The humor of Dyslexia...

Sometimes I think the best tool when dealing with dyslexia has got to be a good sense of humor.  Being the only non-dyslexic person in a home with four other dyslexic people can drive you crazy sometimes.  For example, there is the continual question of  "mom how do you spell......."  .  I can't begin to tell you the number of times a day that I have to respond to this question.  So the other day Anna asked me "mom, how do you spell sprained?" to which I responded very slowly " s........p.....r....a.....i.....,ok, s.......p..........r.........a.......i.........n........e.......d.".  A few hours later I get on facebook and there is Anna's status  "Phillip spained his ankle today."   Out there for the whole world to see.  Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. 

What are the real statistics?

Okay, just in the past two weeks, I have had conversations with parents of two dyslexic kids who have not been able to get an accurate diagnosis and one first grade teacher who feels certain that one of her students is dyslexic but can not get the school to test and diagnosis him.  I wonder just how many people there are out there that have struggled with dyslexia and yet don't know it or can not get an accurate diagnosis.  With all the advances in medicine and technology, why is it so difficult to get a diagnosis for dyslexia?  The diagnosis alone made such a huge difference for my family.  Just to be able to see the beast for what it is instead of stabbing in the dark revolutionized our life.  How many more people out there would be set on the road to freedom just by knowing that there is a name for what they are struggling with and they are not alone in this struggle?  I just do not understand why a diagnosis is so hard to come by?

Learning to be an advocate.

God works in mysterious ways.  Today I went to a Monthly Parent's Breakfast at my kid's school.  These are usually pretty routine boring events.  Well today they were encouraging parents to ride a bus to Austin, Texas next Wednesday for a Texas Charter School Rally.  There was a woman there from Portland, Oregon who works for an organization that trains people on how to become advocates for special causes.  How cool is that, and I sat right next to her.  I expressed to her my desire to start a Dyslexia Awareness Campaign and she informed me that they were going to start having meetings at this school to train parents on how to become advocates for charter schools.  So there you go.  I will be getting trained on how to become a advocate for charter schools, yet I will be able to apply the same principles to my Dyslexia Awareness Campaign.  Like I said God works in mysterious ways.  I am excited....

Dyslexia Awareness Campaign

Anybody that knows me very well, knows how passionate I am about dyslexia.  One of the things that just drives me crazy is how difficult it seems to be to get a child diagnosed with dyslexia.  In my case and several other cases that I know of, it would not have happened without an all out fight on the part of the parent.  Once I started educating myself about dyslexia, there was no doubt in my mind that my child was dyslexic.  Getting the diagnosis was a whole other battle.  I really think that unless you are dyslexic or live with someone that is dyslexic you don't have a clue about dyslexia.  Obviously our system of higher education in this country is doing a very very poor job of educating our educators about this learning difference.  Everyone seems to be very aware of autism and all of its aspects, but very few really understand dyslexia and all that it involves.  When my daughter Anna was 8 years old I had her tested by a reading specialist from one of the local school districts.  She was given the diagnosis of ADD, nothing was even mentioned about dyslexia.  When Anna was 12 I had her tested again by the diagnostician for the local public school, there again she was only diagnosed with dysgraphia.  By this time I knew enough about dyslexia to know with out a doubt that she was dyslexic.  Through much persistence on my part and lots more testing on Anna, we were finally given an official diagnosis of dyslexia.  The people that were testing Anna acted so surprised that Anna was dyslexic.  They obviously did not know much about dyslexia, Anna is very severely dyslexic.  At the time I did not realize just how rare that diagnosis was.  Since then I have talked to so many parents who have children that are obviously dyslexic, yet they can not seem to get a diagnosis.  I am not sure where to begin, but I realize that there needs to be an all out effort to educate the general public and especially the educators about dyslexia.  It is proven that it is crucial for dyslexia to be diagnosed and treated early (like first or second grade) to prevent emotional and self esteem problems related to it.  So my question is why does it take fighting with the system until the child is 12 or 13 years old before you finally get the diagnosis.  Something desperately needs to change.  I propose an all out dyslexia awareness campaign.  Not sure how that is going to happen but I am ready to start it.   We need some kind of logo like the pink ribbon for breast cancer or puzzle piece for autism.  I am open for ideas....

