How to Write an Email to Teachers about Your Child's Learning Disability
Every school year I dreaded writing an email to my daughter’s teachers informing them of her learning disability.
I felt overwhelmed, and would procrastinate, setting down my laptop in search of something crunchy to munch on.
Sometimes because it felt so heavy, I would wait until my daughter really began to struggle in class before I would finally sit down to write that email.
This one task held so much emotional weight.
Underneath the surface, frustration simmered. Why must I detail and explain what dyscalculia was and how it impacted my daughter? Schools should already be informed about this learning disability. If my child was ADHD, I wouldn’t have to explain what it was and how it impacted learning. And I had enough experience to know that dyscalculia awareness in school was rare.
In the early years of learning about dyscalculia, it felt daunting to describe something that I was only just beginning to understand myself, let alone describe to a principal or teacher.
I also felt uncertain at what sort of response I would receive. Would the teacher be open and curious, or unaware and defensive? Common unhelpful responses included “I’ve never heard of that, it must be really rare,” or “She can just use a calculator or multiplication chart.”
It was understandable that this seemingly small task was no small thing. It brought up so many uncomfortable feelings and frustrating experiences.
My daughter will graduate from high school this coming spring, and while I am finally done writing these school emails, I imagine that my daughter will be calling me from university asking me to edit her self-advocacy emails to her professors.
In truth, I began helping her craft emails to her teachers each year beginning in 8th grade. It has never been an easy task because the responses she received from her teachers were often mixed.
In 11th grade, one of my daughter’s teachers referred to her dyscalculia as a “perceived struggle” and denied my daughter’s request to meet and talk about her specific struggles in the class. My daughter felt humiliated and misunderstood.
That same year my daughter’s social studies teacher responded with openess and curiosity, inviting my daughter to meet and discuss the particular difficulties her dyscalculia caused in class. Together they discussed the specific challenges and came up with a few simple accommodations to make the content more accessible. My daughter felt seen and empowered.
It’s hard to be vulnerable with others when we don’t know how we will be received.
If I could do those years over again, I would be gentle with myself for the resistance and dread I felt each year. This seemingly simple task was so much more involved emotionally. If you are parent in this stage, I hope you will be gentle with yourself too. Communicating with teachers about your child’s learning disability can be overwhelming and difficult.
In looking back at our years of writing emails to teachers, I thought it might be helpful to offer a few tips to make this task easier for you, and to provide an email template you can use for your own emails.
To read on and to download my Email Template to Teachers about dyscalculia, please check out my full written article on my Substack as a paid subscriber (options as low as $8). Thank you for supporting my ongoing dyscalculia advocacy work in this way.