What my son’s greatest student news taught me about supporting kids with learning differences
I was folding clean laundry at the kitchen counter yesterday, crumbs from my 10-year-old’s after-school granola bar still crusted on the edge of the table, when my 13-year-old Jax ran in from checking the mailbox, waving a cream envelope so hard the corner smacked our bowl of bananas. “I got in,” he yelled, grinning so wide his dimples showed all the way. “I actually got in.”
Jax has dyslexia. The program he applied to is the 2-week teen rock climbing intensive at our local community college, something he’s been asking to do since he started climbing at the gym two years ago. The application required a 200-word essay explaining why you wanted to attend. For most kids that’s a 20-minute homework assignment. For Jax, that’s the kind of requirement that has ruled him out of dozens of things he’s wanted to do over the years: the school writing club, the regional science fair, even a summer soccer camp that required a written self-evaluation.
He insisted on doing the whole application himself at first. I left him alone at the dining table after dinner the first night, and when I came back an hour later, he’d crumpled three sheets of paper into a ball in the trash, his pencil snapped clean in half. He mixes up the order of letters so often when he writes by hand that even he can’t read half of what he puts down, and switching to the laptop didn’t help much—autocorrect changes half his words to something totally different, and he can’t scan the text fast enough to catch all the mistakes before he gets frustrated. That night he leaned his head on the table and said, “Why does everything require writing? I just want to climb rocks. I don’t need to write an essay about it to be good at climbing.”
I sat down next to him, didn’t tell him it was okay to quit, didn’t tell him “try again tomorrow.” I just pulled up the prompt on the laptop and said, “Tell me what you want to say. I’ll type the words as you say them. Then you can go through and change anything you want, leave any mistakes you want. I won’t fix anything you don’t ask me to.” He talked for 10 minutes straight: about how he wanted to learn to lead climb, about how he wanted to meet other kids who liked climbing as much as he did, about how he wanted to practice on real outdoor rock instead of the gym walls. I typed exactly what he said, no rephrasing, no fixing wording. When he was done, he went through it himself, changed two lines, fixed the three typos he caught, and said that’s it. I offered to fix the rest, and he shook his head. If they don’t want me with my typos, he said, I don’t want to go.
That’s when I started thinking about how often we get this wrong, as parents and teachers. For years, well-meaning people have told me that if I help Jax with his writing, I’m babying him, that he needs to learn to do it all on his own to get by in the real world. But what this experience taught me is that most of the time, the barrier isn’t Jax’s ability—it’s the arbitrary requirement that everyone does everything the exact same way. The point of the essay for the climbing program wasn’t to test writing skills. It was to make sure the applicant actually cared about going, that they weren’t just signing up because their parents made them. Jax showed that, clear as day. The people running the program didn’t care about the typos. They just read what he had to say, saw he was serious, and accepted him.
This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about small, easy adjustments that let kids show what they actually know. For example, if you’re a teacher grading a science project on rock formation, the point isn’t to grade spelling and handwriting. If a kid struggles with writing, let them dictate their report to you or a paraprofessional, let them use speech-to-text without forcing them to fix every typo before you grade the content. If you’re a parent whose kid wants to apply for an extracurricular, ask them “what part of this is the hardest for you?” before you jump in to do it for them or tell them it’s too much. Sometimes all they need is for you to write down their words while they talk, so they don’t have to fight through two barriers at once. It takes 10 extra minutes, it doesn’t require any special funding or training, and it changes everything.
Jax can tie eight different climbing knots faster than any instructor at his gym. He can spot a safe, doable route up a 40-foot wall in 10 seconds that takes most new climbers five minutes to work out. He can name every type of hold, every piece of gear, and explain how to handle common falls better than most adult beginners I’ve seen. None of that shows up on a written essay. For years, we’ve spent hours every week doing writing drills to help him keep up with his grade level, and that work matters, but it doesn’t matter more than letting him do the thing he’s great at, right now.
We taped the acceptance letter to the front of the fridge, right next to his first climbing competition participation ribbon. Jax leaves for the program in two months, and he’s already saving his allowance for a new pair of climbing shoes. We still have fights over homework most weeknights. His IEP for 8th grade is still under review, and we don’t know if he’ll get all the testing accommodations he needs next year. Some people still ask me when he’ll “grow out” of his dyslexia, or why I don’t make him practice writing for an hour every day instead of letting him go to the climbing gym. I just tell them what that envelope taught me: the greatest news a kid can get isn’t just getting accepted to something they want. It’s being seen for what you can do, instead of being judged for what you struggle with. It’s still messy, it’s still a fight some days, but right now, that’s enough.
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