Kate Ball, a pioneer in the remediation of dyslexia, was born Katherine Aristeen Hart on May 23, 1926, in Harlingen, Texas.  She attended schools in Corpus Christi and Houston before her family moved to New Orleans in 1935.

In 1947 she graduated from Louisiana College with a B.A. degree in English and with Louisiana’s Lifetime Certification in Secondary Education. Syracuse University awarded her a graduate assistantship in English, and she took her Master’s degree in English from there in 1949.  At Syracuse she met Lee Ball, Jr., also a graduate student at that time.  The couple were married in 1951.

Kate’s early professional experience included teaching high school English, French, psychology, and civics, as well as teaching college English and French.

She first encountered the phenomenon of dyslexia in the early 1950’s, when she was teaching Third and Fourth Grades at the Pikeville College Training School in Pikeville, Kentucky.  In her Fourth Grade class, there were five little boys, all of good intelligence, who nevertheless could not read.  None of the professors of Education at Pikeville College could offer help with this problem, beyond the diagnosis that the boys were “non-readers.”

In a letter to her husband’s parents in New York, Kate described the puzzling situation.  Her mother-in-law, Mae Ball, was a graduate of Teachers College of Columbia University, and she by way of answer mailed Kate a book which eventually led her into her life-work of providing help and hope to dyslexic chidren and their parents.  The book was Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects by Grace Fernald.

Dr. Fernald had invented the kinesthetic method of remediating dyslexia, though the term “dyslexia” does not appear in the book.  Perhaps the word had not yet been coined.  Dr. Fernald sometimes called the disability “alexia” and sometimes “word blindness,” although no one who reads the book can doubt that she was describing what is now known as dyslexia.  Kate learned two valuable lessons:  first, she learned that dyslexic people can be helped; and second, she learned the kinesthetic method by which to do it.

In the following years, Kate and her husband Lee moved from Kentucky to Iowa, and from there to Oklahoma.  Lee had obtained his Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1958, and he became a Full Professor of English at Southeastern State College in Durant, Oklahoma.  (The school’s name was later changed to Southeastern Oklahoma State University.)  Here, Kate also taught as a member of the adjunct faculty.  She held classes in English Composition, Humanities, Survey of English Literature, Linguistics, and French.

Kate had a life-long love of foreign languages.  Beginning at age 12, she studied Spanish for five years.  Beginning at age 14, she studied French, also for five years.  But it was at college that she met the language she came to love most—ancient Greek.  Louisiana College was a Baptist institution, and offered New Testament Greek as a help to its ministerial students and to others who might be interested in church work.  In time, and over the years, Kate became an avid student not only of New Testament Greek but also of classical and Homeric Greek.  Indeed, in her retirement years, her favorite pastime was reading and studying the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A love of language was to be found in Kate’s heritage.  Both her father and her father’s mother displayed this characteristic.  Kate believes sensitivity to language and a heightened awareness of how it operates in the mind led her to the discovery of a new method to remediate those with a disability in language, that is, those who are dyslexic.  Her method trains the mind, through various drills, to perceive the written word as beginning at the left and progressing on through the word to terminate at its ending on the right.  This counteracts the tendency of dyslexia to scramble the letters up in a meaningless and indecipherable jumble.

But we are getting a little ahead of the story of Kate’s life.  During the years she was teaching conventional college courses and raising her family—a son and a daughter—what of dyslexia all those years?  Kate still remembered the promise of Grace Fernald’s book, and how to use the kinesthetic method.  She had used it, a few days, with those five little Fourth Grade boys in Kentucky, and saw that they were successful in learning to write, spell, and read by that method.  However, unfortunately, this progress was cut off short, for Kate also learned that she could not devote the time necessary to helping those boys overcome their dyslexia—not while she was also responsible for all the other children in Third and Fourth Grades!  While she and the five little boys sat around a table in the back of the room tracing words with their fingers, the rest of the children seemed inclined to climb the blackboards!  It was clear that no teacher could combine the two duties—teaching a classroom of children by the conventional methods, and also remediating dyslexic children by Grace Fernald’s method.

As a result, over the years, the most Kate could do was sometimes help a dyslexic child, or an adult, in private sessions in her home.  Invariably the method worked, and the student was delighted at how easily he could master words which he never before had been able to handle.  It was such a shame that there was no school where these unfortunate folks could be taught by a method that would enable them to learn.  But there was nothing available to them.

Then, one summer day in 1974, Kate met a neighbor, Mrs. Jean Choate.  Soon their friendly conversation turned to Jean’s greatest sorrow: that her youngest child, Arthur, was a failure in school, in spite of all she could do to help him, and all her efforts to find help for him.  Kate immediately suspected dyslexia.  There were the two most salient symptoms: a bright child and the inability to read.

It was the middle of June.  Kate had no classes to teach at the college, and Arthur was out of school for the summer.  Kate invited Jean to send Arthur over to her house for some help.  Arthur was unwilling to go.  He said to his mother, “Mom, you know, and I know, that I’m not ever going to be able to read.  So why do we keep trying all these different things?”  Arthur was thirteen years old, and in Eighth Grade at Middle School.

