Education Archives - Sisterhood Of The Sensible Moms

Grrrr. Nothing like an inbox full of missing assignment notifications from school to enjoy with my morning coffee and bowl of cereal. It’s way too early to pretend that I’m not annoyed with my middle-schooler, but if I’m honest, I’m a little defeated too. These missing assignments have become a regular event around here. This is not eighth-grader-itis or I’m-too-cool-i-osis. This is not a byproduct of too much screen time or a symptom of an over-scheduled kid. This is what dyslexia looks like, at least in my house.

My middle son has dyslexia. When he was four, my precocious funny boy was quoting back entire passages from books, picking out the different instruments in “The Nutcracker” and teaching himself how to ride a bike and a skateboard. He was also really struggling to learn the letters of his name. I took him to a group of specialists in Washington, DC who tested him for 5 hours. When they emerged from the testing room with him, the center’s director was laughing and she turned to me, “If you ever tire of him, I’ll take him.” She also said that the testing was inconclusive. There were worrisome issues with some visual processing areas, but he had some real gifts in verbal comprehension and non-verbal processing. And so the story has gone for years even up until this semester. Dyslexia is a slippery fish and we recognize it more in the shadows than the light.

Dealing with Dyslexia Isn't Easy | Parenting | Education | Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

My son is smart enough and socially gifted enough to swim with the other kids in the classroom who do not share his diagnosis. In fact, if you had to visit his classroom, you would be hard-pressed to pick him out of the crowd of sweaty eighth graders at first. If you hung around long enough, you would see him start to bob a little. You would notice how hard it is for him to copy notes from the board. You would see that it takes him longer to read a passage, and you would sense his anxiety when presented with a lot of visual information all at once. Dyslexia can look like attention issues and tiredness and even laziness. But how it looks is nothing compared with how it feels.

Tiring, exhausting, confusing, and confounding: dyslexia checks every one of those boxes and then some. Just last week, I used the word flummoxed to describe how I felt about my son’s current academic situation, and we really are. My husband and I worry about his future constantly. His potential rarely matches his performance. We have older kids so we know that this is not a recipe for success. We are well aware of all the pitfalls waiting for kids who are not successful academically. Our eyes are wide open and are hearts are willing, but our path forward is uncertain. My emotional state is all over the place as we deal with the fallout of the issues dyslexia brings, but that’s nothing compared to what it’s like for my son.

For the most part, my son just keeps swimming along. Sure, he is working a little harder than everybody else, using up those reserves a little quicker, and pushing himself to the breaking point a little faster, but that’s just how school is for him. Sad to say, but school has always been a difficult place so he is used to the daily struggle.

But sometimes he gets overwhelmed. A difficult assignment, a missed class, or just too much work in one week can provide the tipping point that takes him from finishing to flailing. At moments like this, he is swimming upstream through rough seas with fogged goggles. He quite literally loses his way at the same moment he runs out of steam. These are the moments when the waves crash over him and he starts to sink. Then those emails start filling up my inbox.

So now we are back in the unenviable position of circling the wagons and trying to regroup. We are all stressed out and cranky at having the same conversations, worn out and tapped out confronting the same issues, exhausted and deflated treading the same water. School is a marathon not a sprint so we keep repeating this mantra hoping that it will bring peace and focus. School rewards the long view and the courageous return to the journey every single day, so we tell him to keep moving forward despite how unproductive he might feel. School forgives momentary failures and allows us to learn from our mistakes, so we help him brush off losses and find strength in small victories.

Today these emails are peeving me, but they are also tangible reminders of the rough seas that mark my son’s marathon journey through school. So I will remind myself to channel patience and understanding for something beyond my experience. I will take deep breaths and try not to scream or lecture. Today, I know we will do what we have always done for him: throw him a lifeline, extend our hand, pick him up.

Today, like every day, we will pray that he will just keep swimming.

Dyslexia can feel a bit like swimming upstream, but we just have to keep swimming.

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-Erin

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I’m a post-forty woman. In simple terms, that means that the checklist of things I do before I start my day looks like this: Open eyes. Put feet on floor. Get caffeine. Check social media.

Because I do the daily check-in on my Facebook feed and the other feeds as well, I have noticed something. While I am looking for cute pictures of your family, some of your great book recommendations, and even an article you might suggest for me to read, some of you are getting worked up. Like really worked up. And we’re all worked up about the same thing: schools.

Not that I blame you. I was recently hanging precariously out of my own tree. Last week, my brother posted a link to an article TIme was going to run. In the actual article, Time reported about people working to reform schools by reducing or ending the practice of teacher tenure and highlighted a recent court case Vergara v. California about just this thing. The reporting was fairly balanced, but then Time decided to do something just plain dirty. It titled that article Rotten Apples and suddenly all the world’s, or in this case, the federal system of education’s problems were being blamed on bad teachers. I couldn’t help myself. My blood started boiling, so I shared that post on my wall.

There was even a hashtag #TIMEfail. I was buoyed by the number of people who were with me. I wasn’t in a tree, I was in the same boat as lots of other people and we were all pulling the oars together. But here’s the thing: Facebook status updates don’t change the world, at least not the world of chalkboards and pencils. And tweets don’t move mountains. Most parents and educators are not bloggers and social media partakers like me.

My message was being heard but not by the right people. Social media may be a great first step and good for clearing the “pissed off” pipes, but it is not really action. Social media can raise awareness and entice people to action (we’re looking at you, Ice Bucket Challenge), but it lacks gravitas and doesn’t inspire commitment over time.

In the spirit of “Do this, Not that,” here are 3 things, you can do that really can change the world, or at least your school. At the very least, it will keep that boat to keep on keeping on in the right direction.

1. Get involved. Instead of just grousing on social media about the crappy fields your kids are forced to play on, make sure you are part of the solution. Join the PTO. Help raise money. Volunteer at school or choose to be part of the home solution. A huge portion of what schools and teachers get blamed for are things we as parents should be taking care of at home. Keep your ship in top shape and that will help too.

2. Take that commitment to the next level. You can attend Board of Education meetings or School Improvement Team meetings. Never underestimate that your presence doesn’t matter at these. These are definitely instances where bodies matter. Who fills a chair better than you?

3. Vote. Mid-term elections aren’t sexy, but they are necessary. Take time to figure out who is more than just a sympathetic ear to those making educational decisions. Find your players. Find those willing to die on the sword of education. These are your people.Tweet and Facebook that you support them and spread the word.

Then do this: go out and vote. Demonstrate you are paying attention to what is being said about and done for our children. If the children of your county are not being funded as the main priority (like ours aren’t), take that anger to the polls and do some damage where it hurts.

Show your local government leaders that in your mind and heart there is nothing else to do but that. Make yourself heard and not just on social media. On that note, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead

The following is for our local readers: I happened to go to a community meeting recently in which our school superintendent basically said that there are no more corners to cut, no more coupons to collect, and no more creative accounting to make the education budget work. The consistent underfunding of our local schools has now created an unsustainable situation. There is nothing to be done but get mad, get out there, and get busy changing people’s minds about what an education is worth and what we are willing to pay for it. If we consistently pay lip service to the notion that education is important, but then are unwilling to back what we say with action, we’re doing a disservice not just to our kids today but to our county tomorrow. I trust my good friends and neighbors to do their part and invest in our future.