When Learning Differences Are Not Recognized

If parents and teachers do not understand and address learning difficulties early, what begins as an invisible learning difference may start a chain reaction that may only become visible when frustration, shame, and misunderstanding have begun their work on the child's mind and heart.

You do not understand where I come from

or how I feel when you make fun of me...

By Tia Crumpton - Ohio

Nathan Gulbransen
California

For thirteen years I have been sitting and decorating classrooms trying to learn something. I say decorating because I was playing the same role in those classrooms as the monkeys on the posters, striking poses and making faces as if they were mentally lost. I was furniture, but I wasn't just normal furniture. I was that loud and ugly sofa that was in your great aunt's living room that was dying for attention. I would get that attention by making jokes, talking out, or just bugging people. For these actions, I was strictly punished for this as one should be, and during the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, I had season tickets to detention.

In the seventh grade I had a history teacher that I really liked.  She taught differently than my past teachers. We acted out battles, wrote stories as if we were eyewitnesses to historical events. I learned more in that class than I thought I could ever learn, and I had fun doing it. But like all good things, that class ended, and I was back to being that ugly sofa.

Throughout my schooling, I was written off by teachers as a class clown, a smart alec, or just someone who didn't want to learn. The fact was that I couldn't learn from the ways that the teachers were teaching, I wasn't able to remember anything that I read in textbooks, and my memorization was that of a student years younger than I. I was called lazy, nonchalant, and unmotivated, and for the longest time I believed those labels, and thought that I didn't belong in school.

It was hard not knowing what I could do, not knowing what I was good at. I was never let in to any of the discussion about anything that was going on with me. In school, I always heard "She has problems with this, she can't do this, she doesn't know how to do that." I never, ever heard anything good about me. The only thing I heard was that I was a very quiet and polite young lady. I never heard, "She's a good student, she's does well in that. These are her strengths." At home, it was "You don't want to do anything. I don't know what's wrong with you."

I could always only talk about my weaknesses, never about my strengths, because I never knew I had any. If someone asked me about my strengths, I wouldn't know. Growing up, I thought that there must have been something wrong that I did. I was too lazy or stupid. It was me.

In my opinion, young children can be really cruel because they really don't understand how much they can hurt other children by teasing them. They think it's just a joke, but it really hurts. It makes you feel like you're nothing.

Sometimes teachers don't treat you very well because they think you're slow. They often just can't understand. You don't get good grades. It doesn't help if the students who are in your classes tease you too. It really hurts, and it makes you lose respect for yourself. You feel you can't do anything right. It really makes you see all the bad sides of yourself instead of all the positive things.

I hadn't been doing well in college, and I didn't know what to do, what to major in. I took a semester off to travel and do some internships. I came back and walked into the Dean of Students' office to get a new advisor. After he pulled out my transcript and looked at it, he asked me "Are you still the screw up you were before?" Having someone I didn't even know look at a piece of paper and say that to me really crushed me and hurt me deeply. Even though I hadn't done well, I had always thought of myself as a person with good intentions. It was the worst feeling, but it was a wake-up call for me to deal with the difficulties I'd had in school.

All I have to offer is a simple and short story. It begins something like this.

Imagine sitting quietly and still at your desk in your classroom. You're only old enough for your head to be a foot, or slightly more, above the top of your desk. In front and towering above you is a teacher with the responsibility of making sure all the students finish their short paragraph on the solar system. Imagine further, that all your friends have departed for lunch, leaving you alone on the field of battle with the giant Goliath, who declares that you shall not leave until you finish your paragraph.

Like the biblical figure, David, your slingshot is in hand, but unlike him, you cannot find the proper stones with which to load your weapon, nor do you have the technique to effectively use it. You can feel the terror beginning to fill your body, like the tide racing into a bay.

You glance up, carefully eyeing the mighty colossus. As he moves to take the higher ground over your shoulder, you realize this is your only chance. Like a bolt of lightening streaking from the night sky to the ground, you dash from the field of battle, leaving the mighty Goliath bellowing at you from within the classroom as he collides with the tightly packed desks. As you sob quietly in some corner, you realize that you have gained only a momentary reprieve. Soon someone will come for you and take you back to the plain of battle.

This happened to me. I sat at my desk, the paper in front of me, and I didn't know what to write. Nor, as a matter of fact, did I know how to write what I didn't know what to write. What I did know how to do was run, so I ran, and ran, and ran.

Since then, I have grown a little. Now I might even tower over my former teacher, but I have come upon many mightier Goliaths. Still, I could not drive home my point with my slingshot. Each time, it was loaded with the wrong facts, or my shots went astray, and I got back papers with unsatisfactory grades. I ran a lot then. I ran from situations where I had to produce something that I simply could not.

Freak!

I sat in class trying to orally read a paragraph out of a history test. When I came to a word that I could not read, anxiety hit me like an ocean wave. The room started to swirl and I started to break in to a shaky sweat. Just as the undertow pulled me under and began dragging me out to sea forever, I heard my mother's voice, "Velvet, wake up." I rolled over and looked up into my mother's concerned eyes. The lines around her eyes looked deeper than usual this morning, I thought. As I was about to roll over and go back to sleep, my mother grabbed my shoulder and said, "You either get up and go to school, or get up and get out of the house." I wrenched my shoulder away from her grip and slowly crawled out of bed. I turned around and faced my mother, sending her hate through my eyes. I told her to get the hell out of my room.

