Don M. Winn's Blog, page 7

Does Your Child Have Too Much Homework?

Virtual and/or distance learning is a new frontier for many children and their parents. Parents have a lot of extra work that they need to do when they’re overseeing their child’s distance learning. Some parents remark that the workload is too much for their child, that their child has too much homework. For example, in one evening, a child might be assigned a few chapters to read in a book and then asked to write a five-hundred-word report on what they’ve read. Now how can a parent know what their child can reasonably do, especially if they have a learning challenge? And how can they communicate their observations to the teacher?

I recently conducted a Zoom video interview with educator and reading specialist Faith Borkowsky. I thought I’d share some highlights from the video interview here on my blog. This week, Faith offers some words of advice to parents who wonder if their child has too much homework, and a few thoughts about what parents can realistically expect from this school year.

The following information is from the video interview with Faith Borkowsky. You can watch the whole interview  below or on my Don Winn YouTube channel.

Don: Faith, can you tell us your thoughts about what a reasonable amount of homework might be?

Faith: All right, so, a couple of things going on. First let’s talk about the word reasonable. What does that really mean? Reasonable for grade level—you know, appropriate grade-level work? Or just reasonable in general?

I’ll give you an example: when my son was in elementary school, I remember that he came home every night with lots and lots of math problems for homework. He did not have any learning problems, but he was being given about fifty long division problems. At his age—I think it was about third grade—that to me was unreasonable. I wanted him to go outside and play; he was an active kid, he needed to get out and move. He was having a hard time just sitting there doing the work, and he understood long division. When a teacher can see that a student has mastered a skill in five to ten examples, it’s not necessary for the student to complete fifty examples. That’s unreasonable in my mind. And that has nothing to do with a learning challenge.

Sometime there’s just busy work. I think a parent needs to sort out what is busy work and what is reasonable for a typical learner at grade level, and then decide what a parent can do when a child struggles, a child with learning challenges.

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Reading and Learning Challenges at Home

This has been a school year unlike any other. Many children are learning at home via virtual or distance learning. Parents may find themselves in closer contact with their children’s education than ever before. They may notice their child has some problems with reading. Why? Virtual school exposes a child’s reading and learning challenges at home to a greater degree. What should parents understand about their observations?

I recently conducted a Zoom video interview with educator and reading specialist Faith Borkowsky. I thought I’d share some highlights from the video interview here on my blog. This week, Faith offers some words of advice to parents wondering if their child needs additional help with reading. She also offers an observation and a general caution to parents of kids engaged in virtual learning this year.

The following information is from the video interview with Faith Borkowsky. You can watch the whole interview  below or on my Don Winn YouTube channel.

Don: As an educator and reading specialist, what sort of challenges have you observed this school year?

Faith: The challenges in reading instruction are the same as they were before the pandemic. Schools are still using leveled readers instead of teaching kids to use their phonics skills and to look through a word from left to right, and schools are giving kids books with words they don’t know how to read without looking at pictures. None of this has changed. It’s the same challenges.

Don: Many parents that I’ve talked with are seeing the degree of difficulty their child faces with reading and learning challenges at home, but have no idea how to help them. Do you have any suggestions?

Faith: You have to know exactly what the issue is. We can’t help children unless we know what the deficit areas are. You have to figure out what exactly is holding this child back.

Usually it’s the foundational skills like phonological difficulties and decoding difficulties.

For a parent to be able to help and determine what the problem is, it can help to take some words out of context (you can make a list of words) and see if the child can actually read these words when there are no pictures and no other repetitive words. I’m a big believer in using words they have to truly decode, not words they’ve already memorized.

