Nathan’s Story

​(As told by his mother, Lisa Harp)

Whenever I hear parents talk about their children’s learning issues, I go back in time to Chandler, Arizona in the early 1990’s.

I can still feel that penetrating wall of heat as I walked my six-year-old son across the street to school. You see, there were two children from his class who qualified for extra help that summer break…and you got it…my kid…my little cowboy…was one of them.

The math was there for all to see.  He was at the bottom of his class. It wasn’t news to me.  Nathan struggled to read, write, focus…and…school was just so hard for him.

The Devastation of Underperforming in School

I was heartbroken, devastated. As I held his tiny hand in mine, the summer heat felt like it might just melt us both before we got to the school. Even worse, my little boy who’d always been so happy, was losing his sunshine.

Here I was…a teacher…and my child was struggling to learn. The embarrassment ran deep, but the worry crowded that and almost everything else out. The sheer desperation…the fear for his future overtook everything. 

Why couldn’t I help him learn? After all, I was highly trained in the field of education.  

Desperation was the worst feeling of all. I would have tried almost anything to help my little cowboy. I’d already tried so many things that hadn’t worked. On that particular day, I knew something else was going on with my perfect little boy. 

I also knew I was wasting my time taking him to the school’s program. They were just going to do the same things with him – traditional reading and writing activities – that didn’t work for him all day long. There were no different or unique activities that were being offered – nothing that went to the root of the problem and fixed it.

Back then (and now) the main support most struggling learners receive is more practice, shortened assignments, and more time. The idea is that things might click the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth…thousandth time it is done.

Yes, that works at times, but repetition is a rough road to travel on, especially for bright children who are under-performing. Repetition can be a helpful tool. Most children need repeated activities to learn. But it doesn’t correct processing issues. The worst part of all is the boredom! And Nathan was bored to death! He hated school so much.

But…I’d said yes to the summer program…hoping it would at least nudge him in the right direction. Like any parent with a struggling child, I could cross my fingers and hope.

What Happened to My Baby?

The realization hit me hard. The beautiful, happy baby I’d had only a short time ago was apparently now…a bottom feeder, the one who needed help. He was falling behind rapidly, and I felt powerless to help him. Even worse, he felt all the stress of school performance and grades.

But I was insane in a way. I wanted help for him so badly that I didn’t even care if they tortured my first-grade boy all day.  “Just help him read,” I’d think. “Help him learn,” I pleaded in my mind. “Maybe this would be the breakthrough,” I thought as I ushered him into the icy cold classroom, fighting every gut feeling I had to just grab him, take him home, and quit all this nonsense. But there was that little seed of hope that this was the one thing that would turn him around.

It wasn’t.

The Danger of Not Getting the Right Help

Years passed without any real change. Nathan had a couple great teachers and a few who sliced huge scars onto his soul. That can’t be redone. But he was happy, hard-working, extremely social, and if there was ever a kid who wanted to learn, it was him.

After long school days, I made Nathan to sit at the kitchen table to read, write, and do math. I had him practice multiplication facts using the only thing I knew to do at the time – flashcards. (Kids with dyslexia don’t learn with flashcards. It’s like speaking another language to them.) I forced every academic I could down his throat and he spewed out the best sludge that he could.

But it only helped so much.

​I knew this kid was smart, though. When Nathan was three years old, he used big words like “articulated” and “demonstrated”…perfectly in context every time. His vocabulary and personality astounded most people who met him. At the time, I was sure my boy was gifted, and his future would be bright.   

But he’d mess up some words, too. He had a hard time saying magazine (mazagine) and specifically (pacifically). He could tell you the words of a movie verbatim after one viewing, though, and he could build huge Lego sets on his own, following the directions step-by-step.

Some of his teachers pushed for medication. I stood my ground and refused. This was the heyday of Ritalin where kids lined up in the nurse’s office at school to get their pills. I knew one thing in all of this: that wasn’t going to be my child.

It wasn’t.

I can’t say that I didn’t have some weak moments where I thought medication might help. But I’d read too much about the down sides of Ritalin and didn’t want that for my little boy. I’m glad I held my ground on that issue!