Still, he did as his mother asked and appeared at Kate’s door at nine in the morning.  Unhappy and unwilling at first, he took to Dr. Fernald’s kinesthetic method like a duck to water.  As he learned word after word, writing them and reading them, he grew more and more excited and happy.  Kate and Arthur worked for two hours that day, with frequent breaks which Arthur spent in the backyard swinging on the old tire swing which hung from a huge elm tree that stood there.

When Kate dismissed him at eleven o’clock, he ran home, got on his bike, and pedaled happily to where his mother was working.  He just couldn’t wait to tell her the good news, and to show her how the kinesthetic method worked.

As the summer moved on, Arthur attended at Kate’s house five mornings a week, making very rapid progress in reading and spelling.  As it happened, the word spread, and soon several other dyslexic children joined the little informal school around the dining room table.

As the summer drew to a close, the parents of those children began to fret over the fact that soon the sessions would come to an end, and the children would have to return to public school (where there was no instruction for dyslexic children), while Kate returned to her college classes.  A meeting was held one night, where Kate and the mothers and fathers discussed plans.  Kate offered to notify the college that she would be unavailable for adjunct teaching in the fall semester, if the parents would commit themselves to bringing their children to have their dyslexia remediated.  They agreed, and someone scouted around and found a place for the school to be held.  This was in the Child Welfare Building, on Beech Street near Third Avenue in Durant, OK.  (This building has since been demolished.)

Thus was born the Dyslexia Clinic School, later to be known as the Red Fern School.  This first year, there were nine or ten boys and one girl.  It is said that four out of five dyslexic children are boys—no one knows why.

The following year, St. William’s Catholic Church in Durant provided a building, and for a year the school met there.  It was while the school was meeting there that Kate developed her own method of remediation.

Dr. Fernald’s method certainly worked, and at one time had been incorporated into the Los Angeles Public School system.  But there were some drawbacks to the method, as Kate found.  Since she had to work alone and had no money to train and hire other teachers, a more streamlined technique was called for.  She developed what she called the psycholinguistic method, based on the way the mind (psyche) processes language (linguistics).

This technique has the advantage that the facts learned for one word easily transfer to a host of other words, whereas in the Fernald method each word must be learned separately.  The use of the psycholinguistic method therefore makes remediation much more rapid.  In time, Kate began to call this the Red Fern School Method for remediating dyslexia.

Before that year at St. William’s was over, children were coming also from Texas, and someone secured a place for the school in Sherman, TX.  Since the school had little or no money, a place in which to meet was always the biggest problem.  In the following years, besides Sherman, the school was held at Pottsboro, Dripping Springs, and Denison, all towns in Texas.  Kate had a Board of Directors, with Mr. Ralph Porter as Chairman, and year by year the school continued, always by the skin of its teeth.

At last came the 1980’s, and a severe and long-lasting downturn of the economy.  The day came that Red Fern School had to close its doors, but not before many children and their parents had emerged out of the shadows of failure into the light of day.

With this development, Kate retired from teaching altogether, except for some private tutoring of dyslexic children and adults in her home.  And at last she decided that she had to give that up, too.  Her husband had died in 2003, and as she entered her eighties, she felt she was getting too old to continue this work.

However, in the summer of 2008, a good friend of Kate’s spoke to her about her little grandson, Tanner, eight years old.  The child was bright, but failing in school.  There again were those two red flags!  Kate felt she could not give Tanner the amount of help he needed, but his mother, Shannon Herman, was willing and eager to have Kate teach her the psycholinguistic method by which Tanner could learn.

So Saturday morning classes were set up, again around the old dining room table, as Kate proceeded to teach this passionate and very dedicated mother how to remediate her own child.  Not only that, but the classes were joined by Mrs. Laura Clark and Mrs. Ann Brimage, both retired elementary teachers.  Laura was the owner and founder of The Umbrella, a private school in Durant which operated outside school hours during the school term, and all day in the summer.  Ann also worked at The Umbrella.

For nearly a full year, these three ladies attended weekly classes, learning and practicing the psycholinguistic method for remediating dyslexia.  Soon Kate would be able to confer certification upon them to be teachers of this method.  She was very happy and grateful that the Red Fern Method would not vanish off the face of the earth, but would continue to be used at The Umbrella.

“Not only will children and families be saved from the anguish of academic failure,” Kate wrote in 2009 as she was preparing to confer certification on the three teachers who studied her method in the small class, “but also this region of southeastern Oklahoma can become a beacon of hope and success for those suffering from dyslexia.”

The Umbrella formally closed in 2014, but Clark continues to help dyslexic children in her work as a Reading Interventionist with the Durant Public Schools.  And she has been an invaluable help in developing this website to share Kate Ball’s method of teaching dyslexic persons to read.

Kate Ball died in 2018, survived by son John Roger Ball and daughter Mary Elizabeth Ball, and a host of remediated dyslexics and grateful family members.