When All Else Fails, Fourth-Grade Teacher Takes to Juggling

When fourth-grade teacher Myron Wilcox sees that his students aren’t concentrating on their work or are having trouble reading, he’s as likely as not to bring out three balls or some cigar boxes and start juggling.

Wilcox, who teaches at Pleasant View School, learned to overcome reading problems as a child when his father taught him to juggle. Now he uses the same method on his students when they run into problems.

“I figure if it worked for me, it’ll work on today’s kids,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox suffered as a child from dyslexia, a reading disorder that causes words to appear backward.

“I couldn’t read,” he said. “The words were all mixed up in my mind because it was almost impossible for me to track, to follow the line.”

He said his father, who juggled as a hobby, realized his son needed to learn to follow, or track, from one word to another.

“Because tracking is basic to juggling, he decided teaching me to juggle would help my reading and he was right,” Wilcox said.

He said that once he learned to track and to juggle, he was able to read.

“It wasn’t long before I was reading complete books,” he said.

Wilcox said he uses juggling, as his father did, to teach the art of tracking to students.

“A lot of teachers use juggling for exactly the same purpose,” he said. “It helps teach students to anticipate, to look at a word by configuration and see more than one word at a time and it develops right and left vision equally, allowing the student to see the whole picture.”

Besides tracking skills, juggling teaches people to concentrate.

“You really have to concentrate if you’re going to juggle,” Wilcox said. “If you lose your concentration, you’re going to lose whatever it is you’re juggling.”

Wilcox usually confines his juggling to recess or after school, but once in a while he’ll do it in the classroom for brief periods if he thinks it will help his students.

“When I go out at recess and pull out the balls or cigar boxes and start juggling, it doesn’t take long to draw a crowd of students,” he said. “Almost all of them want to try it and they end up learning concentration and the art of tracking without even knowing they’re improving academically.”

Wilcox said it does not take long to see results in reading and concentration improvement in students he has instructed in juggling.

Another benefit of juggling, Wilcox said, is that it improves physical skills and teaches people to handle objects better.

“You’d be surprised at how many parents tell me that their kids have improved in manual dexterity after they learned to juggle,” he said. “They don’t drop things as often, and parents appreciate that, especially when it is the kid’s turn to do the dishes.”