The Dyslexic Advantage (30 page)

Thriving in High School and College

T
he period from mid adolescence to young adulthood is also a critical time for individuals with dyslexia. During these years they must become increasingly responsible for their own organization, learning, and significant life choices.

One of the most important choices facing individuals with dyslexia during this time is whether to attend college or to head directly into the workforce. In this chapter, we'll focus on the decisions and challenges facing those who choose to go to college. We'll discuss issues related to work in the next chapter.

Students with dyslexia who plan to attend college face two important tasks during their high school years. The first is developing the skills and supports they'll need to succeed in college.

 

Learning and Study Skills.
Students with dyslexia must first and foremost develop the ability to identify and use their ideal learning style. An individual's ideal learning style is determined by his or her blend of four key learning components. Those components are
Information Input
,
Information Output
,
Memory
(or
Pattern Processing
), and
Attention.

Information Input
refers to the routes through which we absorb information. Some students take in information best through auditory routes and are good at remembering things they hear, while other students learn almost nothing by listening and find lectures a waste of time. Some students (even some with dyslexia) learn best by reading, while others learn poorly through print. Some students learn well by looking at visual representations of information, while others must put things into words to remember them. Others learn best by interacting physically with information or learning through exploration, while others find that activity distracts them from learning. Each student must find the routes that work best for him or her, then do everything possible to channel incoming information through these routes.

Information Output
refers to the routes through which we express or communicate information. Some students are powerful oral communicators and can easily express their thoughts by speaking. Others communicate better by putting their thoughts in writing. Others express their thoughts best using visual or structural representations, like diagrams, schematics, or working models. Finding educational environments where work requirements are well matched to output strengths is also essential.

The third learning component,
Memory
, we discussed in chapter 16, but understanding memory is so important for determining ideal learning styles that we'll touch again on some key points. During this discussion you can refer to figure 1 on page 115, which illustrates the structure of the memory system.

Memory can be divided into two main branches: working and long-term memory. Working memory is like the random-access memory (RAM) on your computer. It's where information in current use is kept so it can be quickly accessed for processing. Working memory has visual, verbal, and spatial/kinesthetic branches, and different students may show big differences in how much information they can hold in each. Knowing which branch of working memory works best for them can help students with dyslexia channel information into the appropriate form. For example, students with strong visual working memory can turn all sorts of information into visual representations like charts, graphs, icons, pictures, or mind maps. Students with strong auditory-verbal working memory may use key words or acronyms to hold a larger amount of information in a smaller working memory space. And students with strong spatial/kinesthetic working memory can use movements or positions in space as “pegs” to keep information in mind. We discuss such memory (or mnemonic) techniques in detail in our book
The Mislabeled Child.

It's important to realize that students with working memory weaknesses—which includes many individuals with dyslexia—can also “offload” their working memories by using external memory aids or “surrogate memory devices.” These aids can include word lists of key terms; cards showing formulas, steps in a type of problem, or examples of the type of problem being solved; lists of sentence and paragraph types (as discussed in chapter 26, on writing); checklists of “to do” items; or any of the other organizational methods and technologies we've been discussing. With the right strategies to offload working memory and take advantage of other cognitive strengths, limitations in working memory don't need to cause serious problems.

The other major branch of memory, long-term memory, can also be divided into two branches: procedural memory and factual (or declarative) memory. As we've discussed, procedural memory helps us automatically master procedures, rules, and rote tasks so we can perform them without consciously thinking about them or using working memory. Inefficiencies in procedural memory are common in individuals with dyslexia, but just as with working memory, problems can often be prevented by using appropriate strategies and accommodations to offload procedural memory. These strategies involve explicitly studying and practicing the rules and procedures for complex tasks and having memory aids containing this information available when they are being practiced.

Factual or declarative memory can also be divided into two major branches. The first branch of factual memory is episodic or personal memory, which we described in detail in chapter 16. This is memory for things as they've been personally experienced, or imagined as experiences. Episodic memories are typically recalled as mental scenes that are reconstructed in the mind using bits of past personal experience.

Semantic or impersonal memory, the second branch of factual memory, contains information in a form that's noncontextual or unrelated to specific experiences. Semantic memories are typically more like abstract definitions than examples.

As we've written earlier, in our experience most—but not all—individuals with dyslexia favor episodic over semantic memory. Knowing which form of factual memory a student prefers can greatly help with learning. For example, students with a strong episodic memory often remember facts better when they couch them in story format, whether the stories are real or fanciful (like Blake Charlton using fanciful narratives to represent the periodic table). Individuals with strong episodic memories also tend to remember information better when they think in terms of cases or examples rather than abstract or noncontextual definitions. In contrast, students who favor semantic memory will do best when they can “boil down” specific examples into general principles or underlying themes.

Attention
, the fourth system component, is often spoken of as if it were a single function, but it is actually a complex combination of different subsystems. Many students with dyslexia will struggle with some aspects of attention in certain situations, so it's important for these students to understand how attention works in order to troubleshoot their areas of challenge.

One of the key components of attention is working memory, which we've already discussed. Individuals with relatively small working memory capacities (including many individuals with dyslexia) often experience lapses in attention during tasks that place heavy demands upon working memory. What's actually happening is that they're experiencing a breakdown in attention because their working memory is being overwhelmed. This type of working memory overload and attention breakdown also occurs often in individuals with procedural memory inefficiencies because they must perform many more tasks than most people using conscious focus and working memory, since these tasks have not yet become automatic.

