When Chelsea was just a toddler, we thought she might be deaf. Seemingly quite interested in what you had to say, she would give you great eye-contact, watch your lips move and then simply run along falling directly into the very thing you had just instructed her to avoid. At times, we wanted to just scream—and we would have if we believed it would help! Once, while visiting great-grandma on the homestead farm in Wisconsin, Chelsea took off running down the lane toward the intersecting country road. I yelled out for her to stop, but she just kept running. One of those massive gravel dump-trucks came barreling down that country road. I could hear it coming. My heart pounded profusely as I raced after Chelsea—I caught her just in the nick of time right at the edge of the road—the truck driver laid on his horn and rumbled past a laughing little girl and her trembling dad. That was it—we had to get her tested.
She tested just fine. “Nothing wrong with this little girl’s hearing,” the doctor said. But she suspected something developmentally wrong. Chelsea didn’t crawl on time, didn’t walk on time and didn’t talk on time—at least, according to most social standards of “time.” At four years she still made strange vocalizations and used hand gestures to get what she wanted. Her vocabulary was almost non-existent. So, further testing was called for. Chelsea was shown a series of pictures that contained subtle differences. For example, in four separate images a man was pictured camping in the woods; in one such image the man held his axe over a chopping block, in another he sat by the tent and the axe laid on the ground next to him, in the third the man sat by a chopping-stump where the ax was embedded, and the fourth was some additional variation thereof. The doctor then asked Chelsea a series of questions to determine her ability to discern differences. Chelsea looked a question at mom and dad in response to each of the doctor’s statements.
“Show me the picture where the man is sitting beside his axe.” Chelsea heard “picture,” “man” and “axe.” Well, all four images contained those things. In advance of the exercise the doctor had ensured that Chelsea knew which item was a man, which was a tent, which was an axe, which was a tree, and so forth. She knew what her eyes gathered, but she didn’t know that the portion of her brain responsible for processing auditory information was malfunctioning. Chelsea was diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder.
At first we were devastated. Oh God, why our little girl? Will she always be different? What will this label mean in her life? What can we do for her? Well, in searching we found a computer-based program called “Fast ForWord®.” This program was developed by two auditory specialists using a computer game environment to captivate the child’s attention, along with a series of auditory techniques to break down sounds into individual phonemes so the brain is trained how to “hear” and how to make sound/letter correlations. Students wear a headset so that all external auditory stimulation is controlled and to focus their phonemic and phonological awareness. Chelsea used this program for about one year from age six to seven. In that time frame she learned to read and her communication skills were dramatically enhanced.
Beginning with kindergarten, Chelsea attended a private Montessori school. We believed she would benefit from a multi-sensory, experiential, “hands-on” approach to learning. And she did! Fourth and fifth grade she attended a private Christian school. Sixth grade was the “show stopper.” This is when conceptual learning really kicks in. Chelsea could get by with the foundational stuff, but with concepts like the water cycle, photosynthesis, and literary analysis, Chelsea was lost. Her learning had always followed a sort of step-function format. You couldn’t track Chelsea on a “learning curve.” She either got it or she didn’t (apparently) until suddenly, one day, with seemingly miraculous speed she would tell you exactly what you wanted to know. Not good for test taking. She might know the information, but she couldn’t recall it upon demand. Then, at a later date, out of the blue she could suddenly tell you all about rain clouds—just when you thought she wasn’t getting the concept. We held several meetings with her sixth grade teachers and the school principal. All nice people, but they didn’t know what to do with Chelsea’s differences. Also, we sensed that Chelsea was being teased by her peers. It was time for us to homeschool.
Mom has been her primary teacher beginning with mid-term sixth grade. Chelsea is taking her high school exit exams right now—for the third time. She’ll get it. We have no doubt. She will do it—in her time. Chelsea still has retrieval problems, but we know how to test her, how to challenge her and how to love her. The Christian school principal warned, “What about socialization? If you take her home, you will isolate her.” Well, we have a wonderful daughter who has escaped all of the torture of the high school socialization process. Have you ever been in a high school girls’ locker room? Chelsea has taken tennis, pottery, dance, and she will soon earn her black-belt in Tae Kwon Do. We have come to find that sight/sound learning in combination with movement is particularly beneficial for Chelsea. The routine kata movements of Tae Kwon Do and the tactile memory of those movements have greatly enhanced her ability to process, retain, and recall information. Reading aloud as a family has also been extremely beneficial—in more ways than one...
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