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jjaybs · 04-14-2016, 01:43 PM

Code:
1700 words, ready for grading

When you’re young, and you play hockey, a lot of things take a backseat to that. Homework, relationships, a social life… mostly homework.

I struggled a lot with school when I was a kid. When the teacher asked me a question, I knew the answer, but I could never seem to translate it to writing. My classwork was poor, and my homework was worse, but I figured that was just because my dad let me stay outside on the ice longer than he should have, and I would rush my homework.

When I was six or seven, we started reading aloud in class. I remember it was Metsanvaki Kay Helsingissa [The Forest Folk’s Trip to Helsinki], and we were supposed to go round the class and everyone would read a sentence. Doesn’t seem that scary, right?

I always liked stories, and was always one of those kids sitting right in front of the teacher at storytime, so when the reading got to me, the teacher, Mr Kapanen, gave me this big, encouraging smile, and so I looked down at the page and--

Nothing.

Well, not nothing, but it was like someone had put the book into a blender and turned it on while I was still trying to make sense of it all.

‘Mikke?’ Mr Kapanen said, wary. ‘It’s your turn, Mikke.’

I looked down at the page again and burst into tears. I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t even try to sound it out, like a lot of the other kids did. It was just nonsense.

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In hindsight, I don’t know how I got to the age of seven without anyone realising I’d never learnt to read.

I had a lot of meetings with the school counselor, and she gave me a lot of different kinds of tests, and eventually, they realised I was dyslexic. I actually started crying again when they told me I thought that meant I was really sick.

(I cried a lot when I was a kid. I think that’s why I’m so in touch with my emotions now, no matter how blank I look on the ice.)

Eventually I calmed down, and they told me that I wasn’t dying, and that dyslexia was a learning ability, and that all it meant was that I was going to have to get some extra lessons to help me out.

‘Will that mean I’ll have less time for hockey?’ I wanted to know. I remember my dad’s booming laughter.

‘We’ll make as much time for both hockey and school as you need,’ he promised me, and he was right.

A quick look at my daily life after being diagnosed:

5.30am: I would get up, and skate on the neighbourhood rink with my dad. He worked nights, and would come home from work exhausted, but still get me up and get my skates on and sit on the bench with a thermos of tea and watch me.

6.30am: Early morning hockey practice became pretty normal. I would get in the car still with all my gear on, and Dad would take me to the local rink where there were a bunch of equally exhausted seven year olds leaning on their sticks. There’s a lot of talk about how crazy youth hockey is in Canada, and Russia, but here in Finland, we’re just as hockey mad. If you start the day with hockey, you know it’s going to be a good day, my uncle always said.

8am: School was even more exhausting. They assigned me a tutor to help me, and I’m sure he meant well, but I struggled to focus on what he was trying to teach me, and my school work slipped even more. Kids knew I was getting help, and they started teasing me about it, which didn’t help. They called me stupid, and I started to believe them.

4pm: I had special after school dyslexia classes, as well as the tutor, and they helped a little more, I remember, but I missed after school hockey, which was where all my friends were.

When you’re that young, everything starts to wear on you pretty quickly. I was never very good at hockey, even though I practiced every day, twice a day, most days, and getting up early and staying up late to practice is a lot to ask of any little kid. I started skipping the morning skates wit my dad, and I stopped skating at night, after homework, and eventually, I would only lace my skates up on a weekend.

-

Rauma’s a small town, and my hockey coach was actually the gym teacher at my school. He took me aside one day, into his office, and let me sit on one of the big chairs, usually reserved for grown-ups, or other teachers, and he asked why I wasn’t at hockey any more.

I could have told him how tired I was all the time, and how I didn’t want to be at school all day and hockey all night, or how I wasn’t enjoying it any more. A couple of weeks previous, my friends had all been moved up to the under nines team, to prepare for next season, including my best friend, Mik[ael Talo, Laukkanen’s childhood friend and current teammate with the Kelowna Knights]. I was stuck with the under eights, with the coach’s son, and a group of six year olds. I felt like I was stuck with a group of babies.

I shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ I said, and looked at my feet.

‘I have an idea,’ he said. It didn’t sound like I was getting kicked off the team, so I looked up. ‘The under nines goalie fell out of a tree yesterday and broke his wrist. We don’t have anyone to play in goal for the game this weekend. How’d you like to go and give it try? I told Coach Oksanen that I had the perfect player in mind for him.’

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I’m a pretty young guy. Not a lot of, uh, long term relationships. But getting on the ice in goalie gear, that’s about the closest thing I can imagine to falling in love with a person. I was awful. Of course I was. I think we lost 18-11, or something like that, but every single guy on the team lined up to hug me, and pat my helmet, and when I looked into the stands, my mom looked so proud of me. It was awesome.

So the next practice, I put the pads on again. And the practice after that, and after that, and that was it, for me.

I knew I couldn’t go to hockey practice unless I did all the extra work I was given, to try and catch me up with the other kids, so I would start it on the bus home from school. I’d do it through dinner, and the second I was done, I’d be in the car, skates on my lap, and bouncing impatiently. Weirdly, what it took for me to be able to do better in school, was hockey. If I do this worksheet, I can get on the ice for half an hour. If I finish that book, I get to go to a camp the next town over that weekend. Once I started thinking of it like a challenge, suddenly I was flying through.

Not that it was easy, that is. Nothing about school for me was easy, and I still found myself in tears of frustration some nights, especially when I hit my teens, started being bussed around to hockey games overnight, and I would sit in my hotel room and struggle through the kind of reading work an eight year old can manage. It sucked. It still sucks, to be honest with you. Luckily, a lot of hockey is listening, or watching tape. Not a lot of reading in the locker room, though a couple of guys like to do the Kelowna Star crossword to unwind before a game.

-

It’s a weird thing to bring up, I always find. When I first got to Kelowna, everyone was super friendly, tried to include me in a lot of stuff, including the crossword group. I was flattered, but. There’s nothing cool about having to turn them down because you can’t read the font newspapers are printed on.

The guys were really awesome about it, which honestly surprised me. In a sport like this, you get chirped for having big feet, or small feet, or blond hair, or-- you get the idea. You’d think “I can’t read” would be pretty high on the scale of things you can chirp me about, but they just blew past it completely. Deets [Dieter Dominique] punched me in the shoulder and told me I wasn’t getting off so easy, so now he sits next to me on the plane and reads the clues to me, and we fill it out together. It was actually a really good way to bond with him and his roommate Mia. Even if she still scares me a little.

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I decided to start Use Your Words as a way to show other kids with learning disabilities that they’re not broken, or stupid, and that it doesn’t have to affect your whole life. BC has a really great program for kids with these kinds of issues, and Use Your Words is raising funds to help expand it to every school in the province. We’re holding a charity game this offseason, which me and a couple of teammates will be participating in, and we’re auctioning off a ton of game used gear from me and some other Knights, and a few Knights alumni, too, which I’m sure will raise a lot of money.

The important thing now is for me to pay it back. Everyone important to me was super supportive, and I want every kid who struggles with the same thing to know that if they need me to, I’ll be that support.

Mikke Laukkanen, Kelowna Knights