You can see if children are able to rhyme. This is not a determining factor. We know that what’s really important, what’s predictive of children being able to read, are the individual phonemes, but when young children have difficulty either producing rhymes, generating rhymes, or understanding rhymes, that’s a sign that there could be something going on. So if you see those types of phonological difficulties, decoding difficulties, a parent might want to start trying to get kids to attend to letter/sound correspondence; reading left to right; encouraging children to use their finger under the words, so that they’re really looking at the words, not at the pictures; and getting them decodable books—those types of books encourage children to look through a word, especially if they are cumulative in nature. You could start at the very beginning, seeing what they’re able to do, and start showing them the letter/sound correspondence.

[Here is a list of recommended decodable books.]

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Edith Zimmerman: Drawing as Therapy

Edith Zimmerman, the talented and creative person responsible for Drawing Links: A Newsletter with Comics and Links, has agreed to discuss her work and her story with us and show us how she uses drawing as therapy.

I always love to see people using their gifts and talents in outside-the-box ways and sharing their stories so they can inspire today’s struggling readers.

Don: Edith, thanks so much for joining me today! When you were growing up and picturing your life as an adult, did you imagine that you would be drawing comics and writing a newsletter for a living? If not, how did it come about? And what challenges have you faced?

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Edith: Ha! My first instinct is to say “No way!” but now that I think of it, I did love to write and draw as a kid, so I think I’d be happy to know that I’d found a way to do both as an adult. (“The internet” might be harder to explain…)

The quick story of how the newsletter came about is that I wrote and drew a lot in college, and then pursued a career as a writer, mostly for the internet, for the following 15 years. A few years ago, after I stopped drinking, I started cartooning about my life, just for fun, as an extension of my morning journal habit. Eventually I posted the stories to a private Instagram account, and about a year ago, I quit my day job and started a comics newsletter to share the cartoons publicly and try to make a living doing it. (Whether it will work out is still TBD!)

As for challenges, the hardest parts seem to be the flip sides of the best parts. I’ve never had a firm long-term career goal, so it’s usually hard to predict where I’ll be in a few years. And I’ve rarely made a consistent amount of money from one year to the next, so preparing for the future can be challenging. And although I mostly love the freedom of what I’m doing, I also have pangs of feeling foolish, which leads to fear about what I’m going to do next and how I’m going to make enough money to feel safe and good in the long run. These pangs are mostly fleeting…

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Don: In your comic Country Running, written during this pandemic, your running became a metaphor for how you were feeling about life that day. You wrote: “Everything feels so different sometimes. Like none of this I could have planned or anticipated. And the path keeps changing. I keep trying to put into words this feeling of being carried along by something.” Your feelings are so relatable! What is helping you to stay grounded during these unprecedented times? Does using drawing as therapy help?

Edith: Thank you. I’m glad that resonated with you. My morning routine (coffee and drawing, every day) has been invaluable. It is an anchor in my life. Also, I don’t have kids or a mortgage, so it’s easier for me to feel more open-ended about the future, which right now feels helpful. Knitting, running, and TV have also been helpful. It feels good to have portable hobbies right now. And, I guess, a portable career!

Don: My wife and I have both remarked on the sense of wonder you are able to convey about everyday objects and encounters. Getting curious about the berries in your backyard (Yard Berries), an encounter with your mom about her gift of cloth napkins (Napkins), or a spark of interest in Shakespeare after hearing a friend quote from The Tempest (Tempest). What suggestions do you have for families about staying in the moment, about making everyday encounters a learning/bonding opportunity?

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Help for Adults with Dyslexia

It is estimated that at least 1 in 10 individuals must deal with dyslexia. Many have remained undiagnosed and unsupported well into adulthood. And although the primary focus of this blog is on helping and advocating for children with dyslexia, over the years I have also blogged about help for adults with dyslexia. So for Dyslexia Awareness Month, I wanted to share a few of my blogs that directly address the needs and challenges of adults with dyslexia.

5 Hallmarks of Adults with Dyslexia. Since so many adults with dyslexia are undiagnosed, there are countless thousands of folks who are silently dealing with the toxic burdens of shame, anxiety, and the fear of being found out. If you suspect that you have dyslexia, this article will help you discover three steps you can take to cope with and understand your struggles. You are not alone!

