Important Things I Learned from my Learning Disability

Comparatively little was known about learning disabilities when I began school in the 1960s. What educators were agreeing on then was that, if a teacher understood their subject well, all their students should be able to learn that subject. If you weren’t doing well, nobody blamed the school or the teacher. They blamed you. The only “medicine” offered to help my problem came in the form of a pinewood paddle administered via the posterior. I tried a bunch of that nasty medicine, but it didn’t cure my disability.

I did want to improve both my reading and math skills. I wasn’t fighting them or claiming the topics were too boring or irrelevant, though much of a public school education then truly was very boring for me, and much of what they assured me I needed to know became useless trivia, the kind of information you’d never need to recall beyond a test date. You see that teaching to the test is not a new invention.

For a long time, I didn’t know how to describe to teachers or counselors what I was experiencing, except frustration and anger. The result was that both reading and math were going terribly for me. I found reading difficult. Recalling the sounds of the letters and working out new and longer words didn’t seem difficult, but when my eyes moved to begin a new line of text, they would lose their place. I’d often find my eyes on the line I just read or skip past a line. It still happens now.

My problem in math was different. Numerals don’t function at all like letters for me. Remembering how to spell words correctly was easy for me, but recalling even a short string of numbers was very hard. For some reason, my short-term memory had difficulty holding any digit sequences correctly. Even when I could recall the numerals, their order might be confused. Numeric dyslexia? If that’s an actual thing, I didn’t find it searching by that name.

I was never made aware of any tutoring that was done by the school. Private tutors were an expense my parents could not yet afford. If you were clearly having difficulty, the schools typically offered only two options. The first option offered was to just make the student repeat the grade. My folks correctly guessed that it would humiliate me to be flunked into my younger brother’s grade.

The other humiliating option was special education and that was populated by kids with varying degrees of developmental delays. I didn’t want to be with the kids who had cerebral palsy or deafness or partial to complete blindness. Not that I disliked them, I just wanted to be with my “normal” friends.