Accepting that there’s a Problem is the First Step to Getting Help

​When Nathan was in the fifth grade, we moved to Colorado and the real struggle began. He fell further and further behind. Due to stress, his asthma became so bad that he had to have breathing treatments almost every day at school. He was losing self-confidence and knew he wasn’t performing as well as his peers

​Awareness…it’s a thing with kids. They know who’s getting A’s and who’s getting F’s. They know who’s the fastest runner and who the kid that can barely make it to the finish line is. They also know the Kangaroos are the low reading group and the Dolphins are the high reading group.

My son was a Kangaroo, and I vowed he’d one day become a Dolphin

Other Schooling Options Can Help

​One day, after another horrible day at school, something snapped. I knew Nathan couldn’t go back to school. I knew he needed something different. He was going to be home schooled, and some how, some way, I’d find a way to fix the problem.

I went on a mother mission. Keep in mind that in the 1990’s, the internet was an infant, so there wasn’t the glut of information there that you get today. There wasn’t much information in general on how to treat learning disabilities, especially for the unique learner.  But my chin was set in a hard line. This was my boy, and I wasn’t letting him fail any more.

Although Nathan missed the social component of school, he flourished at home. I didn’t know then that you can’t learn when you’re in fight-or-flight, and my son had been in six years of fight-or-flight.

Days passed and we started getting our sweet boy back.  It was like a breath of fresh air.

But the problem of learning still existed.

“There has to be a way to help him,” I thought.  “And other kids, too,” I mused. My head spun with ideas.

A Learning System that Works…

There had to be something more…a way. A system. A plan that worked. I checked out books in the library, studying well into the night. On the brain, learning, teaching, child development. Learning disabilities, dyslexia. Anything I could get my hands on.

I was lucky enough to live in Colorado Springs at the time and took classes from one of Diane Craft’s protégé’s…Rebecca Kinnard. The information was based on researchers Doman and Delacatto. Their research was done in the 1950’s and 1960’s for “brain injured” children. It’s focus on motor, visual, and spatial skills intrigued me.   

I learned about the brain and how it affects learning, about the power of cross-lateral movements and neuro-plasticity. This was the first step toward giving me gave me a solution to Nathan’s learning problems. But it wasn’t everything.

Every day, I had Nathan work on cross-lateral and brain integration exercises.  We noticed one thing right away. He calmed down. He quit having as many asthma attacks. He was more primed to learn.

But…sadly…it wasn’t enough.  We saw improvement, but I still didn’t have that Dolphin I wanted.  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t care if he was in the high group or not.

He did.

​And I wanted to help him get there.  He’d been through enough.

Each Learning Coimponent is Crucial

I took Nathan to the eye doctor to get his eyes checked and that’s where I discovered vision therapy. I immediately had him tested and enrolled him in vision therapy classes. I became fascinated with the field! 

I learned that we have muscles in our eyes and that they can become weak and keep a student from lining math columns up correctly or writing on lines on a paper. Of course, there’s a lot more to vision therapy, but the eye muscle part of it alone had me hooked.

Nathan always had a difficult time with margins. He would start writing almost in the middle of the paper. That’s because he wasn’t seeing the line where it actually was. His writing was messy, sloped downhill, and his penmanship was irregular.

Nathan had a difficult time with reading, writing, and spelling as well, and I attributed a lot of these problems to his inability to perceive the world correctly. It had nothing to do with his intelligence! It didn’t take long for the vision therapy to kick in!

Soon, he was writing in the margins. I had been teaching him cursive, and that helped immensely. Switching from print to cursive is difficult for students, but it’s so important for a unique learner who is struggling to get print on paper to use cursive. Cursive flows, and the options for reversals are so much less.

​I was so interested in the vision therapy component of learning that I received training for it. I applied what I could to learning – reading, writing, and math – making up my own exercises and applying them to academics and learning.

I took the larger component of academics and broke those skills down into smaller units – micro-skills. From there, I combined the micro-skills with visual, gross motor, and fine motor skills. In addition, I tied in brain balancing exercises. Not knowing if it would work, I had Nathan work on these exercises every day.

​After all, I had the perfect guinea pig at home – my sweet boy who wanted to succeed more than any kid I’d ever known.  At one point, if someone would have told me to stand him on his head in a corner for 45 minutes a day, I would have done it!

