Issue 24: From Challenge to Change: How Dyslexia and ADHD Led Me to Help Others | Laura Webb

Fourth grade is when things went south for me. From kindergarten all the way through third grade, my days were filled with art, nature, and fun. I lived in a small mountain town in California, and we spent most of the time in the glorious outdoors. But by the fourth grade, I felt like I was drowning in schoolwork for the first time.

As an adult, I have built a career out of helping kids with dyslexia and ADHD find the best practices for their brains. Then, I encourage them to apply those ideas to everyday life. In contrast, my own experience finding out how my brain actually works differently was long and arduous. I love to go through the process of helping parents tell their children that they have dyslexia, for instance. After all of the questions are answered and a child has absorbed what it really means to be dyslexic, there is an ownership over it. There is a happy acceptance when they realize what an amazing brain they actually have. They get to feel that EARLY on. They get to absorb and process that information sometimes before the dreaded fourth grade.

Mr Cook's fourth-grade class was THE class at my elementary school. I was happy to be part of it, and I got so excited in class. I was seated next to a new friend and discovered belly laughs for the first time. I had never had so much fun with another person. My favorite thing in the world was to talk and laugh with her. But… I had a male teacher for the first time, and his booming voice scared me. I didn't want to get in trouble, but I couldn't resist. I marched in every day, looking forward to seeing my friends and laughing with them in secret. I remember furiously playing four-square at recess as I was better than anyone else. I relied on that recess time. It felt like air, like I could breathe.

Book reports were the worst for me as a kid. In 5th grade, as any deadline approached, I became more and more panicked. I remember one Friday after school telling my parents that I had a book report due Monday, and I had not read any of the book. Tears welled up in my eyes as I knew that the task was now impossible. While my parents were sympathetic, their solution was to cancel any plans for the weekend and support me in binge-reading the book. Afterwards, my dad helped me type the report on an old Amiga computer. He typed, and I told him what I thought the book was about. We finally got it done. This occurred anytime there was a due date or a big project. Science projects, book reports, state reports, you name it, and I procrastinated it. I powered through this way.

My teachers were unaware of my struggle at home. My parents were unaware of the struggle at school.

As high school ensued, I became less and less interested in the subjects and content we were studying and more interested in survival. When they added letters to math, I was horrified, and I did everything I could to do well in math class, which now felt like a foreign language. I'm sorry to say that cheating was one of my coping mechanisms. It made me feel terrible, but I already felt like I was missing a key component that everyone else had. I had to do what I had to do.

Doesn’t everyone?

In my junior year of high school, as I attempted to prepare for the SAT and ACT tests, my eyes began to water, and my headaches increased. My brain was rejecting the amount of reading that was necessary for these tasks. I had to walk out of one of the three-hour-long pretests because my eyes were watering, and I just couldn't do it. Defeated, I finally told my mom how hard it was, and my parents decided to take me to the eye doctor. There, we discovered that I had something called convergence insufficiency. My eyes were not teaming up to track left to right. The muscles were weak. I had to have what they called PRISM therapy three times a week for a few months. It helped, and I remember being relieved that there was something medically wrong explaining what was going on with my reading problem. By that time, the feelings that came up when I had so much studying to do were intense. The pit of my stomach would turn, and I would try to avoid the work at all costs.

I smiled on the outside, but I sank further down.

Reluctantly, I went to a small college in town with my best friend as my dorm mate. College taught me more about my brain and how we acquire language, and I was fascinated. Armed with my coping mechanisms and a boatload of coffee, I had white-knuckled through and made it out on top. Big shout out to the Chi Omega sorority house for letting me study with them and use their copies of old tests. I did my best work pulling all-nighters and hitched my ride with other girls in my program who operated the same way. I learned to scrape and survive at all costs, partying in between all-night study sessions.

I was absolutely spent. Should I take the GRE and go to grad school? Hell no. Not me. I'm done! I felt like I needed out. Like I needed to get far away and find freedom.

I graduated with an undergraduate degree in speech-language pathology and loved working with smaller kids, as I had when I was a nanny. Babysitting smaller kids had always been my gig for extra money. I liked to help kids learn. That's all I knew. There had to be a better way for kids to learn to read and understand the world…without me having to go to grad school and take another TEST. Bleck.

I got a tutoring job at a literacy center, and they started me off teaching Algebra One to high schoolers for $15 an hour. I had to relearn the dreaded algebra alongside my students, but I taught myself one chapter at a time, using colored whiteboard markers and tiles. My students liked the fact that I didn't know some of the answers. I was like them. I missed some of the letters and numbers and sometimes came up with the wrong answer. We would figure it out together as a team. As soon as a new student saw that I, too, struggled with letters and numbers, they would drop their guard and settle into a space where they could learn.

Not every student on my caseload had been diagnosed with dyslexia or ADHD. In fact, back then, it was very uncommon to have a student who had been properly diagnosed at all. I just had some very creative little people who thought in different ways. Some were similar to me, and some were opposite.

You want to doodle the whole time we are working together and draw the story we're reading?

Great!

You want to hide under the table for the first 10 sessions and snuggle with our therapy dog?

Cool!

You want to walk around the property in the majestic redwood grove while I write what you dictate?

Of course!