Traditional Misconceptions

I find myself in a very rare situation of being at home by myself for at least 5 hours.  This time is extremely precious to me, so I try to make every moment count.  Absolutely no one here to interrupt me, the ridiculously dirty house is screaming at me, but I will do my best to ignore it for now.  So I would like to start by telling a little about my experience of how my misconceptions about dyslexia, kept me in the dark for so long.  For so long I like most people when I heard the word dyslexia had this preconceived notion of someone who transposed their letters when writing and reading.  I knew that this would make reading some what difficult for them, but that is pretty much all I really had ever heard about dyslexia.  So when I started experiencing some difficulties when homeschooling my second child Emily, I never suspected that the problem could be dyslexia.  Emily had a little bit of a slow start learning to read, but by the age of nine she was reading well above her age level.  Emily was having some major problems in other areas though.  First of all she could not seem to memorize the very basic math facts.  She was extremely intelligent though so she could still figure out the addition and subtraction problems even though she could not memorize the facts.  It just took her longer, but when it came to multiplication, I knew that it was going to be essential for her to memorize these facts.  Through much trial and error and money wasted on products that were not effective, I finally stumbled upon a method that worked for her.  I now know that it was in line with the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching dyslexics.  The area that Emily struggled the most in was spelling.  I bought all kinds of different spelling curriculum hoping to find the one that would unlock the key to her spelling problem.  I hired two different tutors (both of which had been English teachers for public schools) still her problem remained a mystery and a source of much embarrassment to her.  It was not until her senior year of high school that I stumbled upon someone that was knowledgeable enough about dyslexia and was able to suggest that this might be the problem.  I had absolutely no idea about the complexity of dyslexia and all the areas that it can affect.  I just assumed like many people that because Emily could read so well, and she did not transpose her letters or numbers that dyslexia was not a possibility.  I think that it would be best to get rid of the word dyslexia and come up with a whole new name for this condition, that way people wouldn't use the traditional misconception about dyslexia as a frame of reference.  I get so tired of people (especially professional educators) thinking that they know about dyslexia when really all they know is this traditional notion of dyslexia.  So I want to start a new campaign in the world of education to rename dyslexia and redefine peoples notion of it.  This blog is the beginning of that campaign.

The Mother of a Dyslexic

I just sat down to the computer (first I had Emily show me how to sign back in to my blog) and was already to pour my heart out about all the misconceptions concerning dyslexia.  In comes Phillip with sad eyes wanting me to read to him.  While I am disappointed that I will not be able to unload all my thoughts and feelings at this time, I do not want to miss this golden opportunity to instill a love for reading in my son.  It has been my experience with Emily and Anna(both are dyslexic) that by reading to them and in front of them, I was able to inspire them to overcome the difficulty associated with dyslexia.  They both now love to read.  I am getting a late start with Phillip, but never the less I intend to wet his appetite for good literature so that he too will join the rest of his siblings in the love of literature and written words.  So the intended blog post will have to wait while Phillip and I read  "King George, What Was His Problem". 

"The people walking in darkness have seen a great light..." Isaiah 9:2

We are all familiar with the feeling of stumbling around in the darkness, groping for the light switch, then finally on comes the light and everything becomes clear.  Well for my family and me, the darkness was dyslexia and the light came in the form of an organization called Neuhaus Education Center.  For my husband the darkness started creeping in when he began public school.  Being severely dyslexic he began having many difficulties with reading, writing and pretty much anything associated with language.  Like most dyslexics he was also very intelligent, so he figured out very quickly how to hide the fact that he was struggling.  So began his life long quest to bring as little attention as possible to himself.  He made it to ninth grade before a language teacher finally discovered that he could barely read.  She had him put in special education classes(this was before the days of inclusion).  He wasn't in there long before that teacher realized that he was much too intelligent for her class, so back to the regular class he went with out anyone trying to figure out what his problem really was.  So he graduated from High School at the bottom of his class, with a keen awareness that there was something very different about him, but in total darkness as to what it was.  It wasn't until he was in his fifties and I was experiencing  much difficulty trying to homeschool one of our children(that is a whole different story, for a later post) that we stumbled upon in-depth information about dyslexia.  The darkness finally came into the light and he realized that there was actually a name for what was different about him.  Most importantly he realized that it wasn't just him, but a significant number of people share his learning difference.