Learning Outside The Lines

Two Ivy League Students With Learning Disabilities And Adhd Give You The Tools F

Jonathan Mooney, Dave Cole

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781439104736
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Difficoltà di apprendimento

Learning with YOUR purpose in mind -- not your parents', not your teacher's, not your school's
Every day, your school, your teachers, and even your peers draw lines to
measure and standardize intelligence. They decide what criteria make one person smart and another person stupid. They decide who will succeed and who will just get by. Perhaps you find yourself outside the norm, because you learn differently -- but, unlike your classmates, you have no system in place that consistently supports your ability and desire to learn. Simply put, you are considered lazy and stupid. You are expected to fail.
Learning Outside the Lines is written by two such "academic failures" -- that is, two academic failures who graduated from Brown University at the top of their class. Jonathan Mooney and David Cole teach you how to take control of your education and find true success -- and they offer all the reasons why you should persevere. Witty, bold, and disarmingly honest, Learning Outside the Lines takes you on a journey toward personal empowerment and profound educational change, proving once again that rules sometimes need to be broken.

Part I: Deviant Minds

1: Jonathan

I met Leo the Late Bloomer—a lion from a children’s book—the morning of my second day of third grade. My mother bought Leo on my first day of third grade when, standing in front of Pennycamp Elementary School in Manhattan Beach, California, I turned to her and asked calmly, “Why am I stupid? I can’t read; all the other kids can read. What’s wrong with me?” I must have broken her heart standing in front of the third-grade classroom. In just a short time, I had gone from being an energetic joyful child to a depressed little man.

At home, I was the glue and the joy for the tensions of a blended family that consisted of my mother, father, half-sisters, and half-brother. Throughout my childhood, our house was filled with passion and always with the humor and the spirit of people who never fit in and fought at all costs to succeed. I grew up there, and although I would leave with my own share of wounds, my family would eventually save my life. They loved me, an eccentric child with red hair and cowboy boots. Like everyone else in my family, I had a foul mouth and was afraid of no one.

“Leo couldn’t do anything right,” my mother read to me the morning after I asked her why I was stupid. “He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write.” I sat in her bed, my head in her lap, listening to her read. It was so familiar. Throughout my entire life, she had read to me about animals that never quite fit in: Ferdinand the Bull, Frederick the Mouse, Curious George, and Paddington the Bear. She continued to read, “He couldn’t draw. He was a sloppy eater, and he never said a word. ‘What’s the matter with Leo?’ asked Leo’s father. ‘Nothing,’ said Leo’s mother. ‘Leo is just a late bloomer.’”

Born into an Irish working-class family, my mother was bright and very likely had undiagnosed dyslexia. Having struggled with school her whole life, she saw the similarities between my schooling and what she had gone through. In her mind school was about conformity, discipline, and power.

“ ‘Better late than never,’ thought Leo’s father. Every day Leo’s father watched him for signs of blooming. . . . ‘Are you sure Leo’s a bloomer?’ asked his father. ‘Patience,’ said Leo’s mother. ‘A watched bloomer doesn’t bloom.’ ”

My dad was on the other side of the family divide. He was the valedictorian at Holy Cross College, and after getting a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Chicago, he received a law degree from Georgetown, where he was selected to the Law Review. He loved me more than anything he had ever loved in his life. But when I hid in the bathroom, afraid to make the morning ride to school, or when I stumbled over words and could not learn to spell my name, I believed he was ashamed of me. I felt as if I needed to work harder, to be smarter for him to love me.

“So Leo’s father watched television instead of Leo. The snow came. Leo’s father wasn’t watching. But Leo still wasn’t blooming. The trees budded. Leo’s father wasn’t watching. But Leo still wasn’t blooming. Then one day, in his own good time, Leo bloomed.”

When my mother hit this point in the story, she always smiled, and I smiled too, but I also turned to her and said, “Leo would have been fucked if he was ever in Mrs. C’s class.”

