#good luck everyone my handwriting is essentially illegible

[mixed-up-metaphors]

insert studio laughtrack here

[elljayvee]

I am someone who probably has undiagnosed ADHD. My one child's ADHD-specialist therapist laughed when I said "oh, I do that too, I thought everyone did" to something she said about my kid, and then handed me a card for a practice that specializes in working with adults whose ADHD was undiagnosed as children....and I told my spouse about it and he said "ayuh"....anyway....so that was right before Pandemic Times....my point here is that if you were undiagnosed with something as a kid and are struggling to get accommodations in college, there are often specialists in _adult diagnosis_ and you will probably have better luck getting help if you can find one of them.

I have two kids, one with ADHD and the other with...we aren't sure yet. The one with We Aren't Sure Yet, I spent years arguing with their teachers that No, They Aren't Just Not Working On Their Handwriting, Something Is Wrong, This Isn't Right and being assured no, no, lots of kids go through this learning to write....until suddenly in 5th grade I got "hey have you had this child evaluated for dysgraphia, you should've noticed something wasn't right."

WHAT THE FUCK.

My kid turns out to have severe dysgraphia, and what their OT said was that essentially, the best thing is to get accommodations -- that any kind of therapy aimed at improving the situation has minimal results and children often find it demoralizing, to boot. So now my child has accommodations and their language arts grade went from a D to a B+, just from not having to handwrite. Handwriting is so difficult for them, and they also cannot spell (common with dysgraphia), that their book reports were often three short sentences long, almost illegible, and with half the words misspelled. I had them dictate to me instead, and instantly got full, structured, thoughtful book reports that actually reflected their understanding. They simply could not write those down. (They are learning to type, which has been great for them. They're still not as good with typing as with dictation, but it's getting there.)

In yourself ("other kids don't seem to do this, why do I") or as a parent, when you notice Things That Don't Seem Right, you often get told by people who SHOULD know better that you are wrong and it's fine, but literally every time I've thought that about one of my kids, I have been correct. And a big part of it is that, yes, a lot of things look like someone who is stubbornly staying in Beginnerland like @szhmidty said, but....if someone is taking longer than usual to come out of Beginnerland? Get that checked out if you can. Annoy a pediatrician until they agree to refer you for an OT eval, or a neuropsych exam, or whatever is needed to track that down, because it could be something that having help with will be lifechanging.

I saw a video talking about why schools shouldn't grade or assign homework the other day (interesting video! I support a lot of what the speaker was saying!) But at one point word searches were described as obvious busywork - what's the point in teaching kids to read diagonal words, after all?

Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia.

After going through IB classes in high school, after finishing my BA while working full time, after failing algebra with the same teacher two years in a row, there is no kind of homework that has ever made me cry so hard as word searches did in the 3rd grade.

If you've got a kid who has been working on a word search for an hour and is crying and telling you "the words aren't there," if you've got a kid who never knows what the pictures are in connect-the-dots because they can't connect the dots in the correct order, if you've got a kid who can't read analog clock faces after months of being taught how to read time, if you've got a kid who retranscribes all their music class handouts as letters because they can't wrap their head around reading music, I'm begging you to get your kid tested for dyslexia/dyscalculia.

And I'm begging you to get them tested before they learn how to mask so hard that it's difficult to get an official diagnosis because if they need disability accommodations in college they're going to need a diagnosis but they're going to be so good at masking their disorder that it's going to be difficult to prove that they need accommodations. And 'well if you can get by well enough that as an adult you can pass a test designed to diagnose children you must not need help' is bullshit because those tests don't make you do algebra or learn a new character set.