When the Brain Can't Hear Unraveling the Mystery of Auditory Processing Disorder

Chapter One The Many Faces of APDJeff was seventeen years old, over six feet tall, and outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds. He was a big kid. Tough, too. He was one of the starring offensive linemen on his high school football team. Word had it that he could cut through the other team's defense like a knife through butter, scattering smaller players in all directions.Yet, despite all of his toughness, he had a gentle, polite manner and a heart of gold. When Jeff and his mother arrived at the clinic, he greeted me with a shy smile. He was extremely cooperative during testing and apologized whenever he made a mistake or missed an item. He even called me "ma'am." I'm not too fond of that generally, but, coming from him, I found it quite endearing. Which is probably why I felt as if my heart were breaking when, halfway through my explanation of his test results, he dropped his head onto his folded hands and began to cry.My voice stuttered to a stop. I laid my hand lightly on Jeff's shoulder, and he grasped it in his large, meaty palm and squeezed.In a choked voice, he whispered, "I thought I was just stupid.""What do you mean?"He lifted his head and met my gaze. There was relief in his eyes, but also anger, embarrassment, and just a little defiance."You know, dumb jock. I just always figured I was stupid. That's why I couldn't get it. I was just a big, dumb jock. A joke."These were astounding words coming from a boy who had just been elected "most popular" in his junior class and was a sure bet for prom king in his senior year.Jeff had experienced academic difficulties ever since he had begun school. He had had problems learning to spell and read and still struggled with those subjects in his junior year in high school. He liked the idea of losing himself in a book, of journeying to far-off lands or reading about historical people, but he rarely opened a book unless forced to. Jeff had a difficult time sounding out the words, so his reading was slow and laborious. As he described it, by the time he figured out what the words were, he had lost the thread of the story.But Jeff loved to spin tales. He would make up stories about princes and dragons, life in the circus and travels to outer space, and tell them to his younger brother, who would sit spellbound in wonder as the stories unfolded. Creative as he was, Jeff never wrote his stories down. As with his reading, spelling was a struggle, so much so that even if he focused on telling the story and just coming close enough to the spelling of the words so that he could return and correct them later, he was unable to understand his own writing when it came time to polish what he had set to paper. As a result, his English composition and creative writing papers were short, poorly organized, and contained only simple language and elementary vocabulary. They exhibited no hint whatsoever of the imaginative mind of the boy who held the pen.Jeff came from a rural school district, and special education services were scarce. Nevertheless, during his elementary school years, he did qualify for reading remediation and tutoring under the classification of learning disability. Since junior high school, however, he had not received any services, primarily because he consistently earned A's and B's in all of his classes. Therefore, the school-based special education team had decided that his reading problems were no longer affecting him academically.The reason for Jeff's apparent educational success was, unfortunately, all too common. As a student who excelled at football in a town where football was all-important, he had been passed through every class since he was in the ninth grade. No academic probation or C's for our boy, no, sir. In fact, his good academic record, combined with his amazing sports ability, had already resulted in offers of full-ride sports scholarships from several major universities -- before he had evBellis, Teri James is the author of 'When the Brain Can't Hear Unraveling the Mystery of Auditory Processing Disorder', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743428644 and ISBN 0743428641.