Reading, Writing & Frustration
Her bright but dyslexic daughter seemed destined for a future as an underachiever. Then new technologies provided help.
THE TURNING POINT IN THE STRUGGLE WITH OUR DAUGHTER'S DYSLEXIA came during Sarah's sophomore year in high school. She and I were in her bedroom, and, as usual, I was reading her lessons aloud to her. We'd started with chemistry, where I had barely navigated through the thicket of the periodic table. (Molybdenum? Yttrium?) Now we were deep into our third hour of Advanced Placement world history and reviewing a chapter on Chinese history.
Sarah paced the room, repeating back key phrases about 3rd century B.C. China and orally summarizing the material, paragraph by paragraph. I made a wild stab at pronouncing the name of the emperor who united the warring provinces of China and built the Great Wall: Qin Shihuangdi. It came out like "Quincy Honky."
  (Scott Robinson) Washington Post Magazine
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Sarah grabbed the book back. "That's not how my teacher pronounces it."
"Then you do it," I snapped.
Sarah burst into tears.
It's painful to recall, but the episode pushed us to discover and take advantage of powerful new technologies that eventually helped our oldest child achieve her full potential -- that of a girl capable of plowing through difficult coursework and pulling down a 4.1 grade-point average.
If only we could have foreseen the future in first grade, when we had our first inkling of a problem.
Back then, Sarah had a fondness for the book Put Me in the Zoo, not great literature but great fun to read when you're starting out on that voyage to literacy. She'd read the tale, about a funny, spotted leopard desperate for a home in the zoo, seemingly effortlessly, over and over again: "I would like to live this way. This is where I want to stay." At least, we thought she was reading it.
We soon discovered, when Sarah turned to other books, that she had been memorizing the words. Basic words such as "ball," "the" and "dog" baffled her. Sometimes she recognized words on one page but had no recall when she saw the words again a page later. At times, she reversed the order of words in sentences or skipped them entirely.
We brought up our concerns with her first-grade teacher. "You need to read to her more" was her response. But we were already reading heavily to Sarah. My husband and I are writers, and reading is a passion. We redoubled our efforts, recording the number of books on a log we kept on the kitchen table. Once a week, she took it to school, where the teacher put congratulatory stickers on it. By the end of the year, she'd hit 460 books.
Surely Sarah would pick up the ball and run with it, we thought. But while the other second-graders in her public school were sailing through The Magic School Bus and Amber Brown-- books with chapters, plots and complex thoughts -- Sarah was stuck with basic readers such as The Snowball.
"I saw a snowball on a hill," it read. "It rolled along and picked up Bill!"
