Turning Reading Challenges Into Passion and Purpose

The first thing I remember growing up is just how much I wanted to learn, how I wanted to be a big kid who went to school. I wanted to do this so badly that when I was 4 and I was living in a small little neighborhood, there was a little preschool by the community church just a few blocks away from this little house that we were renting at the time, a little small town in Mississippi. And I would walk myself down there—we were very free and feral back when I was a kid—to this school and I felt like such a big kid going there and learning about my numbers and my colors and about animals and different things and being able to interact with the teacher and the other kids in the class. And it was such a sense of empowerment. I did feel big. I felt empowered. I felt like the learning belonged to me. 

And then I continued and I moved around a lot because of what my dad did at the time. We found ourselves in different places. At the start of public school, when I entered into, like, big kids school for reals, you know, I wasn’t a bad student. And in fact, the teachers thought I was pretty bright. I was able to talk for myself. I seemed to pick up on things really well. I was funny and everyone seemed to like me.

And I had a good way of thinking that I was learning how to read. And for me, that was being in those readers and listening as other kids were reading. And what I thought they must have been doing was what I was doing, which was hearing what they were saying and mapping that onto the words, whole words based on the visual patterns that I saw. And I was memorizing these words. 

And then one faithful day finally happened, when I was in a position where I had to read the book before anybody else did. And, I couldn’t read it. Because I guess the other kids weren’t just hearing other kids read the words and memorizing them. They must have had some other way that I was unaware of unlocking that code, of deciphering that print. And for me, that was a black box I couldn’t peer inside of. 

My teachers let me know pretty quickly that I was one of the dumbest kids in the class. And after some testing was done that was confirmed for them. My testing didn’t show that I was exceptional. That I had a great potential to do better than what I was. For whatever reason, I wasn’t showing up on those tests the way that I thought I was showing up since I wanted to be in school.

And that was a really hard moment for me: To realize that something has fundamentally shifted. Not about me. I was the same kid coming to school day after day. The one who before that, they thought was bright enough, but now I wasn’t enough. And they kept telling me that over and over again. I remember this one episode a year later after this testing was done, and I was deemed to be an unexceptional kid not worthy of intervention or the label of dyslexia. I 

remember being there and having this older kid come in and I was told by my teacher that this kid was coming in and we were gonna help each other and that he struggled to read like I did. So, I’d be helping him and he’d be helping me. And there’s this one day when that teacher wasn’t in the class and I was left there. And the substitute came in, this other teacher from this other class, just stepping in for a moment and asked: “Why is he here?” And I said: “Oh, uh, we help each other. I help him out with reading. He helps me with reading.” And that teacher looked at me just with disgust in her eyes. We all know you can’t read. Nobody would ever want you to help them with reading in front of the whole class.

And, of course, then everybody laughs. And then, of course, what happened next was that that little boy was told to go back to his class and he never showed up again. So, whatever support they thought they were giving me, that they had found a workaround to take this unexceptional kid who wasn't bright enough to be dyslexic to help him out, was gone. 

I remember being held after school with kind of the rejects. The ones who weren’t good enough to get intervention or to get an IEP and having to sit there after school day after day and just kind of slog through my English work. Slog through my spelling lists. I remember staying up late at night, working until late in the hours, getting in trouble the day after because I’d left my light on or they thought that I was watching TV. But what I was really doing was I was trying to study those spelling lists. And I’d still go in week after week and I would make an F every single time. So, this just kept going on and on and on.

And eventually, my dad moved us to another state. And it turned out that I was finally exceptional. My math was actually really good. And in fact, in the school I moved into, I was ahead of every other kid except for one. He had also moved in from a different place.

He was a different type of brat. He was an Army brat. He was a military brat. And he moved around a lot too. And we were on schedule to need to take calculus by our senior year because we were a full year ahead of every other kid, actually, in the state because there was a pretty standardized way that they did math.

So, we moved to a state that we were a full year ahead. And, of course, I had a choice to make. The school counselor is looking at my records and saying: “I see a lot of stuff on these records here and a lot of information.” 

I said: “I don’t wanna bring any of that with me. I don’t want anybody to know, no teachers to know about that.” 

[She] was like: “Really?”

I said: “Yeah.” 

[She said:] “But you need to be in a different math class.” 

I’m like: “Well, I’m tired of standing out.” 

[She said:] “But you stand up for a good reason.”

[I said:] “But I’d still stand out.”

So, we filed that away and I went and I repeated the same math content. I did pretty dismal in the class. It was boring. I’d already been there. I didn’t like the teacher. I was new in class. I was just trying to fit in. So, I kinda slogged through the content. Made my way through it

and I left all that behind. And so, then I started to kinda move up in my ranks and compensate the best I could, and it turns out that I was pretty exceptional. I started getting into the advanced classes. I started getting into AP. I still struggled with spelling.

I still couldn’t read fluently. I still struggled to read the words on the page, but I was compensating. I was working harder than I think anybody else was in those classes. And then I went to college and I was doing really well there too. And I was still struggling.

I can remember that in my last year, I was taking one of my final tests and the professor would count off for spelling. And trichotillomania which is this type of neurosis that you get where you compulsively pull out your hair was not a word I could spell. So, I wound up making a B+ on the test because I missed a few words in spelling. Imagine that. You’re in college and the reason why you don’t make an A is because you knew the content but you couldn’t spell the words.

And my peers will be studying late at night. I would be done studying the content and I would know it. And they’d be like: “What are you doing?” And I’d be repeatedly writing words on the board for the test the next day knowing that the professor would count out for every misspelling I had on the test. You know, it doesn’t go away, guys.

As I progressed and went into graduate school and moved on, I started to see the bigger picture, and I started to see that the research I was studying and learning about cognitive development could be applied to something that was really personal to me: To literacy. That I could take what I was doing and really was exceptional at, which was being analytic and thinking and being a research scientist, being trained then as a neuroscientist. I could apply to literacy, and I put all my efforts into learning what real schools are like, how they run. I’ve worked on how policy impacts that. How curriculums are built. How assessments work. How the brain works when it comes to literacy. How language and cognition interplay with one another. How we look when we respond to intervention. That became my passion. My purpose.

The other thing that I’ve done is I’ve been public like this and I’ve reached out. And one of the things that I wanna share with you, why this is so important for us to share our stories is because we’re not alone. A lot of us were never helped. A lot of us were not exceptional. A lot of us were thought to be less than.

And we’re out there. I call this the silent majority. Dyslexia is not a story of two ends of a distribution. It’s the story of a quiet group of people who many of us had to compensate and try to find our way. So, what I do now is I try to create systems and help to inform how policy is written at this point because I got tired of trying to constantly fix policy to try to get ahead of the curve. And, how we can make better curriculum, better interventions, and better translate the science that we have. So, if you hear me out there doing what I’m doing it’s because I was once a little boy who wanted nothing more than to go to school. And, that’s why this matters.