When I’m From

 

 

When I was in elementary school in the 1960s, there was no such thing as a learning disability – at least not at my school. Children didn’t have things like dyslexia, ADHD or any of a myriad of other challenges. If you got things right away and excelled, you were smart. If you took a long time to learn things, you were slow, and if you took a very long time to learn things, you often repeated a grade. If you were considered the “R” word (I use that because that was the word used at the time), a designation given by a doctor, you went somewhere else, and often didn’t live with your family.

Sometimes families fought against having a child institutionalized, and tried, with varying levels of success, to have their child educated in a regular school. I knew a few people like that from my neighborhood.

They repeated grades and eventually learned enough to move on until they reached 16 – usually by eighth grade because the school didn’t want them repeating a grade more than once – and they were legally allowed to leave school. Then, if they were able to get jobs, it was at a basic level, and they stayed in the same job for the rest of their lives.

But those with learning disabilities, rather than the R word, were given different designations, mainly because teachers often didn’t have knowledge of disabilities, and didn’t know how to teach students how to overcome such obstacles. 

Some were called lazy because they could do the work but had difficulty paying attention, or because they could learn but somehow couldn’t make sense of the textbooks they read. Some were considered troublemakers or attention seekers because they called out in class or couldn’t stay in their seats.

And if you happened to be left handed, anything you did incorrectly was blamed on that. Whether you were punished for being left-handed in my school depended on whether you were a boy or a girl, and whether or not you had the misfortune of having a teacher who had it out for your gender.

I was in the left-handed category, blissfully unaware that any of the other “nonexistent” challenges applied to me.

When people learn that I attended Catholic school and still managed to grow up to be a left-handed adult, they are generally stunned.  In fact, other than one of the safeties who patrolled the aisles in our overcrowded first-grade class to help the teacher during handwriting class, no one ever bothered me about being left-handed.

But the same could not be said of the left-handed boys in my class. One told me years later how he was repeatedly hit with a ruler by the nun. It was fairly well recognized that she didn’t like boys.

Being left-handed, I tended to start writing my letters backwards from the wrong side of the paper. My mother, early on, corrected this tendency, but she was never satisfied with my handwriting ability. She considered my best to be nothing short of lazy and sloppy, and my homework was frequently torn up. I would then have to do it over. But on the bright side, because writing spelling words was an every night assignment, I became an excellent speller simply because I had to write my words so many times.

What they did not know about me at the time was that I am mildly dyslexic. I had a bit of difficulty when we first began learning to read because I didn’t understand some of the rules we were given. We were told that words that ended with tails – a term my teacher used for silent e on the end of a word, although I missed that part – had a long vowel sound. To me, a tail was the loopy bit that went below the line. My mother didn’t understand why I pronounced every word that ended with p, y, or g with a long vowel sound.

It wasn’t until I explained about tails that my mother realized that I was too concrete a thinker to understand what my teacher was telling us, and she then explained that the teacher only meant an e. After that, my reading pronunciation and comprehension picked up so much that I went from the second reading group to the first in under a month.

I must have some subgroup type of dyslexia. While I do have difficulty at times going from one line to the next while reading – bookmarks aren’t just for closed books – and sometimes important words jump out of one sentence and into another, making a jumble of the page, my major problem is with textbooks.

I can read novels, and even biographies without difficulty. But textbooks and technical manuals are somewhat beyond me. I can’t retain the information by simply reading. I need to either hear it or write it. And even then, I’ll never be able to find the facts I’m looking for again in the textbook.

I didn’t learn until college that outlining chapters was a lifesaver. As I read my assignments, I outlined what I read. That way, even though after reading it I couldn’t tell you what I’d read, I had notes to refer to, and I learned from those.

I managed to breeze through elementary school – often on the honor roll – without ever doing my textbook reading homework. If I heard it in class, I could reproduce it on a test.

When I didn’t do quite as well as my parents and teachers thought I should, they agreed that I was lazy, and if I weren’t so lazy, I would do better.

The proof of this to them was that, other than handwriting and art, my two worst subjects in school were history and geography. Those two subjects mainly only require one to be able to read. But it was a textbook that had to be read. And often, not everything we had to know was discussed in class. They knew I could read quite well. But I didn’t do well in those subjects. 1492, 1942, 1249 ans 1294 are pretty much the same number to me, as the numbers dance around and show off.

Phone numbers are a nighmare. If you say the number aloud, I can copy it correctly. If I am copying from a page, I frequently transpose numbers, and I have to very slowly, digit by digit check to make sure I've copied it correctly.

I did do really well in history and geography one year. In history, we were studying the Middle Ages, an era I’ve always loved, and in geography we were studying Europe. We started off with the UK and Ireland, and I did a fantastic job, since my ancestors were from Ireland and Scotland, and the Beatles were from England (and I loved The Beatles).

As we progressed through Western Europe, my grasp of the subject slipped until, by the time we reached Spain and Portugal, my grades were as bad as when we studied US geography (So many states and capitals!).

