Dyslexia

DH is dyslexic but is a University Professor in spite of his wonky spellings and the age it takes him to read anything. It was never accepted when he was at school.

DS is also dyslexic and we had a fight to get him help. At primary school we were told we were fussy parents. DS became more and more unhappy at school, so we had him assessed ourselves before he went to secondary school and lo! we were right. Once he had help he began to do well but his self confidence has always been a problem.

Now DGS is having problems but DG has arranged for some tutoring once a week which he's thoroughly enjoying. He's a bright little lad - very practical - and his reading has improved enormously. However from time to time his behaviour is a little strange and I wonder if it's due to him having meningitis two years ago. He was meant to have annual follow ups but they've not happened. The trouble is you can blame the illness when in actual fact it's just part of growing up.

That's interesting Hunt.
I read that sometimes with visual dyslexia the slow short term memory isn't clearing the word or letters before so it all turns into a jumble. I wonder if he was breaking it up into small areas with the magnifying glass and that helped?

My husband is dyslexic and now also has a severe eye problem which means he has to use a magnifying glass clipped to one lens of his glasses. He has to hold the reading matter 2 inches from the magnifyer. One day he read an article from the newspaper out loud to me. When he had finished, I said to him''Do you realise what you have just done?'' In fact he hadn't realised that for the first time ever he had read a piece of script without a single falter or mistake. He was quite over come! We rang the Dyslexia Institute and they seemed very interested in this but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

Interesting. How do you write 'recognise' for example. Presumably not rec og nise. It's really interesting how everyone develops ways of doing things.

I could never build words. I might have known, for example, tent and peg but would not recognise tentpeg. I had to recognise whole words but was always being asked to break a word down and so recognise it. I never did!

There are some very good computer programs now I believe but the way I was taught to teach (if you see what I mean) was with cards. Every sound goes on the front of a card with a reminder word and picture on the back. They built up and the student goes through them really fast each week until the recognition both for reading and spelling is instant. It is usually slower for anyone dyslexic to make something automatic so it needs lots of repetition. It works for visual dyslexia and the inability to hear the sounds and put syllables together.
I noticed in Australia non-dyslexic kids had similar packs of cards as the norm for learning to read and spell. I wish we did in Britain.

Having read Soops Entry I want to add something. I did not learn to read until I was 13 and remember many painful hours of stress, anxiety and tears when having to read aloud to teachers and relatives all trying to teach me to read.
When I had small children I helped in the junior school but could not read aloud to the children because it regenerated all those negative emotions.
When I was 40 I was enabled to see that I was still carrying those childish emotions with me. I was helped to use my 40 year old emotions to help bring the childish emotions up to date and loose their power.

Dyslexia is real! Having said that I also say to others it's a teaching disability not a learning disability. Everyone can learn if taught in the way that works for them. To many people these days use dyslexia as an excuse for poor writing etc. Well I am dyslexic and so is my daughter quite severely but that has never stopped us.
People with dyslexia find spelling hard and because they can't spell a word can't look up how to spell it. I bought my daughter an aurally coded dictionary and she never looked back. I also constantly told her that she was to say to people that said she had a learning disability " no I don't the teachers have just not find a way to teach me yet"

At 50 I was delighted to have a diagnosis having been tested after discussing my problems with writing without mistakes with someone from the OU.
A womans at the OU Manchester office took my test script seriously and she insisted that she really thought I ought to go for the assessment. I was still insisting that I was just bad at writing. That diagnosis gave me a lot more self confidence.

It proved what my schools had said, that I was very clever, but I was considered lazy due to my bad writing and spelling. Schools in 50s and 60s had no awareness of the condition.
I have a good brain but the processing of visual memory and some other subtle skills was very poor. I could always read aloud well but writing was awful and I lost marks all over the place for any written work..

Interestingly when I went to the last bio bank assessment one of their memory tests indicated dyslexics might have problems with one or two of their tests. Visual memory stuff.

I lost this thread. Sorry it's a bit late to come back to it now but ...

It's interesting the different reactions that teens have to being told they are dyslexic. Some do hate being pigeon holed but others are so relieved to know that they may well be highly intelligent despite not being able to do the automatic stuff that others find easy.

At the moment I'm teaching young adults who have never learned to read at all and that is really interesting too!

