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.