A Safe Place for Joey. Mary MacCracken

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СКАЧАТЬ so he doesn’t learn to read when he is taught by a whole-word or “see and say” approach. He often cannot even remember letters themselves and twists b and d around. He has difficulty retrieving the words he needs in order to say what he wants to say: “Can I borrow the … you know, the thing you cut with?” Or words come out wrong sometimes: “bermembered” for “remembered” or “basgetti” for “spaghetti.” He may read “united” as “untied” and “nuclear” as “unclear.”

      Math difficulties, the Orton Society says, are now included as another part of dyslexia; math is another language that needs remembering and managing. A child with dyslexia has difficulty with overall organization – he loses his sneakers, his homework, and his sense of direction. Other members of the dyslexic’s family through the generations probably had similar difficulties.

      Dyslexia is not a disease but a kind of mind, often a very gifted mind. There have been many famous dyslexics – Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Nelson Rockefeller, Cher, and Bruce Jenner among them. A child, or even an adult, with a dyslexic mind can learn. He or she (though four times more often he) just needs more help and must be taught in a systematic, sequential way, using strengths, minimizing weaknesses, and helping him or her achieve success. Experts agree this child can learn to read, to write legibly, to spell passably well, and to put his or her thoughts into clear, understandable spoken or written words.

      Children with learning disabilities, or dyslexia, or learning differences, as some of my colleagues put it, have very real and important problems that deserve study, effort, and understanding. The labels don’t really matter; the children do. We can help them – and we know how. These are children who can succeed if they are given the chance.

      By the time I had finished my four diagnostic sessions I had found a lot more things to like about Joey. He had even more going for him than I had suspected. He was far, far brighter than the average seven-year-old. Mrs. Stone had given me a copy of the Child Study Team report, and there the school psychologist had written that Joey’s “Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient on the Wechsler was in the average range.” This was true; the full-scale score was average, but it didn’t begin to tell the whole story. There were enormous differences in Joey’s subtest scores, ranging from a high 98th percentile in Vocabulary to a low 2nd percentile in Block Design. When there are tremendous peaks and valleys of this kind, the child is almost always much brighter than his full-scale score shows. To average out subtest scores is like averaging the temperatures at Death Valley to seventy degrees when in actuality it’s sometimes one hundred forty degrees during the day and zero degrees at night.

      Unlike many learning disabled children, Joey’s receptive and expressive word knowledge was large and rich. When asked what a nail was, he replied, “It’s a construction material – you hammer it in like this.” On another test Joey described elbows and knees as “joints,” whereas most children his age answer, “Things that bend.”

      In contrast to his good vocabulary, verbal abilities, reasoning, practical judgment, and common sense, his abilities to understand spatial relationships, to put things in proper sequence, and to repeat from memory a series of digits or words were very poor.

      In the Block Design subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Test, he pushed the blocks across the desk in frustration and banged his head with his hand, shouting, “Stupid kid!”

      When he couldn’t remember more than two numbers and none at all backward on the Digit Span subtest, he began bouncing up and down and finally out of his chair.

      During the third testing session, Joey told me that he thought maybe he “saw things funny.” He was right, or at least when he tried to reproduce what he saw with paper and pencil they came out “funny” and bore little resemblance to the original. Joey continued to use his left hand consistently, and some designs were drawn sideways, some upside down; angles looked like double dog ears.

      Joey had other troubles. He read 41 as 14; the letters he meant to be d’s turned out as b’s. He had memorized twenty sight words, but when he came to a word he wasn’t sure of, somehow the letters twisted around and he read “cliff” as “calf” and “felt” as “fleet.” When he read out loud he skipped lines and made up words, but if I read to him, he could answer every comprehension question in detail.

      Joey was not only smart, he was aware and sensitive. As we started a spelling test he said, “Okay. I’ll do it, but could you please not put that big circle on the front that tells how many I got wrong, like they do in school.” Joey demonstrated:

      It wasn’t only letters and numbers that Joey mixed up. He jumbled his own thoughts as well. I asked him to write a few sentences about whatever interested him. He thought hard and then took a long time to write. “I’m going to make this neat,” he told me as he worked.

      When I asked him to read out loud what he had written, he read, “I like to go fishing because we always win.”

      “Wait a minute here,” he interrupted himself. “That’s not right. See, I began about fishing, but then somewhere, about here” – Joey put a line after fishing, which was written “fsihign” – “I must’ve begun thinking about soccer.”

      I didn’t have a test to measure the restlessness inside Joey. But observation made it clear that he was much more active, tense, and distractible than the usual seven-year-old. I even wondered if the neurologist’s decision against medication was correct.

      I had worked with other children who were labeled hyperactive or as having a “hyperkinetic syndrome” – and I had seen medication such as Ritalin work for some, although not for all. Originally, the thought of medication of any kind repelled me, but I learned that it did work for some children as long as it was carefully monitored by a pediatric neurologist or experienced pediatrician. Often hyperactivity and learning disabilities are considered one and the same, but they are actually two separate conditions. When they occur together I think of it as “dyslexia plus,” the plus being hyperactivity. Both teaching and rearing these children takes a great deal of energy and love. Just to get them to tune in so that they can hear what you are saying is a big job in itself – to sustain their attention minute after minute so that they can learn is a tremendously difficult task. These are vulnerable children – their sensations heightened, their motors always running a little too fast, never quite in time with the rest of the world. They are exhausting children. They need more supervision than most. They need more loving. They also give it back in quantum measure.

      The Stones arrived at the same time but in different cars, coming straight from work to my office. Mr. Stone was well over six feet tall, lean, with hair just slightly darker than Joey’s.

      “Did you get a sitter?” Mr. Stone asked his wife.

      She shrugged, a small frown crinkling her forehead. “I tried three, but no luck. I think they were making excuses.” She turned to me. “Ours isn’t the easiest house to baby-sit. When I went back to work last year I tried to make arrangements to have someone there when the boys got home from school. Nobody lasted longer than a week. They all said they couldn’t take Joey. They never knew where he was or what he was up to – and if he was there, he was into something he shouldn’t have been into. So now the boys look after themselves. Joey, and Bill, he’s our eleven-year-old, fight constantly, but Richard, the oldest, is thirteen and responsible, and he can handle Joey better than most. My parents live across town, so Rich can call them if anything serious comes up. My mother is ill, but my father can drive over.”

      “Which usually makes things worse rather than better,” Mr. Stone added.

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