This is not a channeled a post. Most of the posts in this blog are channelled, but this one is based on my own learning.
My Brief Story
As I’ve mentioned before, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) when I was 27. I was well into my career as a Tax/Transfer Pricing Consultant at a Big 4 Firm AND I had already finished a college degree in Economics and Accounting. I sought the diagnosis because I began to get into trouble at work and I was always talked to about eating my time in a billable hour environment. That is, I would read each documentation three times because that’s what it took for me to be able to turn it in to the Director or Manager, but I would only charge the time it took me to read it once, because that’s what ‘normal’ or ‘neurotypical’ people charged. I thought this was better than blowing the budget, which would get me in much more trouble as a supervisor. To be clear, my Directors and Managers always approached it professionally, and to the extent they could, kindly. But in all honesty, if I tune back to how I felt back then, I was mortified and traumatized. Each time I was talked to, it brought back all the times I hid how long it took me to understand my textbooks when I was in college. It would take me anywhere from four to six hours to read about 20 pages in a chapter. The reason it took me so long was that in order to understand and remember it, I had to take copious notes on my text. Long story short, the more I hid my difficulties, the more I began to experience physical symptoms of stress and the breaking point was when I had persistent and intermittent insomnia. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I finally sought help from a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with ADHD. About six months later, I felt the need to leave my job to go to graduate school to figure it all out. In graduate school, at University of California, Santa Barbara, I was finally given accommodations for a reading comprehension disability after taking a neuropsychological examination. It turns out that I read really slowly when purely reading by sight and it is severe enough to warrant accommodations. I call what I have mild dyslexia because while I don’t understand what I read when I read by sight, I don’t have phonological issues with text. In the daze of dealing with everything I was learning about myself and the strong emotions that come with such a diagnosis, I ended up flunking out of that graduate program. I did finish a graduate degree in another university that prioritized teaching over research.
Learning to Forgive and Picking Myself Back Up
When I received the results of my neuropsychological examination, I cried for hours at one of the lagoons in the school. I was angry, to say the least, that so many people, so many institutions missed me. I felt that no one cared enough to point out that I may need help because I also flunked out of two undergraduate institutions prior to this. Saying that I was angry is an understatement. I was disappointed in myself, in everyone that cared for me, and all the institutions that educated me. I also missed my responsibility in the whole thing and didn’t ask why is this happening for me and not to me? I needed to cross that bridge from the anger to taking responsibility, and that bridge is forgiveness. After that, I needed to learn how to pick myself back up, matriculate in a different institution, and prove to myself that I could do it. If I could do it all over again, I would have told myself as a graduate student not to judge myself based on a past that does not serve me in the present and to try my best to let it all go.
The Importance of Catering to your Learning Style
Why is this coming up now? I am currently attending law school and I have already guided some of my classmates to use text-to-speech technology if they believe that they are auditory learners. It is not so much that my abilities are less than those without ADHD or a learning disability, it is more accurate to say that I learn in a very specific way. That is, I am an auditory learner and if I try to read purely by sight, my reading comprehension would be very poor. However, if I read something through text-to-speech, not only is my reading comprehension very good, I also read reasonably fast.
This came up because one of my classmates was called on in class through the Socratic Method and felt disappointed so I texted in a group chat to try text to speech. When I spoke up and gave suggestions of apps that do it, I was surprised by the response, in that there were more of us auditory learners than I understood. Perhaps, they may not have a learning disability like I do, but because they ‘lean’ towards being an auditory learner, utilizing text-to-speech technology has benefits.
My experience as a community college professor was similar. I had quite a few students who would struggle with the course. They would do all the homework, take notes on their book, go to all my classes, and still they could not pass my tests. This would alarm me because I was a similar student and fundamentally, there is a well known fact that is often not spoken of and it is that reading comprehension skills are highly predictive of success in higher education. That is, if you do not understand what you read, the lectures may be confusing to you and thus, you may begin to get discouraged. Worse of all, you may think you are not smart, which is very silly, considering that being good at reading by sight has nothing to do with being smart other than that the education system was built and designed for people who read very well by sight. If you think about the construct of our education system, most of it is still anchored by the written book through textbooks that are written on paper. Sure, in lower division undergraduate courses, there are many alternative ways to do the reading including using dynamic e-textbooks with built-in text to speech technology and other supports, but as you progress through higher education, those supports often end because the demand for the textbook doesn’t warrant it. This might be especially true if you attend a graduate school that supports a niche. So, for those of us who are auditory learners, other means of having the book read to us is critical to our success in earning the degrees we want.
