Better dyslexia book
For years I thought I was ‘normal’ – although Dyslexia Book perhaps a little stupid, or maybe just ‘dumb’. I knew I was always a little behind the eight-ball, I didn’t understand what the teacher was talking, and couldn’t ‘pay attention’ to the classroom situation, but with enough effort, huge concentration, and a degree of canny strategizing I got through.
Being dyslexic is usually associated with having reading and writing difficulties, and that is certainly the case for me. Eventually, somewhere round about my 10th birthday I figured I had mastered the art of ‘reading’ and became an avid reader – for the next three days. Finally I gave up exhausted, having read my first book five or six times – up to page six – and eventually realizing that although I could read, and say each word, I had no idea what they meant, or what the book was about. Now, as an adult, I will happily dig your garden or mow your lawn in preference to reading a book.
‘Dyslexia’ is about language, and about not being able to do language well. Difficulty with reading is only one part of being dyslexic – but let’s explore that for a moment. As a dyslexic, I know that words are the things that come out of your mouth – and into your ears. The things in books, or in the newspaper are not really words at all – they are just pictures of words, they are things to remind you of the words that you can say and hear. The really hard part is that they are made up of squiggles – black marks on white paper – and these things have no recognizable resemblance to anything real at all; and especially not to whatever it is that they are meant to be referring to.
What I mean is, whereas the Chinese symbol for ‘mountain’ actually looks like a mountain, the squiggles called ‘letters’ bear no similarity to a high hill at all. This might not be a problem to you, but I’m dyslexic, and that means that I think in pictures, and with these ‘letter’ things, I don’t get the picture at all. I don’t know what you see when you open a book, but the first thing I see is flashes of lightening jumping all over the page. When my primary school teacher asked what I meant, I drew a line where the lightening went, and she said that it followed the gaps between the words down the page. I said yes, this is the same as the ladders in ‘Snakes and Ladders’, and I always hit the bottom.
The same teacher asked me why I like to draw a line around my page, and I told her it is not a line, but an electric fence – like on our farm – to stop the words, and my eyes, from wandering off the page. I was not allowed to draw my lines on school reading books, and that made reading too hard – the words wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to work them out, and they kept jumping from one line to another. The teacher put a blank card under the line I was reading, and that helped – but they wouldn’t let me do it at college. Now, as an adult with my laptop, I can finally write (neatly what’s more) because the computer puts all the bits in the right place. I know I can’t get a computer to read for me, but the interesting thing is, comics work really well for me because all the pictures are there and I can see exactly what the message is. I can even read the words in comics – and this is because they are all in square letters or capitals, which people like me find easier to understand.
