Free Shop and Let Die by Kelly McClymer

x apples and
gives Sally y, how many apples does John have left?”
    He sighed, and answered as
if he was indulging a madwoman. So like his father there. “x -
y.”
    “ Then why do you have “x +
y” written down?”
    He scowled, determined not
to admit that his dyslexia was responsible. He and I both know that
his IEP calls for him to have word problems read to him, but he’d
rather face water torture or the rack than ask the classroom aide
to read simple problems to him in full view of the rest of his
class. He’d rather get an “F” than ask me. He’d rather die than ask
Seth.
    Without further word, I
read each problem to him and he easily answered correctly and made
the appropriate corrections on his paper, although each time his
erasures got more and more violent.
    At last, Supermom status
buoying me, I hugged him. “You can do this honey, you just need a
little help. Ask for it, why don’t you?”
    He nodded, but only to
escape.
    I continued, “There’s no
shame in dyslexia, and your tutoring will get you up to speed soon,
so you won’t need to ask for help very much any more.”
    He was making good
progress in his reading tutoring, and had brought his reading level
up from second grade to fourth grade level. But since he was in
seventh grade, that didn’t help him handle the massive amounts of
reading material he had to process. His coping mechanism was to
avoid reading altogether if there were more than three sentences on
a page.
    He brought home more
papers with “F” on them than any child’s heart could stand. Always
in bright red and branded large on the paper. Every teacher
professed profound surprise that Ryan’s dyslexia was causing the
problem when I brought the issue to their attention.
    It seemed impossible to me
that they missed the obvious. But then again, I only looked at
Ryan’s homework. I didn’t have to look at the homework of thirty
other kids.
    School is tough on some
kids. Ryan’s friend Elliot is a very smart kid without the
self-preservation skills to keep his intelligence hidden. The
teachers visibly winced when he raised his hand because they knew
he was going to make a thoughtful, well read comment pointing out
how shallow the teacher’s own knowledge of a particular subject
was. They kept trying to put him in the gifted and talented
program, but his mother had had the good sense to refuse after his
first two weeks in it.
    Elliot, a normally
reasonable child, came home ready to do battle with the world
because the school interpreted gifted and talented to mean the
child should have to do more and harder worksheets than the
ungifted and untalented kids, like mine. Discussion was frowned
upon, and competition was brutal.
    Elliot made an eloquent
and articulate statement to his mother, the gist of which was that
he would become either a juvenile delinquent or mad as a hatter if
he were forced to spend even one more day in such a
class.
    She, a true Supermom if
ever there was one, decided to keep him in school (but not in
G&T) part time for his socialization skills, and homeschool him
herself in the afternoons and on the weekends. I envy them the
afternoons they spend at museums, traipsing through the woods
identifying plants and animals, and photographing
nature.
    Ryan envies him the
electronics and chemistry labs set up in their basement—although he
participates in Elliot’s experiments and projects often enough that
we have no doubt he’s a smart boy. We hope when he learns to read
at grade level he’ll begin to show the teachers. I try not to give
in to the fear that teachers pigeonhole a kid early on and the
label is almost impossible to shake.
    Take me. Smart and quiet,
the teachers called me. Stuck up and Miss Know it All, my fellow
students said. Shy and paranoid, I labeled myself. Even today, I
can feel myself test out each label for truth whenever I make a
misstep in parenting, wiving, shopping, or life itself.
    On my better days I reject
all the labels, like