I am not a good writer. I have potential; since grade school all of my teachers have told me so. Being put in a “special” reading/writing group in elementary – designed for the students that were behind but didn’t make the requirements for Special Education – I was on the cusp of needing more help but never getting it. I have always had a tremendous amount of energy that hinders any attempts to sit still long enough to write or even learn to spell. Since early on, my teachers believed that repetition and public praise were the only ways to learn to spell. I had to rewrite every word I misspelled multiple times and never had a star on the spelling board, allowing my name’s barren row to stick out amongst the surrounding stars. But the most humiliating example of my difficulties in spelling was on the first day of eighth grade, when my English teacher gave the class a hundred word spelling test. After peer correction, the teacher had the class stand, allowing the students to sit down in the order that they had scored by ten’s. When he called out for the fifties to sit, my partner in shame sat down with an apologetic glance in my direction. I had to wait until he called the twenties to sit down, and he announced that in his forty-some years teaching, he had never had someone score that low.
In high school, the Title 1 “professionals” told me I had to wait until I was in college to get re-tested. To compensate for my difficulties in writing, I became very good at participating in class discussions, which was when my teachers started using the dreaded “p” word. Everyone likes having others believe that they are smart, but by that point, I had already found ways to get by without doing a lot of the things that were difficult or took me longer to accomplish; and once learned, those bad habits are ingrained into my learning process. Some teachers worked with me, allowing tests or presentations to count for a higher percentage. Others would fail me in hopes that I would learn a lesson.
The extreme highs I had as a child were now followed with bouts of listlessness, weeping, and general laziness, in most of my teacher’s opinions. By my senior year, my acceptance into college rested solely on my ACT test scores, and I had managed to forget that I had them until midnight the night of, misplaced both a calculator and a pencil, and fall asleep during the math section (another subject that I was found waning in). I pulled through with a composite score of 21. My ACT score overrode my dismal GPA (which makes me question the system’s effectiveness), and I was accepted into Bemidji State University.
The first week of college, I went to the Student’s with Disabilities Office to request to be tested. The person assigned to my “case” had me as a student; she said that I was capable, but just lazy. Throughout the semester, I persisted knowing there was something wrong until finally I went over her head. By that time, I had failed most of my classes.
The results of my evaluation weren’t available until March, and I was well on my way to flunking another semester. I was diagnosed with the learning disability ADHD, along with the behavior disorders Bipolar and anxiety. It was agreed that I would withdraw from the remainder of the semester to “get a handle on things.”
Five years later, I still don’t have the tightest grip on my problems with school, but I have made many strides. Even now, in my senior year in college, it takes me a long time to write a paper. I usually use a tape recorder first and then I try to type it out. Each component takes a great deal of time, between compiling and organizing my thoughts, reworking words until spell-check will recognize them, and the hardest part: sitting down and starting. It usually takes me weeks to finish a paper, and it is hardly ever on time. But my abilities in understanding and enjoying literature, as well as my aptitude for rhetoric and desire to help students learn without facing the problems that I had to overcome led me to pursue English Education. My struggle with writing is something that I have to overcome on a daily basis, some days it’s better than others, but hopefully, I can impart on my students that only with perseverance will they recognize their own potential.
*small TOWN 