INTRODUCTION<br >TWENTY YEARS AGO， WHEN I RECEIVED MY MA IN ENG-<br >lish from Brown University， I was sure I knew why some<br >teenagers read so much better than others. They came from<br >good families. Their parents had read to them as children.<br >They grew up surrounded by books. Of course they loved<br >reading and were good readers.<br > Then I started teaching， and things no longer looked so<br >simple.<br > I was teaching in a private Dominican boarding school in<br >California. The girls came from wonderful homes， but a dis-<br >turbing number weren t avid readers; some didn t like to<br >read at all. I was at a complete loss. I knew how to run a<br >Chaucer seminar..， but teach reading? I thought there was<br >some specialized knowledge that I didn t have.<br > Following my navy husband， I moved on to Virginia. He<br >went to sea， and I taught in a couple of different high<br >schools while beginning a graduate program in learning dis-<br >abilities at Old Dominion University. I was lucky at Old<br >Dominion， having a visiting professor from the University<br >of Chicago， Ken James， who had trained under Doris John-<br >son， one of the people who helped define the field. His<br >axiom: a diagnosis of learning disabilities is a diagnosis of<br >