A “Sight” Less than Perfect
Twenty-two years ago I was teaching a fifth grade class in West Palm Beach. A boy in my class was not performing at all up to what I felt was his ability. Looking through his records I noticed that his stated IQ for the first grade was 120. By the time he reached the fifth grade his IQ was 80. I further saw a note that he had glasses for a short period in first grade. His parents were called for a parent teacher conference with me to discuss their son’s performance. I asked them to please bring his glasses along with them. After they arrived the father tossed the glasses down on the desk saying, “These were a waste! They’re just glass.” Picking them up, I peered through the lens and rotated them noticing that objects changed shape. Their son had a bad case of astigmatism.
When I attended school as a child almost half my class wore glasses by the fifth or sixth grade. Glasses had no stigma attached to wearing them. For the past 25 years it seems difficult to find a child wearing glasses, especially in the poorer public schools.
As I home schooled my own children along with some
others here in Orlando for the past 12 years, because of the poor education
they were receiving at the public schools they were assigned to. I have done
home school evaluating for the past ten years.
During that time, I have noticed many children were diagnosed by their
schools as having learning disabilities, almost half the home schoolers I
saw.
One of the first families I worked with had four children I was tutoring. Two of the boys, one in the 11th grade and another in the 7th grade only had a reading ability of about second grade. I noticed that when they read they missed most of the small words that they knew. I also noticed that they looked intently sometimes squinting at the words, and they said that when they read much they got headaches. I asked their mother to get their vision checked as soon as possible. She found Dr. Sobel, a pediatric optometrist, at 20/20 who told her that they both needed glasses. They had a condition that caused their eye muscles or the iris from holding a focus for long. It is not the same as far sightedness. After they got the glasses, Daniel commented, I didn’t know words were supposed to look like that.” His reading immediately improved. Joe’s reading did also, but he was now so far behind that he never graduated. He has since been in and out of juvenile detention and jail.
A similar story happened with Rodney. He was in the Ninth grade when I visited he and his mother, I could see he was about to explode. School was pressuring him, he could not do the work. He was getting in with a bad crowd. I had him read for me. He read just like Joe and Daniel. I asked his mother to get his eyes checked, and he had the same vision problem. I tutored him for a while to take off the pressure and help him one on one. His path seemed to go like Joe’s.
I have been trying to make others aware of this
problem but to no avail. To have a child’s education and life ruined
because they can’t see well enough is really a tragedy. No one in school
checks or screens the low students for close vision problems. They don’t
even recommend it. These were lower middle class parents who never
thought that vision was a problem. Maybe because their child could see
some times, they just didn’t know about this particular vision problem.
My own daughter turned out to have the same problem, but she could read well. She just woke up each morning with a bad headache. I asked her if she was reading before she went to bed and she admitted that she was. It seemed a stretch that she could have the same problem as these others, but I took her to Dr. Sobel also. She was nearsighted and needed glasses or contacts to correct her distant vision, but she also had a problem with her eye muscles holding a focus, which translated into a tension headache by morning. So she needed glasses to read and to see at a distance. Her headaches went away as soon as she started reading with the glasses.
I have seen so many students with this problem now
that I can spot it rather quickly. This is a story that needs some real
public awareness. How many children’s lives will continue to be ruined in
education and maybe their whole life by not knowing they have a vision
problem? I have no idea how prevalent this condition is. If you
panned a sixth grade class in most schools, I doubt you will find one
child wearing glasses. Sixth graders are not likely to have
contacts.
I think that schools should screen the low achievers
for close up vision problems from K-12. Recently this was suggested in
the Sentinel. I am in the process of
setting up a means of helping with this.
It is an easily resolvable problem with long lasting effects. It needs to be done for our children.
I will fill you in on progress and announce the plan in the near future.