Post#15 Learning Disabilities How some neurodivergent people evaluate their education
Let’s introduce these people with a straight up irony.
The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents.[i]
Needing no further introduction, I give you …..
Phil Hanley: I had always been guarded. Played it cool. When you can’t read, you have to put on a brave face. In school, I adopted a first-day-in-prison mentality. Never cried when teachers tried to teach by humiliating me.
I didn’t question my comedic ability. I questioned my ability, period.
Even writing a few words was exhausting… School had prepared me for struggle. I was programmed to expect adversity and to assume life would be hard.[i]
Brian: I failed grade 9 because I stopped going to school. I had come to hate school so much that I began to feign sickness in order to avoid attending school. Whenever someone tried to force me to go to school, I simply told them that I had a severe headache. …I still believed myself to be that which the school system had conditioned me to be – a withdrawn, below-average student unlikely to achieve much educationally. …That I continue to doubt my own ability to achieve academic success, even after years of doing so, serves as a good example of the power early socialization experiences have on the human being.[ii]
Philip Schultz: …I’d grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who, if fallible and unworthy, had nevertheless managed to do one thing well enough to get recognition for it. I’d learned to accommodate and live around my compromised self in a somewhat comfortable and acceptable manner. Since I was ten I’d taught myself to live a life of opposites – because I couldn’t do this I learned to enjoy doing that, …
…I often read a sentence two or three times before I truly understand it; must restructure its syntax and sound out its syllables before I can begin to absorb its meaning and move on to the next sentence. And when I make the mistake of becoming aware that I am reading, and deveining in a way that enables this mysterious, electrically charge process to take place, my mind balks and goes blank and I become anxious and stop.
For reasons I’ll never fully understand, or perhaps don’t even want to, I dislike the peculiar, obstinate, slightly out-of-control way in which my mind behaves when I’m reading.
I understood that I was different from other kids… (the fear he struggled with) …was my anxiety about being different, most likely related to my dyslexia, that fostered this fear.
At a restaurant he ordered the same thing every day, even though he detested it, …because I’d overheard a man ordering it on my first afternoon there and I couldn’t read the menu and was too embarrassed to ask the waitress. Phil Hanley made adaptations or masked in this way also. It used to break my heart to watch Yasik do the same when we would be at a restaurant. At the same time, I admired his smarts at inventing this adaption for himself.
Even in a helpful school Schultz knew he was on his own. He and the other students knew through experience that they had to learn to compensate for their inability to immediately process written and spoken language and that regardless of the quality and sensitivity of the education they receive, they have to learn how to adapt independently to each difficult situation. Schultz finishes by saying his experiences are not unique to him and his friends. Children and adults alike “say they are in pain”.[iii]
Clarence Cachagee and his foster brother: By 1972, when Clarence [a foster child] was seven years old and in grade two, he had outgrown his speech impediment but was still insecure at school. Learning to read and write was proving difficult, and he was struggling to make new friends. At the end of the school year, due to his poor marks, the school administration decided to hold him back from the next grade. I think my first experience with failure was when I was seven years old. All those friends that I made through those few early years, I lost them because they held me back. I remember how devastating that was, internally, watching those people move forward, knowing they were going into grade three and knowing that I wasn’t going.
After this Clarence became angrier at school. Other children would sometimes make fun of him for his learning challenges. He started getting into fights… Clarence was beginning to think about himself as an outcast, an ill-fitting piece to the puzzle of his school and family life… I became a bully because I wanted some of those children in school to experience the pain that I was experiencing…[iv]
Dave too was made to feel stupid for a time in his elementary years, and not understanding the bullying, got good at fighting back.
Alex Plank of WrongPlanet: He had also suffered the same kinds of bullying, ridicule, and exclusion as many of his atypical peers. [but] … felt confident that his social status as a dork was the inevitable side effect of being highly gifted. [Then he finds the diagnosis of Asperger’s and] then I got this label that made me feel like a loser…[v]
Rebecca Wilcox: When I was at Oxford University, my friends teased me mercilessly about being dyslexic. …at the time, the bullying feels like the worst thing in the world and not worth living through.
