As I wrote in my chapter of Parenting by Strengths, I have always struggled with writing. I am faced with the irony that I write for a living. I think that I have also underestimated how much I continue to struggle with this. I will be ending my job at the end of the month. Although there were many reasons for this struggling with writing was one of them. I had been writing psychological evaluations for may years, but I had never had to write any Individual Evaluation Plans (IEPs) until last year. I managed to write them well enough--but not quickly enough. Several of them were late, and as the Department of Education regulates the timelines, being late is a serious problem.
I have had many opportunities to think about my writing struggle when sitting in Team meetings. I have been involved in several meetings recently during which I felt a huge amount of empathy for the children being discussed. Just last week I listened to a colleague talking about a child she had observed. She reported that he had written only two or three lines in the twenty-five minutes she had been observing him. The conversation at the meeting was about his difficulty focusing and attending. It simply never occurred to anyone in the room that the task of writing a paragraph could be at all difficult--for a third grader--or for an adult. A few weeks ago a child had missed several days of school due to stomach upset. It was clear from the testing that both of these children struggle with writing. They write slowly, they aren't sure about spelling, and their handwriting is poor.
I know exactly how they feel. To this day, I get tense and anxious when I am faced with a blank page, especially when the topic is a new one. I don't worry about test reports anymore, and as time goes on I don't take as long to write up my IEPs. However, every time I write a new blog entry, I think about those two children, and all of the others who are seen as inattentive, having somatic symptoms, or just as lazy. I know that they can learn how to manage their fears, and maybe they too will write a blog someday.