I think at this point it is worth mentioning that there is a biological basis to your learning style that encompasses more than just how you read. It may be that you need to move while you read or that movement allows you to focus, which is covered in Dr. Roland Rotz’s book Fidget to Focus. I would often tell my students that I read their textbook while on a treadmill or on a hike while utilizing text to speech because the movement increased my comprehension. It could also be that you need white noise or maybe complete silence. Dr. John Ratey wrote a book called Spark that explains the benefits of exercise to the brain. It turns out that focus comes easier if you exercise at least to 70% of your heart rate for at least 30 minutes a day. I once watched a webinar where it was suggested that graduate students with ADHD sometimes ran before tests because it would assist in their performance because the brain is able to focus better. Because of this finding, I ran a 10K every quarter I was in graduate school to motivate me to exercise at least to 70% of my heart rate. Suffice to say, it is important not to compare your learning style to someone else’s because everyone has a different biology and everyone’s brain works slightly differently than the other people’s. So, do you and be you but in order for you to do that, you need to understand fundamentally and biologially how you are. That comes with experimentation and listenting to what your intuiton is telling you about how you learn.
There is Light at the End of the Tunnel. You are gifted, not disordered.
If you are currently going through the diagnosis of either ADHD, a learning disability, or another mental health disorder, I want to tell you what I wish someone told me when I was going through it. It is that there will come a day you will be grateful that you are the way you are once you have the done the inner work to understand why this is happening for you. Not only is there light at the end of the tunnel but you will find that there are aspects of you that are gifted. My natural clairaudience is a byproduct of my ADHD. Once I did the inner work, my gifts activated to reveal a vast universe of consciousness.
The labels that society has put on the symptoms is what it is. We can’t change what it is called by the collective but we can change how we perceive ourselves based on that label. If you see yourself as disordered, that is what will show up in your life. If you see yourself as gifted, then you will discover the vastness of consciousness that is always conspiring to assist you.
Resources for Students in Higher Education
I want to end this post with resources I used to understand how to learn given my particular biology and the learning style that it comes with.
- A good book on how to understand the ADHD brain and how to learn with the ADHD brain is Understand Your Brain, Get More Done by Dr. Ari Tuckman
- Another good book on understanding how to learn is Jim Kwik’s book Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain and Learn Anything Faster. Jim Kwik suffered a brain injury as a child that made it very difficult to learn. He began researching how the brain works while he was having difficulty in college. He is now one of the foremost experts on memory and learning in the United States.
- If you are diagnosed with a print disability, you may qualify for Bookshare. Bookshare provides books with text-to-speech. It is free if you are a student, but requires a small fee if you are no longer matriculated. You must be certified as having a print disability by a qualifying professional.
The quality of Text to Speech technology is quite variable at this time but it is getting better every year. If you are new to text-to-speech, an important thing to do is to match the speed of the text-to-speech technology to your brain’s reading speed, so it’s important that the reading speed is variable and can be changed. If it is too slow, you will get bored and not focus and if it is too fast, your memory will not be able to keep up with the speech to be able to comprehend. These are the text to speech resources I recommend:
- Hands down the most superior text to speech technology out there is Kurzweil. It is often provided with accomodations, though schools don’t always procure Kurzweil. Kurzweil is designed for students so its study skills aid can often be very helpful to students.
- Most Kindle Books have native text to speech capability and the actual text to speech is very good. Even words whose pronunciation is not standard is pronounced well and symbols are often said correctly. The reading speed is not variable within a fluid spectrum, like Apple, but it is good enough. Essentially, you can change the reading speed form 1 to 1.5 to 2 and so on. When you purchase a book, make sure Text to Speech is enabled because it is not always enabled by the Publisher but it is enabled by most.
- I remain on the Apple ecosystem becuase its natural accesibility features makes my life much easier given my print disability. The text-to-speech capability within Apple devices is impressive as the reading speed is fluid and can be changed to 1 or 1.3 or whatever reading speed you want. It is not constrained in set levels like the Kindle. This can be very important for very dense reading, like those in law or other graduate schools, because granular changes in the reading speed when the reading is very dense and the language is very complex, may have vast differences in your reading comrehension. Instructions on how to enable text to speech on the iPhone and MacOS can be found on Apple’s support website. I would like to note that Kindle’s text to speech based on correct pronounciation of oddly pronounced words and symbols is still better than Apple’s and that’s why it’s listed before.
- If you are not in the Apple ecosystem, there are many apps that perform text to speech. Adobe Reader, which is free will read any PDF out loud. ezPDF Reader also has text to speech capabilities for PDFs. However, for both of these apps the speed of reading is not variable, which may throw you off if your reading speed is much faster than what the technology is capable of.
