and she said, there's someone I'd like you to meet. So I met Brenda, and Brenda's 13-year-old son had spent 4 years in a phonics-only reading program only to come out non-reading. And I said, I think I know what has to be done, because with the background experience of Nicholas, I knew it was far more than just decoding involved. And she agreed with her son that I would work with him one Sunday afternoon. So I took my box lessons with me. It took me an hour to get that box lesson ready for him because you've got to redo it, rewrite it, and find all of the material required for this lesson. Christian Agreed to see me and he did this box lesson and he was terrified of working with me when he first came. And as the lesson progressed and he unwrapped every— the shoebox and unwrapped every new box inside and then took the bottle of apple juice and said what could be in it, what should be And I read to him so that he was enjoying the lesson. He got to the end and he shook his head and said, that was so funny. And of all the things I did for him to recognise this is a new approach, this is a new way of teaching, he Agreed to see me a second time. Now, here's my challenge as a reading teacher. I know this child has sat in a class and been bored to tears, but every day he has been there, so he's conforming. He does what he's asked. He's an incredible kid, really, to face going to school and failing every day. And still be prepared to come and work with me. Now my challenge was, I know what I have to do, I have to teach him to read, I have to give him letters and sounds, I've got to give him all of this. How am I going to do it? And I would stew over it in my mind. How am I going to do it? What do I have to do? And I remembered the positives of Nicholas and thought, I've got to turn a book into a play. He's got to love it. He's got to want to do it. Okay, a book into a play is great. What book into a play? And then I remembered my oldest son, who was a super reader, saying to me, Mum, listen to the title of this story. It's called Cow Dunk Custard. Isn't that funny? And that came from a series of books of the Australian author Paul Jennings, and the series of books was all short stories. So I thought I'll go and get them. So I read through the whole— I read through one book, Unbearable, Unbelievable, the whole names of un-something or other. And of all the books, all the stories I read, there was one that came out and it was called Licked. And it's about a kid and his parents, and the child is going to annoy the kid, and the language is phenomenal, and the endings are unpredictable. That's what I chose for Christian. Years later, after I'd been in touch with Brenda and Christian was taught successfully, she said it wasn't the box lesson that got Christian. Christian in, because anyone can do one good lesson. It was the play. It was turning that book into a drama that created active readers, that had me not only reading to him but then dealing with all of the pronoun resolution. And this was my first experience of being able to teach a child who was so out of the system. One-to-one. And that was another component. You know, he'd failed, so I know I have to impact him in ways that are far bigger than teaching decoding. And engagement was a critical number one step. It doesn't matter what else I do, but that engagement piece to get him to say, this is worth my time and effort, was fantastic. And that play, Lit, was the one that did it. And then we— then I listened to Aliens Ate My Homework, and that was number 2. We turned that into a play, and that too was phenomenal. Before I was able to work with Christian all over the summer to have him reading by the end of that summer for the first time in his life. And then to— then eventually I'm working for the school district through Christian. And every year he goes to school, he stands taller and he becomes more confident. He did a huge effort to read and write effectively. And I now have an in with the school district because I took this child who was non-reading and taught him to read effectively. So thank you. Hit like, hit subscribe. And that's the story of Christian and the start of a different journey for me because I am now I'm teaching under ideal circumstances. I'm teaching this boy one-to-one, 4 or 5 days a week, 2 hours a day, to have him go from non-reading to reading. I'm given the time because I'm not working full-time at the moment. I'm given the time to find the resources. I'm given the time to turn those resources into adequate material for this child to be effective, for him to be engaged, to become an active reader. And then how are we going to teach decoding on top of that base? It was a phenomenal experience. And his story, Christian, is also in my book, Reversed: A Memoir, in part 2 of Lubbock. Thank you. I also talk about my other students, but you'll have to read about them all in here. Thank you. Hit like, hit subscribe, share. Let people know that we can and we must teach children to read. I hope you've enjoyed this talk. Ask me questions. What else do you want to know? What else do we have to do to teach our children to read?