Other key components of the attention system include sustained attention, or the ability to remain focused on a task for long periods of time, and selective attention, which is the ability to focus on one thing and to resist distractions. Attention is also heavily affected by factors like motivation and interest, temperament (especially resistance to frustration), and difficulties with information input and output.

Understanding attention is important because many students with dyslexia show big differences in their ability to focus on information of different kinds or in different formats or in different settings. By optimizing the form and setting of the learning experience, students with dyslexia can often greatly improve their attention and learning.

When all four of these learning components—input, output, memory, and attention—are optimized in this way, the effect on learning can be truly dramatic. We discuss these learning components and the ways in which they can be optimized in detail in
The Mislabeled Child.
¹

 

Reading and Writing.
Just as no one should go exploring in the wilderness without the necessary supplies, no student with dyslexia should enter college without a fully developed plan for dealing with the inevitable reading and writing requirements. Students with dyslexia should begin to develop this plan in high school, and it should include steps both to build their skills in reading and writing and to familiarize themselves with the accommodations and technologies they'll need to succeed in college. We've discussed reading and writing at length in previous chapters, so we won't repeat all that information here. However, we strongly encourage all college-bound students with dyslexia to carefully consider that material and make sure they develop the skills and identify the technological assists and other accommodations they'll need to succeed in college. The students with dyslexia who thrive in college are proactive and head off problems before they occur. Often there won't be time available to address these challenges in the middle of a busy college term.

 

Organization and Time Management.
Staying organized and using time efficiently are also key components to achieving success in college. Traditional methods of keeping organized and on schedule, like checklists, whiteboards, Day-Timers, and sticky notes, can all be helpful. Even more valuable for many of today's increasingly “wired” and “plugged-in” students are the newer technologies that provide reminders through computers or cell phones, or desktop timers for computers that help improve time awareness and focus during tasks. Examples of these technologies are listed in Appendix A. Suggestions for other devices can also be found at the Lifehacker website (
www.lifehacker.com
) or on our website (
http://dyslexicadvantage.com
).

 

Peer Support.
As students mature, their relationships with friends become an increasingly important source of support and self-esteem. Unfortunately, only a few of the individuals with dyslexia we interviewed received support from other dyslexic individuals during high school or college. Most remembered those years as a time of isolation and loneliness when they felt separated from the “normal” students by their academic struggles and from other individuals with dyslexia because they were “mainstreamed” into regular education classrooms and had no way of identifying each other.

However, one of our interviewees found his life so wonderfully transformed by the supportive community of other students with dyslexia whom he met in college that the chief mission of his life has become extending that support to other students with dyslexia. David Flink described his early years of schooling this way: “As a kid I always remember feeling alone. Until I got diagnosed with dyslexia in fifth grade, I just felt dumb. The words on the pages didn't make sense to me. Then in fifth grade I was diagnosed, and I started going to a school specifically for kids with learning disabilities.”

While that school taught David how to read and write, after two years he was returned to a general education classroom, where he again felt isolated. That sense of isolation continued until he enrolled as a freshman at Brown University. There his life began to change in a way that he'd never imagined. “Prior to enrolling at Brown, I'd never known anyone else who felt and seemed really smart but who also had a learning disability, because everyone I'd known with learning disabilities had lost so much self-esteem that they didn't feel smart at all.”

But at Brown, David found an entire community of smart individuals with challenges like dyslexia and ADHD. “When I showed up at Brown, the first week of school the disability office held a meeting for all students with learning disabilities, and at that meeting I met a phenomenal group of people. We immediately bonded and started hanging out together. We quickly realized that one thing we shared was that we'd all been told in one way or another that college wasn't in the cards for us—yet here we all were. So we created what we jokingly named the ‘LD/ADHD Mafia' [for “learning disability”/“attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder”]. It was our own version of a ‘secret society,' and we shared each other's gifts and skills and supported each other when it came time to ask for accommodations. That community helped us realize that we weren't broken, but that the system was broken. Embracing my own identity as someone who had a learning difference—and using that identity in a positive way—was huge for me. That was how I first realized that dyslexia could be an advantage.”

David and his friends benefited so much from their community that they began to realize that other students with learning challenges could also benefit from similar communities. From this realization, Project Eye-to-Eye was born. This is a nonprofit organization (
www.projecteyetoeye.org
) that David cofounded with fellow dyslexic and “Mafia” member Jonathan Mooney. (Jonathan is also coauthor of the wonderful book
Learning Outside the Lines
, which has become a classic resource for college-bound students with learning challenges.
²
) It is a mentoring program that pairs college students with learning challenges who've successfully learned
how
to learn with struggling secondary school students, so the older students can come alongside and support with advice and encouragement. As David explained, “We realized that it was important to go back and tell younger students that they can be successful and make it to college, too. When you're in college, there's an innate coolness about you for younger kids: you're only one educational leap above them, and when you actually go to them and say, ‘You could be like us,' they can actually reach out and touch you and see that you're real, and that's incredibly powerful for them. So the experience of going and mentoring these kids and giving them a different message than they were currently receiving was incredibly life changing not only for them but also for us.”