The Handbook / Chapter 14

Learning Different | Billie

A counselor and a student start out strangers and, in most cases, end up close confidants. The best way forward isn’t always a straight line. Navigating together requires flexibility. While most relationships progress steadily, gradually gaining trust and understanding, others get stuck along the way. There are times when what gets said doesn’t get heard.

Photo by Martin Katler on Unsplash

I go into each new relationship with high expectations. I’m hopeful a student will accept that my support is unconditional and my guidance genuine. But that doesn’t always happen.

When my words fail, I try a poem.

Wild Geese | by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

I have shared this poem, a favorite of mine, on a few occasions. No matter what the dilemma, Mary Oliver’s words are so disarming that it never fails to at least loosen a knot. Some years ago, I was having difficulty getting the conversation started with a student and pasted it on our shared document during a video session. She stared at the screen, not responding immediately, and I let the silence linger. As I waited, I reread the poem to myself and felt its familiar warmth fill my chest. When finished, I asked her how it made her feel.

Would you read it to me? she asked.

I told her I’d be happy to. Sharing a poem aloud is one of life’s underutilized pleasures. I began and took my time. She was moved by its simple beauty and was soon sharing her story. A few sessions later she revealed that her severe dyslexia made reading nearly impossible and required full accommodation in school. It had also, I now understood, made it impossible for her to read a poem about wild geese.

There are 7.6 billion people on this planet and no two are identical, not even identical twins. It isn’t surprising that we wouldn’t all think alike. The human brain, with its 80 billion cells, has evolved with an architecture that makes the majority of us function quite similarly, cognitively speaking. It has well established pathways for electrical impulses and chemical signals to get where they’re going and keep us ticking. It’s an evolutionary marvel.

But no sooner is a rule created than an exception is born. Some of our brains digress from the model, processing information outside the normal channels or, in some extreme cases, not at all. I am neither a scientist nor a learning specialist. What I know about learning differences I have been taught by my students. I’ve witnessed the challenges some of them face and the methods they use to deal with them. With estimates of one in five students affected, it’s a more common occurrence than most people realize.

I know that if I listen carefully to a student we can create strategies for communicating and get where we want to go. What is revealed, once we’ve rigged whatever workaround is necessary, is that these kids are as smart as their normal peers or more so. Often they have some extraordinary talent to boot.

Meet Billie.

She’s quirky. Her responses are loose and spontaneous. It’s clear she doesn’t edit herself and isn’t at all worried about how she comes off. I wish all students felt this degree of fearlessness. She laughs easily, at a joke or herself, and shows a playful, creative side. She also has a tendency to momentarily drift off, her eyes floating to the left taking her attention with them. It doesn’t last long and when she returns we pick up about where we’d been. I don’t make too much of it. I’m having fun.

She opts for a double-barreled batch of descriptors which I welcome.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS | BILLIE

POSITIVE

FUNNY

GENEROUS

OUTGOING

OPTIMISTIC

OPEN MINDED

CREATIVE

AMBITIOUS

RESILIENT

CURIOUS

PRUDENT

HONEST

NEGATIVE

IMPULSIVE

SELF DOUBTING

PROCRASTINATOR

ANXIOUS

IMPATIENT

INDECISIVE

COMPETITIVE

OVERCRITICAL

INCONSISTENT

MOODY

I learn of her interest in theater which comes as no surprise. Her quick witted and slightly loopy affect would be right at home in the writer’s room. She comes from a family of creatives and seems to have inherited both an appreciation of, and a talent for, expression.

When I ask about school, she winces and tells me about a difficult 9th grade. Lots of kids have that, I tell her. There’s more to it, she says. She then tells the cobwebbed history of her struggles with ADHD, how she initially resisted the diagnosis and treatment, and how relieved she was when she accepted her condition and the medication prescribed.

We spend hours getting to know each other, picking through the memory boxes in her warehouse. By then I know her relationship with her family, school, and creative pursuits. Her mom, a geriatric nurse, works with elderly patients and the subject Billie is considering for her topic. I ask her where she fits in. Billie often transports her mom to and from patients’ homes, sometimes in the middle of the night.

B: I wait in the car.

M: And?

Billie is understandably proud of her mom’s sacrifice for others’ benefit. But she admits she plays no significant part in the tale rendering it of little use.

