I started reading to my son in the womb. My entire family is a group of readers, and I wanted him to have all the joys of reading we have.
As I read to him while I was pregnant, he would either kick in response or calm down. I suppose, depending on the book. When he was a baby and a toddler, I read to him at bedtime every night. Introducing all my favorite children’s books and discovering new ones as I read to him was a joy to us both.
We read “Big Bear, Little Bear,” and he could say the repeating phrases with me as I read and pointed to the words. He loved looking at books and would ask me,
I could read by the time I started first grade at age 6, because my mother taught me. As she taught me, unbeknownst to either of us, my 4-year-old sister learned alongside me. By the time she started first grade at age 6, she could read so well that they moved her up to second grade. She could have gone to third, but moving to second was traumatic enough.
Her daughters, ten years older than my son, are readers. One more than the other, but now they are grown, we share books with them and my other sister, almost like a family book club.
I introduced “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle to all of them, including my son, and it remains our all-time favorite. However, when my son was old enough to read it, I had to read it to him.
My son started kindergarten a month after he turned 5-years-old. As an only child, he was excited to spend his days with other kids. It was a Montesorri school, which is self-paced, so the teacher and I didn’t worry too much that he wasn’t reading yet. I continued to read to him every night.
By the end of kindergarten, it was clear he still couldn’t read. I’m a former educator, and I wasn’t concerned because boys start reading at an older age than girls. In fact, we do boys a disservice asking them to learn to read when they are closer to five than six. That part of their brains isn’t fully developed yet.
For first grade, I took him to the school where I was the school counselor. I had his teacher picked out. However, I asked him before I did it, and explained that it was different from Montessori and they would expect him to sit at a desk in a row, and that everything would be scheduled.
He already thought there was a problem. He wanted to read.
Obviously, there was no lack of intelligence
Happily, his first-grade teacher was patient and had worked with me with other children who struggled to read. To this day, he says he is grateful to Ms. Griffin for teaching him to read. Big sighs of relief all around.
However, as he progressed to fourth grade, he continued to spell certain words oddly. He wrote “wen” for when and “wer” for where. He reversed letters while reading or writing. His writing didn’t match his intelligence, as his lack of reading skills hadn’t matched it earlier. I continue to read the harder books to him.
So, in fourth grade, I gave him a screening test for dyslexia. He scored as Dyslexia Remediated. Which isn’t as encouraging as it sounds.
Remediated means he had discovered and created his own ways of figuring out words. And it was exhausting. In third grade, he suffered often from headaches and stomach aches, and didn’t like school. His third-grade teachers refused to put him in the gifted/talented classroom. He made himself go to school every day to help a friend in class who was autistic. He blamed his fatigue on Ryan.
I took him back to Montessori for fifth and sixth grade, and I requested that he be tested for learning disabilities. They did, but the ARD meeting where we discussed what to do next did not go well.
I had naively trusted the school district
I was naive. I had left the school district by then, but I had been one of the first Special Education teachers in Fort Worth ISD in my twenties. Then, we taught students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and ADHD in Resource rooms for part of the day, and in regular classes for most of the day.
We had wide-ranging testing done by psychologists, there were social workers assigned to schools, Special Education teachers like me were trained in modification and remediation models and techniques. Twenty-five years later, I foolishly trusted the system.
By then, most of that had gone by the wayside for students who are dyslexic. A Texas legislator had a child with dyslexia, and didn’t want them classified as needing Special Education. This left little help.
Once he was tested in the Montessori school, they acknowledged that he had some difficulties with reading, but said it wasn’t severe enough for Special Education, and they didn’t have any actual programs for dyslexia.
They did allow him to go to the Special Education room to use a computer program called Lexia whenever he requested to do so. It helped, but a middle school boy is unlikely to request often enough to go to a Special Education classroom if not required.
Stop reading to him
The psychologist who tested him asked me if I read to him.
Okay, lady, those are fighting words. She went on to say her son had difficulty reading, but she wouldn’t read to him. Apparently, so he would “figure it out for himself.” I felt sorry for her kid.
The screening I gave him already indicated he was figuring it out for himself. And that wasn’t enough.
By seventh grade, he was back in regular school. Montessori didn’t have basketball, and basketball was, and is, his passion. It was the reason he went to school from seventh grade through high school graduation. It was the reason he went to college.
I immediately requested that he be tested again for dyslexia and offered services. Since I knew the psychologist, I was sure he would get what he needed now.
For two years, he was either not put on the testing schedule or, when he was, it was canceled. He also began to be treated differently by some of his teachers. To cover for his difficulties reading, he became the class clown. His grades went from As and Bs to Cs. Still no testing.
Institutionalized racism played a part
I now believe his teachers and the system practiced institutionalized racism. Mostly unconscious, but racism nonetheless. In their minds, he, as a half-Black kid who played basketball and was a class clown, was doing the best he could academically. I believe they thought Cs and low Bs were the norm for him.
I kept reading to him
I continued to read to him, including his harder textbooks. We watched movies based on books he was assigned to read.
When he started high school, I continued using movies of books he was assigned. We discussed the movies after watching them, so he could anchor what happened in the story. And I read the books to him.
He managed most of his textbooks by then, but I had to read the longer ones with him
We limped along while I continued to pursue testing.
Until he threatened suicide out loud in class
He was a sophomore in high school, and a teacher asked him to stand up and read out loud to the class. He tried. Then he slammed the book down and said,
I started him on antidepressants and counseling. You would think that would have spurred the school system to test him. You would have thought wrong.
One of my friends, who liked Blake, as most adults who knew him outside of school did, was part of the FWISD administration. She told me to threaten to sue. I did.
Before I threatened to sue, I took him to a psychologist in the private practice where I was now a therapist. I paid out-of-pocket to have him receive psychological and neurological testing that included an IQ test.
The definition of a learning disability
His IQ was 120. Well above average, and in the gifted range. The range his third-grade teachers didn’t think he fit. When I was teaching, this was the very definition of a learning disability. Someone who wasn’t performing up to their IQ capability.
If he had been in school when I was first teaching, his difficulty reading would have been noticed, tested, and remediated.
Finally tested and vindicated
After I threatened to sue, they got him into testing quickly. Six years after I initially requested help for him.
During testing, I brought him his lunch. The school psychologist took me aside and told me,
We both had tears in our eyes.
He was designated 504, which required he be given more time for testing and assignments. His grades improved dramatically. I continued to work with him at home, using some of the tools I used as a teacher.
I also continued to provide movies for books. I would read things for him and give him synopses, asking him to repeat them.
He improved in reading as the pressure and stress lessened. The spelling took considerably longer. I proofread his papers in both high school and college for spelling.
And…I kept reading to him
I read to him until he went away to college. He attended an academically challenging school, second academically after Rice, and ranked twelfth in the nation academically, after Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. He chose the university because he could play basketball there. With his 504 designation and modification of more time on tests, he did well there both athletically and academically.
As an adult, he is a voracious reader, although he uses audiobooks most often. He still misspells certain words. He still mixes up letters or sees a word and thinks it’s another one. He’s on his third attempt to read The Alchemist, and is determined to finish it.
He also taught himself coding recently to create a manifestation, gratitude, and inspirational App called Vortex, by Blake Darren Scott. As someone who knows what struggle feels like, he wants to smooth the way for others.
I admire his resilience and strength, and don’t regret a single book I read to him all those years.
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This post was previously published on the Challenged.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Carol Lennox
