This past summer I was assigned Henry Jame’s Portrait of a Lady and couldn’t read more than a page without getting a pounding headache and falling asleep. At first I attributed this to the complexity of the language, and assumed that I was having difficulty reading it because it was too challenging and therefore boring. As it turns out, it probably was too challenging, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was my eyes.

Like so many other people, I have vision disorders (in my case, tracking problems and convergence insufficiency) that make reading, computer work and other close-up tasks very difficult. Having convergence insuffieciency means that a person's eyes do not work well at close distances. They often drift outward, causing that person to see double. The person naturally tries to pull their eyes back in to make the close object clear and single, causing a lot of strain on their eyes.

Fortunately my parents and I discovered the problems when I was in elementary school and I was sent to vision therapy, so I was able to recognize what was going on when the problems came back last summer. Many kids aren’t this lucky.<!--more-->

It is very common for kids who have vision disorders to be misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorders, or to be considered “behind grade level” and bad readers. According to a 2007 NY Times articleby Laura Novak, “Experts estimate that 5 percent of school-age children have convergence insufficiency. They can suffer headaches, dizziness and nausea, which can lead to irritability, low self-esteem and inability to concentrate.” Unfortunately, as the article goes on to explain, a large number of these cases go unrecognized or are misdiagnosed.

Fran Alboum, my grandma and a former 6th grade English teacher says, “Some kid’s eyes can only hold the focus for a short time, and then they have to get their eyes back in focus, so they become very slow readers. They think they don’t like to read, they don’t realize that their eyes just can’t hold the focus long. That’s very common. Sometimes I would be told by another teacher that a kid was ‘too dumb to read a word.’ No one is that dumb. I would find the parent and recommend eye training, and the kid would end up an A student. It happened a lot. And there are a variety of problems that eye trainers can identify. Some kids can’t do math because they don’t see numbers clearly. It’s not that their 'math-phobic,' they can’t read the problem.”

Fran was the first person to realize that I had convergence insufficiency when I was having trouble (after three years of piano lessons) telling "b"s and "g"s apart on the musical staff.

According to a reportfrom the Optometrists Network, "...due to pervasive lack of testing for convergence insufficiency -- many people are not getting the help they need early in life. And many are never helped. Children, teenagers and adults who remain undiagnosed and untreated tend to avoid reading and close work as much as possible..." Convergence deficiency and other vision disorders are just one of the many problems with school-age children that are not recognized or are wrongly diagnosed.

A recent Insideschools post featured Beth Fertig's book about students who go through their entire schooling career with a learning disability that is never diagnosed, and the work Advocates for Children does to help them obtain needed services. Vision disorders fall in the same category; teachers are not taught to recognize signs of these disorders and students are not tested for them on a regular basis. Vision disorders are particularly troubling because people know so little about them, yet they have very serious effects on kid's learnings. (Note: it is possible to have 20/20 vision and still have convergence insuffiency).

If my grandmother had not recognized my convergence insufficiency, I would not be the strong reader or student I am today. There are a number of days when I throw down the assignment I'm working on because my eyes are tearing and my head is spinning. I know that it's my eyes, and that it's not that I'm stupid or can't read; I also know there are way too many students who have no idea why those frustrating symptoms are happening to them.

Thanks to vision training my eyes are getting much stronger and a lot of these problems are going away. I can only wish for others who may be  experiencing thesymptoms of convergence insufficiency that they get the help they need.

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