Dyslexia

In the summer of 2008, right before her senior year at Yorktown High School, Virginia Shutler got news that shocked her: After a career as a star student, she was diagnosed with dyslexia.

by Joanna Chakerian

Photos by Matt House

 

She decided to include her revelation in her college admissions essay to a number of prestigious schools: “Dyslexia si nehw uoy daer sdrawkcab. Let’s try that again. Dyslexia is when you read backwards. The slight twinge of frustration you may be experiencing is a sentiment I’ve known for as long as I can remember.”

Virginia, 20, had a 3.6 GPA in a challenging schedule with Advanced Placement classes, but she had secretly struggled with reading, writing and math for years. Her parents had spent an estimated $14,000 on private tutors trying to figure out what was wrong. When she was diagnosed with dyslexia, they learned she had been reading at the lower 18th percentile level, which is extremely slow.

Dyslexia, a learning disability that impairs reading, is pretty well understood in society today. But educators and medical professionals are increasingly recognizing that parents and teachers may be missing red flags for dyslexia in bright children. A study by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and University of California, Davis, found that IQ and reading aren’t linked in children with dyslexia and do not influence one another. The image of dyslexia is even changing in popular culture. Percy Jackson, the new Harry Potter-like swashbuckling teen character in the upcoming new movie, “The Lightning Thief,” proudly declares he has dyslexia in the book series on which the film is based.

Experts say that teachers and parents shouldn’t assume that because a child is articulate and has a high IQ, there is not a problem. In Virginia’s case, she says her dyslexia became noticeable in the second grade when everyone else could read and she still couldn’t. Teachers told the Shutlers that Virginia was smart and that they didn’t see it as an issue. Rob, Virginia’s father, says, “There was a point in elementary school where a very gifted reading teacher basically said, ‘She’s fixed.’ It reminded me of “The Poltergiest.” The house is haunted, and they bring this lady in that’s supposed to be able to exorcise the spirits.”

Virginia wasn’t fixed, but she learned to mask her problem. She did extra credit wherever she could and took power naps in between completing her homework, which would take her hours longer than her friends. She had to do several drafts of every written assignment because she couldn’t put down ideas into paragraphs, she recalls.

By her junior year, Virginia could no longer keep up the pace in trying to stay competitive with her peers, and couldn’t complete standardized tests in time.

She developed anxiety and began taking antidepressants; her low self-esteem from school began spilling onto the soccer field, a place where she used to thrive.

“You could just see her implode,” her mother Sharon says. “It was just so upsetting as a parent to watch.”

 

Marilyn Zecher, a certified dyslexia tutor in the D.C.-Metro area and a nationally recognized expert, says learning for bright dyslexic students is “like having a Pentium computer on dial-up.” Zecher says her clients are predominantly students who were diagnosed late. She believes that there needs to be more awareness on the part of the teachers about the pervasiveness of dyslexia and the fact that it affects reading speed, processing, handwriting, spelling and reading comprehension, among other things. “I can tell you, as a classroom teacher, had I not been trained to recognize the subtle unique differences of the language-based learning disabilities, I might have had a lot of kids slip through the cracks,” says Zecher.

The International Dyslexia Association estimates that as much as 15 to 20 percent of the population has symptoms of dyslexia. Instructional methods such as the Orton-Gillingham method of multi-sensory reading instruction—using visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles—has gotten increasingly popular since its unique hands-on methods meet the reading requirements mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Virginia has used it to help her.
In Fall 2010, the Roberts Academy at Florida Southern College opened to bright dyslexic students in first through fourth grade, where the school’s challenging curriculum is heavily focused on the Orton-Gillingham method.

Rob and Sharon say that because Virginia could sit still and do her homework, they, like her teachers and tutors, didn’t consider that she may have a learning disability. Barry Ekdom, a neuropsychologist based in Fairfax, says parents often just have their children tested for issues such as Attention Deficit Disorder, but he says if he did that he’d miss the reading problem.

“For the most part, dyslexic kids are very, very bright,” says Jane Hanson, a dyslexia tutor in the D.C.-Metro area who works with Virginia. “So they can mask it; they can compensate in lots of different ways. The story that you hear over and over again is ‘Why is it that it takes me so much longer, and I have to work so much harder than any of my friends to get a grade?’”

In October 2009, Nobel Prize in science winner Carol W. Greider admitted that she had been dyslexic as a child and was placed in remedial classes because teachers thought she was stupid. Greider says she learned to compensate by memorizing words in lieu of being able to spell them, a tactic that Virginia has used, as well.

