DOVER — Growing up in Toronto, Ontario, Neil MacGregor noticed early on it took him much longer than his classmates to read simple passages or write.
MacGregor was left "exhausted" after trying to piece together the foreign-looking symbols in his books, and eventually developed ways to get through school by skipping some assignments altogether and solely relying on classroom instruction rather than opening his books.
"I went through high school never reading a textbook," said MacGregor, who said he wasn't truly "illiterate," but wasn't far off in elementary school due to his reading difficulties. "It was a miracle I got the grades I got."
MacGregor was able to get into college, though, in 1999 — despite a 73 average and a teacher telling him he'd only be "a waste of time and money" — thanks to a national study that looked at what students with learning disabilities needed to succeed in a normal college setting.
It was through his time at college MacGregor discovered a computer-based program that changed the way he learned and helped him graduate at the top of his class despite the fact he was reading at a 7th-grade level.
MacGregor also discovered an ability to help others with reading and writing problems, and now, about seven years after graduating, MacGregor has made a career out of instilling some of the compensating skills and tools he learned in other struggling individuals.
MacGregor, now 31, is the vice president of learner development at ST4 Learning Inc., a Dover-based company that is the United States distributor of goQ literacy software.
MacGregor travels the country and holds webinars to aid struggling students and adults, and trains teachers to use the programs — all work he said he enjoys because it allows him to help people deal with many of the issues he still encounters today.
"The real joy is when I get a chance to sit down with the kids and show them a tool they never thought existed," said MacGregor. "It's that moment when they realize reading isn't scary, awful or something to be avoided. They just look at you like, 'Wait a sec — gamechanger.' It's that gamechanger moment that I live for, because I've been there."
The gratification of those moments come often, as ST4 Learning serves the entire nation and its parent company, goQ, is an international company.
MacGregor and his company has been in Dover since December 2009, and he's logged more than 70 flights across the country and held countless seminars to help a variety of individuals from elementary school students to chief executive officers at multimillion-dollar companies.
MacGregor said he doesn't serve as a "tutor" directly to the students, but he does spend a lot of time with students when he helps get the wordQ and speakQ software, which also comes in multiple languages and can be used by foreign language students, up and running in school districts.
One such school is the Cochecho Arts and Technology Academy, a Dover charter school that MacGregor said has been using the program for a few weeks.
The school was given free copies of the software to help its students, and MacGregor said free copies are being given to everyone within the Greater Dover Chamber of Commerce as a way to create ubiquitous local usage of the program as a way to show how it can change a community.
"A lot of people don't learn to be better writers when they go to school to learn what to do in careers" such as law enforcement or automotive repair, said MacGregor. "The idea is if we make a hotbed of this type of application and innovation, we can get the story going statewide and used everywhere."
That universal usage through providing easy access to the software is what MacGregor said his end goal is, as despite changes in the way learning disabilities and learning difficulties are perceived he said many individuals still don't get all the help they need.
"The overall idea is to provide software to people," he said. "Although I have a learning disability and I have a paper that says it, the software doesn't care. It's to help anyone who's struggling with reading or writing at any age level."
More information about ST4 Learning and the goQ software is available at goQsoftware.com.