Mrs. C, a graying and slightly balding woman in her mid-forties, was my second-grade teacher, who taught me to be ashamed of myself. In her class, school was no longer a safe place about playing with blocks and working with other kids, things that I was good at. In first grade, I could not remember the months of the year or the days of the week to save my life. But my teacher told me that I was okay, that kids learn at their own pace, and she let me play with blocks. Mrs. C did not believe in that. The first day of second grade I was greeted with a desk and was told that I had to sit there the entire day. There was no play time, only a twenty-minute recess. For me, every day of second grade was a series of painful tasks to endure. I couldn’t tell time, I couldn’t spell, and reading was the most traumatic of all.

I was in the blue jay reading circle, reading, “See Spot run,” most days. I knew what kind of reading group I was in. My circle met on the right side of the classroom, all the way across the room from my desk. Gathering my books like all the other kids, we methodically moved to our different circles: the robins, the hawks, the sparrows, and the blue jays. Our paths would cross only slightly, but I could see the books getting thicker in each group. One girl, Jenny, laughed at me almost every day and said, “I read that book last year.” In our circle I didn’t talk, and looking at the pages made my head hurt and made me feel dizzy.

During reading I was so angry and ashamed I could taste my stomach acid come up into my throat and seep behind my nostrils any time I burped. I used to imagine killing the teacher. Mrs. C talked to the kids in the higher reading group differently than she talked to me. Her body language told them that they were “good,” they were smart, and it told me that I was stupid. In my reading group each time I attempted to unscramble the words that floated around in my head, I tried to tell Mrs. C to let me stop. I couldn’t breathe. I felt trapped. I was trying so hard and wanted desperately to be like everyone else. I learned that year to hide in the bathroom to escape reading out loud. In the bathroom, I would stare at the mirror, hoping to God that no one walked in on me crying. But it only worked sometimes. Mrs. C often stopped the lesson until I got back from the bathroom. When I returned, I could feel everyone staring at me.

I knew how important school was to my whole family. My father was smart; my brother, Billy, had already left for college. My sister Michelle would go two years after him, and everyone knew that Kelly had tested genius as a kid. But Kelly and I had something in common. When I was in second grade, Kelly was depressed and missed almost half of her senior year of high school. We would hang out in the mornings, and she talked to me much like my mom did—about how school was intellectually and emotionally restrictive. She was an actress and a source of creativity in my life. But she would still go to college and get good grades. I didn’t think I could do that. I thought I was stupid. At night, my parents argued about my school and about how much my mother should help me and how much of the work I should have to do. I sat outside their bedroom, and listened and heard the anger and pain in my dad’s voice. I wanted my dad to be proud of me and to love me, but I didn’t know what I could do to make him think I was smart.

About once a week I waited outside my second-grade classroom and listened to my mom argue with Mrs. C: “You are destroying this kid. Look at him. He doesn’t shower. He doesn’t talk. He has been diagnosed with depression. He’s only seven. Every time you terrorize him with those goddamn spelling words, he wants to kill himself.” I worked for three hours a night on my spelling that year, only to fail every test. “Kids have to learn how to spell. Those are the rules. There are no exceptions, Mrs. Mooney.” So my mother created the exceptions: “mental health days.” Anytime I had a spelling test or I didn’t want to go to school, I didn’t. “Screw Mrs. C and her stupid spelling tests. We’re going to the zoo.” Mental health days were one of the few bright spots in my life, when the pain stopped for a while. My mom and I just watched the animals and bought popcorn. Even as the afternoons would end and I would start to rub my eyebrow because I was so scared to go back the next day, my mom would say, “Fuck Mrs. C and her spelling test. You are smart, and they don’t know who you are.” Those words were embedded in the back of my mind and have stayed with me.

The first day of third grade, after I asked my mom what was wrong with me, I met Mr. Rosenbaum. Walking into his room, I unconsciously rubbed the bald spot on my eyebrow and looked down at the ground. Unlike when I was a little kid, I was now afraid of adults; in school they made me feel ashamed of myself. Mr. R came right up to me before any of the other kids. When I walked into his classroom, he asked me what I liked to do. I didn’t know what this man wanted, so hesitantly I told him: “I like to play soccer. I am really fuc . . . , I am really good.”