That year convinced my parents it was sheer laziness when I didn’t do well in history and geography. They didn’t understand how difficult it was to stay focused on a textbook.

Every year I vowed to do a much better job academically, do all of my homework – even the reading part – and be at the top of my class. And every year, that lasted about a week.

I really tried. I was one of the top 10 or so students in my class, but I just couldn’t hold onto the elusive textbook knowledge.

What I also didn’t know until I was an adult was that I also have ADD – unfortunately, I didn’t have the hyperactivity, which I could have used a bit of. I’m sure the ADD played a role in my lack of focus.

Because I was a very good reader – and loved an audience – my teachers rarely called on me to read. Instead, they called on those who had very little ability to read aloud. I had to pretend I wasn’t paying attention to be called on – they loved to embarrass children back then. Once I demonstrated I did, indeed, know where we were, and had read a sentence or two, someone else was called on to struggle through two or three paragraphs.

When it came to independent work, I was either hyper focused or off in that land I go to where my invisible friends all know me.

When the teacher was teaching a new concept, like expanding numbers, Roman Numerals or points of grammar, I understood the technicalities very quickly and was ready to move on to something else. Unfortunately, that never happened, so I’d zone out for the next few days while she retaught the same thing.

Most of my real difficulties in school were social. I didn’t get the subtleties of my classmates’ behavior. My so-called friends picked fights with me (arguments, not fist fights) for unfathomable reasons. I didn’t know how to fight with them or why they wanted to, so I just went off by myself. And they all grew up emotionally before I did (some say I still haven't), so my friend set kept getting younger.

How ADD mainly affected me was at home. My mother had a rule about how close you could sit in front of the TV. You had to be on the rug, and even then, I was often told to move back. It wasn’t because I was in anyone’s way. It was that early TV belief that the radiation from the TV would get you.

My problem was that if I sat on a chair or the sofa, there was too much space between the TV and me. Aside from it being more difficult to become one with the characters at that distance, even the airspace between the TV and me was a distraction.

This was so much of a thing with me that, to this day, I can recall what shows I watched as a small child, from Bertie the Bunyip and Captain Kangaroo to Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone, but I can’t recall a single episode – or in some cases, the characters themselves – unless I’ve seen the shows in syndication as an adult. I may have been facing the TV and wanting to watch, but if I weren’t right in front of the screen, I couldn’t maintain any attention to the show.

When people would tell me I was smart, I always felt like a fake. Of course I was lazy: my teachers and my parents said so. Every year, despite what my tests and report cards reflected, I was sure I was going to be left back to repeat the grade. Of course, I thought teachers could fail you if they didn’t like you, and I thought none of my teachers liked me. I doubt any of them remembered me once I was out of their class.

I once told my mother that school to me was like hanging outside a second-story window, holding onto the window sill, afraid someone would close the window on my fingers and I’d fall to my death.

That’s also how I’d still describe my social skills.

I like the idea of parties, but I don’t like being at them. I never know what to say, so I end up saying all the wrong things. People tend to avoid me, and when they don’t I’m just waiting for something terribly stupid to fall out of my mouth. Stage fright, to me, is going to a party where the only person I know is the one I came with.

But put me on a stage, and I’m in my element. I have never experienced stage fright on a stage. I’ll sing, I’ll act, I’ll play my guitar, and I’ll have the most fun a person can have because I don’t have to interact directly with the audience. There’s airspace separating us, and I’m not them.

One thing I did learn because of the stage is that I can’t memorize lines by reading them repeatedly. When I was in a play in community theatre, I knew everyone’s lines but mine. No matter how much I studied my lines, I didn’t hear them, so I had difficulty remembering them. Too late, I realized I should have read them on tape and listened to them. Ah well, next play. Someday.

Ironically, I write novels. I love playing with words. But it’s on my terms. It’s a conversation between me and my invisible friends (aka characters). And sometimes my invisible friends won’t talk to me, either.

Years ago, a group of my (visible) friends and I would get together every week. We all wrote stories, and we’d read them to one another and critique everyone’s work (kindly). At one point we discovered that out of seven or eight of us, only one wasn’t dyslexic.

So the question was asked: What one word did all of your teachers use to describe you?

And the answer was the same for every one of us.

Lazy.

Outside the Box

I sometimes wonder if I was born with a form of dementia.

I generally call it a short-circuit in my brain, which sometimes behaves almost like an out-of-body experience.

This sort of thing has been happening all of my life, and is not simply something that started after age 50. In fact, it hasn’t happened much at all since age 50.

I don’t know if it happened before I started school. The first memory I have of it was when I was in third grade. It was the first week of school. I know this because we were still in regular clothes, and hadn’t started wearing our uniforms yet.

In those days, girls’ dresses usually had sashes. As an eight-year-old, I couldn’t manage to tie the sash behind my back, although I could button, zip and tie shoe laces, all in front of me.

It was the end of the day, while we were waiting for our bus. I had asked one of my friends if she would tie my sash. My recollection of what happened was that I stood there quietly while she tied it, and that was the end of it. Well, she had said something funny, and I giggled.