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Living with an Adult with Dyslexia. This is one of my most-read blogs, as my wife and I share the journey we’ve had together and the effect my dyslexia has had on our relationship. We’ve both had so much to learn! But learning all we can about dyslexia has made all the difference, and it can for you too.

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Adolescent and Adult Dyslexia Diagnosis Survival Tips. One hallmark of life with dyslexia is that every task requiring reading, writing, and sometimes math require extra time to complete. Lots of extra time. So how can one prioritize, schedule, and manage when time is such an issue? We’ll consider some takeaways from David Rock’s book, Your Brain at Work. While it’s not a book specifically for dyslexics, there are some great ideas to implement, including a great coping skill for dealing with negative self-talk that provides a lot of useful help for adults with dyslexia.

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Dyslexia: When It’s as Good As It Gets. This is another reader favorite. In it, I share the fact that since dyslexia can’t be outgrown, it’s with us for life. How can we accept and live with our challenges and limitations? Read on.

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Coping with a sense of Loss of Control. Written during COVID-19, this installment deals with times in life when we feel lost or out of control. Whether we feel overwhelmed with the current health issues plaguing our planet, or overloaded because of our own challenges with dyslexia, this blog will help you find your balance again and rethink the choices that are still available to you.

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Wherever you and your family are in your dyslexia experience, don’t miss the award-winning books Raising a Child With Dyslexia: What Every Parent Needs to Know, by Don M. Winn, and Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent’s Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention, by reading specialist Faith Borkowsky.

Cardboard Box Adventures picture books are great for shared reading and can help parents establish a strong preliteracy foundation for their children. Check out the CBA Catalog for a full list of award-winning picture books, chapter books, and resources for parents and educators. Visit my Amazon author page for more information.

The post Help for Adults with Dyslexia appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

Dyslexic Children and Virtual School

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, and since it’s also just a few weeks into the new school year, it’s a good time for parents to acquaint themselves with some ways they can help their kids get off to a good start, especially if they have a learning difference. How can dyslexic children and others get the most out of virtual school?

Whether your child is learning remotely or not, these are difficult and challenging times for parents and kids alike. Starting in February or early March, most students were plucked from their familiar school environment (and their dyslexia accommodations) for the remainder of the school year. And, while it was a necessary and responsible thing for school districts to do, there was an immediate resulting “academic slide,” or loss of educational momentum and traction.

I’ve written before about the “summer slide” that happens when kids take time off from their books and reading for their summer break; it’s a well-documented phenomenon. But in 2020, the slide began months earlier than normal, and that’s causing a tremendous impact on all students, especially those with dyslexia and other learning challenges.

Now that the new school year has begun with many students learning remotely, the slide is continuing. Since most parents are not trained educators, it can be difficult for them to know how best to help their struggling child. For some ideas to help, here are some tips for getting the most from the new school year in the blog The COVID Academic Slide Fall 2020.

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What if you observe that your dyslexic child is struggling, not just with reading, but with writing, or math, or tasks that involve sequencing like learning the alphabet, tying their shoes, or memorizing their multiplication tables? Or what if you’ve noticed that they are having difficulty regulating their emotions, perhaps talking negatively about themselves and their capabilities?

Enter social and emotional learning. This term encompasses all the crucial skills that every child must learn in order to manage their emotions and function well in a social world. So many kids only get a little bit of help with reading, and no help at all for the other social and emotional aspects of dyslexia they may have struggled with. Learning to read is not enough. Being a struggling student causes a gamut of emotions that, left unaddressed, can set a child up for needless suffering. Your observations as a parent matter so much! Discover the importance of social and emotional learning in Learning to Read is Not Enough for Dyslexics.

