How My Wife’s Undiagnosed Learning Struggle Taught Me To Make Lifelong Learning Accessible For All
Last month, I stood in the back of our small town library’s community room, folding flyers for our free after-school learning drop-in, and watched my wife lean over a second grader’s worksheet. The kid had traced the same three letters four times, each one backwards, and crumpled the paper halfway, shoving it into his hoodie pocket. His cheeks were pink, and he wouldn’t look up. My wife didn’t tell him to slow down or ask him what was wrong. She just pulled her own wallet out, flipped it to the side where she keeps her old 2010 driver’s license – the one where her birth date is written in messy, half-scrambled handwriting – and pushed it across the table. “See that?” she said. “I still mix up b and d sometimes, too. Want to try my trick?”
I didn’t know how much my wife’s school experience shaped her until we’d been dating two years, and we sat down to fill out mortgage paperwork one night. She got three lines in, pushed the pen across the table, and wouldn’t look at me. That’s when she told me she’d grown up with undiagnosed dyslexia. Her teachers called her lazy, told her she didn’t try hard enough, and by the time she dropped out of high school at 17, she believed them. She didn’t get a formal diagnosis until she was 27, when she signed up for a GED class and a teacher there finally recognized what was going on. She told me that for 10 years after that, she still avoided filling out forms or reading out loud in front of anyone, because she was still waiting for someone to call her stupid.
We moved here three years ago. The local school district had cut half their special education aide positions the year before, and a lot of parents were talking about how they couldn’t afford private screenings or tutoring. My wife kept bringing it up at dinner, how many kids were going through the same thing she did, how many adults she’d met around town who also never learned to read well enough to help their kids with homework or fill out job applications. So we asked the library if we could use the community room two nights a week, for free. They said yes, as long as we cleaned up after ourselves. We printed 50 flyers at the local print shop, paid for them out of our grocery budget that month, and that’s how our drop-in started.
A lot of people ask us what kind of program it is, what credentials we have. We don’t have a formal program. We just have tables and chairs, a basket of supplies, and two hours a week where anyone can come work on whatever they need, no sign-up required, no questions asked. The basket has sticky dots (my wife’s trick for people who mix up their starting lines – put a tiny dot on the left side of the page so you always know where to begin), fidget toys for kids who can’t sit still, highlighters, large-print handouts for adults with vision or processing issues, and extra pencils. We don’t make anyone say what they need help with before they sit down. If you need help, you just sit at one of the front tables, and one of us will come over when we can.
That’s the first thing I’ve learned that any parent or teacher can put into practice, no extra budget required. Most of the time, the biggest barrier to learning isn’t a lack of fancy curriculum or certified staff. It’s shame. People don’t want to stand up in front of a room and announce they can’t read well, or that their brain works a little differently, at any age. So instead of making people ask, just make help available. If you’re a classroom teacher, keep that basket of supplies on your desk where anyone can grab what they need without raising their hand or drawing attention to themselves. If you’re a parent running a neighborhood playgroup, keep an extra table open after playtime where anyone can work on homework or study materials without checking in. It doesn’t take extra work, just a small shift in how you set up the space.
The second thing is to normalize your own messy learning. My wife never pretends she’s perfect. When the 16-year-old working on his driver’s permit test asks her to read a question, she’ll sometimes stumble over the words, and laugh and say “Sorry, my brain mixes these up too, let’s try it again.” That’s way more helpful than pretending you have it all together. It tells people they don’t have to be perfect to learn something new.
We get a lot of adults coming in, too. There’s a mom named Maria who comes every other Wednesday after work to study for her GED. She dropped out when she was 16 because of the same undiagnosed dyslexia, and never went back until last year. She told me she wouldn’t have signed up for a formal class because she didn’t want to be the oldest person in the room, answering questions wrong. Here, she can work at her own pace, and ask for help when she needs it.
It’s not perfect. We have a waiting list for kids who need one-on-one help that we can’t always meet. We can’t afford to do formal dyslexia screenings, so we have to refer kids back to the school district, where wait times are six months or longer. Sometimes we run out of paper and have to ask for donations, and it takes a couple weeks to get more.
Last week, that same second grader brought in a worksheet he did at home, all the letters the right way around, and taped it to the community room wall. My wife wrote her name next to it, in her messy half-scrambled handwriting. We don’t have any big plans to expand or turn this into a big organization or anything. We just show up, two nights a week, and keep the door open. That’s enough, for now. My wife says the whole point is that learning doesn’t end when you graduate high school, and it shouldn’t only be for people who can afford it or don’t need a little extra help. We’re just here to make that easy, the way no one did for her.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How My Wife’s Undiagnosed Learning Struggle Taught Me To Make Lifelong Learning Accessible For All