 

Teachers who recognized that something was “off” with Virginia’s abilities—although they didn’t know exactly what—were few and far between. One of Virginia’s 11th-grade math teachers was sympathetic when Virginia didn’t finish a trigonometry test in the allotted time. “I knew this was totally going to blow my grade for the quarter,” Virginia recalls. “I couldn’t even help it, I just started crying. Everyone had already left, the bell had rung, and she just took the test, ripped it, put it in the trash can and just gave me another test, and said, ‘Try again.’”

Allison Anderson, the director of the Learning Needs and Evaluation Center at the University of Virginia, says she has seen dyslexic students make it all the way to the highly selective university level without having ever been properly diagnosed with dyslexia in grade school, and then have to work with the center for accommodations.

Eric Brockman, 46, of Baltimore, made it through college only to have his coping skills for dyslexia catch up with him in the senior levels of his career, as his ability to memorize words weakened with age, he says. He developed anxiety and depression when his job began to require more writing and reading comprehension. As a systems networking engineer, his bosses whom he developed relationships with often ignored his inability to read or write well and would correct his work for him, until rising up the ranks required more writing. “I used to change words around already from what I already [saw], and they wanted me to be able to produce it from my mind,”

He says. When he was fired last April, he was diagnosed with dyslexia the next day, and began multi-sensory tutoring. “I would say it’s helped my reading and writing by 85 percent,” Brockman estimates.

 

Some graduate schools are trying to raise future teachers’ awareness of dyslexia. Jenny Thomson, an assistant professor at Harvard University’s graduate school of education, teaches a course on reading difficulties and the assessment of different learning disabilities. In 2008, she began using a “truth and myths about dyslexia” activity on the first day of class, where students have to rank the importance of various factors in contributing to dyslexia, an area where she says she sees her students struggle. The graduate students usually recognize phonological processing and visual difficulties as factors, but not the relation to IQ.

At Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., where she is now a rising junior, Virginia has transitioned from weekly multi-sensory tutoring her parents helped arrange for her with Hanson, to specialized learning methods the school has available. Learning Commons is a program that provides academic support to a wide variety of students seeking it, including those with learning disabilities. The resource of this program that has helped Virginia the most has been Kurzweil Reader, a text-to-speech software program that scans a students’ textbooks, puts them in a computer database to have read aloud by audio, and even returns the books to the students re-bound.

 

Kurzweil has propelled Virginia into a new level of class participation: effortlessly referring to specific details from what she has read, a far cry from relying on conceptual observations. Additionally, she enjoys reading (by audio) in her room now, as opposed to the library, which is more devoid of distractions.

Bringing with her the self-acceptance of her learning situation, in her first year of college Virginia was set on studying pre-med, and quickly met roadblocks with difficulty in chemistry and biochemistry. “I was clinging to the idea that I wanted to be a doctor, and I had to have an honest moment with myself,” she says.

Virginia chose new courses, including American Nature Writing. A pivotal moment, she says, is when she called her older sister, Natalie, in an anxious moment, who told her to not worry about the grade so much. Virginia took the advice, and received straight A’s last semester. Now, she says, the focus on nature in American Nature Writing has tapped into her kinesthetic spirit, a trait and strength common of people with dyslexia, and she would love to visit Walden Pond in Massachusetts, made famous by Thoreau.

With dyslexia always in the back of her mind, Virginia is still a normal college student with ever-evolving dreams and goals. Her latest “dream of dream” jobs after college is an entrepreneurial venture not on the academic track, nor is it lacking ambition: “to open a coffee shop with light-fare breakfast and lunch place in a forward-thinking coastal town in the South.”

 

However, the struggle to feel normal in a world that revolves so heavily around the written word will still be there. Recently, her mom wrote her an email from London, wanting to catch up on how the week had been going in a long paragraph, instead of Virginia’s preferred communication style: short and sweet. She took a deep breath from the anxiety and told her mom that she was incredibly overwhelmed and needed to respond to it later. “It’s sad, because it’s a freaking email,” Virginia says. “But it’s just so much easier for me to communicate with someone face to face, and requires so much less energy. It’s incredible the difference it makes to be in front of someone and the ease in which words come.”

 

Signs in Young Children
- Difficulty learning the connection between letters and sounds

- Reversal of words, seeing tip but reading pit

- Confusing small words, such as “at” and “to,” mixing up letter b and d

- Does not recognize words that begin with the same sound, for example bird and big

- Difficulty reading single words, such as a word on a flashcard

- Have a hard time with rhyming words, such as knowing that hat rhymes with cat

 

Signs in Adults
- May hide reading problems

- Avoids writing

- Often very competent in oral language

- Relies on memory

 

 

(Nov. 2011)