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When parents notice that their child is dealing with frustration, discouragement, anger, despair, or other difficult emotions, it can be challenging to know what to do next. Dyslexic children adapting to virtual school are likely to feel all these emotions if they find themselves without their usual accommodations. In this next installment, we take a cue both from child psychologists and from cartoonist and blogger Edith Zimmerman in the blog Helping Dyslexic Children Illustrate Their Feelings.

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This technique asks that parents get their child to draw them a picture, or pictures, of what they’re feeling. This technique works when other techniques fail for one simple reason: kids don’t have the skills or vocabulary to eloquently describe what they’re feeling and experiencing. However, they can draw a picture of it for you. Once you identify what your child is dealing with emotionally, you can help them address it in a healthy way. This is key: learning won’t take place until you do, because kids can’t learn when they’re in pain.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you. I hope you find these resources to be helpful to you and your family.

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Wherever you and your family are in your dyslexia experience, don’t miss the award-winning books Raising a Child With Dyslexia: What Every Parent Needs to Know, by Don M. Winn, and Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent’s Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention, by reading specialist Faith Borkowsky.

Cardboard Box Adventures picture books are great for shared reading and can help parents establish a strong preliteracy foundation for their children. Check out the CBA Catalog for a full list of award-winning picture books, chapter books, and resources for parents and educators. Visit my Amazon author page for more information.

The post Dyslexic Children and Virtual School appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

Helping Dyslexic Children Illustrate Their Feelings (Comics as a Coping Skill Part 2)

In my last blog post (Comics as a Coping Skill: Part 1), I shared the work of Edith Zimmerman, a cartoonist and blogger who uses her art to express and process her feelings, and to help kindred souls do the same. Her work and her process really got me to thinking about how the same method could help new homeschoolers this year, especially those with dyslexia and other learning challenges. By helping dyslexic children illustrate their feelings, you can learn valuable clues about how to provide what they really need to help them learn.

Families are really struggling right now. It doesn’t take much investigation to discover that parents and kids alike are at the very least uncomfortable with all the unknowns of distance learning, and at worst, floundering desperately to find their way. Emotions are running high, and as a result, very little learning takes place.

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As my friend Lois Letchford says, “Children don’t learn when they’re in pain.” I certainly lived the truth of that statement in my youth. Schoolchildren today are in great pain resulting from the uncertainty due to the pandemic, and as a consequence, they are most likely not learning as well as they would under ordinary circumstances. So how do we help kids move from a place of pain, frustration, anger, or uncertainty to one of safety and love where learning can take place?

I suggest taking a cue from Edith Zimmerman and encouraging kids to draw how they’re feeling. When you see your child getting frustrated, checking out, stalling, making excuses, or getting defiant, it’s an opportunity to hit the “PAUSE” button on schoolwork and get them to draw you a comic or cartoon about how they’re feeling. By helping dyslexic children illustrate their feelings, you will enable them to express those feelings through art, not through acting out.

Hate your math work? Draw a picture of how it makes you feel. Missing your friends? Draw a picture of what you’d like to be doing with them. Frustrated about too many essay questions? Draw a cartoon about how you feel about them. Hate being stuck at home? I’d love to see a cartoon about it.

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Whether your child scratches heavy black lines with crayon, draws a picture with no sunshine anywhere to be seen, or sketches a self-portrait full of tears or gritted teeth, the point is that a picture will give voice to feelings they may not have words to express. That artwork will give you, the parent, insight into what your child really needs most from you right now.

Their drawings might reveal that they are feeling:

powerlessunheardscoldeduncared forafraidangrylonely or isolatedafraid to be honestunsafeunlovedlike something is unfairfrustratedhopelessforgottentrappedlike they can’t go on

Parents, none of these things are easy to see or easy to contemplate, but your child may be feeling them, nonetheless. As you read through that list, notice that the antidote to none of these is “just quit stalling and go do your homework.” Instead, this is a time for patience. This is a time for kindness. This is a time to remember that everyone is struggling to find their way.

