Dyslexic author offers a different outlook for kids who don't fit in

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 5:44 PM PDT

By Tony Lystra

By the end of his first day of first grade, Jonathan Mooney was the bad kid. He fidgeted. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Every day at school was miserable. Mooney said he was always “chilling with the janitor in the hallway,” because his teachers booted him from the classroom. He was “on a first-name basis with Shirley, the receptionist in the principal’s office.” And when he wasn’t in trouble, he was hiding in the bathroom, his face streaked with tears, to avoid having to read.

He was labeled dyslexic in fourth grade and diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder the following year. He dropped out of school for a year in sixth grade and began plotting his suicide. He didn’t learn to read until he was 12.

And yet, Mooney graduated in 2000 from Brown University, an Ivy League school, with a degree in English literature. He was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist and founded a nonprofit organization to help students with learning disabilities.

How did he do it? On Monday, during a presentation hosted by the Family House Academy, a private school in Kelso, Mooney said he certainly didn’t become a “normal” person.

In fact, “normal people suck,” he said. “It is a tyrannical idea that there is a normal way to be in the world.”

Mooney, who has written two books about the world of so-called “special education” students, told the audience of more than 100 parents, students and educators who had gathered at the Cowlitz PUD building in Longview that the education system broke him down. He simply couldn’t fit in. And before long he was convinced he was “stupid, crazy and lazy.”

He offered an alternative outlook Monday. Most artists, entrepreneurs and innovators were just like him as children, said Mooney, who is 30 and lives in Los Angeles. They weren’t incapable of learning, he said. They were simply “late neurological bloomers.”

Children with learning disabilities are often “on a different timeline,” he said. Which, “means that things can change. And there’s a lot of hope in that message. And it’s not a message that we’re giving kids in this culture.”

“We spend a lot of time trying to fix kids like me,” he said. “Guess what we lose sight of? We lose sight of what’s right with kids like me.”

Mooney, a vivacious bouncing red-head with a booming voice, told parents and teachers not to ask whether the children around them are smart, but “how is my child smart?”

He suggested talking to kids about the different ways people show their intelligence. One of the great ironies of child psychology, he said, is that ADHD isn’t a deficit of attention; it’s an ability to pay attention to seemingly a thousand things at once, which will come in handy on Wall Street or other chaotic work environments.

If kids are struggling, he said, focus less on remedial skills and channel them into areas where they excel, such as a debate club for a kid who’s particularly verbal but not so good at writing.

And don’t tell kids they have to sit still in their desks, he said. The fidgeting stimulates the brain and helps them pay attention.

Mooney also told parents to become advocates for their children at school — and to teach kids to stand up for themselves. When Mooney applied to Brown, he told the school he wouldn’t give them SAT scores because he bombed the test. The school didn’t allow face-to-face interviews as part of its admissions process, so Mooney waited in an office for 12 hours until he got one.



He spent his years at Brown pacing in the back of lecture halls, taking notes on a clipboard. He studied using books on tape. And in his own oddball way, he began making his way in the world. He said he once got an A on a paper at Brown, even though, his dyslexia in full effect, he wrote it on “orgasmic chemistry” instead of “organic chemistry.”



“Tell a kid, ‘You’re not broken,” he told the audience. “Normal’s broken.”