She has taken to heart my advice that her personal statement should reveal her essential qualities.

B: Improv and ADHD.

I ask her how she would weave the two together.

B: We’ll improvise.

I laugh. This will either be great or a total disaster.

PERSONAL STATEMENT | BILLIE

Yes, and.

If you’ve ever spent any time around improv, you know the phrase. It’s the organizing principle that encourages you to free your mind of limitations, to accept the world around you without judgment, and to build on it without shortcutting or shutting down. One moment you have absolutely no idea what character you’re playing and a second later you’re a taxi driver taking the Kardashians to a nail salon.

This is the way I have tried to live my life— open, curious, and optimistic.

I grew up around #########, the improv group that launched the careers of ##########, and so many others. ########, as a kid, I remember being sprawled on the floor in front of a stage while a group of actors invented strange new worlds out of nothing but their own, and each other’s, imaginations. And how they made me laugh.

It carried over at home. We were encouraged to speak our minds and everyone’s opinion was welcomed. We played little improv games and spitballed concepts for art projects and home movies. One such brainstorming session spawned the family written, acted, and edited THE BULLY MOVIE which won no awards for its 6 year old director (who else?) but received a standing O at the family-only premier in our living room.

High school is organized around a very different principle— rote learning and memorization, and not always understanding. More No, but than Yes, and. I had difficulty adapting to the restrictive environment and rigid requirements. My mindset was different and not always welcomed. I had trouble maintaining my interest. I was easily distracted and frequently overwhelmed. Homework became a daily six hour marathon. Even having completed assignments, I found I understood little and the enjoyment I had always taken from learning had gone missing.

I reached out for help knowing I couldn’t keep up anymore. I was diagnosed with ADHD and, whilst the medication helped, I found the more powerful solutions came from one special teacher who put learning in a different light— not from memorization but comprehension. I understood more deeply. My innocent love of learning was sparked again. My curiosity returned as my mind learned to identify ambiguity and go towards it in all my studies. I used articulation as a check on comprehension and retention. By repeating the big ideas out loud, even if only to myself, made a real difference. As for the other aspects of my life, socially I chose to push away the rigid, restrictive friends I’d been running with and welcome back the ones who let me be my best, free and improvisational self.

I naturally came back to the arts, writing film concepts again and participating in a screenwriting workshop in New York City. I had once again found my roots, my childhood self, that allowed me to be mature but unselfconscious and write without judgment. In school, I applied this new thinking in my classes, specifically my AP Comparative Government class where we would have to participate in debates with no preparation. This idea flowing lifestyle invigorated me more and more everyday and has gotten me my life back.

I can’t control how life comes at me. And not everything can be improvised. I know that in college I will be expected to compete purely in academics. But over my high school years I’ve collected the necessary tools. And given the programs I’m likely to pursue, I’ll be able to apply the full complement of my abilities.

When hard work is called for, I’ll deliver. If a debate breaks out, I’ll choose a side. I’ll argue when it’s my turn and listen when it’s not. I’ll face life with optimism but balanced with healthy skepticism.

And really? When life throws a curve I’ll be ready to improvise.

Yes, and.

End.

The way Billie links Yes, and with her personal philosophy is quite brilliant. It speaks to a kind of enthusiasm that colleges find desirable. In building a class, a college looks for those who will be game to engage. Billie is not your cynical sort.

But she has another sleight of hand ready. She manages to frame her academic difficulties in terms of her school’s stringent environment. It’s a bold move arguing if only teachers were open to a more improvisational approach to learning I’d have performed better. Somehow she has created enough forward momentum that her argument lands. When she states later on her renewed commitment to academic study, she allays whatever fears remain.

How would the admissions office react to an applicant openly discussing her learning difference? As we laid out in chapter 6, it is a choice each applicant must make for themself. And Billie clearly made hers.

As she tells it, she has made peace with her learning difference. She sees it as fairly common among her crowd of creatives. You have to be a little cracked to see the humor in things, she says. I offer these lines from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:

Forget your perfect offering

There’s a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

My group of friends is studded with nonnormative thinkers. Billie’s first choice was to attend film school and she felt she could risk being completely honest as her future learning and performance would rely less on academic research and more on creativity.

We’ll see if her gamble paid off.