That dyslexia is about scrambled letters, but it is much, much more.
When I was in grad school for my MSW, one of my classes was on brain disorders… you know, like dyslexia, ADHD, ADD, the whole alphabet soup. Well, at midterm I handed in my exam, and the next class he handed them back… but when he got to me, he said, "See me after class!" AGGG! What the fk, I thought I aced it!
Well, after class he said, "Read what I wrote on the exam." I read it back to him. He said, "No, read what you wrote." So I read it back to him and he said, "No, look at the paper and read what you wrote." All of a sudden I realized that I left the "not" out along with other words… I freaked out! If you read what I wrote, it sounded like I said what was true, but I went on to describe why it was not.
He said, "Have you ever been tested for dyslexia?" I said no, and asked if I wanted to take a screening test (Um… he was an adjunct professor, but his day job was evaluating juveniles for the court system). Well, the test had something like 24 questions, and if you got something like 12 of them “wrong,” you likely were dyslexic. I got something like 20 wrong! Things like...
- Late talking compared to typical developmental milestones. ✓
- Difficulty with rhyming (e.g., struggling to match words like cat, hat, and bat). ✓
- Trouble learning nursery rhymes or remembering the sequence of sounds in words. ✓
- Pronunciation issues, such as swapping sounds in words (e.g., saying "pasghetti" instead of "spaghetti" well past the typical age). ✓
- Difficulty remembering names of letters, numbers, or days of the week. ✓
- Slow, labor-intensive reading. ✓
- What the professor caught was:
- Skipping "Small" Words ✓
- Missing Articles or Prepositions ✓
- Incomplete Phrasing ✓
- Self-Editing Blindness ✓
Those who follow my blog see a lot of the above. I started running my posts through AI to proofread them.
You know what drives me up a wall? Simon. You remember Simon… beep, beep, flashes colored lights and you had to repeat the sequence… that drives me bonkers!
I was at a fundraiser for GenderPAC and talking to another guest, I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but he was also dyslexic… he would go on to become the governor of Connecticut, Governor Dannel P. Malloy.
Dyslexia goes way beyond scrambling letters (Hint: we can read papers upside down!).
People with dyslexia often develop exceptional big-picture thinking, strong empathy, and great visual-spatial skills to compensate for processing written language.
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