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Really look at the drawings your child does for you. Listen to their messages. Have a hug. Spend some time outside together. Talk kindly to your child. Comfort them. If you don’t have all the answers right now, that’s okay. When your child looks back on this time in their lives, they won’t remember how much math they learned. They’ll remember how they felt when they spent time with you. They’ll remember that when they felt afraid and alone, you listened. You showed them they were safe and loved.

Cardboard Box Adventures picture books are great for shared reading and can help parents establish a strong preliteracy foundation for their children. Check out the CBA Catalog for a full list of award-winning picture books, chapter books, and resources for parents and educators. Visit my Amazon author page for more information.

The post Helping Dyslexic Children Illustrate Their Feelings (Comics as a Coping Skill Part 2) appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

Comics as a Coping Skill: Part 1

Now that the 2020-2021 school year has begun, things are crazier than ever, and you might wonder what relevance comics as a coping skill might provide. If your school district has opened its doors, you likely have concerns about health safety issues in the classroom and on the bus. If distance-learning is the way things are (at least in the beginning), gritted teeth and moments of wild-eyed panic may feel like more a part of your day than normal.

In the building where my wife offices, the secretarial pool area has been taken over by the home-schoolers of the office staff. Many professionals are having to bring their young kids to work with them and are having to try to figure out how to balance their own workday with the needs of their children. There are many tears, acts of defiance, outright rebellion, and power negotiations for all in the building to hear as parents and children struggle to find their way through this maze of new endeavors.

Either way, parents and children alike are feeling a lot of uncomfortable emotions. A lot of uncomfortable emotions. It’s a lot to process.

While exploring ways to help, I encountered the work of Brooklynite Edith Zimmerman, at her newsletter and website Drawing Links. Although it is a subscription site, you can click “Let me read it first,” to preview her work. 

Why is Zimmerman’s work worth your time and attention? Because she demonstrates that with a few strokes of the pen, a few simple line drawings, one can tap into their emotions and see things with greater clarity.

Four years sober, Zimmerman is no stranger to challenges and hardship. She gets it. She has lived the truth that changing one’s attitude is the only path to embracing the things we cannot change, and that is a message that resonates deeply with those of us with learning challenges.

Whether she’s cartooning about how COVID-19 has altered her perception of time,

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learning to let go of expectations that weigh us down,

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or how moments of fear and hopelessness (again due to COVID) are a call for transformation,

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there is much to ponder in these simple squares of text and drawing. I invite you to explore and enjoy her work.

In Part 2 of this blog, we’ll look at ways we can translate Zimmerman’s example of using comics as a coping skill into our own modified “classrooms” as a way of helping struggling students process how they feel about change, uncertainty, and more.

Cardboard Box Adventures picture books are great for shared reading and can help parents establish a strong preliteracy foundation for their children. Check out the CBA Catalog for a full list of award-winning picture books, chapter books, and resources for parents and educators. Visit my Amazon author page for more information.

The post Comics as a Coping Skill: Part 1 appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

The COVID Academic Slide: Fall 2020

Parents and students face great uncertainty about the upcoming school year. Some districts will begin the school year remotely, re-evaluating the possibility of returning to the classroom later in the year, some schools plan to open with students in attendance immediately, and others are planning a remote learning experience for the entire year. Many people are worried that kids lose their forward momentum with learning and even worse, lose skills they’ve already learned. You’ve probably heard the term “summer slide,” which refers to educational losses that take place over the summers. Are kids now about to enter a period of COVID academic slide?

How stressful this must be for all concerned! What about single, working parents with a young child or children? Or kids with special needs? What if parents had difficulties themselves when in school, and don’t feel up to the task of monitoring their child’s education? What about the health risks to those students and teachers who re-enter crowded environments? How will the circumstances in each district affect a child’s academic growth and social and emotional learning? Sadly, the situation presents more questions than answers right now.

