Second-Grade Terrors
By Jonathan Mooney
Learning disabilities activist Jonathan Mooney is the author of Learning Outside the Lines, a memoir of his struggles to overcome LD and ADHD and The Short Bus, his account of a journey across America visiting people whose lives are “beyond normal.” An honors graduate of Brown University, he is also the co-founder of Project Eye-To-Eye, a mentoring and advocacy non-profit organization for students with learning differences. Mooney, who often uses humor to describe the absurdities children with LD face, here relates a decidedly unfunny episode in his young life—one many young children with dyslexia deal with regularly.
An experience that haunts a lot of second graders—especially those with dyslexia—is something called “reading out loud.” Let me tell you how I remember it.
There I am in the reading circle. The first kid starts to read, and I start to flip ahead looking for my paragraph. If I can pre-read it, I’ll be okay. But that’s considered being “off task” or cheating, so my teacher yells at me to stop.
The next kid starts to read and my hands start to sweat, my face fills with fire, my words are broken up, and I’m choking.
As the kid next to me starts to read, I raise my hand. Where am I going? To the bathroom! I am so terrified that I get up and march intro the bathroom in tears. I cry. I throw up. Occasionally I even pass out. Sometimes I also think about suicide.
I’m hiding in the bathroom, praying that I get passed up, but when I march back into class, what do I discover? It’s my turn!
So I stand in front of all my friends, publicly humiliating myself. I stumble, I mumble, I choke, I suffocate over every word, every sentence for a 20-minute eternity. And we wonder why we’re picked on in the playground!
No child should ever have to go through that, yet it’s happening across America this minute. Let your kids know how wrong that is. Make them understand that it is not the fault of their disability—that it is the fault of the environment they’re forced to operate in.
Mooney’s recollections are similar to those of Greg Louganis, who before becoming a world-class athlete, faced similar trials and tribulations. In Golden Boy with a Secret, the Olympic gold medalist shares his struggles growing up with dyslexia.