Finding His Beat

During my days at UNT from 1989 to 1992, I worked a number of jobs while earning my degree. One job that was interesting was working as an assistant in the College of Music for Robert A. Winslow. I drove the marching band's box van to the practice field every day, set the large instruments out for the members' rehearsals. I also enjoyed driving the van full of instruments to and from weekly football games

One particularly funny story was when UNT visited College Station to play Texas A&M in a preseason exhibition game. After the meticulous, precise and impressive performance of the Aggie band, the pride of UNT took the field and put on an equally awesome halftime show with a finale that featured our incredible marching drumline and a crazy display of glitter -- tons of glitter! As both bands left the field and I was picking up the instruments, I remember a coach from Texas A&M asking me, "Who's going to pick up all this glitter?" Both teams sparkled brightly through the 2nd half of the game.

During the off-season, the job would require me to arrange the orchestra chairs in various rehearsal halls. I got to enjoy the incredible talent that practiced daily. It was a wonderful college job, and I gained such an appreciation for the variety of musical talent for which UNT is known.

Riff Wright ('92)
Aledo

Life's Work

I want to tell you about the moment my life changed -- and it happened in a UNT classroom.

On the first day of my master's program at the College of Education, a professor screened a professional development video, exploring what it actually feels like to live with a learning disability. I sat in that room as a grown man and, for the first time in my life, understood what had been happening to me since childhood.

I have a reading disability, one that had gone unidentified for my entire academic life. At fifteen, I wrote in my journal: "I hate reading. I think I have dyslexia or something … and everybody laughs at me." No one acted on it.

UNT gave me the language, the framework and the professional identity to transform that wound into a life's work. The M.Ed. in Special Education was not just a degree, it was a diagnosis, a vindication and a calling, all at once.

And then I went to work.

For more than 20 years, I served inside public school classrooms -- first as a special education teacher, then as an educational diagnostician. Over two decades of making sure the students in front of me got the help I needed and never received. Every evaluation I completed, every IEP I wrote, every struggling child I refused to overlook was a direct response to the silence that had followed me my entire life.

UNT did not just educate me. It explained me to myself, and then equipped me to spend a career making sure other children would not have to wait as long as I did to be seen.

Christopher Khoury ('05 M.Ed., '14 Ph.D.)
Frisco

Khoury is the author of the memoir, Keep Pushing Forward.