Spring’s Sneak Preview

I talked with many parents whose kids finished the previous school year at home via remote learning. Many found the situation difficult, some to the point of unworkability. Parents who juggled the new demands of working from home themselves were greatly distracted by the needs of their kids’ schoolwork. Meanwhile, those parents employed in vital services had to go to work every day. Their kids had to try to figure out how to become self-starters educationally. It didn’t always work.

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The Losses Started Immediately

A huge subset of kids lost significant academic traction during the few weeks that wrapped up the last school year. Parents on every social platform made jokes about how much wine it was taking to do “this home-school thing.” Others jokingly declared their child’s “graduation” because the whole proposition was so overwhelming.

I also spoke with kids about their thoughts on the end of the last school year. Many felt so overwhelmed that they just checked out. Most of them said they played video games as a way to avoid the stressful situation entirely. Others—especially those who have learning challenges—felt angry and frustrated. They missed the help they were used to getting in the classroom. Sadly, it didn’t take very many days of falling behind to derail the educational train.

The Snowball Effect

It doesn’t stop there. Due to COVID-19 recommendations, many families have had fewer social connections, travel opportunities, and chances for educational stimulation this summer. The traditional “summer slide” of educational loss has become a summer avalanche—a COVID academic slide. In many ways, it’s understandable: people are bored, scared, and overwhelmed with the open-ended-ness of the pandemic. It’s human nature to revert to less healthy coping skills when everything about life changes. Parents and kids alike are spending much more time hunched over screens or standing in front of the refrigerator. Now that previous distractions are less available, people are doing whatever they can to escape current realities. This might even include putting schoolwork on the back burner.

But here’s the thing: we don’t know how long this pandemic is going to last. The future is filled with unknowns, so putting life on pause isn’t really an option.

Let’s temporarily set aside debates about vaccines—when they’ll arrive, whether they’ll be safe, who will and won’t take them. Most scientists currently estimate that our lives will continue to be greatly affected by the pandemic for many months. These effects on our lives includes the academic lives of students.

Long-Term Consequences

What will be the result of many more weeks, or worse yet, months, of loss of academic traction and momentum? Will kids experience lifelong effects from these academic losses, struggles, and traumas? How will kids feel about themselves if they have difficulty moving forward academically?

How will the COVID academic slide impact kids’ self-worth, and their belief in their own potential? In ten or twenty years, we will be able to look back and see the educational consequences of the pandemic. But for now, pondering its personal and societal effects moves us to take stock of things.

Practical Help for the Family During the Pandemic

I wish there were easy answers. While I am grateful that some students will sail right through these changed circumstances and avoid COVID academic slide, far too many will not. And due to the variability of each family’s circumstances, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But some good guidelines to consider follow below. Much like ancient mariners found their bearings using the stars, here are a few tried-and-true principles that can be used for navigation of difficult or puzzling environments.

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Be open and honest together. Ask questions, and really listen to the answers. Are your kids afraid to go back to school or more worried about what might happen if they do not? Are you, as a parent, having misgivings about how to balance work and home demands? Talk about them. How do you each feel about homeschooling? What challenges might be encountered? If everyone feels like a part of the same team, there is one less reason to feel isolated.Do your best to foster a sense of cooperation. With so many tasks and jobs to juggle, each family member has an opportunity to contribute to the overall functioning of the group. Make a real effort to show appreciation, even for the little contributions each person makes.Be kind to one another. Everyone is struggling to cope with uncertainty, grief, and discomfort. Adjustment takes time. By modeling good coping skills, parents reassure their kids that things are going to be ok.Remember the value of patience. As each person feels the normal ups and downs of mood and emotion during this crisis, our bandwidth for chaos, noise, and interruption can narrow. It takes a concerted effort not to take it out on ourselves or our loved ones.Read together regularly. Sharing stories together draws parents and children closer together, fostering bonding and a warm sense of belonging. Even ten or fifteen minutes together can create a meaningful nightly ritual that everyone can look forward to. It can provide children (and parents too!) with a sense of safety, security, and routine.



