PUTNEY — My fondest memory from my second year of first grade was finally getting to be in a school play.
The first grade holiday play was a re-enactment of the “Paul Revere's Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The entire class was to read the poem out loud as various “special” people acted out the parts in period costume (made from construction paper).
Because I could not read a word from the poem, I played the part of the lantern-hanging friend. My job was to wait until the proper time and then climb up a stepladder holding the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns, made from flashlights inside carved Quaker Oats tubes. It was perfect for me. I could climb ladders. I'd do it even if there were no play.
It was the high point of school for me; the only trouble was when Rebecca asked the rather personal question.
“Why doesn't he have to read the poem?” she asked. This was an honest enough question, but before I could chime in that it was because I had to climb the ladder, Noah answered her.
“He can't read, there's something wrong with his brain,” he said.
* * *
It all came back to me, as I sat writing and rewriting the reports for my first semester of teaching at Landmark College. All the words and ideas typed carefully into the college network left only the routine task of copy editing.
Lydia, my supervisor - a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology - hovered above me as if she were some sort of blue, Hindu corrective organism with 12 hands, each holding a red felt pen.
“There is no R in quantity,” she instructed. “The period comes inside the quotes. Everything should always come inside the quotes. You should probably write this down.”
“Thank you,” I said, scribbling her advice on the brown cardboard back of spiral notebook, knowing I would never see it again.
For over an hour, I would write and she would mark with her orange pen the finer points of punctuation, spelling, and grammar.
It is always hardest when a situation turns from a simple review of my work into a missionary crusade against the gaping holes in my almost half a million dollars' worth of education.
You see, most of my first 14 years were spent in on-on-one corrective collaboration just like this one, at great expense to both the taxpayer and my parents.
I tried to explain that I have learned, memorized, and even taught every nuance of the peculiarities of written language - spelling rules, punctuation rules, sentence templates. I even completed the better part of an undergraduate major in transformational syntax during the fuzzy delirium of Hampshire College.
But no amount of cajoling can persuade the educational expert, once she or he has latched onto the mission. Lydia was mistaken in thinking that a) she could fix me in one afternoon, b) that I could or should be fixed at all, and c) that I even cared.
This was not a new experience. I am broken. I am dyslexic, and there is a billion-dollar industry of self-congratulatory professionals who aim to stomp out the manifestations of this horrific “brain disorder.”
* * *
Dr. Thomas Brown, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School and associate director of the Yale Clinic for Attention and Related Disorders, compares executive function to the conductor of an orchestra.
Imagine a symphony orchestra in which each of the various sections represents a different aspect of cognition. For example, the rhythm section could represent capacity for math; the string section, reading; the woodwinds, writing. Perhaps another section of the orchestra could represent the cognitive capacity to find really cool stuff in video games.
In this model, the conductor of the orchestra would represent executive function. The conductor tells each section when it can come in and when to play more quietly; executive function coordinates the different parts. For example, executive function takes charge when it's time to stop playing video games and start reading.
According to current thinking, the combination of decreased ability to regulate one's impulses and behavior and the increased need for stimulation by those of us with ADHD puts us at much higher risk of failure in making the transition into college.
Just at the time that we are asked to significantly increase the level of independence with which we approach our lives - making appointments, organizing large projects, prioritizing and managing a variety of required activities in the context of very little structure - we are provided with the freedom and opportunity to find a huge variety of stimulating activities, none of which in any way support the transition we're being asked to make.
Writing is one of the most complex cognitive tasks that we ask of young people. It requires so many levels of activation, inhibition, analysis, and synthesis, not to mention all the lower-order secretarial skills - handwriting, spelling, grammar, usage, and mechanics. My still-unresolved struggles with basic language skills combined with my challenges in the area of executive function, made writing research almost completely unapproachable.
Brown says that those of us with executive function difficulties can pay attention as well as anyone else on earth under two conditions: when we are interested in the material, or when someone has put a gun to our head.
According to Brown, the issue is not with attention but with the level of stimulation required in order to get the synapses to fire in the frontal lobes. For those of us who struggle with executive function, the synapses in our frontal lobes require a higher level of stimulus in order to fire.
This is why attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other executive function disorders can frequently be treated with stimulant medication. The stimulants help to excite the neurotransmitters in the frontal lobes and thus make it easier for the synapses to fire.
By this theory, ADHD is inaccurately named. Rather than describing us as struggling with hyperactivity, it seems more accurate that we struggle with an under-stimulus. So much of the behavior we associate with ADHD - risk-taking, high sensation seeking, jittery movements of the foot, and so forth - do not represent so much an overabundance of energy, but in fact a very real need for a higher level of stimulation.
According to this model, when students like me are assigned a 10-page research paper and given three weeks in which to complete it, a predictable pattern emerges.
During the first week, the stimulation of the deadline does not reach a high-enough level of urgency to provoke any action, so nothing happens.
In the second week, the looming deadline creates enough urgency or stimulus to provoke anxiety, but still the stimulus does not reach the level required to inspire action. In other words, we start to worry about the deadline, but we don't do anything.
