But most of all, I liked tutoring the children – helping them learn, learning from them. I had always intended to return to the children I had first taught – to the strange, beautiful, haunting world of emotionally disturbed children. They were, after all, the reason I had returned to college in the first place. But now I found myself increasingly caught up in this new field of learning disabilities. I had to learn more, understand myself and Maggie, and the others. I was thoroughly and completely hooked.
I applied to a program offering a master’s degree in learning disabilities and was accepted. I spent the next year and a half studying the historical development and theories of learning disabilities, the processes of the brain and the central nervous system, the techniques and tests involved in diagnosis, and the teaching strategies of individualized remediation. Unlike those of my undergraduate days, the courses fascinated and engrossed me and we had able professors to teach us.
We learned the electrical and chemical components of the brain, the functions of the right and left hemispheres, and the importance of such things as the development of the corpus callosum, the myelin-covered bundle of nerves that divides the two hemispheres. We learned that the delayed maturation of myelinization can slow down communication between the two hemispheres.
We learned that the cortex alone has over nine billion nerve cells and millions of interconnecting neural pathways. I marveled that there are millions of tiny neurons inside our brains, firing again and again during a single second – a colossal Fourth of July finale going off continuously inside our heads. I wondered that any of us got anything straight.
We learned that there is not just one single, simple learning disability, but many. The term “learning disabilities” covers disorders in written language (also known as dysgraphia), disorders in arithmetic (dyscalculia), and disorders in receptive and expressive language and reading (dyslexia), as well as difficulties in perception of spatial relations and organization. We learned that dyslexia is a specific condition with its own causes and symptoms and that special teaching techniques work. The problem is not a lack of intelligence, but an inability to process language.
We learned that there were many more boys than girls with learning disabilities, although no one was quite sure why or just how many more children in the United States were considered to be learning disabled.
Statistics now show there are five to ten million children, up to 20 percent of all our children, who have some type of learning difference, and probably even more who are not diagnosed. I know from practical experience that in almost every typical classroom there are one to two children who are destined to fall behind unless they are recognized, diagnosed, and given help. Recent studies give indications that there are more dyslexic boys than girls not only because of genetics but also because exposure to the male hormone testosterone affects boys during prenatal development of the brain.
I was continuing to see Bobby and Maggie and three or four other children at the church, and I was sure now that once I finished graduate school and had my learning disabilities certification, I wanted to set up a private practice.
Most of my fellow students were planning to work as learning disability specialists on state-mandated child study teams in public schools, and they urged me to do the same, citing the advantages of vacations, insurance, tenure, and pensions.
But I loved working in a one-to-one situation with a child. In the quiet I could almost hear what was going on inside the child without the need for words. I loved having it all together – doing both the diagnostic evaluation and the remediation, although of course at times I did just one or the other. I felt that there was a tremendous need to provide help for these bright, sensitive children who were so often misunderstood and thought stupid by some and lazy by others. Few understand the courage it takes for a child to return to a place where he failed yesterday and the day before and, in all probability, will fail again the next. I was moved time and again by the bravery of these children and joyous when they realized that they could learn and be successful. I loved them without reserve.
The difficulty of setting up a private practice in learning disabilities lay in the lack of models. I couldn’t locate anyone who had actually done what I wanted to do, or even anyone interested in exploring the possibilities. I decided the thing to do was to be practical and just proceed one step at a time. I had some children – now I needed an office. If I was to be a professional, I had to have a place of my own.
I had been following newspaper ads and calling real estate salespeople without success when, unknowingly, one of my children, Fred, led me to my office.
With acuity and cruelty his fourth-grade classmates had dubbed Fred “the pig boy.” He was not really a pig, of course – but when he was upset or angry he flared his nostrils and curled his lips until a kind of snout appeared while he snorted and grunted and crawled under his desk.
I worked with Fred on reading and writing, but he also saw Dr. Oldenburg, a clinical psychologist, for his deeper emotional problems. Rea Oldenburg was both respected and controversial. She was well known in the field for her work on the origins of children’s fears, and almost as well known for her outspokenness. We conferred by phone several times a month about Fred’s progress. During one of these conversations, shortly before my graduation, Rea Oldenburg mentioned that Fred’s mother had told her that I was planning to open a practice in learning disabilities and was looking for office space.
I stalled, trying to choose my words, sure she would think me presumptuous. But instead she said, “If you’re serious, there’s office space opening up here in our building. It’s only one room, but there’s off-street parking. Dentists and eye doctors downstairs. Psychologists and psychiatrists upstairs. You’d be on the second floor with us. We all have patients like Fred, who have learning problems as well as emotional ones.”
I was at the address Dr. Oldenburg had given me before nine o’clock the next morning. Any office building with Rea Oldenburg in it would have been attractive to me – but to have it on a quiet, tree-lined street in what was or had been a residential neighborhood seemed too good to be true. The building itself was wood shingled with a stone front and blue-shuttered windows. The dozen nameplates beside the wide front door announced its metamorphosis from home to business.
“It’s small,” Dr. Oldenburg’s secretary repeated, opening a door to a room, off a small waiting room on the front side of the building. “And there’s no bath – but Dr. Oldenburg would probably let you use ours.”
“It’s perfect,” I said.
I scrounged up the security deposit and first month’s rent. I furnished the office with a windfall of slightly inappropriate office furniture from a friend who was closing his BMW dealership. Not the small, welcoming round table and chairs and white wicker I’d visualized – instead a six-foot-long, black-walnut-topped desk with black swivel chairs behind and green leather chairs in front. I bought a secondhand file cabinet and had a phone installed, and I had a place of my own.
The children loved my office almost as much as I did – especially Michael. Eight years old, not yet reading, painfully shy – until he reached the desk. Once there he leaned back in the huge swivel chair, propped his feet on the desk, lit an imaginary cigarette, blew smoke rings, and proclaimed himself ready to begin. I sat beside him in a smaller chair – and Michael was right. He was ready and he began to learn to read. Michael was the first of a number of children referred to me by the psychologists and psychiatrists on the second floor. Maggie, Bobby, Fred, and two or three others whom I had been seeing at the church moved with me to my new office. Gradually, my practice grew.
I had been seeing twenty-year-old Tony at the church, and he too preferred my new office space and furniture. His father had bought Tony’s way through private high school by paying tutors to write Tony’s reports and by making donations to the school building fund in amounts large enough to bring him passing grades. Tony had been referred to me by a psychiatrist with