LEARNED
Several times during my undergrad I had people suggest to me that I couldn't possibly understand what it's like to have trouble learning or to struggle in school. A more amazing statement could hardly be uttered. What makes this more amazing still is that these comments came not from strangers but from folks who know me somewhat, and in one case quite well.
In response, I recalled I still had a couple of report cards from elementary and high school displaying that, in grade four and twelve, I attained a C average. So, in a first attempt to convince the dubious, I posted scans of these to social media. In addition to my consistently poor grades, what these documents also reveal is the unanimous determination that I wasn't a dunce but only needed to try harder. In every grade, every subject, and nearly every unit I failed to excel; yet no adult made an effort to understand this beyond a presumption of laziness. Having done school for decades, read virtually all the education theorists, and having trained as a teacher myself, calling a five-year-old or a fifteen-year-old lazy or disinterested seems, well, pretty lazy and disinterested. And where a clear pattern exists, and we've known of a thousand possible issues and as many workarounds, it feels worse still. Weirdly, everyone you'll ever read or speak with agrees that forcing children across all of civilization to go to school and then merely press them through goes beyond stupid-level to hilarious-grade neglect.
But there are worse things than laziness and neglect. For instance, your teacher could take an interest in your learning and your future, as one of my high school English teachers did. She took me aside one class, after we'd gotten back our mid-terms, and explained that she felt I shouldn't waste my time trying to do any more schooling. School, she said, was clearly not something I was able to manage and that I might consider dropping out of high school, to save myself time and energy, and get myself a job. While demoralizing, this was better than the time my Biology instructor – the one who, rather than admitting she didn't have an answer to our questions, would regularly lie to us – threw her eight inch-long metal stapler at me across the entire length of the classroom, missed by mere inches, and took a chunk out of the door of the wooden cabinet hanging on the wall four feet behind me. What precipitated such a violent outburst? Well, I'd put my head down out of boredom and exhaustion from once again being lectured at rather than engaged and, you know, educated. Of course, at no time did she apologize. Having fully committed to, but only by fluke avoided, a likely career ending act of violence against a totally silent, motionless, seated (effectively asleep) student was no big deal. In fact, she double down and had me stand for the rest of the class, insisting that I was drowsy due to a lack of oxygen, because I had my head down... (And, being passive and obedient, I did what she asked.) So passionate about my learning and confident in the uplifting power of her words and the emancipatory content of her textbook, this senior educator – at the height of her career, experience, and earnings – was willing to sacrifice a pair of my incisors or even my vision, perhaps. (Dear iGen, this is what the world looked like before everyone was carrying a phone and camera in their pocket. And this is also why we worried less about words and names and more about stick, stones, and staplers...)
Aside from these courageous acts of applied pedagogics, and those like them from other seasoned educators, I always found school a challenge. Only after experiencing a two-year-long crash-course in discovering my learning-related disabilities, and rejecting all conventional learning and study techniques that were never of any use for me, did I perform well at school. Going from where I was at and just doing more of the typical routine, but longer and harder, as recommended, was no good for me at all. Of course I did so for a time because I'd bought the expert opinion that I was merely lazy. Eventually I abandoned all that when I realized that I retained nothing if I took notes in class, and had to spend hours reviewing material, essentially sitting through the lecture again. There was no way around this labour if I took notes; but I knew that I easily retained the contents of a two hour documentary or and episode of As It Happens or my favourite podcast – despite taking no notes. So I gave that a shot. I took no notes at all and just paid close attention in class and asked questions when they arose. Suddenly I soaked up everything the teacher had to share and I was mostly able to abandoned the whole concept of studying. Upon reflection, I'm not actually sure how it's even possible (never mind why anyone considers it optimal) to read a PowerPoint slide or text on a chalkboard, while listening to an instructor, and taking valuable notes at the same time. Though I imagine the conflict I have with this largely lies in my terrible reading skills.
The biggest challenge I have with conventional schooling is certainly my difficulty reading. Mostly I just read very slow. Slow reading is not so unusual but I read slower than anyone I know. For perspective, I read so slow that I simply cannot watch a subtitled film because the words turn over before I can get half way through what's on the screen. And I misread short phrases or single words quite commonly, too. If you've ever heard me read aloud you know that I can't make it very far without mangling words. When trying to read faster I stop seeing words and just skim or infer. This happens without intending to do so and hinders more than helps, of course, as I misread or don't catch important details. As a teenager and in my twenties I tried different methods for increasing my reading speed: by simply trying to read more and more often, as well as using other techniques like only seeing the words, avoiding mouthing them or saying them in my head, etc... Sustained efforts resulted in no appreciable change. Obviously, this problem with reading translates into a significant impairment in virtually all areas of education, as it is commonly enacted.
