My phone buzzed on the table and Jesse’s name popped up on the screen.
“Oh my god, so glad that is over,” she said as soon as I picked up. She had sent me a “D-day” text a few hours earlier as she left to take her board certification exam, and I could hear the huff and puff of her breath in the cold air as she walked back across campus to her parked car.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“I think it was ok.”She spoke quickly, her voice teetering on that edge where the adrenaline of the morning met the relief of the moment and the exhaustion that would soon follow. “Felt like the practice exams, and I did ok on those. This past week has been brutal. I rested yesterday, slept all day and I think a Jello shot and back to bed is all I can handle for the rest of today.”
I laughed. You might imagine she is exaggerating, sleeping all day after weeks of studying, off to bed after a four-hour exam, but I know better. I know she is dead serious. I have seen this routine ever since elementary school. Following a few hours of schoolwork, I would find her lying on the floor or in a chair, asleep, napping in the middle of the day. In high school, she would come home at 2pm and sleep for a couple hours before returning to campus for activities or beginning homework. Exam week, SATs and AP exams would knock her out for the rest of the day.
If you are the parent of a dyslexic child, you know this to be true. Your child comes home from school exhausted.
Exam week makes it worse. My youngest, a high school sophomore, just finished midterm exams last week. The schedule is two exams a day, for four consecutive days, with just a 15-minute break in between exams. Cedar, like many dyslexic students, has extra time accommodations, so at the end of the second exam period they stay late, sometimes for both exams, to finish. It adds up to more than five hours a day of testing. By the end of the week, they are toast.
Exam week is a challenge for all students, but it is particularly hard for dyslexic students. The dyslexic brain is literally working harder than a typical brain to complete these tasks.
For the past twenty years researchers have known that there are differences in brain activation, visible on fMRI scans and evident in metabolic studies, between dyslexic and non-dyslexic brains. These studies showed that the brains of dyslexic students were “working a lot harder and using more energy than normal children.” More recently, researchers found dyslexic brains “deficient” in what they called “rapid neural adaptation,” meaning these brains did not adapt to repetition in the same manner as typical brains. This resistance to rapid adaptation forces them to process words fresh every time they encounter them.
Of course, any parent or teacher who has watched a child painstakingly sound out a word on one line then appear to have absolutely no recognition of it on the next line, knows this to be true. But it turns out it’s not just words. Dyslexic brains adapt less quickly to all sorts of neural stimuli. Apparently, the world is relentlessly new and fascinating to the dyslexic brain. While researchers label this difference a “deficiency,” I wonder if it is a start to understanding the source of the observed creativity and openness to novelty of the dyslexic brain.
I expect every dyslexic student has been told at some point that they just need to “try harder,” or “focus” and “apply themselves.” I did this myself when my oldest was a young student. I didn’t understand dyslexia. I was baffled by her struggle. I cringe now when I think of it.
What does it mean to a 6-year-old to “try harder?” How, in their mind or in their physical body, are they supposed to do that? When Jesse was six, she would clench her fists, grit her teeth and furrow her brow as if she could use her muscles to manifest “trying harder.” We couldn’t see her brain. We couldn’t see how much harder she was already working, how many parts of her brain were active, how many neural circuits were firing away, metabolizing, exhausting her more and more, minute by minute. All that was invisible. So, she tensed her body to make the effort visible.
I recently had a conversation with my spouse, a veteran high school math teacher for over thirty years. He lamented the number of times he had told students some version of “try harder.”
“I don’t do it anymore,” he said. “It’s meaningless. I tell them something specific instead. I tell them to go to the library on Sunday afternoons, or compare notes with a classmate, or do ten extra problems.”
He had realized, especially after watching his own children, that he didn’t really know how hard most kids were trying, that the adage was just laziness on his part.
“If you think there is something a student should do, tell them what it is.”
It is ironic that the lazy response from teachers and parents telling kids to “try harder,” inadvertently labels and stigmatizes some of the hardest working kids. Remember, dyslexic kids are already working harder. Their brains are already using more energy than the brains of typical kids. A dyslexic child cannot “effort” their way out of a neurobiological difference. Dyslexia education is vital not just for elementary reading teachers and special ed teachers, but for all teachers. Dyslexia doesn’t end in elementary school.
My middle daughter is both dyslexic and dysgraphic. She is a searing analyst and an excellent writer, but she cannot spell, or punctuate well, or get her ideas out of her head, through a pen, and down on paper. Her handwriting is mostly illegible. She has keyboarding accommodations for everything. More than any of my children, she has been hurt by teacher comments suggesting that if she would just put in a little bit more effort she could really excel.
“They always assumed since I was proficient in one thing, I would be in another. But I wasn’t.”
Her hurt is visible as she recounts the litany of comments she received throughout high school from well-meaning teachers.
“They have confidence that you are capable of things that you know you aren’t and they think it’s encouraging but it’s actually pretty demoralizing and humiliating.” The sting of her words pains me as a parent and I expect it would come as a surprise to too many teachers.
Our dyslexic kids are exhausted. They are exhausted from trying to hide what they cannot do. They are exhausted from the mental effort of trying to keep up in a school system that over-emphasizes speed and executive function. They are exhausted from strategizing how to budget their energy expenditures.
My 15-year-old recently labeled this process “optimized laziness.” They use the grading portal to keep track of their average in every class so that when exam week rolls around they know how to budget their mental energy and use it where it is needed most. If that means not studying much for history because it falls on the same day as English, and your grade can withstand a B on the history exam, then so be it. My middle daughter used a similar process in selecting courses, mixing AP and non-honors courses in a way that befuddled the school but helped her budget her mental energy.
Being dyslexic in an educational culture built for typical students is a constant, complicated and frequently demoralizing juggling act. When we tell kids to “try harder” we are telling them to change who they are. Maybe it is time to think about how we, too, as teachers and parents and schools, could change.