The move class was a eelent wast off 4.00 I let me col off in the are condisoner plas, becas it saw wery hot outsid.
-Written by Karen Morse in September, 1983, her senior year in high school.
Karen Morse grew up in Henniker, N.H., a valley town where people not only know your name but your nickname, too.
She started school in the basement of the old Grange Hall with 15 classmates. Every few years, like a surprise package, the class picked up one or two more. By the time she reached high school, there was little difference between classmates and family, between school and family.
Her school (Grades 7 through 12) has but 120 students, the second-smallest in the state. It was a source of pride to townspeople that they had been able to pay for their own school and avoid consolidation with other school districts. On this evening the town showed its feeling for the school and in particular for this class. More than 900 people-one-third of Henniker`s population-crowded onto the high-school ball field to see 27 of its children graduate. The class held the core of the girls` basketball team-state champions four years running. Thirteen in the class had been accepted at colleges; nearly all others were service-bound or going to junior colleges or vocational schools.
In such a class one student stood out: Karen Morse. Her achievements dazzled: National Honor Society, ”Who`s Who in American High Schools,” class president, student-council president. Her classmates also named her, among other honors, as having the ”most school spirit.” She edited the Henniker Times, the school newspaper. She wrote an editorial that won a national award for writing among high-school students.
People still spoke of her stirring speech at a school-district meeting when she defended the school board`s efforts to raise money for an addition against one of its most vociferous opponents: Wallace Morse, her father.
A few days earlier, had Henniker to choose one young person to hold up to the world and say, ”Here, judge us on this, what we produce,” few would argue that Karen Morse should not be the one.
But the day before graduation the Concord Monitor, acting on a tip from someone at the school, published a front-page story that shocked this small town. Headlined ”A Refusal to Graduate,” it told the public what the school and Karen`s friends had kept private for more than a year.
Karen Morse could neither read nor write. She suffered from a learning disability called dyslexia, a disorder characterized by the habitual reversal of letters or words. Dyslexics also may perceive words upside down or backward.
Karen would receive her diploma, but it would be unsigned by school officials, a technical distinction that meant she had not graduated. The school would continue legal responsibility for her education and send her to attend a private school specializing in dyslexia. The annual cost to Henniker, already one of the most heavily school-taxed towns in the state, would be more than $20,000.
It was startling news. How, the reporter asked, could Karen Morse have accomplished so much if she could neither read nor write? Karen`s reply unsettled the town and, much later, educators and parents across the country. She had gotten by, she said, by conning friends and teachers into giving her answers, by faking, by cheating. She had gotten by, she implied, because the school had passed her along, grade after grade, without knowing who she really was.
Since that graduation night, there have been months of anger, times of bitterness, charges of deceit and of betrayal. Now, when she comes home to Henniker from her school in Massachusetts, Karen stays in the house on Morse Circle, built on land that has been with her family since her great-grandfather`s day, and she rarely goes out.
Karen`s mother, Barbara, remembers her as a normal child, perhaps a little slow to talk. ”She was never interested in fine motor activities, she`d just get frustrated, but that wasn`t that unusual-except I had to repeat directions a lot.” In elementary school ”we were told she was horsing around too much, but her grades were always satisfactory.”
Meanwhile, for Karen school quickly became a frustrating, tormenting game. ”I knew I was different from the others,” she recalled recently, ”but I didn`t know how or why. I just knew I had to fool everyone to survive.”
So she became expert at the covert glance. When asked to hand handwriting samples she sometimes waited until last, took a paper from the pile and substituted her name at the top. In reading class she listened to the ”smart kids” reading aloud, memorizing the words.
”In 4th grade, if you were bad, the teacher sent you to stand behind the door. So I always was bad before reading. When it didn`t work, it was torture. When push came to shove, I`d cry. That always worked.”
Karen grew up with two brothers in a busy household. Her father had a wood-hauling and truck-contracting business. Her mother worked the late shift at a local plant. When they asked about homework, she disappeared into her room. Come morning, she copied her friends` work.
She perfected the art of what teachers call losing yourself. She sat low in a chair, ducking her head to avoid a teacher`s eyes. Said one of Karen`s former teachers: ”If you don`t want to be called on, you can learn how.”
When asked to read aloud, she explained how she would become ”totally obnoxious. I`d crack jokes, tell anecdotes that had nothing whatever to do with what we were doing and crack the kids up. I wouldn`t be called on after that.”
Karen was promoted year after year because many subjects were scored as satisfactory or unsatisfactory rather than by an A-F grading system. In such a small school, the teachers got to know students from the day they entered kindergarten: Karen was a girl who, outside the classroom, could talk articulately. They knew she was bright, so in grading her they gave her the benefit of the doubt.
In 9th grade, her French teacher requested that Karen be tested for learning disabilities, noting: ”Karen is often quite withdrawn and asks if she could sit in the back of the room. She has lots of trouble saying, `I don`t understand.` She gives monosyllabic responses whenever possible in class and sometimes refuses to answer at all.
”. . . Karen has a great deal of trouble spelling and writing: She recognizes this and feels she asked for help last year but did not receive it; she has given up on getting help in regular classes.”
When tested, Karen was diagnosed as having a ”mild learning disability.” She was assigned to a resource room tutor three periods a week. For Karen, at 14, the resource room did not seem a place of help but of humiliation. ”When the LD (learning disability) teacher would come into the class and say, `Can I have Karen this period?` I wanted to die.”
