Flashcards
Flashcards
by Woody Woodger
The first real poem I ever remember writing was of a cat as it waits to eat her dead owner. It was the August before 11th grade, and I had long ago found my passion for writing. I say this is my first poem, because unlike poems I had written for class assignments, the purpose and meaning behind this poem were obtuse.
In the poem, the cat is very static. So is her owner. The only active things in the moment are the flies that circle her stomach. Billy Collins, I’d call the tone. I remember I was thinking of him when I wrote it. Did I have a crush on Billy Collins? Well, Collins is lucky he never met me, apparently. Because my poem does not end with the cat eating her owner. Just the flies circling her belly. Like vultures.
The topic of any literary narrative-type project I've written always ends up being about my dyslexia because it has to be. Testing, special summer programs, Title 1, special accommodations, after school programs, my mother crying; my disability has left my journey of how I learned to read and write a matter of interest for the state of Massachusetts. Documentation exists somewhere deep in the state’s annals; some thick, manila trove of eligible forms and progress charts that, ostensibly, would tell you this story. I do not know if I could ever access any of those documents. And when I think of that lack of access. I feel helpless.
Testing, special summer programs, Title 1, special accommodations, after school programs, my mother crying; my disability has left my journey of how I learned to read and write a matter of interest for the state of Massachusetts.
I spent a lot of my life being “drilled with words,” a phrase which here means: the treatment methods I received for my dyslexia unintentionally oriented my relationship with language to be an antagonistic one.
For a few examples: crosswords and word searches in practice books by the pool in June, verbal, written, and nightly spelling tests administered by my mother, multiplication tables, addition tables, subtraction tables, I never reached division tables, all administered by my mother, Title 1 weekly evaluations administered by my school, my mother, frequent reading pop quizzes, frequent after school conferences, crying, so much crying, and Reader Rabbit.
But, mostly, I remember the flashcards. As the flashcard reader, I have a fairly easy job: say, out loud, the word that appears on the card. “There’s nothing else,” Mrs. J. informs me brandishing her long, lacquered French tip, “beside the word on the page.”
I am a fifth grader sitting in a chair designed for a preschooler going after school three nights a week to have a woman with chunky, inoffensive necklaces accost me with miniature billboards for an unfamiliar world. To me, the flashcard is a single word dangling in the moment, meaning nothing, modifying nothing, creating context for nothing besides a mechanical, Pavlovian response.
it says. And I, the reader, say, “word”. Most of the time, this is easy. “But they are going faster and faster,” Mrs. J. tells me one week. “Soon I will have to time you.” There is a rubric, she informs me, but she will not show me this rubric because showing me would somehow be illegal and would invalidate our work. I remember leaning over the kidney-bean shaped table as if to tempt the absurdity of it all to leap out of the papers at me, snapping.
I felt so helpless and robbed of agency in my treatment. I felt like I did not know how I was progressing and that I was not allowed to know. If I’m being honest, my prime motivation for seeking treatment was not to become a better reader and writer, but it was to make my mother stop blaming herself for my deficiency. I felt deficient. I felt poked and prodded like a frog strapped to a dirty lab tray.
In retrospect, considering my lack of agency while learning to read and write, I think exercises like flashcards—exercises that “drilled” me with words—influenced what I believe about language. I grabbed a Hershey's Kiss from the bag Mrs. J. would bring. I grabbed a green one. I remember that I grabbed a green one because I always do even though I know it doesn’t affect the flavor. As I chewed the candy, its once solid body melting and accepting my bite, I’d like to think I isolated two concrete effects that my dyslexia treatment had on me, right then and there. Regardless, here they are now: 1. Language does not always want to be understood, and 2. if you let language be misunderstood, if you can LET language happen, language and its possibilities peek out even a little further from the Hershey Kisses bag.
“Be warned: dyslexia is a quiet / embarrassment. You'll be dumb / enough to require practice / writing the word people for two / hours so you stop putting 9's in / it, but you'll be functional / enough to disappoint your / mother every time you get a / brain aneurysm over a / preschool crossword puzzle. / According to the Mayo Clinic / "dyslexia tends to ruin families", / which might be a misreading / of "dyslexia tends to run in / families", but that doesn't mean / misreadings are false. What is / false is the Austin Learning / Solutions website referenced / earlier in this commercial / because finding solutions in / learning, or to learning, has / proven to be baseless.”
—Excerpt from Dyslexia Advertisement, by Woody Woodger, DIAGRAM
The school’s conference room sits across from the art room; the hall decorated with student work—unconvincing flowers, popsicle-stick cabins, culturally insensitive papier-mâché masks. To me, it exposes the business of education, even public education. Its existence suggests there could be anything negotiable about a child’s education.
The conference room: this is where my disability was decided, agreed upon. I was not there because there was no reason for me to be. But my mother told me the broad strokes. It was my mother and father on one side of the table; the school board, a board-certified reading specialist, and the school's legal defense on the other. They discussed philosophy, such as, what’s a school's responsibility to one single student; and what does it, the child, actually need? But really, my mother told me, it was clear the hold up in treatment was over the pay raise the school would need to issue to the reading specialist so I could receive special tutoring.
