I appreciate this is ‘off topic’ as it were, but I was most surprised to read this article from AA Gill in today’s Sunday times, regarding his dyslexia. He is a perceptive writer whose work I have enjoyed for many a year.
Perhaps some of you here suffer from dyslexia or know someone who does, so please take a few minutes to read what it says, many of us can empathise with the youngsters he meets as well as his own experience.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/ar...
Love to all.
Anne G.
Comments
It is not a disability.
I know some very successful people who are dyslexic, including a past producer on Television news. :)
Gwen
Perhaps not
But it is a challenge. Maybe it made me try harder, but then again my version of this wasn't the severe variety. Some words end up very scrambled to me, but I depend on what makes sense in the context of the sentence to help me. Pretty much now it's so automatic that I hardly notice. Now my writing it's harder. Like the author of that article, I would be lost without my spell checker. I also have dyscalculia which is Dyslexia with numbers. Again there are ways to deal, mostly double checking everything 2 or 3 times. Yes, I'm very slow with math. Just to add to problems understanding others mix in Audio Processing Syndrome. Simply that is Dyslexia for your hearing. The gray matter mis-processes the information regarding what I hear.
All this together means symptoms that are mis-diagnosed as Autism, Aspergers and in my case Mental Retardation. Of course things have improved from the dark-ages of the 70's in the American South. I was so very lucky I had Mrs. Perrol, my fourth grade teacher who cared enough to look a little closer at a certain shy red headed student.
Hugs!
Grover
I have a version of the audio problem
Unless I can lock onto someone's voice visually or in space, somehow, instead of words I hear amplified background sounds coming out of people's mouths. And wind and machinery noises sound like voices mumbling behind doors. It's pretty odd but I've dealt with it all my life and my brother has it, too. It's related to ADD.
I can lock my attention onto a voice, once I locate it, and then I can remember everything I hear verbatim, sometimes for hours and back in school, for days or weeks. It made me a terrible note taker, though, since I didn't need them. This is where I get my writing ability with dialog, I think, observation and memory. :)
We're all different, ain't we? :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Let me backtrack a bit on Dyslexia
I do not mean that it is not hard, but those with a problem deserve all the support that can be given. It is a mind set to me.
I was once told that my life would never be the same since I'd been raped. NOW WHAT TH FUCK ! I was supposed to let the bastards wut done it win?
NOPE, UUH UUH, ain't Happenin". It's the attitude!
Gwen
Interesting article
we had two boys in our class who were probably dyslexic, and we teased them mercilessly. At ten or eleven we didn't know about such things and one assumes that everyone else can express themselves with relative ease. Unfortunately they can't.
I suspect since then life has paid me back--I've been teased for being transgengered and having one's core exposed is even more humiliating than one's communication skills.
I write as much everyday as AA Gill does, he takes all day, I knock it out in an hour. Still, life is like that.
Angharad
Angharad
I am one of them
The dyslexian group, and alas not contributing to the stories here. I learned to read through a curtain of tears, but somehow I managed to pass through eight years of the Swedish schoolsystem without anyone could tell me why I could not write without making all those mistakes. Then a teacher in my own language told me and my mother that I needed to see a specialist. This could just confirm the diagnose and told me that it had been found out too late in my life. The only way to hope for was that I would be able to learn how a printed word looked and by that way llearning to write it. Not till several decades later when I first got me a compuiter I found out that I could write anything longer that the text on a picture postcard.
BTW Public Radio here in Sweden has carried a 45 minutes series on Dyslexia evry day during this past week.
I would like you all to help all kids that you happen to see that have difficulties with reading or writing to seek ehlp or if you could help yourseklves. It was such a relief to learn that I was not dumb, just having problems with the reading and spelling. And I managed to take my exam as a pharmacist.
Many greetings from
Ginnie
GinnieG
I'm almost afraid to ask
You're dyslexic, a pharmacist, and yet you can read doctor's prescriptions?
:)
Penny
I am Dyslexic
Edeyn Hannah Blackeney
Aren't you one of those mensa people?
So, in spite of it all, aren't you actually quite bright?
I was never diagnosed with nuttin', but I have huge problems learning by reading. Just cain't get them right thoughts inta my haid. :)
However, if someone explains something to me and teaches me how ta do it, I am firmly locked on it. Usually when someone told me I couldn't do something, I just got pissed off and did it anyhow.
Somehow though I doubt that I will ever be a Theoretical Physisist unless I get to go down a worm hole and figure it out. :(
Gwen
Not a Mensan
You see, while most Mensa folks I've met were quite nice and friendly, funny people... EVERY SINGLE ONE of the recruiter types for Mensa I've met in person have been absolute arseholes. The kind of person what inspires I try to find snarky things to annoy them. So, I've never joined, though when they see my results to tests and such, they come a'knocking.
But yeah... I'm usually considered quite bright.
Are we allowed to see humor in this?
Then, there was the dyslexic insomniac agnostic who lay awake at night contemplating the existence of dog.
Seen on a bumper sticker, "D.A.M. - Mothers Against Dyslexia. :) Portia
Portia
another one.
DYXLESICS UNTIE!
'cause if you can't laugh at yourself, somebody has to do it for you...
I used to think I was screwed up
That was when I discovered that we all have problems, and I think it is really constructive to get to the place that we can laugh at ourselves a little.
Gwen
Me Too!
Yup, I'm dyslexic and been through the mill like a lot of others.
People think that dyslexia is just jumbling up words. It's not just that. Your brain is jumbled too.
My short term memory stinks.
I could lose my way out of a wet paper bag.
My writing is awful.
My concentration is....erm what was I saying?
My organisational skills are deplorable.
My time management skills are so bad that I went to do a college exam a day late and wondered where everyone was.
Does any of this ring a bell with anyone?
Hugs
Sue.
~~ This post brought to you by the sponsors of Sue Brown and the letters q, f, j, l and the number 67 ~~
What really messed with my head...
Was the names of two of my guys I knew of from my first go-round at college in the early/mid 1990s...
One of them, his parents wanted to mess with the standardized "bubble" tests that kids have to take on a regular basis to measure "achievement" in school... apparently, they got the name from a song by Tom Lehrer written in the 1960s... his name was:
...
The second, his parents were of the mindset that since you were allowed to decide what your child's name looked like (how it was spelled) and how it was pronounced, the two didn't have to coincide... his name was pronounced (MY-kuh) the same as the biblical name, 'Micah' is pronounced... but it was spelled: