Becoming Karen

[Christina Smith]

KarenRae (Brown) Melton Age 84 passed away April 25, 2024 after a short illness. She was born at the family home, 8 miles east and 1/2 mile south of Bedford, Iowa on September 3, 1939. The 3rd of 4 children born to Harold R. (Shorty) Brown and Marvel (Burns) Brown. Karen attended West Gay School from Kindergarten to first semester of 8th Grade. The family then moved from the farm to Bedford, Iowa where Karen began the second semester of 8th grade at Bedford Jr. High School. She attended Bedford High School, graduating with the class of 1957. After high school Karen went to work in Omaha, Nebraska.

Karen met and married Charles Donald Melton in 1960. Two sons were born to Karen and Don. Randall Allen and Jeffery Donald. The marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Through the years she was employed with several companies. Beginning with the Omaha Board of Education, Western Electric, Omtronics Mfg. and 26 years with Northern Natural Gas, becoming the Enron Corp. in later years. She enjoyed working and met lifelong friends through her jobs. Karen also enjoyed being a grandmother and was heard to say many times, "being a grandmother is the most fun I had in my life".

She was preceded in death by her parents, Marvel and Shorty Brown; son, Jeffery Melton; grandson, Kristian; sister, Joan Kemery and her husband Charles; brother, Bob Brown and his wife Mary; husband, Don Melton; significant other, Mervin Walter and brother-in-law, Lambert (Butch) Vrba.

Connie Nielsen: A thousand per cent! I originally wrote the concept for the series because here we have an extraordinary female artist, but the only thing well known about her, which is very usual for female artists, is her love/sex life: Her syphilis, her lover who died.

They were, including letters that have been more recently released. For her becoming an artist was to live, not becoming was to die. The choice was very simple, except for the fact that living seemed so much harder than dying. She had to find a place where living was worth the struggle, the everyday struggle. Our series shows how tough that struggle really was, the amount of things thrown at her, from society, tradition and her family.

Many of the best modern drama series tend to explore how complex and contradictory their central characters really are. Could you suggest some of the contradictions or complexity of Karen Blixen?

Yes. She literally walked in her tattered clothes in and out of government offices, pleading with the British government for these families to be given the land and allowed to settle on it. And she succeeded, which is a real testament to her.

I never heard back from them, but the experience put the thought back in my head and I decided to dig a little deeper this go round. So, I re-registered and got the ball rolling again. When I saw all the tests I would have to do, I thought, If I get cleared, clearly, I am meant to do this.

I donated on August 16, 2023, and on January 4, 2024, my voucher recipient got his kidney. I would hands down do it again if I could. I almost feel guilty because I had no pain. I would say I was back to 100% within two months, maybe three. I try to tell anyone willing to listen in the hopes that I get one more person to go through the process and help someone else live a better life.

I am a wife and a mother to one son. I am a huge believer in helping others in any possible way, which is why on top of being a living kidney donor I am also a regular platelet donor at the American Red Cross. I live outside of Atlanta, GA, and work full time from home. I was very fortunate to be medically able to donate my spare kidney to a stranger. I seem to talk nonstop about NKR to any and every one hoping that I will inspire someone else to take the same journey as I did. In my spare time, I help with a few animal rescue groups and love watching the birds and other wildlife that venture into our backyard. Donating my spare kidney was one of the biggest joys of my life!

If you would like to help someone in need of a kidney transplant by becoming a living kidney donor, click the button below to register with the National Kidney Registry. This is an initial registration, not a commitment to donate. You are free to opt out of the process at any time.

This past year, I interviewed Brianna Guild from SLP Literacy Corner for the De Facto Leaders podcast. In preparation for our interview, she shared a detailed summary of what she wanted to discuss in our episode, and I decided to publish it as a post because it has a lot of useful information for clinicians who want to learn more about literacy, or who want to know how they can find their niche within their field.

Brianna is a private practice Speech-Language Pathologist in Ontario, Canada. She provides virtual speech therapy sessions, primarily in the areas of literacy, language, and articulation, to residents of Ontario.

She started her own small business, SLP Literacy Corner, in 2022. She aims to support busy educators by creating resources and sharing activity ideas aligned with the Science of Reading. She is passionate about sharing low-prep resources and ideas for students of all ages, so educators can spend less time planning their literacy lessons.

Her journey to becoming an SLP was not a traditional one. She received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with a minor in Psychology from the University of Guelph, and then her Master of Health Science in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Toronto. She loves that the field of Speech-Language Pathology combines her interests in education, health care, and research.

Brianna and I started out the conversation discussing our own lived experiences learning to read. We discovered we had very similar experiences in that we both struggled initially, but were both able to improve because we received explicit instruction at the right time.

I think I was probably caught up to whatever the grade level reading expectations were by grade 3 or 4. I never had any diagnoses or an IEP, and I went on to be very academically inclined and enjoyed school.

When I graduated from school, I started working for a private practice, where I still work today, and immediately started working with a wide range of clients, including literacy clients. It was an area I was already really interested in and wanted to learn more about, so I started taking more training and workshops, and took on more literacy clients.

The research outlines multiple components of effective literacy instruction. In 2000, The National Reading Panel did a review of reading research that identified the key components as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. More recently in 2020, the International Dyslexia Associationidentified the key components of structured literacy as phoneme awareness, sound-symbol (or phoneme-grapheme) correspondences, orthography, morphology, syntax, and semantics. I hope you can see that there is a lot of overlap in those lists, and personally, I think one of the major takeaways from the research is that literacy is more than just phonics or just reading comprehension. It is more than one thing. There are many different components we need to consider and explicitly work on with children to help them become proficient readers.

When working with other professionals or supporting parents, I think it is important that we take the time to explain the research behind what we are doing and any changes we are making to our instruction as we learn better instruction methods.

In Ontario, Canada there were major updates made to the Ontario Language Curriculum in 2023, which is now rooted in evidence-based reading research, rather than the balanced literacy approach.

Essentially, around the 1990s the balanced approach took over schools. Balanced literacy includes using leveled books and the three-cueing system to teach reading, where you are taught to look at the picture, the first letter in the word, and think about what word makes sense in the sentence. But essentially this is more guessing than reading.

The Science of Reading is the collection of research from multiple disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, and education, that provides scientific evidence for how children learn to read and write, and how to best support literacy development for all readers. The evidence supports the importance of using a structured literacy approach, which teaches literacy skills through systematic and explicit instruction.

A lot of people seem to refer to the transition from balanced literacy to the Science of Reading as just another pendulum swing in literacy instruction. However, this is not the case. The important changes being made to literacy instruction are backed by decades of scientific research. I think that in order to help ourselves, other educators, and parents make this mindset shift to this supposedly new form of literacy instruction, we need to spend some time understanding the why and the research behind what we are doing. If other educators or parents have questions, we need to help provide them with answers and help them understand what we are doing.

One helpful resource that Ontario has is ONlit. This is a website developed by Dyslexia Canada and the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch that serves as a comprehensive hub for empowering educators to provide evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction aligned with the new Ontario Language Curriculum. It has tons of helpful resources for both educators and parents. I think having access to reliable resources, such as those complied in the ONlit website, is really important, especially when it comes to showing leadership and working with other professionals or supporting parents.

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