The High School Guidance Counselor
High school also introduces a new person in your teenager's life, the high school guidance counselor. Your child's counselor will be working with him to help shape educational choices, including choice of classes and planning for the future. If your child has an IEP, he will now also regularly be included in the IEP planning process, and IEP meetings will include transitional planning for life after high school.
Although the counselor is important in your child's life, the counselor may not understand the unique issues that are part of dyslexia. It is possible that the counselor may guide your child toward choices that may limit future options. You need to keep informed of your child's options on your own. Talk to your child regularly about his plans and aspirations and about the classes he is taking at school. Find out what types of courses colleges typically require of high school students, including colleges offering specialized majors or courses of study that your teenager may be interested in pursuing. The counselor may advise course selections that seem appropriate based on your child's past performance and history of academic difficulties, but may not meet minimum requisites for admission to your state university or to more selective colleges. While you should not push your child toward unrealistic goals, you also need to keep in mind that his early struggles with reading and writing may mask his true intellectual capacity.
Your teen's unique combination of strengths and weaknesses may also indicate that he should forge a specially tailored path through high school. For example, while the counselor may be used to directing college-bound students toward a uniform schedule of challenging courses, your son may need to strike a balance between English and history classes geared to the ordinary student, with a focus on advanced math and science courses.
ESSENTIAL
The academic performance of students with dyslexia often follows a paradoxical pattern. Often, students who have difficulty earning strong grades for easy courses do very well in more challenging courses. You should let your child's interest and motivation be the guide to choosing his path through high school; support and encourage your teenager if he wishes to select a demanding academic schedule. It is generally easy for a child to drop a difficult course in favor of an easier one if he cannot keep up.
If your teen is planning on attending college, she may also wish to take honors or Advanced Placement (AP) classes. These classes may have “weighted” grades, meaning that the grades earned are given added points for calculating your child's grade point average; for example, a “B” in AP English may be the equivalent of an “A” in the regular English class. The AP courses are also geared to helping students prepare for an exam that can qualify them to receive college credit for the courses. Your child's counselor may not be aware of her interest in AP courses; encourage your teen to ask early about the process for obtaining entry into these courses, which usually are available in junior and senior years. In some schools the courses are open to all students, whereas in others they may require a teacher recommendation or an application process to win entrance. If your child is “tracked” into remedial level classes when he enters high school, it could be difficult to gain entry into more advanced courses later on.
