Reading, Writing & Frustration

By seventh grade, she used a regular laptop, where spell-checker became a lifesaver.

By then, she had grasped the hard lessons of life as a dyslexic -- that any task involving reading and writing would take her twice or three times as long as it took other kids. She went into victim mode, complaining that other kids had it too easy and that she was the only one who had to work so hard.

One day, she locked herself in the bathroom.

"I'm dumb! I'm stupid!" she screamed through the door. "Those tests that said I was smart -- they were wrong!"

In high school, concerned that she was sinking into a morass of self pity and anger, we had her retested by a private educational consultant, mostly to help her understand that her dyslexia was real. The results were the same. Her ability to blend sounds while reading, her reading fluency, her "word attack" (that is, her ability to process and sequence sounds) were far below average.

As we had requested, the consultant was blunt as she went through the results with my husband, me and Sarah. She ticked off Sarah's many strengths and then turned to her prospects for academic success.

"You are never going to get a lot of A's," she told Sarah. "It wouldn't be fair to expect that of yourself. B's and C's are more realistic, and there's nothing wrong with that."

My husband and I were relieved. Maybe this would take the pressure off Sarah and reassure her that there was no shame in an average performance in school.

Sarah's face darkened. She nodded stiffly, and as soon as we were out the door, she turned on us furiously.

"She's wrong," Sarah hissed at us. "I can so get A's. I'm going to get a 4.0."

SARAH SIGNED UP FOR HONORS-LEVEL AND ADVANCED PLACEMENT CLASSES at our public high school. She plunged into dense college-level textbooks and demanding writing assignments. But her laptop and Franklin speller couldn't keep up with the growing demands of her schoolwork. We ended up reading many of her assignments to her: a process that could take four hours or longer each night. Then came the outburst over the Chinese history lesson.

The next day, I found the Web site for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic -- a nonprofit organization that produces recordings of books and textbooks for people with visual impairments and learning disabilities -- and signed her up. The educational consultant we'd seen in third grade had suggested it, but I had always thought that Sarah could get by without it.