It was on this date back in March 13, 1986, on a Thursday morning at 7:15 am, when I was shot in the back of my head at point-blank range in the teachers’ back parking lot of Southeastern High School in Detroit, Michigan.
My career as a reading specialist abruptly ended that morning.
Mysteriously, I had been warned by one of my nicest students about three weeks before that I was in danger of being killed and should immediately transfer for my safety to another school. I took the warning with a grain of salt at the time, but have often wondered since just what and how that student knew what he did.
Sometimes God allows our lives to be interrupted. At the time of the interruption we may have no idea why He allows things to happen the way He does.
If we are living for Him, sometimes we later see why God has allowed these interruptions and, in the long term, used them for our good and for the blessing of others.
In my case, nearly five years away from teaching provided the time to type up and greatly expand the Bible cross references originally given in The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge to create The New Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, which was published in 1992.
My return to teaching in the Fall of 1990 at Denby High School in Detroit provided me a much better environment to teach because the school was under much better control. I no longer was harassed by “hall wandering” students to the degree that I was at Southeastern High School. I continued to teach at Denby until my retirement from teaching.
I can look back over many years past and see how the Lord used what seemed bad at the time for His good in the long term. When I began teaching, I was involved in a roll-over accident in my brand-new VW. I was taken to Hurley Hospital in Flint, Michigan. I left in a cast on my right hand and had to learn to write with my left hand. Because of my cast, I was off teaching for a month. I was taking courses at Wayne State University. One of my professors, Dr. Donald J. Lloyd, suggested I take the Greyhound bus to East Lansing where he would meet me. He wanted to see the programmed instruction units I had been writing to help my students read and write better. He introduced me to Dr. John Ball, who when he saw what I was writing, said “You’re hired!” I was not expecting to have another job, but I was able to work during summer vacations for Resources Development Corporation writing programmed instruction modules for large corporations.
My reading program is now available on Amazon in printed book format or Kindle format under my name (Jerome Smith), titled The Language Enrichment Program. It constantly amazes me how concerned parents want reading help for their students, but can’t find my program. Whole school districts and even states claim to be so concerned about how students are falling behind in reading skills as measured by the nationally administered reading assessments in the fourth and eighth grade testing and they can’t find it either. They have spent millions of dollars to fix the problem, with little success in most cases.
I already solved the reading achievement problem with my carefully tested program that actually works, yet only a very few copies of my program have been sold. My program raises reading achievement by an average (actually, by a median) of two years in grade level for reading comprehension. Some students improve so much that they are as many years ahead of grade level as they had been behind after using my program. I appreciate what my former chief administrator for the Language Arts department for the school district of Detroit, whose birthday happens to be today, said about me in reference to my reading program. He said, “If Jerry says it works, it works.”