Determined to avoid the problem, I did the only thing I could think of — I started to act up in class

This story is something I haven’t told many people. In fact, apart from my family and close friends, very few know about it at all. Mostly, I’m known as a relaxed, happy kind of teen, comfortable with my small circle of like-minded friends. But there is one thing which has always set me apart. It makes me blush just telling you about it, admitting that something so seemingly simple can be such a huge challenge. But it is. Because no one wants to reach 15 years of age and still struggle with reading Hebrew, and frankly, it was embarrassing. Which is why I made sure no one knew.

I started school in first grade, on par with my classmates. I learned the alef-beis alongside my friends, thrilled to add each letter to the huge alef-beis train which my mother hung up in my bedroom. I’m not quite sure when reading started to become a struggle, but it did. Not in English, where I was devouring books by the dozen. Just in Hebrew, where my classmates were reading sentences with a fluency I could only envy. At first, I did what my teachers told me, painstakingly reading out words one by one, encouraged by a teaching assistant. They gave me different paragraphs to read each day, but it took me so long to get through each sentence that I usually ended up reading about five pesukim of Tehillim over a week. Sadly, after a while, that’s all they’d expected from me.

My teachers must have spoken to my parents at PTA because at some point there were suddenly reading charts on our refrigerator and a new large-print Tehillim on the bookshelf. My parents tried to make it more enjoyable, playing games at the end of each line, putting stickers on the chart, but eventually it all lost its charm. My reading stagnated, until at one stage, my progress ground to a complete halt. By that point, I was eight years old, and my teachers were starting to call on girls to read out loud in class. Each day I would sit, quaking, dreading the time I would be called on to read, and when I was… well, it was painful. Slow, and full of mistakes. Each word took superhuman effort, and eventually I realized that it wasn’t going to get any better. So I stopped trying.

At home, things were happening, one after the other. Most significantly, my mother experienced a difficult pregnancy, and she was stuck in bed for three months. I gratefully took advantage of the excuse of “helping” her take care of my siblings, while the Tehillim gathered dust on the bookshelf. Sure, sometimes she would ask me if I had kriah homework, but I told her I would do it myself, and she really had very little strength to pursue it. My reading was abandoned.

Meanwhile, in school, I had multiple schemes to escape kriah time. Sometimes I’d conveniently go to the bathroom, and some days I’d just whisper the words so quietly that no one would hear the mistakes I was making, or even realize I was reading the wrong pasuk. To further complicate matters we got a new teacher midyear. And somehow, between all of this, the little girl who could not read was forgotten.

I don’t blame anyone for what happened. After all, with all these circumstances surrounding me, together with my strong desire to hide the issue, it was difficult to detect. As I grew older, I upped my game, and constantly found better and better ways to get out of reading Hebrew. And then came high school.

The first few weeks in my new school were filled with anxiety. Suddenly, I was pushed way out of my comfort zone, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before my Chumash or Navi teachers found out my guilty secret. Determined to avoid the problem, I did the only thing I could think of — I started to act up in class. Yes, out of character, I can hear you thinking, but pride makes us do all kinds of things, you know, and this is how I chose to deal with the issue.