Samantha Abeel: My Thirteenth Winter

Samantha describes in evocative detail how her life has been affected by her learning difference before and after she was diagnosed. In seventh grade, she began to suffer anxiety attacks as she struggled with the pressures of junior high, from balancing schoolwork to remembering locker combinations, to social situations with her peers and explaining her learning difficulties with math to teachers who couldn’t understand why a “good” student like Samantha wasn’t excelling. Though signs of a learning difference were there all her life, she was not diagnosed with dyscalculia, a learning disability that effects her capacity to learn skills based on sequential processing such as math, spelling, and grammar, until she was thirteen years old. Her story is honest, hopeful, and is ultimately an inspiring account of courage and strength.

Source: http://www.samanthaabeel.com/

1: Read this story from Samantha’s memoir:

My whole being is quiet, while everyone else in the classroom seems to move and buzz. Outwardly, I work to appear poised and calm. My lips feel straight, tight, and irrevocably closed against my teeth. I am careful to keep the lines around my eyes expressionless. I watch Mr. Mummert’s hand move with swift confidence, dragging and tapping the pale yellow chalk across the blackboard. A series of symbols appears in his wake: the interesting dashes, a multiplication sign, a division symbol, two horizontal lines meaning equals, numbers set around these in an orderly fashion, each group leading to the next as Mr. Mummert’s words and gestures confirm.

Inside I sink, flutter, and tighten. I open my eyes wider and try, even though I know it is impossible, to stretch the opening of my ears. I work at not allowing myself to blink, convinced I must have blinked when Mr. Mummert went over the key part of the problem, or my ears must have missed a key phrase that would tie all of this together. Looking at the yellow marks on the board, I feel as if I am staring into the face of someone I should know but can’t seem to remember. No matter how hauntingly familiar the figures are, they continue to remain anonymous strangers and a wave of guilt and embarrassment moves through me.

The guilt grows, along with an anxious burning that smoulders from my insides outward into my cheeks. I dart a look at the clearly comprehending faces of the rest of the class. I feel so far away from everyone, removed, alone in my ignorance. I am terrified there is something really wrong with me.

I understand most of my other subjects, and math seems to be so easy for my classmates. I feel like a liar, as if I have been leading them on. I have made everyone believe that I am smart. The teachers all like me: I am a good artist, I am creative. It must seem like I am good at almost everything, but they don’t know how lost I feel inside, how helpless. I feel weighed down by the idea that it is too late to say anything.

I feel guilty for making it into the fourth grade without being able to consistently add or subtract. There are lots of things I didn’t master along the way -I only pretended to. Was I supposed to tell someone the truth?

Terror begins to freeze up my entire frame as I realize that Mr. Mummert is going to call on someone for the final answer, that he is going to turn around and that he may call on me. There is a moment of silence as he makes a few last dashes with the chalk. Eager hands shoot up around me, and there is a general squirming toward the edge of seats and a few whispers:

“I know … I know what the answer is.” Mr. Mummert finishes and turns around to face the class. I am paralyzed, .frozen like my pet rabbit when my dog walks past her cage in the yard. I drop my eyes away from Mr. Mummert, careful not to attract any attention to myself. The words in my head repeat themselves again and again as I hold my breath: Please don’t call on me. Please … don’t … call … on , .. me.

“Elizabeth,” he asks, “why don’t you come up here and show us how you got your answer.” He hands her the chalk. I release the air I have been holding in my chest and my muscles relax with relief, as I sink back in my chair. For a few moments, while Elizabeth awkwardly scratches out her answer,

I am safe, until Mr. Mummert approaches the chalkboard again.

This lesson might seem like a normal lesson from a teacher’s point of view. I am sure you have taught a class in a similar way many times. But this story really makes one think about the way we deal with students as individuals.

• Do you think there might be students in your classes who are genuinely unable to “get” certain concepts?
• Could they understand better if the class was run in a different way?

2: Now read this story from Samantha’s memoir.

We are in desperate need of food and luckily our ship with the help of our pet humpback whales is going to land on the next island just in time. According to our charts, unfolded road maps from Heather’s mother’s car, we are due to see land at any moment. In preparation, Heather sweeps the planks of the ship while I look around for materials to rig a sink and cooking area. I select the place where there is a bend in the porch as the spot for our galley. Hanging an old putty bucket by its handle to a hook on one of the porch pillars, I am able to weave the hose up through the spokes in the porch railing and up the pillar so it hangs down and pours like a faucet into the bucket when it is turned on.

Our ship is fully equipped. We have bunk beds made out of two porch chairs set facing each other, old hanging flower baskets are used for food and specimen storage as well as for drying herbs. Heather, who is primarily in charge of navigation, has a large table for her charts, and I have a small desk of my own for our marine research. Our mission is to save humpback whales from poachers and help the endangered wildlife of the oceans. Both Heather and I have the power to call and to speak to the whales at will.

The sea whisks by the hull of our ship and, eventually, Heather gives the order to weigh anchor. Throwing an old cinder block tied to a string over the railing, we decide it is time to go explore and get supplies from the island where we have landed.

Picking up buckets and slinging them over our arms we make our way cautiously through Heather’s backyard fence and look around. Hundreds of various food sources grow in the clumps of bushes and weedy growth at the edge of her yard, and we know from experience which ones will be the most useful. Both of us set to work harvesting. There are square-stemmed woody plants that, with their outside layer removed, reveal a soft reedy material that can be cut up into crab meat. There is also a plant with thick green leaves that, when dug out of the ground, has a bulby root system that can be peeled and chopped. We collect pinecones and red berries from shrubs for jam. We also pick various leaves and dandelion stems. Finding a few more broken, hanging flower baskets and string we make our way back to the ship and climb aboard. It is a good thing, too, because the wind has begun to change, and it is going to be all we can do to miss the oncoming storm.

• How is this lesson different from the previous one?
• In what ways does it meet her needs better?

3: Write a blog entry in which you reflect on the relationship between creativity, constructivism, and accommodation of difference.

Creative Response

Are you feeling creative? This article might help you: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/7-tenets-of-creative-thinking-michael-michalko

This is NOT an assignment. Next time you want to create a learning resource create something using the ideas you have come across in this lesson.  Your response could be a creative one, e.g.:

• make a video and upload it to YouTube;
• create a poster using a tool like PhotoShop;
• write a scene for a play;
• write a poem;
• etc.

When you are ready to continue to the next activity, click on the Mark Complete button below (first time) and Next Topic on subsequent visits to this page.