Sierra Goodfellow

I Belive.mp3

Instead of having us all suffer through the second-hand embarrassment of listening to me struggle to read a couple of paragraphs that I wrote a week ago, I decided that I would give a crash course on how I learn.


At a very young age, I was diagnosed with severe Dyslexia, a disability that I have come to lovingly describe as trying to read and write while looking at the reflection of the paper through a moving funhouse mirror. My brain will actively change words and flip letters on their head while distorting the rest of the page. I can in fact read, it is just extremely difficult and takes twice as long if not longer when compared with an average reader. As a kid, this was extremely discouraging as assignments that were meant to take ten minutes were turning out to be two-hour-long endeavors


Equality in the classroom, and even life, is not making sure that everyone gets exactly the same thing, it’s making sure everyone gets what they need. For an extreme example, you can not put a deaf student in a classroom full of ‘able-bodied’ people and expect them to thrive. This is in no way saying that this student is not intelligent, more often than not they are more than capable of learning the material, they are just not being given the same kind of opportunity that other students are. Now many say that this is not true, they are getting the exact same treatment as the rest of the class, so how dare I say they have a disadvantage. This, however, is wrong. When you have a disability a good chunk of the doors that are left open for a lot of students are suddenly blocked by boulders, and for some kids, these boulders can be chipped away at. It’s an incredible moment when a boulder finally is cleared from a doorway, but sometimes these boulders are made of stuff that does not chip, no matter what tools you use to try and break it down. Now there are other doors that can be opened, ones that most kids do not need to use, so they are locked. In fact, these doors are not only locked but they are barricaded and guarded by ignorance and stubbornness to change. Removing these barriers from the doors that I needed to succeed took my family and I ten years. In that time I was forced to adapt to difficult teachers, despondent case managers, isolation from my class, and ever-changing assistive technology that would barely work on the best of days.

Finally, about three years ago I was introduced to Micky, yes I named her, Micky is the one reading this to you right now. She is the voice of the Read&Write google program that I use to learn any material. At first, I was very reluctant to use the software, it was cumbersome to get a different computer every class and I was still convinced that if I worked hard enough I wouldn’t need to rely on anyone for reading. This was the same year that my progress came to a screeching halt, and as my physical health declined I was forced to come to terms with the idea that there was no “getting better”.


Over the past couple of years, I have been preparing myself for a life outside of high school and the military. Micky is such a large part of my life, and probably the golden door that had to be busted open with nothing short of a tank. Learning the material has rarely been the problem, it was always getting access to it, and after 12 long years, I am now graduating high school to enter a university of applied sciences, a future that my 2nd-grade german school claimed was not possible. We are a diverse group of people, especially in the military community, we all need different support, and if it wasn’t so hard to gain the simple forms of said support most of us would probably be in very different places. We don’t all need a computer that reads to us, some just need a hot meal or some extra time on a test. Equality, in every aspect of life, doesn’t mean everyone gets the same thing, it’s everyone gets what they need.