Pink Princess your husband is probably Asperger. They often have Dyslexia but are actually very intelligent, most of the most intelligent people on the planet are reckoned to be Aspergers.

The reason I say your husband probably has Aspergers is that they also have very narrow interests and tend to get stuck on what they are interested in. They often become experts in the field they are interested in.

The reason I left teaching was disgust with the way the right wing Wirral Borough Council was lying about provision for children with special needs. I had a staff of 14 peripatetic teachers of reading and I was thrilled when I was told I would be given an extra 6 teachers and a couple of graded posts. I quickly found out that nearly all the part-time teachers who had been helping remedial pupils in the 150 primary and middle schools were being sacked, saving the council some 70 full time teaching posts. My service was being used as a smoke screen, so they could post in the press how committed they were to helping children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties.

My younger daughter was assessed as being dyslexic when she was six. The school arranged lessons which helped enormously. She has an IQ of 140. She got 10 GCSEs (6 grade A) 3A levels and went to university. She trained as a Montessori teacher which she loved.

Have just joined you all on Gransnet and was also a teacher-of dyslexic-students ( or Dyslexia Teacher ! ) the finance issue for schools has just about come full circle for Dyslexic pupils and many specialist teachers have been replaced by an extra few hours of classroom support.
Yuk.

One pupil I taught and with the most severe of dyslexic problems did extremely well at all Science A levels because he could remember almost ALL his science teachers had SAID ! He went on to get an Hons degree and was invited back by Uni to do a Masters straight away in...er...Combustible ...er ...um Stuff!

On a happy note...

In the first lesson with a new pupil/ pupils, I used to tell them that as we are all different, we are not all good at the same things and that I HAVE NEVER been able to ride a bike.
Particularly for boys, this had them utterly amazed and in a good mood, in fact they thought I was very odd...but NEVER used this against me to make me a target of any bullies around, such was the rapport and the privacy of what we talked about as regards difficulties.

Also,( perfectly true as far I was taught on my various Sp Needs & Dyslexia courses ! )
There is such a lot, electrical- energy- wise etc, going on in the brain of a Dyslexic person that one can never say anything so crass as "empty headed " about them.
That also comforted pupils and their parents too!

Happy Days.

I have just discovered this interesting thread.
My DS2 who is now 40, started school he had serious problems learning to read and write.He was intelligent in everything else.
When he attempted to write it was a jumble of letters which made no sense to anybody but himself.He would also do mirror writing and always get some letters the wrong way round.I was told that the reason he was doing this was because he was left handed!.His reading efforts were zero.At seven he still could not read and was put into a remedial class and other children started calling him a ''spacker''which is local dialect for a backward person.
When he got to secondary school he made no further progress and started playing truant.His truancy got so bad we were threatened with a fine for failing to send him to school.
He left school at 16 with no exams at all but somehow got accepted to train as a motor mechanic, something he excelled in.He had, unknown to us being driving illegally from age 13, having been taught by an older boy.As soon as he was 17 he sailed through his first and only driving test.Later on he worked as a driving instructor.
About four years ago he began to take an interest in photography and was accepted on a degree course.He completed his basic two years degree course as it was mostly practical work.He excels in anything practical.He did not attempt to do the final year honours degree course as it consisted of written work which he is still hopeless at.He know that tere was help now for dyslexic students but would not accept it as it in his words is ''putting a label on me''.
He is now unemployed, mostly through his own fault as all he wants to do is photography which he is excellent at.My DH, his wife, ex-wife my self and his older children all have helped with his written work.His reading is now normal but he will never be an avid reader.
In his early days I heard about dyslexia.I asked his teachers if this was his problem but was told there was no such thing.
I wonder what would have happened if he had been born today?.

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One of my friends has two children both dyslexic. We met when we lived on the same estate and had baby boys within weeks of each other. Her son was clever, quick, inventive and ingenious. When DS was still sitting on a rug putting things in his mouth, her child, at a year, had worked out how to move furniture to access shelving units to climb onto them and use a coat hanger to get things he wanted off the top shelf.

Our two sons went to school together and when my friend's son went into the junior school still struggling with reading the head teacher suggested that the problem was simply that he was not very bright and as a middle class mother she was expecting too much of him.

She managed to pay for him to be assessed by a private educational psychologist, who said he was in the top 2% for ability - and dyslexic. Fortunately a job move took them to another part of the country and a more enlightened education authority. Both boys were thoroughly assessed and were given tailored personal curriculums. As a result both achieved good enough exam results to get apprenticeships and both, now in their 40s have had successful careers.

