I was a good writer and a good speller. So why were spelling bees such a nightmare for me?
At a spelling bee for my first grade class, the teacher gave me a word. I wrote it in my head. But I had trouble reading my (imaginary) handwriting. I knew it was a two-letter word ending in "e", and the first letter was one of those letters with mountains and valleys. But was it "me" or "we"? I guessed wrong.
The teacher freaked out. How could this smart student spell "me" incorrectly? It's only two letters long. And how could Alice say it starts with a "w" when it clearly begins with an "m" sound?
She decided I was just being difficult, and she made me continue with the spelling bee rather than be eliminated.
Fourth grade was infinitely worse. We were lined up against the wall. The teacher said a word I had never heard before. I told her I didn't know it, and I would just sit down. She said I had to try. Since the word sounded like nonsense to me, I strung together a bunch of consonants. That was the closest I could get.
The teacher didn't believe I was trying, and wouldn't let me drop out.
I asked her if she could say the word in a sentence. She did, but that didn't help.
The teacher and my classmates were getting quite angry with me for holding up the whole spelling bee. I didn't know why I couldn't spell it, but on a whim I said, "I can't spell something if I don't know what it means."
The other kids tried to define the word for me. They said, "It's not pants, and it's not a skirt." Well, that only confused me more. Lots of things aren't pants or skirts. One thing I did know was that this wasn't a definition.
I asked the teacher to say the word again. With tears running down my face, I closed my eyes tight, and listened as hard as I could. Doing the best I could, I started with a "k". I realized she would get angry if I didn't follow it with a vowel so I made one up, and then ... I had nothing. I threw in a few more letters to try to get the right length.
Seeing that I was in distress, the teacher softened a little. She didn't let me sit down, but she realized that I was trying.
She went on down the row until someone correctly spelled "C-U-L-O-T-T-E-S". That's how I learned that word.
From my teachers' reactions, I suspected that my brain worked differently from most people's. I had almost a photographic memory for words I read, but I had much less room in my memory for words I heard (except for song lyrics).
Throughout elementary school, I had a terrible fear of being called on. When a teacher surprised me by asking me something I wasn't expecting, I would freeze like a deer in the headlights, and not process the question. When I had to read out loud, I could say the words, but I couldn't simultaneously understand what I was saying.
Without being fully aware of what I was doing, I developed a few coping mechanisms. One was to raise my hand and answer a lot of hard questions early in the school year to establish myself as a smart kid whom the teacher could leave alone. This way, I often managed to stay under the radar.
I was quite embarrassed that I won a French medal when we graduated from high school, since I could barely speak French or understand spoken French. I was good at reading and writing, and that was good enough for my French teacher, who valued those skills more than speaking or listening.
I managed to avoid oral exams for most of my life.
Unfortunately, the general exam at Princeton was oral. Only later did I realize that I should have written down the questions and solved them on paper, before presenting my solutions on the blackboard. Had I thought of it at the time, I might have considered it to be cheating, since it wasn't what was expected.
I was vaguely aware that this was a learning disability. I decided to train myself out of it.
Volunteering at Recording for the Blind was a big help. It gave me practice understanding what I was reading aloud in real time, without having to reread it silently to myself. I almost quit on the first day, until my trainer cleverly had me listen to audio tapes of a Princeton math professor who stumbled, made mistakes, backtracked, and generally didn't speak very smoothly. While I felt sorry for those who had to learn math from his tapes, it set the bar low enough that I knew that no matter how poorly I read, I wouldn't be that bad.
When I taught in a math program for gifted high school students, one student was viewed as a difficult kid who "acted out". He would call out the right answers, but he was viewed as a troublemaker. One of the teachers got angry at him for not bringing a notebook to class. The more the student was pressured to take notes, the worse his behavior, and the less well he did. I observed him for awhile, and realized that he was great at processing spoken words and working out problems in his head. Writing it down impeded his learning. He had been told he was trouble for so long, that eventually he took on a bad boy persona since that was what was expected of him.
When I teach, I try to both say and write everything that's important, and to remember that different students learn in different ways. The more chances we give them to succeed, the fewer we'll lose.