Still, her leadership and popularity remained undiminished. When free of classroom pressure, she was an outgoing personality, a forceful public speaker. Junior year, she was elected class president and president of the student council.
The closest thing to a confidant was her English teacher and school newspaper adviser, Marianne True, who found working on first drafts of Karen`s newspaper stories ”like learning a new language.”
”She never spoke in class, except one time,” True said. ”Later she told me she wanted to speak, but by the time the words went from her brain to her mouth, they came out jumbled. She said she wanted to do her work but just couldn`t.”
Here was a girl who didn`t do well in journalism class, yet she was editor of the school newspaper, a circumstance that owes a lot to her popularity and that it was such a tiny school-three or four students were the newspaper`s staff. The otherwise-outgoing girl was bluffing her way again.
Soon after the start of her junior year, Karen`s LD teacher (her third in three years) resigned, leaving a letter for her replacement: ”Karen has gone through 11 years of school pretending to read. She has been scolded for `not trying,` `being lazy` or even for being defiant or stupid by adults who are puzzled and frustrated by Karen`s inability to read. Karen knows that her intelligence equals or exceeds that of her peers. Yet she is unable to prove this. Karen has been identified as having psychological problems. It is highly likely that any emotional difficulties that Karen exhibits are a direct result of her learning disability.”
In May, 1983, the school sent Karen to a specialist who said she was the most severely dyslexic student she had ever tested. It was determined that Karen knew only nine letters of the alphabet by sight. She couldn`t write the numbers from 1 to 20. She couldn`t read signs. She couldn`t read most one-syllable words. In one test she scored below 1st-grade level.
It was as if she never had entered a classroom. They found that for most of Karen`s life, the world had been a confusing place. She had trouble understanding time. She did not know right from left.
Doctors told Karen`s parents that dyslexia is a failure in information processing. Most estimates say 10 percent of the population, mostly males, suffers some degree of dyslexia. It seems to have no cure. Its cause is in dispute. Most research focuses on central-nervous system malfunction. Other theories point to inner-ear problems, allergies, stress or a fear of reading induced by traumatic early school experiences.
Whatever the cause, the Morses were told it seems to be inherited.
It was then that Wally Morse revealed what he had kept private through 22 years of marriage: He cannot read, either. He was expelled from school in 10th grade for throwing a teacher through a window, an expulsion that Wally now describes as a relief. Wally suspects that he is dyslexic but never has been tested.
A doctor told the Morses that Karen desperately needed more intensive remedial work and that they should see a lawyer about the rights of special-education students. She cautioned them not to allow Karen to accept a diploma. Under federal and state law, a school is responsible for
”appropriate” special education until a student reaches age 22 or receives a diploma, she said.
In Henniker, teachers and administrators were stunned to learn the depth of Karen`s problems. School officials urged Karen to attend a school specializing in dyslexia. Shaken, Karen composed a letter to the board, dictating it to a friend.
”The graduation ceremony has been an incentive for me for many years. My diploma would be the one thing that I could keep to remind me that all my struggles and pain were worth everything that I endured. . . . I have spent 12 years pretending to be able to read because it was vital that I appear to be the same as everyone else. . . . Now you ask me to go to an unfamiliar place so that people may see how truly ignorant I am. . . . Don`t ask me to give up the small amount of self-respect that I have left.”
The board allowed Karen to stay in Henniker for her senior year, with tutoring one hour a day, six days a week. After graduation, Karen would start classes at the Landmark School campus in Prides Crossing, Mass., the nation`s oldest, largest (six campuses in three states) and best-known facilities for dyslexics. It would be paid for by the Town of Henniker.
She continued to take high school tests orally. Texts were tape-recorded. Teachers stayed after hours to help with homework. Her grades averaged in the 90s, helped along enormously by after-school tutoring, memorization and teachers making allowances for her dyslexia.
In the summer of 1984, Karen arrived at Landmark School, located on a secluded wooded hillside that was once a graceful estate. The school was founded in 1971 by a dyslexic, Charles Drake, a burly, white-haired Harvard University Ph.D. He began with 45 students; now there are 435 in the multicampus complex around Beverly, Mass. For every three students, Landmark has one teacher or staff member.
Drake warns new teachers, ”You`ve fallen among the most manipulative children on Earth.” The school`s teaching methods are complex, but its philosophy is simple: The world is not generous to an illiterate, so you do not coddle the dyslexic. It is not okay to avoid the work. The work will be boring, sometimes painful. When necessary, we will be hard. When necessary, we will comfort.
At the school, Karen felt raw, vulnerable, exposed. She tried every trick, every con. A teacher told her bluntly, ”You`re under a microscope with me. You`re not going to cheat your way here.”
Her teachers were awed by Karen`s defenses. ”I had never seen anyone like her,” one tutor said. ”She could fool any tester you ever saw-a real pro at covering up. I had to show her that I knew what she was doing. I wasn`t going to let her get away with pretending to understand.”
Slowly, the hidden world of language took shape for Karen. For the first time she recited the alphabet without an error. Her reading inched forward into the 2d grade.
But she grew despondent.
”We call it the reality crisis,” Drake said, ”when they face that they will be dyslexic for the rest of their lives, that no longer can they get by on luck. But they can acquire skills, although it will take enormous work. When that happens, a kid can go into an absolute nose dive, and this can last from three weeks to three months.”
When Karen`s parents visited in the fall of 1984, they found their daughter remote, estranged, barely willing to converse.
Landmark counseled patience. When Karen comes through her crisis, a teacher told them, she will be ready, for the first time, to learn.