Spelling is pretty ridiculous. I worked out there are 10 or more ways to spell the or sound. Daft! We all spend far too much time learning complex spelling when we could be learning more useful things, I reckon.

Nelliemoser, yes your experience sounds very familiar - left and right confusion is still a bug-bear, before I took my driving test my instructer told me to explain problem to examiner and if I did turn right when he had said go left, as long as I executed a safe turn it did not matter. When you drive yourself you know where you are going so its not a problem. At the moment I am learning ballroom dancing and once again my left/right problem gets annoying but we just laugh about it now....(the plusses of being over a certain age..you just dont give a d***).
I am so glad most teachers get decent training about this........when in my first year of secondary education my English teacher thought it would be a good lesson if she wrote all my spelling mistakes from my most recent work on the blackboard infront of the whole class. Everyone had a jolly good giggle and I just wanted to die - yet for some reason she thought she was being helpfull.

It does make you angry that people don't realise that dyslexia has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are intelligent or not.
I had one funny thing when I was teaching. We had a really brilliant dyslexic boy who needed a reader and emmanuensis for his exams. One teacher muttered darkly about having to help someone who couldn't even read. We fell about laughing when he came back looking stunned having realised the kid was one of the most gifted in the school.

At school between 1953 and 1966 I could read quite well ( we learnt with phonics.) I was always considered clever but lazy. A big problem I had at at school was writing anything without making mistakes in letter order and punctuation. I still have problems with anything hand written. I describe this as my head being able to spell but my hands can't. I do not hand write letters.

I was found to be dyslexic when I did an OU course at the age of 50.
A very observant worker at the OU regional office did a quick diagnostic test, I thought I was just a bad writer, but she really encouraged me to go for a full assessment. It was very rewarding to to discover that there was an explanation for getting bad exam results and being slow at maths etc.

I now notice that I find big blocks of text hard to follow visually and the same with groups of numbers. I can only really deal with maximum four digits. This is one reason why my posts are always very spaced.

Hilda It also took me several attempts to pass my driving test I suspect coordination problems but I can generally map read well.

My lovely OH is severely dyslexic,this affects his memory,his confidence,his speech,he can "read" by picking key words to make sense of a sentence,cannot spell,he has coping strategies,and always held down a job until we both where forced through circumstances to give up work,at 39 he (And I but Iam 59) are trying to get back into work,it isn't going to happen anytime soon .
Essex did not recognise dyslexia,mainly I believe because it would cost them .
My lovely OH is intelligent,intuitive,and perceptive.
Not enough is understood about the condition,it is not just about mixing up letters,employers,and colleges that OH has been involved with have belittled,and treated him like an idiot,he has had to fight to get the 2NVQs that he is proud of only to be told they are not enough to secure a job for him,so who holds him while it eats away into him while he believes he is a failure,my lovely brave caring manxxxnellie

On the other hand there was widespread recognition of and support for children with dyslexia by the early 1980s when I was a SENCO in schools.
I was providing laptops for children with dyslexia for my Local Authority by the end of the eighties.

I used to think dyslexia was just about mixing up letters. But then son-in-law came along - he'd had an awful time at school, failed most exams but managed to get into Art college where someone sent him to be assessed. I realised how much more there was too it, such as memory problems, & we helped him get access to funding for a computer & SATNAV (after he went back & forth across Tower Bridge 6 times). These helped but dyslexics often have other neuro-diversities. I read an article about Adult ADHD and ever sympton matched my sil's behaviour. He was bullied and exploited by a business partner who should have known better as they were working in the field of assistance to dyslexics etc in Universities. With great difficulty we managed to get him assessed, diagnosed & treated.
People with such diverse ways of thinking & being are often very creative and much needed to break out of old patterns of thinking but our schools & world is geared to logical thinkers. As an adult our sil is dealing with 35 years of not being understood at home & school as well as his leanring issues. He is surviving because we and his wife have created a safe coccon in which he can use his skills but it is constantly challenging & hard work, especially when he forgets to take his medication or skips his routines.
Two University teachers I know are very rude about dyslexic students who they feel hold the University to ransom & demand extra time, facilities etc. So many just do not understand enough about the condition.