1. Bad News

(FYI: The Big Idea here, if there is one, is to post the chapters of a book currently titled Each Brain Is Unique: Learning Disabilities & Hidden Abilities as I write. Comments and suggestions will be incorporated into the final draft before going to print.)

My parents must have been devastated. Their first born son, flunking third grade? Both of them had been to college back in the WWII era, my dad earning an accelerated degree in electrical engineering from MIT in just two years before heading off for a stint in the army, and my mom leaving her musical studies at Vassar to mary him. By the time I came along, they were living in an architect-designed home in a prosperous suburb of Boston, and sending us to expensive private schools. The men in my mother’s family were bankers and lawyers, in my father’s, engineers. None of them had ever flunked out of elementary school.

But then again, there was the persistent nagging fear, at least so I realize as I put the pieces together in hindsight, that the genetic stock of their adopted children might not be up to the high standards of the rest of the family. I had come from an orphanage (“Just like Orphan Annie?” my five year old daughter asks me), along with a quiet unexpected identical twin brother, and all my parents knew was that a young mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, somewhere in the Chicago area. The orphanage (minus the singing and dancing) was located in Evanston, to the north of Chicago. We were cared for there until the wheels of adoption ground round to my parents’ application, and a social worker called to ascertain that my mother, although shocked, would indeed consider raising twins if that was what it took to push the adoption through.

By the time I was in third grade at the Dedham Country Day School, my parents had brought three more children home, two sisters and then a baby boy, Roger, who, to our alarm, only lasted a year or so until he was sent back, apparently for not being bright enough. (Perhaps he had some disability that warranted his being institutionalized, at least in those years, but he seemed a cheerful and normal baby to us, and I wonder what the unconscious message was for the rest of us when we realized that inadequate children could be returned.) I might just add that even writing his name down now feels like breaking a taboo. Our parents never spoke of him.

But back to third grade. A grey-haired teacher with rows of blooming geraniums on the classroom windowsills soon discerned that I was not reading the text when it came my turn. I was ad libbing from the photos and what the previous student had read.  Easier than deciphering those odd markings in their swimming lines at the bottom of the page, where recognizable letters or words sometimes popped up, but were surrounded by mysteries that would have taken a lot of squinting and experimentation to decipher. My writing was hardly any better. I seemed not to be able to pick up third grade spelling, even with months of repetitive drilling. My parents came in for a conference. They were told two things, at least two things that they shared with me.

One, I would be repeating third grade. (The news soon spread. It was met by some of my classmates with pity, while others eagerly teased me about it. None of them played with me at recesses afterward.)

Two, the principal and my teacher, along with a consulting psychologist, gave my parents some helpful advice about alternative approaches. I was never going to make it to college, but that was all right. I seemed bright enough, even if unsuited to academics, and a trade school was something they needed to think about. (In hindsight, I realize the psychologist must have diagnosed me entirely from the teacher’s description, without ever testing me.) His diagnosis, repeated to me by my parents, was that my brain must have been starved of oxygen during a difficult birth, damaging certain critical areas involved in language and reasoning.

I’ve met many bright young people who are the first to go to college in their families. Sometimes it’s hard for them to convince their parents that college is worth the time and expense. My family suffered from the reverse of this problem. My father,and his grandfather (who had raised him) were MIT graduates. All the men in my mother’s family had gone to Harvard. The idea of a son who would at best manage to graduate from trade school and become a landscaper or carpenter was alarming, to say the least, but they persisted as best they could, hiring a tutor in the emerging specialty of dyslexia to work with me at school, and sending me to summer-long camps where retired teachers drilled me endlessly in spelling and basic math. (The first of these summer tutors was a large, toad-like man, swelling out of his green camp-uniform shorts and shirt, with halitosis so severe that it was painful to approach the other side of the table for our sessions).

A year behind my twin brother and just one year ahead of my next sister (who excelled at all things academic), I stumbled along through those elementary school years, graduated sixth grade at the bottom of my class (except for art; the art studio was my refuge in those years, and the art teacher always liked my work). What to do with me next? My brother had been sent, years earlier, to the more rigorous Dexter School (where, as students were often reminded, the Kennedys had gone), and I was sent along behind him for seventh and eighth grade. My father, who still recalled his grade-school Latin almost perfectly and could do advanced mathematics on his pocket slide rule, spent many an hour drilling me on declinations and conjugations. With a deep sigh, he would test me on yesterday’s lesson, ascertain that I recalled almost nothing of it, and begin again. Still it refused to stick, and I must have logged some of the lowest grades on my math and Latin tests that Dexter had ever seen. My parents were resigned. They already knew I wasn’t on track to be a Senator or President, let alone a bank manager, but they wanted to get me through high school.

