STARKVILLE — LaDerick Horne was born with a learning disability.
Delivering a keynote address Monday to the Innovative Institute — a conference for educators Mississippi State University’s Research and Curriculum Unit hosted at The Mill at MSU — the author and poet said the disability greatly impacted his course in life. But, he said, his condition wasn’t immediately apparent.
“Initially, when I went to school, I didn’t have any issues,” Horne said. “Kindergarten was easy. Playing with blocks, coloring — I was really good at that. But I started struggling when I got to the first grade.”
Horne’s struggles were so severe he had to repeat the first grade. He barely got through second grade and in third grade, he said, he received his label as a person with a learning disability.
The day came when his class was doing “read down the row” — where the teacher had each student in the class read a paragraph from a story in order from front to back along each of the rows of seats in the classroom.
Horne struggled with reading and writing — he later said he didn’t get proficient with writing grammatically-correct sentences until junior college — so much that he said he’d often try to escape to the bathroom or said he needed to see the school nurse to avoid the public embarrassment of struggling to read aloud. But on that particular day, he couldn’t get away and had to try to read in class.
“I remember stumbling through every word,” he said. “Every syllable was painful. I got about three lines in before someone on the right-hand side of me started laughing out loud.”
Eventually, Horne said, the teacher told him to stop and told the class’ student teacher to take him out of the class.
“My teacher takes it upon herself to stand up at her desk, in front of the entire class, in front of the entire room and says very loudly to the student teacher ‘Take this boy out in the hall and see if he knows how to read,'” Horne recalled. “How do you think that made me feel? Pretty bad, right?”
‘Learning in solitary confinement’
Horne, now an advocate for students with learning disabilities, was tested and placed into a special education program. At the time, he said, modern special education was still a relatively new concept — he said the law creating it was passed in 1975, two years before he was born — and it often felt like his school was just trying to figure out where to put the special education students.
While he said he was lucky to have a great educator for his special education teacher, the program at his school was a self-contained classroom.
“For those of you who have never personally had the pleasure of being educated in a self-contained special education classroom, I had the same teacher, the same teacher’s aide with the same kids in the same room for like 3 ½ years,” he said. “I liken it to learning in solitary confinement.”
By the time Horne got to high school, he said he felt like he was living a double life. He was considered, among his peers, to be an intelligent student, and he said he was a talented artist and an athlete at the time. But he knew his struggles, and he said that pressed him into a deep depression his junior year.
Horne pushed through the depression, and once he came through the other side, he decided he would go to a four-year university. After a stint in junior college, he earned a degree in mathematics from New Jersey City University.
‘Hidden’ disabilities
Though Horne has found success, he said he’s not alone with his struggles.
He said many people have what he called “hidden” disabilities — conditions such as a learning disability, dyslexia, autism or attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) — that can be hard for other people to pick up on.
Students with those hidden disabilities are more likely to drop out of school, have higher rates of drug usage and are more likely to have negative encounters with law enforcement.
“With a hidden disability, there’s an extra added challenge to navigating the world,” Horne said. “I can pass for normal if I want to. Meet me at the bar, I seem like a pretty normal guy. I’m not normal. I’m a little different.”
Horne has written a book about empowering students with disabilities and works with organizations, such as Eye to Eye, that work with students who have learning disabilities. He said it’s important to teach students with hidden disabilities that it’s OK to identify themselves and say they need help.
It’s especially important, he added, for educators to have honest conversations with the students about their disabilities, but to do them in an asset-based manner that highlights their strengths in the context of their disability, rather than only focusing on the things they cannot do.
“We firmly believe that disability should be a positive identifier,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be something we’re ashamed of. It doesn’t have to be something we’re afraid of.”
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