What happens when a struggling student gets their dream school acceptance: teacher insight for parents
I was grading exit tickets at my desk after school last Tuesday, half-listening to the custodian lock the gym down the hall, when Mia popped her head through my classroom door, holding her phone so tight her knuckles were white. She’s a senior I’ve worked with since her freshman year, when she transferred to our high school and dyslexia that had gone undiagnosed through middle school was finally identified. For three years, she’s stopped by my room after school once a week to work through essays, study for tests, and eventually chip away at her college applications. She didn’t say anything for a full ten seconds, just held the screen out toward me, and I had to lean in to read the subject line: “Congratulations on your acceptance to the UW Marine Biology Program.”
Mia’s wanted to study marine biology since she was 12, when her grandma took her camping on the coast and she spent three hours turning over rocks to look at crabs and anemones. When we first started talking about college, her dad pulled me aside after a parent-teacher conference and asked if I thought we should steer her toward something “less reading-heavy.” He said he just didn’t want to see her disappointed, after years of teachers telling her she wasn’t working hard enough, of her coming home in tears because she’d tested lower than she knew she was capable of.
That’s the part I end up talking to most parents about, when they sit in that same chair Mia was sitting in yesterday, worrying that their kid’s big dream is too much for their learning difference. I didn’t tell Mia’s dad he was wrong to worry. I just asked him to hold off on suggesting she change plans, and instead ask her what she needed to make it work. For Mia, that didn’t mean 3 extra hours of tutoring a week, or me rewriting her personal statement to make it “perfect.” It meant shifting our after-school sessions to lunch when she had to pick up her little brother from daycare. It meant letting her record my lectures instead of rushing to take notes that would be illegible by the end of class. It meant I only pointed out typos in her essays after she’d read the whole thing out loud to me first, instead of marking every mistake before she’d even finished drafting.
That’s the first concrete thing I tell parents now, when they ask how to support a kid with big dreams and big learning struggles: Instead of leading with “is this too hard?” lead with “what do you need to give this a try?” It’s a small shift in phrasing, but it changes everything. It tells your kid you believe they can handle the hard parts, instead of assuming they can’t. When Mia failed her first AP Bio test sophomore year, I watched her mom walk into the school to pick her up, and instead of saying “maybe this class is too much, let’s drop it,” she said “want to get a slice of pepperoni pizza before we sit down and go over what you missed?” That’s the kind of small, concrete support that adds up, way more than any generic “I believe in you” speech.
A month ago, Mia told me she’d pretty much accepted she wouldn’t get in. Her test scores were still lower than the average incoming freshman, even with extended time, and she’d had to take two general ed classes at the local community college last summer to bring up her GPA. She said she’d already picked out a backup program at a smaller school that felt doable, but she still got the notification email early while she was in math class, and ran straight to my room as soon as the bell rang.
After she finished crying and we took a blurry photo to send to her mom, I started thinking about what actually counts as the greatest news a student can get. It’s not always the acceptance letter to the dream school, though that’s certainly great. It’s the news that all the small, messy, embarrassing work you put in when you were tired and felt stupid actually mattered. Mia spent three years retyping every paragraph two or three times. She skipped going to the movies with her friends on weekends to work on her college apps. She asked for help over and over again, even when it made her feel bad to admit she didn’t get something the first time. For a lot of kids with learning differences, the hardest part isn’t the work itself—it’s feeling like you have to constantly prove you belong, even when you make mistakes.
The second thing I tell parents and new teachers is: don’t fix the struggle for your kid. It’s so tempting to rewrite the essay, to do the extra credit project for them, to ask the teacher for an easier assignment just to get a better grade. But that just teaches your kid that they can only succeed when someone else does the work for them. Mia’s personal statement had three small typos in it when she submitted it. I noticed them, I pointed them out, and she said she was fine leaving them, because it was her essay, typos and all. That’s what made it good: it was hers. It talked about how her dyslexia makes her read slower than everyone else, but that means she notices small details other people miss—like the way a tiny change in water temperature can change the entire ecosystem of a tide pool. The admissions officer actually mentioned that line in her acceptance note.
Mia’s still got a lot of hard stuff ahead of her. She’s working extra shifts at the grocery store to save up for books, she’s still figuring out how to request accommodations through the university’s disability office, and she’s already talked about how nervous she is to keep up with the reading load for upper division science classes. We don’t know if it’ll go perfectly. There’s a good chance she’ll have to retake a class, or have a semester where her grades are lower than she wants, and she’ll question if she belongs there.
But that’s okay. The greatest news she got wasn’t just that she got in. It was that she showed up, for three years, for herself, and that was enough. And that’s the lesson any kid can take away, whether they get into their dream school or not.
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