By the third week, the stimulus now boils to the level of urgency in which action might be possible, but the anxiety of the looming deadline also increases to the level whereby it becomes almost impossible to act.
In that case, I would usually look for self-soothing activities to manage the anxiety. In my case, in high school, those activities would inevitably include drugs or alcohol, but for many students it can be video games, instant messaging, Internet pornography - whatever.
I didn't know any of this; all I knew was it was Sunday, the night before my history term paper was due, and rather than working on it, I was out in the woods getting stoned.
I had chosen a topic, the history of maple syrup making in Vermont. I had found one source, a book with one chapter about the history.
Armed only with that single source and no preparation, I set my alarm for five o'clock in the morning. When the alarm went off, I ripped myself out of bed, charging with the urgency that I had five hours to produce at least five pages with no preparation.
I went to the library, hoping that the cumulative efforts of all the other people who had ever studied in the library would support me in my endeavor.
I started by reading the chapter on the history of maple syrup making and taking limited notes. Next, I started paraphrasing that chapter in my own words, carefully retelling the stories I had just read, in my horribly misspelled, dyslexic scrawl.
I was still only three pages into the paper and I had exhausted all that information. It was now 7:30 a.m., and I had until 10 o'clock to generate another two pages.
There is a wonderful thing about the ADHD mind: when the stimulation gets to a high-enough level, the synapses really open in the frontal lobe, and we can achieve what is described as a level of “hyperfocus.”
In an act of desperation and creativity, I invented a one-on-one interview with a fictional, old-time Vermont maple sugar man. I called him Floyd Van Alstine, an actual person whom I had never actually spoken to.
After a brief description of Floyd in his sugar shack, I wrote dialogue that I claimed to have transcribed from a tape recording.
As fate would have it, by 10 o'clock I had roughly eight pages of dyslexic scrawl, complete with a fictional bibliography and a smattering of fictional quotes. I walked into U.S. history class along with all the other students and handed in the scrawled pages.
”I'm sorry,” I began, as I would most conversations with faculty about work I was trying to explain. “I did not get a chance to type this, so it is only a rough draft.”
I think Sven, my teacher, was so amazed that I actually produced something that he accepted my paper graciously. The next day, he handed my scrawled pages back to me.
“This is a good first draft. Type it up and you should be in good shape.”
I went to the computer lab to try to type my paper, and I found Chad typing away. He was clearly a fast typist, with no inherent resistance to writing.
“Is there any way I can convince you to type my paper, Chad?” I asked him in desperation.
Chad puzzled over this for a moment.
“If you will do two mornings of a.m. barn duty for me, I will type your paper.”
We had a deal, and within 45 minutes I had my paper typed and ready to hand in.
In the end, I received a B-minus. It was marked down for being late, but my fictional interview had inspired the teacher enough to make him feel that, had it been on time, it would've been worthy of an A.
Now, many people would look at my situation - a student waiting until the very last minute to write his paper - and say that this is clearly an issue of motivation or laziness.
However, if I was being lazy, explain my willingness to get up at 5 a.m. to shovel cow shit, rather than type a seven-page paper.
For me, shoveling was possible; I knew that I could do that. Whereas, typing seven pages was something I had never done, and I did not believe I could do it.
How does one get motivated to do something that he or she does not believe is possible?
* * *
In my 14 years at Landmark College, the first college in the world exclusively for students with learning difficulties, I served as a tutor of reading and writing, a writing instructor, an assistant professor of writing, and finally, as director of admissions.
Every semester, Landmark College receives a number of students transferring from some of the most selective schools in the country - Brown, Cornell, and Williams, for example.
I find this fact interesting because these are students one might predict to be among the most successful. These are students with very high SAT scores, strong high school grade point averages, and truly superior academic skills - all basic requirements for acceptance into such elite universities.
Despite all the advantages, these students arrive at Landmark humiliated and broken, having failed to achieve. Statistically, we know that only 28 percent of the diagnosed students who start postsecondary education will persist to completion, but it is quite a different matter to actually meet such students face to face, to see the look in their eyes as they confront the reality that they failed to measure up to their potential.
Flunking out of college is the inevitable experience of the vast majority of students with disabilities.
Furthermore, the number of college students with learning disabilities has increased dramatically since 1990 under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2000, students with learning disabilities became the majority of students seeking support for disabilities at colleges and universities nationwide, and that number has continued to grow.
We also know that only 25 percent of the students who qualify for support actually seek accommodations, so the numbers are even larger than we can measure using university and college statistics.
Some estimates suggest that of the 18 million students attending college, at least 3 million have some form of learning difficulty, suggesting also that more than 2 million students with learning disabilities are in the process of flunking out of college at any given time. Not only do these statistics make me feel better about having flunked out of Hampshire, my hope is the sheer number would give us pause to question our approach.
My overwhelming memory from Hampshire College was that I was being asked to do things I did not believe I could do.
In retrospect, I can see that I actually could have done fairly easily, but my lack of confidence in my academic skills, my lack of knowledge of my own strengths and challenges, my inability to advocate for myself, and my complete lack of strategies to manage my executive function left me with no idea of how to proceed.
I was at the mercy of whatever circumstance came my way.