To add to this, I also have a serious issue with numbers. I'm profoundly dyslexic with numbers. Even with a small three digit number I often read, recall, and then recite the last two numbers in reverse. (I do appreciate that this sounds absurd unless you've experienced it.) If I do so little as copy a number from one page to another or write out a number I'm hearing told to me (a sum, the time, or a phone number, say) I frequently err. Even today, after decades of doing so, and now anticipating it, and even when I'm not in any hurry, I still trip up. I can be saying the numbers out loud and I will still write a different number to what I'm saying. The numbers simply don't translate properly. It's pretty wacky. This makes dealing with numbers a chore and dealing with them quickly, as in an exam, a real hurdle – meaning that all school math (aside from geometry) was painful at the best of times. Even when I used the knowledge that I did better with numbers when they were represented by objects or pictures teachers never allowed me to show my work this way – even if I clearly displayed comprehension. It took some self-awareness and self-advocating, and instructors with PhDs in mathematics, to appreciate what was going on and be able to work through these deficiencies.
Yet this reality, my experience with reading and numbers, wasn't the most interesting element of what I've discovered about my learning. What's more intriguing to me are the impacts of movement and distraction. Only after leaving high school did I fully realize that I don't think well, clearly or in any fluid manner, if I'm still. I'd noticed when I was a teenager that I had much more to say and was full of ideas when walking around but had little to say, and was in more of a fog, when stationary. I've always had this almost autistic ability to sit at home with someone all afternoon and say little or nothing; but if we go for a walk all of a sudden I can't shut up and can't get thoughts out fast enough. Obviously, if movement and thinking are even vaguely correlated in such a way then desks and the requisite stillness of most conventional classrooms are real structural antagonists to my learning and performance. Along with this desire and need to move, I've always had trouble getting distracted, and most seriously by sound. (I imagine if I was ten or fifteen years younger I would have been diagnosed with some amount of Attention Deficit Disorder as a result.) Today I can manage working through noise but must use various tricks to overcome the impediment. If I'm sitting in a library or cafe writing, say, my ideas are disorganized and come out in awkward chunks, broken up by my own tangential thoughts, dashed by what others around me are saying and doing; and, to counter this, I just know that I have to plug away and will need to go back and sort through the mess and attempt to make sense later – something not possible for students taking quizzes or final exams. Needless to say, like many, being forced to sit in a desk and told to be still for three hours at a time, told to concentrate or do any work at all while there's an air conditioning vent squealing and jittering away, in a room full of people tapping their toes or pencils, sniffling and clearing their throats, is a special kind of torture – and only something I was able to even mildly “get over” in my thirties. (To me, this common scenario, of expecting lucid and productive motionlessness, feels something like forcing an extreme extrovert to go on a silent retreat for twelve years. You just wouldn't do that and expect them to come out the other side psychologically well, never mind learned...)
Another less serious but still fairly consequential impediment to school for me was my writing. As commanded by all the teachers I encountered during my upbringing, including my parents, and up until my second semester of college, I made every attempt to write and print neatly. I think it was assumed that a sustained effort at neat writing would improve my neatness and eventually my writing speed too. That's probably a safe assumption but for me was something that never really transpired. Like with my reading or with taking notes, just doing more of it didn't have the expected results. Too bad. The demand to meet a certain expectation meant that the only option available was for me to forever write slowly. From age five on, my mother – who was a tough and passionate educator – forced me to write and rewrite my school work until it achieved what she felt was my best effort. I can remember sitting up late into the night, and night after night throughout elementary school, burning through page after page having erased so many times that I'd put a hole in the paper or made the page no longer presentable in her mind. And, as a result, you can then imagine just how truly excruciating every writing assignment and research project was. I have no doubt at all that this was done for my own good and could have resulted, in theory at least, enhancing my writing skills while instilling in me a strong work ethic. But, ultimately (even without considering the eventual ubiquity of digital text and digital communication more generally) this attempted rewiring of my brain did me little to no detectable good.
My slow writing didn't change until a Geography instructor, who I'd had for a couple classes at this point, asked me to come in to see him during his office hour. He felt like not only did I always attend class but I contributed, asked interesting questions, and knew the material; so he couldn't understand why my answers were so brief and why it appeared I didn't make it to the last page of the test. We talked about my reading slowly and that my comprehension goes down when I'm nervous or trying to rush, like during a test. And I explained that I just can't write both fast and legibly and so, to get any marks at all, I couldn't afford to take much time answering any one question and sometimes risked being incomplete in my answers. Aside from explaining that I could take a test that would permit me various accommodations if it was determined I had a legitimate learning impediment, he drove home that even if nothing else could be fixed I could feel free to scribble stuff down and even draw diagrams if I liked. He told me that it was his job to infer, or ask me to clarify later, but that he could only give me marks if there was ink on the page. That really changed things and emboldened me. That, at age 27, was probably my first real breakthrough in school. When I stopped attempting to write legibly (which I did by writing in all capitals), and instead scratched away quickly in my terrible handwriting, I bought myself all kinds of time for improved reading comprehension, for checking my numbers, for getting my ideas out and also being able to rework them as needed. And all that also caused me to relax, which in turn made everything easier.
So, with all of this experience in the world of education you can see that I was nothing less than astonished to find that I'd somehow managed to give the people around me the impression that I was even vaguely competent at reading, writing, and arithmetic.