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I wish you well as you begin to find your way through the school year. I look forward to hearing how you are doing, and the creative ways you discover to make it work as well as possible in these troubled times. You are not alone.

Cardboard Box Adventures picture books are great for shared reading and can help parents establish a strong preliteracy foundation for their children. Check out the CBA Catalog for a full list of award-winning picture books, chapter books, and resources for parents and educators. Visit my Amazon author page for more information.

The post The COVID Academic Slide: Fall 2020 appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

Making the World More Inclusive for People with Dyslexia

Just a quick announcement – I will be taking part in a panel discussion hosted by Deep Vellum on Wednesday, August 26, 2020 at 5 pm Central Time. The theme is “Dyslexia: Strategies for Inclusion”, and it is part of their “Accessibility in the Literary Arts” series. We are surrounded by the written word. Most of us think nothing of it. But for someone with dyslexia, this can present many difficulties in daily life. This panel discussion addresses the topic of making the world more inclusive for people with dyslexia.

Register for this event on Zoom.

Why is this a necessary topic for discussion?

Written text should be accessible for everyone! For individuals with dyslexia, in addition to literature, written tools like classwork, employee handbooks, and voting ballots can present challenges. Join Deep Vellum for a panel discussion about school, workplace, and literary strategies to help in making the world more inclusive for people with dyslexia.

Please join me, Don Winn (author of Raising a Child with Dyslexia: What Every Parent Needs to Know and many books for young readers), along with Tiffany Sunday (author of How Dyslexics Will Rule the Future and Dyslexia’s Competitive Edge) and Jasmin Dean, MM (Executive Director, Celebrate Dyslexia) for an in-depth conversation about how to make a difference for people with dyslexia.

Over the next months, Deep Vellum is presenting “Accessibility in the Literary Arts,” an event series that will address vital questions about how to make the literary arts accessible and welcoming to people from all communities.

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For more information about dyslexia, visit my Dyslexia Articles page for blog and magazine articles I’ve written about coping with dyslexia.

The post Making the World More Inclusive for People with Dyslexia appeared first on Author Don Winn's Blog.

Coping During COVID: Finding Unseen Beauty

I have had a difficult time dealing with the upheavals of daily life resulting from COVID-19. Even though I am not actually sick with the virus, coping during COVID is hard. Everything seems so strange and so different. Sometimes I feel lost in an emotional sandstorm, blindly groping for familiar landmarks so I can get my bearings. But things are getting better. Occasionally, I have glimpses of clarity and understanding, moments when I can connect current experiences with familiar ones. The unknown is slowly becoming known. It’s happening gradually, organically, as all true processes in life do.

Here’s how one more piece of the puzzle fell into place for me. If, like me, you are struggling to make sense of all this, maybe my experience will be helpful to you. My wife and I recently rewatched Dances with Wolves. This movie was filmed in several remote places in South Dakota. Some of the locations include the Badlands National Park, the Black Hills, and the Sage Creek Wilderness Area. We have never been there in person, but even onscreen, the sheer expansiveness of the landscape overwhelmed our senses. We both experienced a deeply emotional response to that scenery. It made us both wonder if there was something helpful we could learn from this type of geographical setting. So I started to do a little research on the Great Plains . . .

The Real Frontier

The Great Plains have challenged all who cross them and all who choose to stay. Some of the driest, most desolate country in the lower 48, it contains some of the few remaining areas in the US that still qualify as frontier. These days, the frontier is defined as a wilderness (often uncharted) having seven or fewer persons per square mile. Some statistics use two or fewer persons per square mile as the qualifier. In North Dakota alone, thirty-eight out of fifty-three counties qualified as frontier in 2018. In South Dakota, eleven counties have two or fewer residents. That kind of isolation is foreign to those of us who live in cities where we can have anything we want delivered at nearly any hour.