However, the teacher, who had been out in the hall, suddenly dashed into the classroom wanting to know who had screamed. I thought she was crazy. No one had screamed. There was a little quiet talking, but certainly no screaming.

I know I was confused. My friend immediately looked at me and said quietly, “You did.”

I had not! When no-one said anything, she went around the class asking each person if they had done it. Everyone said no, and my friend kept saying over and over – quietly – “You did.”

I was the last one questioned, and when she asked, figuring my friend knew something I didn’t, I said that I did it. Because I hadn’t admitted it immediately – or perhaps because it had happened at all – I was given a punishment of having to write a 100-word apology.

When I got home, I explained to my mother what I knew of the situation, and what my friend had told me. Of course, she would not contradict the teacher or even write a note saying that I had no memory of the incident whatever.

What I should have done, except that, at eight, I didn’t have the words, was write my side of the story, and how I had no idea what she was talking about. At the end, I could have apologized for any inconvenience I might have caused.

But, as I said, I didn’t have the words. Instead, I wrote an apology that basically used the word very – misspelled as verry, I do recall that much –to make up about 90 of the words in the apology. And I’m sure it was tossed in the rubbish as soon as my back was turned.

The second time happened was when I was about 10. I was visiting relatives for a week. Apparently, when my aunt was out getting a few things for dinner, my cousin fell off one of those baby sit-on-and-scoot toys. Apparently, too, I told my aunt this when she returned home a few minutes later.

Nothing was made of the incident, since there was no blood, bruising or tears involved.

Later that night, apparently, my aunt thought something wasn’t quite right with my cousin. She asked me about him falling. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no recollection of him falling or even of telling her about it. I tried to pull the memory of it, but it was like trying to retrieve a parsley flake from molasses. All I could do was shrug and say I didn’t know.

I don’t think I have had any other episodes quite like that since.

There have been times when I was so involved in the pretend life I lived inside my head that I was out of touch with what was going on in front of me in the real world. 

Who I was in my head was never who I had to remember to be in real life. So there were times when I told people my name was David Michael instead of Cathy. That usually got strange looks. I’d laugh and say I was just kidding to cover my tracks. But anyone who really knew me as a child knew that I always pretended to be a boy named David Michael.

The other form this has taken started when I was in high school, and has also only happened a couple of times that I recall.

The first time was in Chemistry class. I really wanted to like Chemistry. I had visions of being the mad scientist. But my Chemistry teacher happened to be a warm body with a science degree, and that degree was in Biology. She could only explain the work in the exact words that were in the book. I seem to be a "textbook dyslexic," and so couldn’t make sense of what I was reading in the textbook (or any textbook, really).

I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand what she was teaching. Since our class was first track –what would now be called advanced placement – it was unusual for the majority of the class to fail to understand content or, as it turned out, to fail the first major exam.

Our intrepid teacher continued to repeat the same words in the same order to be met with the same lack of understanding from the class.

Finally, I raised my hand and said, “Do you mean…” and proceeded to spend five minutes explaining, in completely different words, the points she had been trying in vain to give us. It was a great explanation. All around me I heard, “Oh, now I get it!” along with the oohs and aahs of understanding. It was perhaps my best performance ever. 

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I said. I couldn’t even hear what I was explaining. It was as if some pixie sitting on top of my head was explaining Chemistry in a foreign language for all I got out of it.

The teacher’s eyes lit up. I never saw her so happy ever again. “Yes, yes, that’s it!” she said.

“I don’t understand that,” I replied, sincerely.

She immediately became extremely angry with me, and told the girl in front of me to explain to me what I had just said. Apparently, her explanation wasn’t as good as mine had been, and I never did understand.

And from that moment, that teacher never gave me credit for any intelligence whatever. I suppose I was lucky she didn’t send me to the principal for insolence.

The only other incident like that that I can recall happened when I was in my 20s. A friend was trying to explain to me how electricity works. I still have no idea.

After he spent about half an hour explaining it to me, I explained it back to him using completely different words, giving him an accurate accounting of the principles of electricity. It sounded very much like I knew what he was talking about.

But again, what was coming out of my mouth had no attachment to my conscious brain. I can’t access the portion of my brain that knows this stuff.

When I finished, he seemed happy that I understood. Until I told him that made no sense to me whatever.

I know he had used an analogy about electrons moving through a wire like water runs through a pipe. And at least he got a good laugh – and has never let me live it down – when I picked up a piece of wire, closed one eye, and looked at the end of it.

“Where’s the hole?” I asked.

No, I had no idea what he was talking about.

I know I’m not stupid. I know these things must be in there somewhere, but there’s no key to the door they’re locked behind.

The only other thing that comes close is when someone asks if I have an idea of how to do something to help one of the students I work with. Without even being aware that I’ve thought of something, I’ll give them a suggestion that usually causes their jaw to drop because they never would have thought of it.

I just shrug and say, “I kind of tend to think a little outside the box.”