Conclusion: More to School than Meets the Eye

There is more to school than reading a book, writing a paragraph, or solving a math equation. What about all those sometimes forgotten skills that help us to be successful as we take notes, follow directions, play a game, take a test or interact with classmates? These abilities cannot be ignored no matter if the student is primarily an auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner. I have learned that since the eyes take in the information and the brain makes sense of what it sees, the visual system is of high importance. 

General School Difficulties

• Having efficient speed/accuracy/ memory needed to copy from the board to their paper
• Forgetting which way was right or left when playing games
• Mixing up cardinal directions
• Following multistep directions
• General ability to process information and remember it
• Wearing shoes on the wrong feet
• Proper organization of school supplies/work
• Needing to touch everything to know how it feels

Education and Vision Therapy

I am sad when I think of my students who lost confidence to do their work correctly and retreated into themselves. I also had students do the opposite, who acted out behaviorally because doing the work was so hard for them. Staying at either end of the spectrum for too long is not a place we want a child to be. Something that vision therapy offers is the chance to be in an environment where making mistakes is okay. During vison therapy we learn and grow in multiple ways at each session. While working on eye focusing skills we learn patience. We teach our eyes to work as a team, while being a part of a team that encourages each other to do our best. Our eye tracking abilities improve while we push ourselves. We gain spatial awareness and appreciate the body God gave us. A positive attitude helps foster and encourage our visual thinking skills. As a former classroom teacher and current vision therapist, I am blessed to continue my work of helping others learn more than classroom skills, but life skills as well. 

Part 3: Writing as Communication

Once learning has taken place, how do you show what you know? My students demonstrated their learning in the classroom through speaking, teaching another student, acting, drawing, using response cards and playing games. One method used daily in most subjects though was writing. The skill of writing is important on so many levels. It allows us to show what we know and communicate with the world. It’s been said that your brain remembers things better when you write it down. What if the physical and mental act of writing is less than fluid for the participant? We utilized writing for the common worksheet, writing notes, tests, learning cursive, and paragraph writing. Writing a math equation is not surprisingly very different from writing a 3 paragraph essay. In both cases though a student must use their brain to formulate an idea, remember how to form the letters/numbers correctly, how to set up and format the writing to be easily read and understood. 

Common Writing Difficulties

• Frequently reversing some letters and numbers (ex. Writing b instead of d or 6 instead of 9, or similarly writing 51 instead of 15)
• Mixing capital and lowercase letters within a word or starting every word with a capital letter
• Disregarding spacing when writing a paragraph (ex. Writing all words on only 1 side of the page)
• Writing words in an appropriate size based on the size of the line on the worksheet, lined writing paper, or free writing
• Setting up the paper correctly with a heading or proper paragraph writing specifications, pencil grip, slanting the page, posture, forming the letters and numbers correctly
• Brainstorming ideas in their head and being able to write them as sentences

Writing and Vision Therapy

Sometimes I would ask students if they could find which letters or numbers they wrote backwards…some students would notice and fix the mistake, others didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. This could indicate that the visual system has trouble processing and remembering what each letter and number means/how it should look. Many students did not use the space on a paper well. Some would write as if there was no line at all, some wrote on the line, but made their letters so large they would fill up the entire line space. This potential spatial awareness problem as well as others can be addressed with vision therapy.

A patient’s writing BEFORE starting Vision Therapy.

That same patient’s writing AFTER finishing Vision Therapy

Part 1: My Road to Vision Therapy

It is still a shock to me that if I had the knowledge I do now about the visual system and how the brain takes in information, I could have spared some of my students’ continuing struggles. Before 2 months ago I had never heard of the words “vision therapy,” nor even knew that vision was different from someone just needing eyeglasses. As a third grade teacher for 5 years, I figured that with the school screenings we had each year, reminding a student to actually wear the glasses they “forgot” in their backpack, or contacting a parent whose child said they couldn’t see well satisfied their eye needs and any further struggles they had were unrelated.

Now I see things differently, no pun intended. Every parent and teacher wants a child to use his/her God given gifts and abilities to reach full potential. Though everyone will struggle at some point in their lifetime, it is nice to have some extra help along the way, that’s where vision therapy comes in.  I left the classroom behind this summer and began my new journey as a vision therapist. I can say I wish I could check in with some of my past students. Perhaps some of them are doing very well now, others may still encounter the same challenges…I wonder if vision therapy could help.

This will be the first in a series of posts I make about some of the struggles I observed among students from this new perspective. I will go into more detail on some of the reading, writing, math and general challenges I witnessed as a teacher.