Born in Boston in September 1951, the second child, of a WWII veteran and his wife.
Three months after I was born, I developed whooping cough. The only treatment then was fresh air, as antibiotics weren’t developed yet. So, in mid-December, I was wrapped in blankets, and placed next to an open window 24/7 until I healed. Mom told me later that she was sure I’d die. Obviously I didn’t but I often had a nagging cough, which annoyed dad.
The School Years
I started school at 5 years old because the law was that if you turned six in September, you attended school that year. I’d have done better in school if I was a little more mature, but I doubt it would have stopped the events that came to pass.
At twelve the public schools told me parents that I was retarded and would not be allowed to attend junior high school. I knew what retarded meant and I was pretty humiliated by this. The threat of going to “the class for the retarded” was terrifying. It was a small class of kids who would lined up, holding hands, to walk down the hall to go to lunch! Some wore helmets, others shuffled, rolling their heads around. This class was totally isolated from the mainstream kids and thinking this was my future until I was old enough to leave school, well, you can only imagine my angst.
Mom wrote the superintendent of the School System, noting that no testing had been completed but since entered school teachers had indicated I was slow, distractible, and didn’t seem to get many of the lessons. But mom noted that no one had ever said I was retarded. Their thinking was true to a certain extent, as I struggled with sentence structure, spelling, nouns, verbs, commas. The school psychologist was sent to our home to do intelligence testing on me and my two brothers. It was kinda fun! The tests were all verbal, with me thinking that many of the questions seemed ridiculously easy.
My final memory of that day was overhearing the psychologist telling mom that “Carol is not retarded. She says, she can’t read.” I’d made it through nearly 6 years of school without being able to read! How? The testing indicated that all three of us kids were pretty smart. We all scored above average with me having superior + intelligence! Ok, now there’s a dichotomy! How does a twelve year old, wrap their head around this? You’re retarded, of no we’re wrong, you’re gifted.
First, it was off to Children’s Hospital for neurological, psychological, and medical testing with their team labeling me with dyslexia, which meant nothing to me! “Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). “Also called a reading disability, dyslexia is a result of individual differences in areas of the brain that process language.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353552#Overview. I learned by listening, not reading. I could not identify a word that was written but identified what words meant, by how they were used in a sentence. In 1887, a German ophthalmologist, Rudolf Berlin, was the first to use the word ‘dyslexia’ in place of word blindness.
Dyslexia is quite common today. One might think, we’ve come a lot further in working with this brain disorder since the late 1800’s. Yet, sadly, this doesn’t seem to be true. As, I hear many teachers still don’t understand this disorder! My teachers often made me feel very badly about myself, with my third grade teacher pointing out to the entire class a mistake I’d made, she got the whole class to laugh at me. Criticism for an uncontrollable reality is cruel.
Treatment
I attended extra curricular classes at school, further adding to my personal embarrassment. These effort was well placed but how can you make someone see what they can’t see? It’s a brain dysfunction. Dyslexia is not curable. Whoever has it, has to figure out how to function in this world while having it. And I assure you, that you have to do this on your own, for the rest of your life. Dyslexia never goes away! There’s no pill, no program, no escaping your reality. I never wrote on the board for the rest of my life because I can’t spell! I never read out loud in public, as not to humiliate myself. I made speeches, lead seminars, even was a magazine publisher, but tried desperately to hide looking stupid or being dyslexic. Not being able to read and write is a terrible handicap. It affects everything that you do…try reading a recipe…dialing a phone correctly, reading directions, a map, a chart, anything…!
As school ended that year, my folks excitedly shared that I was very, very lucky! Out of over 1,000 applicants, I had been selected to attend Boston University PhD program that summer! Oh whoopee! The program had PhD students, doing their thesis’ in special education! I’d have a one on one relationship with a PhD student, who would attempt to teach me how to read! I would travel by train, 45 minutes to Bostons North station, grab a trolley to Park Place, with Trolley’s to get to BU. Then reverse this to get home. I was a tiny 12 year old, who was escorted to Boston three times and then on my own to do this for the rest of the summer. This was simply terrifying to me.
Special Note
In defense of my parents, letting a little girl navigate Boston alone at twelve; well, they grew up just outside Boston, so taking the trolleys was common place for them. All children did in the 30’s.