A simulation · 10 to 15 minutes
A school day as a junior with dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia
You are 17. You take AP Literature, Honors US History and Honors Algebra 2. You understand the material as well as anyone in the room.
What this is
This is not a test, and your score does not matter. It is a way to feel, for a few minutes, what ordinary school tasks are like for a student with dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia.
You will take a reading quiz, follow a lecture, write a timed response, and take a math quiz. The page shows how reading, writing and numbers work for you.
There is a clock running, but getting the answers right is not the point. Notice what it takes to try: how long things take, what slips away while you work, and what you start doing to cope.
Each part follows one student's own account of what happens for her. Other people's experiences differ.
Or jump into one class
On the projector
Sound is not available in this viewer, so what he says is shown here.
Final bell
What your day looked like on paper
Run it again to compare. Each run adds a column.
What the simulation is modeling
- Knowing a word and reading it are separate. This student can use every hard word here in conversation. A word she has never seen written will not hold still and cannot be sounded out, however familiar it is by ear.
- Working out one word costs the sentence. Decoding takes so much attention that what came before is lost, so the passage gets read again, sometimes five times. Under a clock, the usual move is to skip the word and come back for it. The blur on screen stands for that lost understanding. The words do not actually look blurry.
- Ordinary words misread. A familiar word can read as another word made of the same letters, such as was and saw, and the mistake only shows when the sentence stops making sense. Uneven spacing runs words together or splits them into words that are not there.
- What the research says. Dyslexia is usually described as a difference in how the brain links letters to sounds. Many people with dyslexia also describe letters that seem to swap or move, and this period follows one student's account of that. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
- Slides move on. The slide carries more than the teacher says and changes before the reading is done. Listening and reading compete for the same attention, and whatever was on the last slide is gone.
- The page gets a fraction of the idea. This student has plenty to say. Her handwriting looks fine because she makes it fine, one careful letter at a time, so her hand runs far behind her thoughts. Any word can refuse to spell, including ones she says every day, and each stop costs time, a guess, or a trade for an easier word.
- Answers get simpler. When a question or a passage will not resolve, the student often gives a shorter, plainer answer in words she is sure of. The grade reflects that answer.
- Every wrong reading of a number is still a number. Digits trade places, decimal points drift, and numbers that sit close together run into each other. A misread word usually looks wrong and gets caught. A misread number looks fine. This student understands the math and can read each digit. What she cannot trust is their order.
- The grade measures the output. Each teacher comment was a reading of the page in front of them. None of them could see what you understood.
Who this student is
- A junior who has lived with this since early childhood and has built years of workarounds. Words she has seen before read fine and words she has only heard stall her, writing is neat but slow and any word can stall on its spelling, and numbers have to be read more than once. The work usually gets finished, at a cost in time and energy.
What it leaves out
- You did this for ten minutes and knew it would end. A student does it every period, then goes home to homework that takes far longer than it takes classmates.
- Students at this level have spent years building workarounds. The workarounds are effective and tiring, and they can hide how much effort is being spent.
- Asking for help means doing it in front of the room, at 17. Many students decide not to.
- Dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia often occur together, but they are separate. A student may have one, two or all three, and each varies widely from person to person. This is one plausible day, built to convey effort. It is not a clinical picture.
- Numbers are everywhere outside math class: the clock, a locker combination, a tip, a bus schedule. The quiz is one small slice.
What supports change, and what they leave
- Extended time gives room for slower decoding. The decoding is still there.
- Audio moves the task from decoding to comprehension. Listening runs at speaking pace, which is slower than a fluent reader skimming, and you cannot glance back as easily.
- Teacher's notes let a student listen during a lecture instead of racing to read every slide. The outline is still printed text to read.
- A keyboard takes letter formation out of the way. Spelling still takes thought, so a few errors come through.
- A calculator does the arithmetic. The arithmetic is reliable. The numbers still have to be read off the page and keyed in, and the answer read back, and that is where the slips happen.
The questions, the prompt and the standard for a right answer are identical in every run.