Other children can be horrible if they sense weakness. I don’t care if overcoming challenges makes you stronger in the long run, because at the time, the bullying feels like the worst thing in the world and not worth living through.
And this from a school she sought for her boys at the time of writing: I received a call from the school secretary saying they wouldn’t take them. Their education was vastly delayed, she said, their handwriting terrible, reading appalling. I stopped listening and started to sob when the phrase ‘retarded learning’ was mentioned… [vi]
Blyth Hall’s son: …this little boy with his insatiable love of learning, entered school and disintegrated. Prior to school, his curiosity had been constant … [vii]
Emil Sands: (Sands has cerebral palsy and struggles with shame about his body) Today, hardly anyone knows I am disabled. I tell no one because I believe people will like me less. …Or maybe I should rephase: I believe people will like me more if they think I am like them. So I go out of my way to keep my disability private…. I know more than most that difference must be celebrated, and that each time I hide, the shame builds – for me, for others like me.
I am not sure I want to hide anymore. I’d rather embrace my disability than fear its fallout. But it would be a lie to say I love every part of my body. I am still grappling with the ways I have been made to feel that my body does not belong – and with the conviction that it is easier for everyone that I be a failing normal rather than a normal disabled.[viii]
In a poem called “Floodgates” by Alice Alsup a year before she died, she laments that the ways in which people dehumanize her for her difference, making a modest but vital claim: I’m pretty sure my heart works/the same way as theirs.[ix]
In a meeting with one of the learning assistance teachers working with Yasik, we sat together around a low table on children’s chairs though even Yasik’s knees were halfway to his ears. This likely certified learning assistance teacher, told Dave and I in front of Yasik, he will never be more than a carpet layer. She disgusted me. But just in case someone investigates, full disclosure, one of Yasik’s first paying jobs was as a carpet layer.
While in the Orton-Gillingham school, Yasik gave me advice for my students with learning struggles. He told me to give my students a paper to follow so they won’t be embarrassed when they don’t know. My journal says I guessed he was realizing that this support was helping him.
Yet, … Struggling with an individual learning difference, each of these people have learned in many little and big ways, they were not perfect. I am currently reading Unread: a memoir of learning (and loving) to Read on TikTok by Oliver James. It was published this year, 2026. I think it is not a stretch to suggest it may not be the last written about the life experience of someone with a learning disability.
At 21, Yasik never wanted to learn again.
Footnotes
[i] Gill, A.A. “The Parenting Trap” Vanity Fair December, 2012, 130, 132
[i] Hanley, Phil. Spellbound: my life as a dyslexic wordsmith Henry Holt and Company, 2025, 126, 127, 194, 223, 239
[ii] Goodin, Brian “Socialization via Schooling: how schooling helped me believe I was a failure” Education 240-3 Simon Fraser University, 1989
[iii] Schultz, Philip My Dyslexia WW Norton, 2012, 24, 26, 37, 44, 46-47, 50-51, 75
[iv] Cachagee, Clarence, Seth Ratzlaff North Wind Man Gelassenheit Publications, 2023, 17, 18
[v] Silberman, Steve Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 454, 458
[vi]Wilcox, Rebecca Bea’s wrong: we shouldn’t wish dyslexia on anyone: As Princess Beatrice claims dyslexia is a ‘gift’, TV presenter REBECCA WILCOX says… Daily Mail; London (UK) [London (UK)]. 19 Aug 2021: 42.
[vii] Blyth Hall, Sue Fish Don’t Climb Trees: a whole new look at dyslexia: understanding and overcoming the challenges-enjoying the gift. FriesenPress, 2020, 5
[viii] Sands, Emil. The Atlantic March, 2023, 63
[ix] Rebolini, Arianna Better: a memoir about wanting to die Harper, 2025, 172