My room was my world. The bed, a mattress on the floor, was covered with red and black satin pillows. The wall opposite of the bed was spotted with silverware, mostly knives protruding from the cracked plaster and chipped paint. Between the knives rested memories of past visitors written in the wall, like, "F.T.W." signed John, and "Love Is Vain" signed no one. I never wrote on the wall because I was afraid that I would spell something wrong, and my handwriting was embarrassing. (Every once in a while, this fear still rears its ugly head.) The rest of my room was eclectic; I guess you could call it punk paraphernalia. There was the bottom half of a mannequin that I made into a table. It was embraced with barbed wire with a birth control sign pasted on its privates. Also a gross collection of crumpled up papers (homework) lay in a corner. This safe haven I created protected me from the realities of the evil world.

After my mom sheepishly left my world, I started to prepare myself to fight the elements of reality. This was not an easy task. I felt like I could truly say that I know the hell the medieval knights went through preparing for a battle. Armor is not an easy thing to put on, especially by yourself. First, the clothes. "Tattered jeans? No. Stretch pants? Oh, what's this? An old black plastic bag. I can just cut it here and put it on like this and tie it off here, a mini skirt. Great, now what shirt? This one looks good (faded black and ripped across the back) and my faithful flannel, where is that thing?" Digging through a pile of clothes, I retrieved it from the bottom. Tying it around my waist, I headed in to the bathroom where my altar of hair spray and makeup awaited me.

"No need for a shower. My Mohawk is still in pretty good shape. Just a few teases and a splash of Mop an' Glow. Perfect! It will stay up all day." Now the face plate. This part was easy. I just held the black eyeliner up to my eye and drew a straight line from the bridge of my nose to the middle of my temple. That was it for the left eye. The right eye was a little trickier: four straight lines that connected my eyelids to my eyebrows, giving the effect that the eye was behind prison bars. A couple brushes of black blush and a kiss of red and I was done. As I headed out my bedroom door, I put on my most prized possession of armor, my leather jacket, smashed on my combat boots, grabbed my smokes, and was on my way. As I was stomping down the stairs, my mom yelled from the kitchen, "Where are you going?"

"Why do you care?" I snapped, and then stormed out the door.

I had to cut through two neighborhoods and part of a golf course to get to school, which took just the right amount of time for me to get my attitude "bad" enough to be able to face all the other kids at school. I could time it perfectly so that I was always five minutes late, so the other (smart) kids would not see me going in to the SPED class.

The whole angry world I created around me was to protect me. The clothes and make up were a disguise; I hoped that people would see me as a freak, instead of stupid. I would rather have everyone think that I had done too many drugs, and that was why I was slow, instead of them knowing the truth. My "bad" attitude was a way to keep people away from me. Not that I didn't like people! I really liked people, but I thought that they would not like me if they really knew me.

The simple truth was that I have dyslexia and I could not bear the thought of it. Everyone always told me that I was special, but I thought they were just trying to make me feel better. I truly thought that if you were not born being able to do something, if it did not come naturally to you, then you were never going to be able to do it. I did not like myself, so how in the world could anybody like me? I thought that I was the only kid in the world that was going through this struggle, and my life was always going to be like this. There was no light at the end of my tunnel.

It would have killed me if I tried to do something and failed, so I didn't even try. If I had put all the energy and effort I spent on trying to divert attention from my learning difference into my education, I probably could have a Ph. D. by now. The evil "realities" were mostly my own, but I was in the stage where I knew everything, so there was no telling me anything different.

I can sit back now and can see other kids going through the struggles I did. Maybe they aren't acting out as radically as I did, but they are still suffering and my heart is wrenched by this. One thing I can say to them is you are not the only one.

Lost

I was told that I lost my way when I was young.
My way was the hard way.
"Don't go over to the left," they would say,
"It's much easier to the right."
But what they did not know is that I did not know
My left from my right.

Every Wednesday when I was in fourth grade, the class would gather to read a story together and everyone would have a turn reading aloud. It was clear to my teacher at the time that I had a real problem reading, and it was also clear to her that my problem was really just because I was just a difficult kid, and not because of anything else. I have never been more ashamed of myself in my life than I was when I was ten years old in her class, reading aloud. It's a memory I'll never forget.

I would get up and try to read. I would read letter by letter, word by word, and soon I was in trouble. As I started to stumble, she would ask somebody to tell me what the words were. She would always, always make the class help me when I was having trouble. Everybody else could stand up and read, and she never called on anybody else to help them. This made me look and feel like a complete jackass. I lost a lot of respect for myself, and had trouble finding myself as a student for many years.

The worst thing in a child is lack of self-esteem. There's so much yin and yang in those of us who've had these experiences, that a lack of self-esteem may not appear to be a problem. But it is, and it's a devastating problem. I think that I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing whatever I can to talk to people and children about this particular issue.

If we can create the kind of environment at home and at school that levels the "learning playing field" for our children, then I believe that we'll have a hundred million trillion more talented, desiring, kids out there than we do now. And, we will not have the kind of difficulties we all have seen in kids who struggle with learning in school and with understanding and liking themselves for much of their early lives.

© 2002 Hello Friend / Ennis William Cosby Foundation. All rights reserved.