After seventh grade, I was bundled off to a sleepy prep school a few miles north of the famous Andover Academy, and a also a few miles behind it in academic rigor (at least in those days; I hear it’s better regarded now). There I moved into a dorm, happy to be away from the pressures of family life, but did no better on drill-oriented exams. However, perhaps because it was a bit of a backwater, its campus set on an old New England farm, the school still had one foot in the liberal academics that had come in with the 1960s. In the second year I found myself in seminar-style classes where the teachers valued class discussion and thoughtful papers over memorization. Oddly, I began to do well. Very well. I also seemed to gain some confidence there, beginning to step forward as a leader in student government and extracurriculars. Upon graduation, I won several prizes, I can’t recall exactly which, except the one that surprised and pleased me most: The Theology Prize. It was an old fashioned Episcopal school, but our theology teacher was a modern man, teaching philosophy and encouraging independent thinking.

I continued to be remarkably poor at memorization skills, unable to recall my mother’s birthday, for one example. Driving to new places was an anxious adventure, as I could easily loose my way, sometimes even loose the slip of paper with the address of my destination. To visit colleges, I borrowed my father’s car and wandered the byways of New England, sometimes taking accidentally circuitous routes to my interviews, but knowing myself well enough to leave plenty of time for getting lost and found. The odd thing was, I seemed to do reasonably well in my quest for a college that would take such intellectually damaged goods. (I still assumed that my brain carried scars from that hypothesized birth trauma by which the consulting psychologist explained my third grade dyslexia.) When I received a letter inviting me to attend Harvard College, I had to read it over and over before convincing myself that I was reading it accurately and had actually gotten in.

My parents seemed surprised, but still not very optimistic about my long term prospects. I still had not demonstrated much in the way of competence or inclination toward anything they recognized as the stuff of good upper class Bostonian careers. Someone who spent his high school years writing papers about philosophy and ornithology, built theater sets, and took every studio art class offered, did not seem to be on track as a future banker, doctor or lawyer.

That much of their assessment was certainly true. Instead, I chose an odd career for someone who was diagnosed with dyslexia: I became a writer. Also, as a sort of sideline, an on again off again teacher and author of curriculum materials. I seem to have specialized in the things that most confounded me as a student. I still don’t know why.

However, despite my ill-advised career choice, I seem to have made a decent go of it through my writing, thinking, and, the common thread through every assignment, learning. How can someone who was supposed to be functionally illiterate and hobbled from higher academic pursuits by a learning disability ever become an avid writer, educator, and learner? This question drives the next chapter’s ruminations, because I cannot answer it easily or quickly in a single sentence. However, I will an initial insight that I’ve come to slowly, in thinking about my own case: Healthy people, normal people, those who do reasonably well in school, are not expected to be uniform. People are individuals. They have their own thoughts, talents, and desires. They will pursue their own individual life and career paths, and why not? Just as no two faces are the same, no two brains are the same.

But when it comes to learning disabilities in general, and dyslexia in particular, there is a strange lumping effect: While we may have individualized test results and diagnoses, in most matters, we are treated as if we are quite uniform in nature. Dyslexics and their problems can be summed up neatly in a set of suggestions from a specialist. (The bulleted action points at the end of nearly every workup for a student with a diagnosed learning disability are strikingly similar, if not cut-and-paste.)

What if no two dyslexics are alike? I mean, anything alike? Then it would be relatively meaningless to even label them dyslexic. Instead, you’d need to get to know them individually, as if they were, dare I say it, normal people, the ones who are automatically accorded the right to be unique. I am humorously reminded of the bumper sticker I saw once that read, “Dyslexics of the world, untie!” Rather than unite, I think we do need to untie ourselves from each other and the smothering blanket of the label. The message on that sticker is, whether intentional or not, far deeper than a joke about poor spelling.

- Alex Hiam, Amherst Mass.