Dear Former Students: What I Wish I'd Known About Dyslexia

Dear Former Students,

I’ve been thinking about you.

Before I became a reading specialist, before I spent my days teaching educators about dyslexia and the science of reading, I was an upper-elementary and middle school teacher.

I loved teaching. I cared deeply about my students. I worked hard, wanted you to succeed, and believed I was doing everything I could to help you.

But there are things I know now I wish I had known then.

During Dyslexia Awareness Month, I find myself thinking especially about those of you who struggled to read and write.

I wish I had understood that reading slowly didn’t mean you were thinking slowly. Some of you could participate in the most sophisticated classroom conversations. You were curious, funny, insightful. You made connections other students missed.

And then, I’d hand you something to read. And suddenly, everything changed.

What I didn’t fully understand back then was dyslexia primarily affects skills such as accurate and fluent word recognition, decoding, and spelling. It does not tell us how intelligent a student is or what that student is capable of understanding.

I wish I had been better at separating your ability to access information through print from your ability to think about that information.

Slow reading wasn’t slow thinking.

Difficulty spelling didn’t mean you didn’t have something worth saying.

And struggling to read a grade-level text didn’t mean the ideas in that text were beyond you.

I wish I had understood how hard you were working.

I knew reading was harder for some of you. What I didn’t understand was just how much harder.

For a skilled reader, recognizing most words becomes automatic. That frees up cognitive resources to think about meaning, make connections, draw inferences, and learn.

For some of you, simply figuring out the words required tremendous effort.

Then, I asked you to remember what you had read.

Answer questions.

Learn new vocabulary.

Take notes.

Write a response.

Sometimes, do all of that within a specific amount of time.

Looking back, I wonder how often I saw the final product without appreciating the extraordinary amount of effort it took you to produce it.

I wish I had understood some of your behavior differently.

This may be the part I think about most.

Those of you who put your head down on the desk. I saw your shoulders curl inward. I heard you say, whether out loud or silently, “This is stupid.”

I wish I’d been more curious about what those behaviors were communicating.

Certainly, not every challenging behavior is connected to reading difficulty. But I understand something now I didn’t fully understand then: Sometimes avoidance is self-protection.

By upper elementary and middle school, struggling readers often have had years to notice their peers can do something they cannot yet do easily. And they’ve had years to develop strategies to make sure others don’t notice.

I wish I had asked myself more often, What is this task requiring of this student—and does this student have the skills to do it successfully?

___________________________

I wish I had known that giving you access wasn’t giving you an advantage.

I wish I had better understood the difference between intervention and accommodation.

If you had dyslexia, you needed instruction specifically designed to improve your reading skills. But you also needed access to everything you were intellectually ready to learn while those reading skills were developing.

Those are two different needs.

An audiobook doesn’t teach students to decode. Explicit reading instruction does.

But an audiobook can allow a student who is still developing decoding skills to learn about ancient civilizations, ecosystems, space exploration, or whatever else is being taught that day.

Text-to-speech, additional time, reduced copying demands, or another appropriate accommodation aren’t about making learning easier. They are about removing a barrier preventing a student from showing what they know and engaging in content they are fully capable of understanding.

I wish I had understood that more clearly.

I wish I had known older students still needed us to teach them to read.

Perhaps most importantly, I wish I’d understood that arriving in fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh grade without foundational reading skills didn’t mean it was too late to teach those skills.

There can be an unspoken assumption once students reach the upper grades: They should know how to read by now.

They should.

But some don’t.

And “should” isn’t an instructional plan.

Older struggling readers may still need explicit, systematic instruction in foundational skills, including decoding, spelling, fluency, and the meaningful parts of words. The instruction may look different than it does for a beginning reader, but the need for effective instruction doesn’t disappear because a student gets older.

I wish I had known more about how to provide it—and how to advocate for you to receive it.

Most of all, I wish I had known how much educator knowledge matters.

I can’t go back into my old classroom knowing what I know today.

But I can talk about you.

I can tell the educators I work with that dyslexia isn’t simply something a reading specialist or special education teacher needs to understand. A student with dyslexia doesn’t stop having dyslexia when reading intervention ends.

You carry reading and writing into science, social studies, math, electives, homework, assessments—and virtually every other part of the school day.

Every educator doesn’t need to become a dyslexia specialist. But every educator can understand enough about reading difficulty to respond with knowledge rather than assumptions. To maintain high expectations while providing appropriate access. To recognize when a student may need additional support. And to look beneath a behavior before deciding what it means.

Quality professional learning should help educators develop this kind of capacity: Evidence-based instructional knowledge, differentiated support for diverse learners, and practices that strengthen students’ engagement, connection, and sense of belonging.

So, dear former students, I’m sorry for the things I didn’t yet understand.

I hope you knew how much I believed in you, even when I didn’t fully understand the barriers some of you were facing. And perhaps the best way I can honor you now is to make sure today’s educators know what I didn’t know then.

Because awareness matters. But what we do with that awareness matters even more.