He laughed. He had already met my mom and was familiar with my family’s profound way with words. “I know. Your mom told me you were. They are really proud of you.”

“Yeah. Well, my brother comes up from school, from San Diego, to watch me play and my sisters scream on the sideline, ‘Kill them, get the fuc . . . , ah, get the ball.’ My brother says I can be a professional, and my dad’s my coach. He tells me I do a good job. Can I bring my ball to class?”

“I don’t see why not. You just have to let me kick too.”

“I play all the time, on my own. No one tells me to. I work really hard, I do. I work really hard, Mr. R.”

“Your mom said you don’t like to spell.”

“Fuck spelling . . . I’m sorry,” I said with my head down.

“Let’s not worry about spelling. Who needs it anyway? What else do you like to do?”

I couldn’t believe he had said that. I felt lighter for a second, and I smiled. “I like to build things, and I like stories. I like to read them, to look at the pictures, and I like to make them up. I like that a lot.”

He looked at me and said, “Well, if that’s what you like, let’s do it. The soccer part you’ll take care of; the building and the stories, I got. Sound good?”

Throughout third and fourth grade, Mr. R kept his promise to me. He created an environment where I could be successful, and he did not make me feel ashamed of my struggles and weaknesses. His classroom was project oriented, and I thrived in social studies and science. For one project I invented a running shoe with springs in it, which got the highest grade in the class. While I experienced these successes, my weaknesses did not go away, but Mr. R approached them as challenges. In his eyes the solutions were simple: do projects; no spelling tests; use a computer for any writing; and my spelling never counted against me. I still struggled with reading, but in Mr. R’s class, there were no reading groups. Kids went at their own individualized pace, and I didn’t feel as humiliated.

Most of all, Mr. R respected me. When I struggled during reading lessons, he sat next to me and put his arm around me. That arm saved my life. One day toward the end of third grade, he asked my mom and me to stay to talk about my schoolwork. He let me be part of the meeting and wasted no time getting to his point: “You know, Colleen, Jonathan is so bright.” I couldn’t help but smile when he said that. No teacher had ever told me that before. “And I also know you’ve seen the discrepancy between his innate intelligence and his performance specifically in the area of reading and spelling. He is exactly like my daughter who is dyslexic. She’s away at college. I think Jonathan is dyslexic.”

The idea of having a learning-disabled son infuriated my father, but I was tested and diagnosed with dyslexia. I had no idea what that meant at the time. It was never explained to me, and the school told my mother that my spelling and reading problems would probably go away in adolescence. At home, though, I could feel my dad’s disapproval. When I was first diagnosed, my father had refused to put me into special education. In his eyes, it was where retarded kids went.

But regardless of the extra help, I knew I was slipping behind. By fourth grade I was in the resource room twice a week to work on reading. At home I kept asking why I couldn’t read. “You’re a late bloomer,” my mom would say. The resource room was a drop in the bucket, a Band-Aid, when what I needed was a new environment entirely. Even Mr. R couldn’t stop the snide and embarrassing looks my classmates gave me every time I left the classroom to go to the resource room. And he couldn’t help that every time I left for the resource room, I walked down the hallway with kids from the gifted and talented program (GATE). As I walked down the corridor I passed each grade, one by one, in slow motion. Sometimes, for cruel fun, the GATE kids would ask me what room I was going to, even though they knew exactly which room was mine. They wouldn’t wait for an answer, but just laughed and called me stupid.

By the end of fourth grade, my parents, in the face of what was happening at school, latched onto my success with soccer. For my mother, the game became a medium of class warfare, where I was better than the affluent kids from Manhattan Beach. For my dad, soccer became who I was, the place where I lost the stigma of special ed. For years, if I did not play well, neither one of them would talk to me for the rest of the day. But in fourth grade, regardless of the pressure, I still loved to play. For a couple of hours every day, soccer gave me the feeling of what it must have been like to be a smart kid at school. Playing soccer took me through fourth grade and into fifth and sixth, where I no longer had Mr. R’s arm around me.

