Dyslexia is a gift!

Order out of confusion

A ten-year-old girl came in who wasn't reading at all. She had several letters that made her get disoriented just from looking at them. For example, she really liked snakes, and whenever she saw S she would think of a snake, and this would distract her. So I had her make a letter S and a snake in modeling clay, then touch the snake with her disorientation turned off (which really helps learning), and say, "This is a snake, it's an animal that crawls on the ground." Then I had her touch the S and say, "This is an S, it's a letter, it has no meaning outside of a word." That solved the problem.

So I worked several days finding problems like that, and teaching her how to do a reading exercise where she spells any word she doesn't know rather than trying to sound it out. I also taught her how to learn words that are confusing--that she doesn't have a mental picture for, so her mind goes blank when she sees them, like "the" and "of". Having a visual understanding of the small words can really cut down on the confusion from reading. Now she reads several hours each day, for fun--and she's reading at the eighth grade level!

There was one other thing about this kid that was very interesting. She gave funny answers to some questions, and she couldn't find something if she didn't know exactly where it was: she could be staring at it and fail to recognize it. The problem was that, although she was very smart and creative, she didn't know how to think about ideas that weren't completely specified. She could think about "three trees", but the number "three" alone was really confusing, because she didn't know what to imagine three of. Also, the words "thing" and "here" (a fuzzy idea of something in a nearby place) would confuse her and make her disoriented. So I told her to imagine a picture of "a thing that could be anything--it's something but you don't know what it is yet." Then I had her make a model of that picture in clay, and make up a word for it. So now, "three" meant "three eeps", and it wasn't confusing. I also told her to make a picture for a "place that could be any place." Just a few days after the end of the program, her mother told me that she was now able to find things better than anyone else in the family! When she wasn't confused by wondering "where" the thing was, she was able to use her 3D skills and find things.

It's not just about reading

October a year ago I worked with an eight-year-old boy; his reading skills were barely kindergarten level, and his math was first grade. I did pretty much the standard program with him. This October I called to check how he was doing. He's reading at the third-grade level, and doing math at the fourth-grade level.

There was an interesting thing about him, too. When he came in, he was wearing a very thick lens on his right eye; his vision had been consistently tested at 20/100 in that eye, even on eye charts with pictures. But he took off his glasses to play baseball, which he did well, so he had good depth perception in both eyes without his glasses.

While working on the clay alphabet, I realized that he had never learned to distinguish the angles at which lines joined. He couldn't see that there was any difference between /- and |- . So I had him get oriented and worked with him for half an hour on seeing slants and angles. That seemed to clear up the problem. The next day I had him look at a standard eye chart with letters--he read down to the 20/40 line with his "bad" eye! Today, with the optometrist's approval, he does not wear any glasses.

His teacher had excused him from reading aloud in class, because he could not do it. The Tuesday after he finished the program, he volunteered to read--he did it--and the class applauded him!

Computers and numbers and maps, oh my!

A couple of months ago, I worked with an adult woman who had lots of emotions attached to her dyslexia. Even looking at certain letters would bring up heavy emotional stuff from her past. We spent over half the week just working on bringing the emotions to the surface so that they could dissipate. She also had a vicious circle where disorientation would make her panic--when she disoriented, she felt like she couldn't cope as well (disorientation can increase the impact of emotions--for example, in a phobia), and that she'd soon be unable to cope at all. Before she came in, she would not go out to dinner by herself for fear of losing control, and travelling by herself was risky--if she disoriented in the airport, she could miss her flight. During the week, as she learned how to re-orient herself, she became much less afraid of being disoriented and emotional.

She also could not deal with forms, numbers, and maps. Straight lines would disorient her--they'd start to wiggle, she'd realize something was going wrong, and she'd panic. She'd be crying halfway through the form, and not even see the second half. I gave her a simple visualization to "turn down the speed" on her eyes, and the lines stopped wiggling.

During a few hours on Friday, she cheerfully filled out two forms, used a map when the person she was riding with got lost, and learned long division and some of the rules for solving two equations in two variables. She said math was like a whole room she'd never been inside, and now she was looking around and saying, "Hey, it's not so bad in here!" On Saturday, she spent the whole day alone in San Francisco (her first time there), and had a wonderful time. We've been trading email, and she's kept me up-to-date on her store (they used to joke, "Keep her away from the till"; now she can process $4,000 of sales and come out even) and her family (now that they know her sons are dyslexic and how dyslexia works, her relationship with them is greatly improved--the older one, a teenager, is now saying, "I love you," ten times a day). In the first email she sent me, she said, "First of all I'm going to write you a really long e-mail just to show you I can (before the idea of typing an e- mail would never have crossed my mind as an option...just too stressfull!)" Yesterday she sent me an email in which she said, "I have had the luxury of free access to the computer this week because Richard has been away..."