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As a child, I spent time in Oklahoma and Colorado, so I am familiar with the sense of space on the Plains, and the sense of the smallness of one’s self produced by the giant bowl of sky and the endless horizons. It’s an incomparable sensation to feel like there is absolutely nothing between the square foot of earth one stands on and the edge of the world. But understanding the scope of the true wilderness, a frontier full of unknowns, seemed to require a trip to those very locations. Virtually, of course, and in my favorite venue: a good book.

I found what I was looking for in the book Dakota: A Spiritual Biography, by poet and essayist Kathleen Norris. In this work, Norris captures much of what I was struggling to put into words—my response to those wide-open spaces as it relates to how I (and probably many others) feel during these pandemic times. Norris spent her adolescent years in Hawaii, went to college in New York, and spent six years in New York City before making the unexpected choice to care for her grandfather’s farm in Lemmon, South Dakota. Three such disparate environments, climates, and populations offered a great study in contrasts, and as Norris discovered, plenty of space for personal growth.

“Plains Silence”

Norris writes: “I was a New Yorker for nearly six years, and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into the silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays.” Her term, “Plains silence” resonated with me in relation to this new, smaller, more insular world that is pandemic life.

She continues, “The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing.” Wrestling much these days? Yep, me too.

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Empty Wasteland or Spacious Opportunity?

It was here that I began to see the connection between what we pandemic folks are living through and the geography of the Dakotas. “Dakota is a painful reminder of human limits, just as cities and shopping malls are attempts to deny them.” That thought-provoking statement really clarified the contrast in my pre-COVID life and today’s reality. And simply recognizing this contrast has helped me with coping during COVID.

While many think of the Dakotas as empty space to be traversed quickly and only if necessary, Norris observes, “More than any other place I lived as a child or young adult, this is my spiritual geography, the place where I’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance. The word ‘geography’ derives from the Greek words for earth and writing, and writing about Dakota has been my means of understanding that inheritance and reclaiming what is holy in it.”

In a move that shocked her New York friends, she “made the counter-cultural choice to live in what the rest of the world considers a barren waste. Like them, I had to stay in this place, like a scarecrow in a field, and hope for the brains to see its beauty. My idea of what makes a place beautiful had to change, and it has.”

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Wisdom of the Locals

Nearby resident Terrance Kardong refers to the Plains as “a school for humility,” and offers these helpful observations: “In this eccentric environment . . . certainly one is made aware that things are not entirely in control.” In fact, he says that the Plains offer constant reminders that “we are quite powerless over circumstance.” Instead, he notes, “we’re supposed to have a beautiful inner landscape.”

And how does one cultivate this inner landscape? By noticing the little things still happening around us even in the most severe of climes. Kardong reminds us that “the so-called emptiness of the Plains is full of such miraculous ‘little things.’ The way native grasses spring back from a drought, greening before your eyes; the way a snowy owl sits on a fencepost, or a golden eagle hunts, its wing outstretched over grassland that seems to go on forever. . . . One might see a herd of white-tailed deer jumping a fence, fox cubs wrestling at the door of their lair . . . cattle bunched in the southeast corner of a pasture, anticipating a storm. And above all, one notices the quiet, the near absence of human noise.”

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A Welcome Sense of Smallness

The visceral response I had to seeing those expansive vistas of golden prairie and mysterious lonely canyons onscreen reminded me that sometimes it is good to allow ourselves to feel small again. Not infantile or juvenile, but small in terms of scale. Our current insularity is an invitation to sink deeper into the “near absence of human noise,” examine our inner self, and above all, cultivate a beautiful inner landscape. All of these things are key to coping during COVID.

We all face choices and unknowns. Instead of panicking over what has changed, how can we each choose to embrace the space and stay present with ourselves and our families?

In these months of “Plains silence” what beauty will grow in the hearts and minds of those who recognize the opportunity presented by these figurative “wide-open spaces”? What pre-existing beauty will come to be recognized and valued? As always, I look forward to hearing your responses.

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