In fifth grade I was not allowed to use a computer, spelling tests were mandatory, and I had to read out loud in front of the class. The year passed by in a haze, with the background noises of my mother advocating for me at school, while my father insisted that I had to go school, that I shouldn’t need any help. But every other Saturday night, all that slipped away. My dad and I drove to Anaheim to watch the Angels play baseball. At the games, my dad seemed to change. We always left early enough to see batting practice, and he bought us meatball sandwiches. That year my dad had put me on a “diet” for soccer, but during those baseball games he let me eat without worrying about the fat. We watched all nine innings together every game.

In October 1988, I found myself at the most exciting baseball game of my life. My dad had spent all night on the phone to get us tickets to the ’88 World Series—the Los Angeles Dodgers versus the Oakland A’s. I was in sixth grade then, and so much was going wrong at school. But that night at Dodger Stadium, it all slipped away—soccer, school, the pain. The Dodgers won the game with a ninth-inning home run close to where my dad and I were sitting. We just stood there and cheered for what seemed like all night. My dad bought me a shirt. I wanted to stay there forever. As we left the stadium my dad turned to me and told me he loved me. In less than a month, I would drop out of sixth grade.

I spent my last day in sixth grade in the principal’s office waiting for my mom. I had no idea why I was there, but I knew that it had something to do with a story I had written the day before for English class. I had worked hard on the story for over a week. For a moment, sitting there, I thought that I might have been called to the principal’s office because the teacher was so impressed by my writing. Waiting for my mom, I welled up with pride.

I knew I could write a good story, and I wanted so much to do it well, to let them know that I wasn’t stupid. At home in front of the computer, I tried to write about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I could play my story in my mind, seeing all the visuals and hearing the different background sounds. But when I watched it, I did not have words to describe it. So when it was over, I looked down and there was nothing on the page. “Only stupid kids can’t write,” I told myself. I tried again. Three hours later, I stopped, and all I had was a page that was completely unreadable. I decided to ask my mom if she would write down what I said to her. I felt ashamed of myself and felt my father’s eyes peering down on the work. But when it was all done, it was a damn good story.

When my mom arrived outside the principal’s office, I knew something was wrong. In the office were my teacher with my story and the principal. With a piercing gaze, my teacher looked right through me to my mom, with a disgusted look on her face. “Did you let him copy this from a book?” she asked.

My mom answered, “How dare you!” I felt like I was going to vomit.

“You know, Mrs. Mooney, this is a very complex and intelligent story. I know Jonathan couldn’t write anything like this. You know how he spells and what his handwriting looks like.”

After being accused of plagiarizing the story, I left sixth grade for good.

With no school, all I had left was soccer. I turned my natural energy to getting better and spent the rest of the year practicing every day. But at this point, playing soccer had become much more complicated for me than simply being a kid who loved to play. The images of my mom on the sidelines, screaming at me while I played, haunted me. My father adopted soccer as his job in the family, and he coached my teams. He was obsessed with eating right, training, and sleeping, and I adopted his rituals as my own. The irony in all of this obsession and ceremony is that over time, they undermined my belief in my own skill and talent. I was terrified that my only skill would vanish one day. In the end, this regimentation took away my love for soccer, a game that had brought me joy and that I had excelled at. But by the beginning of seventh grade, it was all I had, and in my eyes, it was my only hope for my future.

I thought that if only I had another chance, I could change. In seventh and eighth grade, I got that chance. My new school, Hermosa Valley, was a small community school, and when I arrived, I made a lot of friends very quickly. I did not receive special accommodations, but unlike in fifth or sixth grade, my teachers allowed me to use the computer for writing and never counted my spelling against me. Reading was no longer a “subject”; I did it all at home, slowly (and poorly), but at that point in my life,...