For years, I have thought about a student that was in my class because of his unusual ability to read aloud. He would read aloud speedy fast. About 140 words per minute at the beginning of the year (the average first grader should be able to read about 90 words per minute by the END of the school year). His reading was flawless. He was also an ESL student, his first language being Spanish.
But then, we would get to the comprehension questions.
“What is this book about?” I asked him.
“My uncle has a dog,” he would respond.
The story was about ice cream.
My student, a generally happy-go-lucky kid, was unable to answer a single question about the story that he had just read aloud without a mistake. He couldn’t tell me who the characters were in the story, even when I explained what a character was. He couldn’t tell me the setting (the ice cream shop). Or anything else. But he didn’t just not know the answers, he would give responses that were wildly off the topic.
I thought maybe it was because of his ESL status that he didn’t understand, but truthfully, I was stumped. I had never seen anything like it before or to this day.
Had I been more familiar with hyperlexia, I would have seen a huge, red flag. This was a student who should have been referred to be screened for it. But I had no idea what hyperlexia was. It was just different than what I was used to seeing.
I missed it. That is a hard thing for a teacher to admit. But I did.
So, what is hyperlexia? The term was coined in 1967 by Silberberg and Silberberg. They discovered that a hyperlexic child has an unusual ability to read words way above average for their age at a very young age. This is very surprising (and is probably why I still remember my student to this very day) when compared to the child’s peers. There is a link to autism but experts do not agree what percentage of hyperlexics are probably autistic. Some people say that these children are very good at “decoding” language but other sources say that they learn to read from a whole language perspective. Thus, when they get to a word that they don’t know, they don’t have the skills to figure out how to pronounce it. But the debate continues.
Hyperlexia sounds dreamy – what parent wouldn’t want their child to be “supereaders?” Unfortunately, it is paired with extreme difficulty in comprehension. They often cannot retell what they have just read at all and have little to no comprehension. This is very difficult to address and requires strategies such as going back to very simple passages beneath the child’s reading rate to teach them how to understand what they are reading. The child often feels as though the simple passages are “babyish,” and may struggle with this as well as trying to comprehend.
At the time that my student and I met, I probably had a good ten years of teaching in general education under my belt. General education teachers are taught very basic things about special needs and often, something like hyperlexia is just a paragraph in a textbook during our training. What general education teachers excel at over time is the ability to notice red flags. When a student “looks different,” compared to the hundreds of other children we see, day in and day out, a “red flag,” is raised. It is a sign to pause and examine why. To question. But, a lot of times, the general education teacher doesn’t know what’s wrong. They just know things look “different.” And so, it becomes a puzzle to solve.
This is a time for the teacher to ask a specialist, visit with the diagnostician, send home a note to parents or ask for meetings. I was usually in the thick of this process with multiple students at a time. I believed that no one would fall through the cracks on my watch.
I missed this one.
Maybe he wasn’t hyperlexic. It is possible that the comprehension was slowed because he was ESL. In fact, it was a good chance, looking back, that if I had pursued it with specialists, they would have taken a wait and see approach. He’s ESL, they would say. Let’s see how he develops.
It nags at me to this day.
This is why it is so important that a parent raises these issues with the school. Don’t ever assume that nothing is wrong because the school would have caught it if there was. If you feel in your gut that something is different, go to the school and tell them. Go to the doctor. Don’t worry about how you appear to them. You are your child’s best advocate. It would be WONDERFUL to check into something that is bothering you and find out that it’s nothing. So much better than to not check and find out later that it was, well, something.
I taught for fifteen years and then, after I became a mom to an amazing boy with special needs, I stopped teaching and stayed home with him. It was at this point that I also became certified to teach in special education. Just for myself. And for him. I have the unique perspective of having taught in general education and sat through many, many ARDS and IEP meetings as the gen. ed. teacher. And then, I have sat on the other side of the table as a parent in the meetings. Not once, in all these years, has any school staff member denounced a parent for checking out something that looks different. In fact, when parents do this, it garners major respect on the part of the school. When a parent inquires about something that they think looks different, they are doing their job.
Even the most seasoned teachers miss things.
Do not be afraid. Just do your job.