My mother pleaded, appealed to reason, threw every scrap of pathos she could find; but she just didn't understand, you see. I imagine Mr. Dr. Ed Costa Superintendent of Schools, saying Daria, you see, the budget is tight, and Stacy, the school’s legal counsel, Stacy will tell you, we want to help every child who demands such special, expensive attention as you child. But the budget is already so tight. We would be dipping into our emergency funds, Mrs. Woodger, and that puts the whole school in jeopardy. What if there is a tornado or natural disaster or there’s not enough money for Field Day at the end of the year? Is that what you want? For the others? I know you care about your son, but can't you try to care about every child the way you care about your child?
It was my mother and father on one side of the table; the school board, a board-certified reading specialist, and the school's legal defense on the other.
But essays like these are also never about my dyslexia. These literacy narratives always turn into some sprawling entanglement of co-morbid anxieties and struggles from myself as well as the many other people who are affected by my disease. I am cluttered with treatments and tests and humiliations and concerns over school funding and concerns over my mother’s insecurities and concerns over what career I’m supposed to have while living with this.
As the dyslexia-haver—as the problem child—I’ve long felt that my first responsibility is always to consider how my dyslexia affects those around me and to accommodate their needs before my own. In other words, I am nexus and negotiator of all the anxieties that swirl up from my illness. It’s an absurd burden for a child to hold. I know because I still hold on to it. And it still feels absurd.
But regardless of where this feeling of responsibility originates from (I’m sure that will be the next essay), it is clear to me that I have not yet disentangled myself from the many competing internal and external concerns about my disease, thus making it impossible to reconcile what exactly is MY story of how I learned to read and write. It’s like my Billy Collins knockoff from earlier: a confrontation is promised and promised, but it simply won’t materialize. The cat is weary that the owner is not yet dead, and the owner is not about to suddenly get up. I can’t yet reconcile my dyslexia on my own terms, and my dyslexia sure won’t do it for me. But I wonder, at this point in my life, should I even bother reconciling my dyslexia on my own terms? Could I?
As the dyslexia-haver—as the problem child—I’ve long felt that my first responsibility is always to consider how my dyslexia affects those around me and to accommodate their needs before my own.
Then I imagine she turned to the lawyer and spoke directly to her. “Tell Ed here that since we have an official IEP and have paid the many specialist and testers and basically had to buy my son the privilege of receiving help, now, since we got all that documentation, it's illegal for you to refuse him these services. And if he doesn't, tell him I’ll sue him and this whole school.”
Stacy then removed her glasses because they were covered in Mr. Dr. Ed Costa, Superintendent of Schools’ blood from the thrashing my mother gave him. She wiped them with her equally bloody blazer sleeve and says, “In my expert opinion, it is illegal. And we absolutely do have to treat this,” she pauses to check my file, “child, if the parents ask us to. And obviously, Ed, this meeting was designed to intimidate and pressure these parents into backing down.” And then everyone but Ed jumped above the conference table into a high five freeze frame. Again, I was not there.
A Word Search Erasure of Austin Learning Solutions’ Web Article "Reading Tutor & Dyslexia Services"
Flashcards helped me understand that dyslexia is everybody else’s problem, but mine. There’s tremendous power in allowing yourself to be unmoored from language and revel in the absurdity of words and what we expect them to do for us. As readers and writers, as those who seek to build our relationships to the world with language, I consider us all wildly naive to the power with which we toy. I am lucky. Unlike you (perhaps), I’m encumbered. My relationship to language always will be, regardless of context or culture or divine intervention, a contorted and obscure experience. I represent a more exaggerated version of a truth all people who read and write should know—we never quite speak the same language.
Perhaps my first poem was right all along. Maybe what intrigues me so much about language and why I became a writer was the allure of the tension, the drama, the promise that reading and I would someday reconcile whatever slight it was that sent us bickering into eternity. An eternity on tumble dry.
At the kidney bean shaped table, Mrs. J. and I were playing sudden death. If I could get all the words right this round, I would get the whole pot of Hershey Kisses. We would always bet it all on the last round. We both liked danger. Before we played and ended the session, I asked Mrs. J. if there is anything I can do. Anything to make the dyslexia be less. Can I ever be rid of it? Then she lied. “Don’t worry, I take care of that.” Then she told the truth. “Just focus on the words. They’re the only thing that can save you, now.”
Woody Woodger lives in Washington, D.C.. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, from DIAGRAM, Drunk Monkeys, RFD, Exposition Review, peculiar, Prairie Margins, Rock and Sling, and Mass Poetry Festival, among others, and her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her first chapbook, “postcards from glasshouse drive” (Finishing Line Press) has been nominated for the 2018 Massachusetts Book Awards. In addition, Woodger served as Poet in Residence with the Here and Now in Pittsfield MA.