Archive for August 8th, 2009

Thursday night in class, we watched a video about teaching kids with learning disabilities, what school can seem like to a learning disabled (LD) child, and how parents and teachers often react to them. As the litany of the responses, such as disbelief, anger, rejection, etc. that adults may express towards such children, I just sadly nodded my head. Yes, I knew all these things were true.

When Vince, now 15, was born, he had respiratory distress syndrome, and had to be placed in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. He got out in ten days and seemed to develop normally on most fronts, but he didn’t learn to speak very quickly. I remember when he was 18 months old, he learned that we called the commuter train from which we picked up his father after work the “GO” (so named because it was run by the Government of Ontario; we were in Tornoto) and he showed great happiness when he could shout “Go!” as the train came up.

He made all his development benchmarks as a preschooler, though he was quite hard to discipline. Tantrums! That doesn’t seem like a strong enough word. We got through it somehow, and into kindergarten. I was teaching him myself, and having taught his older sisters successfully I wasn’t too worried. I had been told not to expect him to learn to read as quickly as his sisters, since they were girls, more verbal and developing such skills more quickly, so I wasn’t really worried when he had to repeat kindergarten. Lots of boys repeat kindergarden.

He went to conventional school in first grade and we came up against a curriculum specialist — after a few months the school was pretty sure there was something about Vince that was impairing his ability to learn to read. I wasn’t ready to here it, though, and I wouldn’t let him be tested. Meanwhile, thanks to being a discipline problem, Vince spent a lot of time in the office, he later told me. I don’t remember hearing about it from the teacher, though perhaps I just wasn’t paying enough attention.

In second grade, I brought him back to home schooling, and began to work harder on getting him to learn to read. He made some slow progress, more, I think, than he had at regular school. He could read now, but not well. He never picked up a bookfor fun like his sisters and later his brother would do.

Vince does not like to read, I thought to myself. He is not a good reader, he will probably never quite get it. He may have dyslexia or some related problem.

It was at the end of third grade that I gave Vince and his younger brother a standardized test and  he was far below average in reading. I had known it, of course, but the documentation put the whole situation into a different light. We took him for diagnostic testing to the Learning Center of North Texas. For about $750 they did a a battery of tests. The two things I remember are that he was dyslexic, and he was reading at 1.7 grade level.

I could not have a below-par student in my home school, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I spent the summer with The Read Aloud Handbook and the Writing Road to Reading. I created a curriculum that included listening to novels read aloud. We did the Spaulding method phonics program. Fortunately his younger brother, whom I was also teaching, was now at Vince’s same reading level  so I could teach them from the same lesson plan.  We started out in September, nervously, to see where it would lead.

I had been told at the Learning Center of North Texas that for kids like Vince, phonics training had to be repeated about ten times more than for a child without dyslexia. I worked with them every morning, iwth phonic flashcards, phonics dictation, handwriting (in the Spaulding method, the way the children form the letters is said to impact their mental processing of the information). And, slowly, it began to work. Vince’s scores in phonics, spelling and reading comprehension were going up. He was reading on grade level at last.

But then the discipline problems became overwhelming. He didn’t want to go to public school, though I told him if he couldn’t follow instructions, he would go, because I did have a limit and the tantrums were almost beyond that limit. He didn’t believe me, or perhaps he didn’t care, but one afternoon, after a particularly vociferous argument, about what I don’t remember but usually it was about something mundane — I told him he was going to school. Regular school.  I’d had it.

Perhaps I had tried to hard, worked myself to exhaustion in my efforts to remediate the dyslexia. Whatever the reason, it was April and I went down to the local school to enroll him. The principle told me I could wait until September if I wanted to but I did not want to. A few days later his younger brother joined him and we became, and have been ever since, a family with children in the FWISD.

And how did he do, you wonder? Well, apparently a few days after school began, he decided he was going to refuse to follow instructions, the way he had at home. He told this to the teacher in such a way that she called the vice principal. He told the vice principal some things too. The office called me and I had to come and get him for the day.

Don’t do that again, I suggested. They may send you to reform school. Neither of us knew if that was true, or if there really was a reform school, but the suggestion was enough.  He never tried blatant defiance on a school employee again, as far as I know.  In the fall, he returned to school for fifth grade, and the kids said, “hey, there’s that guy that said all that unbelievable stuff to the AP.”  He was most disappointed that they remembered.

“Will they ever forget?” he asked me.

“They’ll either forget or grow up and go away,” I replied.

I’m glad to say that my efforts to work with Vince in his reading seem to have been effective. He passed the TAKS the next year, the first year he officially took it. Further, he decided to be a good student and by applying himself, he was able to keep up and eventually was able to reach the top tier of classes in junior high school, be in the TAKS commended group, and, riding on his sister’s coattails, gain admission to a local private school with significant admission standards.

When I brought him in to start at private school, I told a couple of people he was not a natural reader and might have trouble in some areas, but they were distracted and wanted to see for themselves. The public school had never identified him as an LD student, so maybe the were looking for more documentation or experience with him. When, in December, the guidance counsellor called me. I was worried. What could he have done this time? He hadn’t rebelled against anyone or shown them his temper, I hoped. And then she asked me,

Did I think my son might have a learning disability?

Yes, I told her, I think he does. But he, and we, can work with it, I promise.