​But…his reading was still sketchy when he read aloud, and he wasn’t a confident reader.  He misread words and his fluency was poor, although his comprehension was high. I knew we had to get this fixed before he went to middle school and high school, so we plugged away on the micro-skills activities.

​Something was Still Missing.

​As I continued to study and refine, Nathan made outstanding progress. His reading improved, his math skill rose to grade level, and his writing became legible. But spelling was still a problem, and he continued having to work too hard to make the grade.

As I did more research, I finally discovered it was the auditory component that he needed. I discovered that auditory processing skills are extremely important, especially for kids with dyslexia. I pieced together more activities and exercises that were based on developmental auditory processing activities.

​Nathan started hearing sounds correctly and learned to manipulate auditory information in his head so he could sound out words correctly and read more fluently. Math word problems became easier for him because he could read and process the information more easily.

​Nathan could also follow multi-step directions after his auditory skills were strengthened.  I smiled, remembering when he was a seven-year-old and became overwhelmed when we gave him more than one thing to do at once. He’d get so upset and say, “You’re giving me too many demandments!”

We learned to not give this kid too many “demandments,” but of course, that only helped him be more sane, more comfortable. It did nothing to help his issue with processing auditory information and strengthening auditory memory.

With all these new and exciting exercises, Nathan started organizing his thoughts and ideas better.  His smile came back…his sunshine was bright and yellow…and I reveled in it!

Adding to the mix, I designed exercises and games he could play and enjoy.  By then, I knew he was a tactile learner and he needed to do something to learn it.  I tried to put as much movement as I could into his learning, and it helped.

A Happy Ending!

Those days passed like a whirlwind and then the news came that we were moving to California. I worried about Nathan…of course. You see, he was Mr. Social and desperately wanted to go back to school.

By then Nathan had completed the sixth grade and I didn’t think he was ready for middle school.  I entertained the thought of private schools, but I knew the area we were moving to was remote and schooling options were limited.

As the school year grew closer, Nathan took me aside and let me know he was going back to school in seventh grade. He was going stir crazy and had his own chin set in a hard line. There was no arguing with him about that.  

So…I enrolled him in Toyon Middle School, scared out of my wits. I didn’t know what I’d do if we had a repeat performance of his other school days, but I wanted him to be happy.

The first few months flew by. He struggled a bit in algebra, but beyond that he seemed to be doing fine. We received a letter in the mail toward the end of the first quarter inviting us to an awards ceremony, so of course we went. I didn’t pay too much attention to the details as like most families, we were busy and had a lot going on with sports, horses, and just normal life.

​We sat on the hard benches in the crowded auditorium listening as student after student was called up to receive an honor roll certificate. Honestly, I sat on the hard bench wondering what we were doing there. Maybe Nathan had a sports award or some other kind of accomplishment.

​And then something happened that I’ll never forget.  They called Nathan’s name…for his honor roll certificate.

Nathan made the honor roll!  He’d done it…we’d done it!

​I breathed. I cried…swiping my tears away so I wouldn’t embarrass anyone. But I was a proud mom, let me tell you!

Back then, schools often gave out bumper stickers that announced your child was an honor student. The principal told us to take one of the bumper stickers off the table.

I took two…I guess I figured we’d earned it. It’s funny how something as silly as a bumper sticker can make you feel like you’ve made it in the world, that you’ll be okay, when really it’s nothing more than plastic, glue, and letters.

Oddly, I never put those bumper stickers on my car…it was enough knowing that Nathan had made the honor roll. But I remembered what if felt like to have a child who wasn’t an honor student, who struggled and worked and never could quite make it. I’ll never forget that feeling.

​Oh, and we got more good news.  By then, Nathan was reading at a tenth-grade level and his confidence grew in every aspect.

​He continued as an honor student, graduated high school and went to college with scholarships.  He bought his first house at 23 and a business at 27.

Nathan’s future is bright…because he’s that bright boy I always knew lived inside a disconnected body and brain…a boy who had learning blocks but still had a lot of intelligence and potential.

​My message to you is this…never give up on your child.  It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you.