In Which I Am Greatly Surprised By My Dyslexic's Favorite High School Class

Due to a combination of dyslexia making reading a writing a lot of work for his brain, ADHD making it difficult for him to a) concentrate in the school environment and b) force himself to be interested in the writing prompts his teachers gave him, Squirrelboy came out of elementary school basically hating to write. In the state writing test he took at the end of fifth grade, he scored on the novice level. That's the lowest score possible. I don't think his teachers were incompetent. The methods they employed worked to teach a majority of their students to write well. However, they did not work for Squirrelboy. Unfortunately, what they did was make him hate writing.

When I started homeschooling Squirrelboy, I approached language arts in general and writing in particular as slowly and gently as a I possibly could. The writing for the first program I tried involved the rewriting of fables, which is a hallmark of a particular stage within classical education, a style that is very popular within Christian homeschool circles in particular. The idea is that the student learns to write by imitating good models. There is nothing wrong with that model for the right student. However, Squirrelboy was not the right student. He hated it with the burning passion of a thousand suns. It turns out they had spent a brief amount of time in fifth grade rewriting fables, and the idea of spending an entire school year rewriting fables was anathema to him. I decided to back off the fable rewriting and just focus on the other parts of the program, which made it at least slightly palatable to him.

I hunted around for another writing program and landed on Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill series. This is another curriculum from the classical education viewpoint, but it approaches the teaching of writing in a very methodical manner, teaching students to notice key details in reading, write summaries (well, actually narrations, but they're similar), make outlines, and eventually write paragraphs about a nonfiction topic. This program didn't create a lot of excitement around writing for Squirrelboy, but he didn't hate it. We used it on and off from the end of 6th grade all the way through the end of 8th grade and he definitely gained some valuable skills from it.

Through a friend and neighbor who has homeschooled all of her kids, most of whom have learning differences, I learned about the Bravewriter program. This is a language arts program started by a homeschooling mom and professional writer that focuses not so much on developing specific skills in a methodical manner as helping a child find their own writing voice and making language arts in general and writing in particular an enjoyable, joyful experience. First I borrowed the basic handbook of the program, The Writer's Jungle, and took Squirrelboy through the process detailed in it. It wasn't a cure all for his hatred of writing, but it was a nice break from the useful but fairly dull skill work in Writing With Skill. Two things we picked up that we used regularly were freewriting, in which Squirrelboy wrote for a set number of minutes about any topic he chose, with no attention needing to be paid to grammar or spelling. This helped him begin to get over his fear of doing writing wrong. Not directly related to writing, we also began to have regular poetry teas, during which we would enjoy a treat together and read poetry to each other. This time gave him an appreciation for a style of writing he previously disliked, though it didn't make him fall in love with writing poetry.

As 8th grade approached, I knew I had to prepare Squirrelboy to write for others. I attempted to do that by a) signing him up for two Bravewriter online classes and b) putting him in a writing class at our homeschool coop. Both were good experiences for him, but the online classes were particularly valuable. Having feedback from a professional writer on what he did right in his writing and how he could improve and having very concrete steps to follow to complete a specific project on a topic he chose was very helpful to him. He came out of 8th grade still not really liking writing, but not hating it, and able to do it competently when he was willing to put the work in.

Even with all the work I did over three years of homeschooling Squirrelboy and in 8th grade in particular, I was still nervous about how his freshman English class would go. He had had fairly limited experience writing for others, and none of that writing had been for a real grade. I was afraid that he would get overwhelmed by the requirements of the class and shut down. To my great astonishment, the exact opposite has happened. English is Squirrelboy's favorite class by far, and, while he's doing fairly well in all his classes, he's doing astonishingly well in English. His teacher has used his work as an example for other students (amazingly, this does not seem to have made the other students hate Squirrelboy). How has this miracle occurred? It's all about a passionate, supportive teacher who drew Squirrelboy in from day one, engaged him, and made him care about doing his best work all the time. That's the thing about people with ADHD. It's not that they can't concentrate. It's that they have a harder time than the average person concentrating on something if they don't care about it. If they're passionate about something, they can, in fact, give even more to it than someone with a typical brain. Squirrelboy's teacher has, to my great astonishment, made him passionate about the writing for his class. The other thing he has done is to choose assignments that are applicable to the real world and that show Squirrelboy and other students that being able to write well is a valuable skill for life. Squirrelboy has spend the past several weeks writing a grant proposal that will actually be presented to a community foundation and may result in funding for a drone for the journalism club (which the amazing English teacher also encouraged Squirrelboy to join).

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Squirrelboy's new passion for writing has not transferred to his other classes. He has had to do a decent amount of writing for both Health and Civics, and he has complained loudly about it. However, he has at least done it competently. Perhaps in another year of high school a different teacher will get Squirrelboy excited about their subject and he'll be able to transfer the passion for writing well that his English teacher is fanning into flame.

There are a lot of successful people in this world with ADHD and/or Dyslexia. What most, perhaps even all, of those people have in common is that someone, at some point in their life, believed in them and pushed them to do their best and pursue what they were passionate about, even if it was hard. Mr. Engineer and I have always tried to do that for Squirrelboy, but it's always better for parents to have other adults in their child's life as partners in this effort. Squirrlboy's Freshman English teacher is proving to be a great one.