One of my children started having great difficulty with
comprehension, organization, keeping track of her homework, finishing homework
and prioritizing and planning her work when she entered high school. Prior to
the public high school she attended a Waldorf school for most of her education.
There she created her own lesson books and was afforded sufficient time to
complete her studies. The teaching staff knew she struggled with some
organizational issues but for the most part she did not struggle with her studies,
which were typically hands-on.
When she entered high school it was suggested our child
might have ADHD. It is a condition I don’t really believe exists on its own.
From my research I have concluded more often than not it is a subset of
behavioral symptoms, typically related to either environmental issues or
underlying learning disabilities or both. I knew she was struggling so my
daughter and I agreed she would have a developmental screening. Her testing
concluded that she did not in fact have ADHD or any other learning disability.
The testing didn’t provide any diagnosis, which we were
thankful for on one hand, but we still did not have a strategy to help her in
school. We began to research organizational tools for teens and had her pick
ideas she thought would work. After a few months she was getting further behind
despite her best efforts. Then a progress report came home. I noticed that on
her homework she was passing with high marks and on un-timed tests and group
tests she passed with high marks. She was failing timed tests, which are a
large percentage of the grade. I asked her to bring home all her timed tests.
As I looked them over for clues, I realized she had several math questions
where the numbers were backwards or where there should have been a 5 there was
a 2. The first thing that popped into my mind was dyslexia, although from what
I knew about that condition kids struggled to read. My daughter liked to read and she knocked down a
few books every couple of days in summer so that didn’t seem like a likely.
We were looking for solutions so we decided to take her in for dyslexia testing and found
out she had reading and math dyslexia. I had a hunch this was not right.
In the meantime, with the initial dyslexia diagnosis I set
out to make things at school a bit easier for her. Within a month I helped her
receive a 504 plan so we could get her basic accommodations. She continued
free tutoring two days a week after school and used every organizational tool we
could find that was geared toward dyslexia. We also worked with the school to
find her a peer mentor that would help her with organization and accountability
to remember to turn work in on time. I wanted her to be responsible for her
week so we agreed I would check her work once a week and she would use her own
systems to check her work weekly.
I started to research conditions that get mistaken for
dyslexia since I learned it is a catch all for a number of symptoms. The first
nine conditions I came across we would have known she had, but then one stood
out to me. Convergence Insufficiency Disorder—a problem where the eyes have a
hard time working in tandem. Symptoms included blurred vision, double vision
and severe headaches to name a few. The disorder mimics symptoms of dyslexia
and ADHD. My daughter often suffered from headaches and with flipping numbers
and problems spelling I thought that perhaps she had an eye disorder, although
I was skeptical because she had 20/20 vision.
I started looking into where I could get her tested and
found a facility specializing in vision disorders. To my surprise and my
daughter’s, she failed almost every vision test. Not even small fails,
severely clinically deficient in several eye convergence tests. This disorder
has tremendous impact on learning. My daughter’s depth perception was off,
symbols like numbers and words never make it to the brain correctly making
spelling and comprehension practically impossible, not to mention the severe
migraine headaches that she would get from the eye strain to perform typical school
work. The doctor couldn't believe she had done as well as she had in school. All they symptoms my daughter had she thought was normal for everybody! Thirty-six weeks of vision therapy is what we were assigned and it made
all the difference.
It took persistence and intensive research to find our daughter solutions. The interesting thing we learned too was that because of her convergence disorder she is a hands-on and visual-spatial learner. Oddly it is precisely what her Waldorf schooling was providing her, probably the reason she struggled less there and we never caught it sooner! If your child has been diagnosed with dyslexia a simple test might prove its not what you think it is and provide you powerful solutions that could make a world of difference for your child as they did for our daughter.
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