I will bring an "uninvited guest" along with my repertoire of skills and abilities to college next year. This uninvited guest is the burden brought by my specific learning disabilities and attention problems.
Throughout school, I hid my learning disabilities from my peers, embarrassed to admit to such a vulnerable imperfection, so it is particularly difficult for me to write an essay about my experiences living with these problems. To say that I was challenged and overcame adversity sounds more like a cliché than the real experience, but it is not just an overused saying to describe how life challenges brought by having severe, multiple learning disabilities taught me perseverance and humility. Recognizing my deficits helped me to appreciate my strengths. Coping with learning disabilities taught me to deal with challenge and adversity. I learned these adaptive skills over many years of self-discovery and effort.
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Nathan Porter was diagnosed with neurological and developmental disorders at an early age. He discusses his struggles with having to be taken out of class and is a student who thrived best in an inclusive classroom after his school adopted the program. |
I was first diagnosed before age three as having neurological and developmental problems that affected my speech, movement, and coordination. I had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) to help me throughout my 12+ years of public school. However, it wasn’t until this year, when I turned 18, that I became self-confident enough to talk about these issues publicly.
The "front line" for my battle with learning problems was not in the health clinic, it was in school and at home. The interventions were educational and behavioral, not pharmaceutical. When I was three years old, my pediatrician referred me to the Child Find Program. Child Find is the early intervention program for preschool special education. I had significant developmental delays in language and motor development that qualified me for these services. I was tested and diagnosed with severe working memory and processing problems in visual, auditory, and motor senses. This affected my ability to learn to read, spell, write, talk, and organize just about everything.
By the time I was in first grade, ssI was removed from the normal classroom and "pulled out" for special services almost all day. I viewed the special services as punitive, boring activities to occupy time. School was miserable for me in those early years. I hated when I was removed from my class; I felt that I was being treated as stupid or lazy, and I was determined to do whatever it took to not be separated from my friends at school.
In third grade, my school adopted a pilot program for inclusion of special services in the "regular" classroom through team teaching, and my experiences at school turned positive. To this day, I fondly remember my third grade teaching team, who understood that teaching in small groups and using different sensory modalities and learning experiences could greatly improve the result in the classroom for all students, not just those who have learning disabilities.
Competitive swimming was an important activity in my life, and it has been a therapeutic addition to the help I received in school. Swimming was recommended as an excellent and healthful therapy that would improve my spatial perception and left-right brain integration. The summer I learned to swim, I would swim laps in my neighborhood pool, a precociously unusual activity for a five-year-old. As a consequence, the swim coach asked me to join the developmental swim team for 4- to 7-year-olds. This was the start of my long-term commitment to competitive swimming.
Ironically, my occupational therapist warned my parents to avoid encouraging my involvement in competitive sports. She feared that my motor planning problems would leave me vulnerable to teasing which could hurt my self-esteem. But I loved sports, so my parents allowed me to pursue what I wanted to do. Competitive swimming helped me to develop a strong work ethnic, improve my focus, set goals, remediate my impairments and achieve in the classroom and in the sport of swimming. Swimming helped boost my confidence to take on new challenges. Before long, I caught the competitive fever, and I was swimming year-round for a club team.
In October 2007, after years of hard work in training and competition, I was named by USA Swimming (the government body for competitive swimming in this country) to the Scholastic All-American Team, an honor given to me based on my grade point average of 4.5 and my placements in two individual events: the 200-yard backstroke and the 100-yard butterfly in the 1007 Speedo Sectional Championships in Atlanta, Georgia. I also earned the honor of Outstanding Men’s Varsity Athlete for 2007 for my high school swimming team.
My academics improved immensely, due to hard work and help from many supportive teachers. My high school offers students the opportunity to take courses from the local colleges in a concurrent enrollment program. I was able to benefit from this opportunity, and I will have completed seven college courses, including upper level college mathematics courses, when I graduate high school. The greatest challenge for me in pursuing this opportunity was not the coursework. In college, you have to self-advocate for your disability if you seek accommodations. I can no longer depend on my parents and teachers to get me what I need. I will have to face up to my issues and address them constructively. I needed to develop good self-advocacy skills.
My high school requires seniors to complete a research and service-oriented graduation project. My senior project addressed learning disabilities, so that I could learn more about these problems and help others who may feel isolated in facing the difficulties living with these conditions. Despite the stark statistics indicative of the social, psychological, and economic risks, there are also hopeful statistics. One in three successful US entrepreneurs reports having a learning disability — supporting the notion that tenaciousness and developing novel problem-solving skills are shared traits found in those who succeed despite having a learning disability.
I learned more about learning disabilities and about myself through my senior project. I also honed the skills of self-advocacy through hard work, practice writing, and public speaking. I built my confidence to undertake the challenges of going away from home to college by exploring and doing well in college courses that I completed at a local university.
I look forward to the opportunity to develop expertise in business, mathematics, economics, and social entrepreneurship in college. I am confident that I can face the challenges of college life and succeed.