What Is Dyslexia?

Now to get a little more technical. Interestingly, it’s a weakness in phonemic awareness that seems to be the root of the struggle with reading and spelling. This simply means that, for whatever reason, people with dyslexia are insensitive to the individual chunks of sound that make up words. For example, the word “hat” is composed of three sounds: /h/, /a/, and /t/. This insensitivity to differentiating each sound is not related to a problem with their hearing or sight; when it comes to words, a dyslexic person’s brain simply processes the information from their eyes and ears differently than a person who does not have dyslexia. As I discuss in What’s Your Dyslexic Superpower?, this difference should never be viewed as a defect in the brain. Instead, when a struggle with reading and spelling manifests itself in a bright child, it should be viewed as a green flag, signaling unique strengths (that are weaker or absent in most non-dyslexics) that may have been overlooked or brushed aside until now because of the all-consuming issue with reading. Granted, learning to read and spell certainly won’t be an easy journey, and many dyslexic minds are accompanied by other struggles as well, but when you recognize that your child’s brain has simply traded weaknesses in some areas for strengths in other areas, the situation becomes much more palatable.

The “Sea of Strengths” model described by Dr. Sally Shaywitz best illustrates this reality for most dyslexics. This model of dyslexia essentially describes the phonemic awareness weakness as a tiny island of weakness surrounded by a sea of strengths in “reasoning, problem solving, comprehension, concept formation, critical thinking, general knowledge, and vocabulary” (57). That’s just a fancier way of saying, “Why is my perfectly bright, talented child struggling with reading and spelling!?”

Experts go around in circles about the chicken-egg relationships involved in answering the question of why reading and spelling are so difficult for people with dyslexia. Instead of discussing the complexities involved, I think the following analogy best illustrates what an amazing feat reading is for a person with profound dyslexia.

Imagine for a moment that the part of your brain responsible for facial recognition isn’t doing its job. And pretend for a moment that you cannot identify another person using any other senses (hearing, smell, touch). It doesn’t matter how many times you see the person… you simply cannot recognize them. This doesn’t mean you don’t have meaningful relationships with others. As long as your friends identify themselves by name when they walk into the room, you’re good to go! But let’s assume for a moment that they don’t identify themselves. Is there no other way for you to recognize them? Sure there is!

Since you’re a smart dude, you’ve memorized an extensive chart of facial measurements for all the people you know. This chart lists the distance between eyes, the lengths of noses, the widths of mouths, etc. So, when a person walks into the room and refuses to identify themselves, you break out with your ruler and start taking facial measurements. Comparing the person’s measurements to your memorized chart, you soon match the person to their measurements and ask, “How are you, Eric?”

For someone with severe to profound dyslexia, recognizing words can be just as daunting a task. The part of the brain responsible for word recognition just won’t cooperate. The person is forced to memorize extensive rules for decoding each word! Believe it or not, 85% of the English language does follow rules. But there are numerous rules. And breaking a word apart to apply the rules is a tedious, time-consuming business.

Hopefully this explanation gives you a greater appreciation for why accommodations are so essential for people with dyslexia. If you had no ability to recognize faces, and twenty people walked into your room and started describing their day to you, all of the information would be useless. Unless they first identified themselves, you would not be able to assimilate relevant information from their description. Did Sally break up with her boyfriend or was that Maggie? And which one had sushi for lunch? In the same way, do antelopes have sweet, orange flesh, or is that a cantaloupe? The answer is obvious for anyone who has experience with antelopes and cantaloupes, but what if you’re trying to learn about a topic that is completely new to you? If the context and your life experiences can’t give your bright mind any clues, you’re at a major disadvantage if you have pages and pages of reading on the subject. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to decode every word and keep up with what you are capable of learning. If only the words would just tell you what they are — introduce themselves before they tell you about themselves. And that’s the beauty of accommodations such as audiobooks!

If you look up the etymology of the word dyslexia, you’ll discover a humorous error. The word is composed of two roots: dys, meaning difficult, and lexia, meaning speech. Although many people with dyslexia do struggle to find the exact words to express themselves, they have no more difficulty speaking than the average person! It seems the expert who coined the term meant to describe a difficulty with reading but accidentally mixed up his Greek and Latin roots! But understanding the meaning of the word brings up an important point.

Every human being on planet earth, no matter how intelligent they are, finds certain things more difficult than other things. They call the easy things their strengths and the difficult things their weaknesses. Let’s use the subjects taught in most schools as an example: math, language arts, science, art, and physical education. I tend to be strongest in math, science and physical education, but weaker in language arts and art. Maybe you can read books ’til the cows come home, but you can’t throw a football to save your life.

We’ve all heard people say things like, “sports aren’t really my thing,” or “math isn’t really her strength.” Sometimes we just mean there’s no interest in the subject. But more often than not, we mean there’s a major weakness involved. If you tell people that math or sports aren’t really your thing, they get it… not everyone is good at math or sports. But if you tell someone that reading isn’t really your thing, they just assume you don’t enjoy reading. Why don’t they assume that you aren’t good at reading just like some people aren’t good at math or sports? I think it’s because there’s a huge stigma involved with reading. Why?

Up until now, modern man has found that the distribution of knowledge is most easily accomplished through the written word. Want to learn how to do something? Go to the library and get a book or read about it online. The easiest way to cheaply pass on knowledge is via the written word. Public and private schools have capitalized on this and have traditionally used the written word as their main means of educating the masses. Essentially, in this country, knowledge is gained through reading. When you combine this fact with the assumption that intelligence is based on how much a person knows, the logical conclusion people draw is that if you can’t read, you can’t gain knowledge, so you must be dumb!

In this country, reading provides knowledge. If you can’t read, public and private schools can’t figure out how to teach you! But consider this for a moment. What if you were enrolled in a school where you were not allowed to acquire any information unless you first caught a ball. The teacher would throw you a ball, and if you caught it, he would tell you some new bit of knowledge. If you dropped the ball, you’d be out of luck. Now your “intelligence” is dependent on your athleticism. Or what if you had to answer a math problem before the teacher would tell you who King Tut was? Better hope you’re good at math or people are gonna assume you’re just dumb all around!

When you look at it that way, it becomes obvious that it’s just as ridiculous to consider someone unintelligent because they struggle to read, as it is to consider someone unintelligent because they struggle in sports. But if quickly and consistently catching a ball was a requirement for the acquisition of knowledge, I can assure you parents would hire coaches to improve their child’s skill. And with the right coaching, the child’s skill would improve. In the same way, if a dyslexic child is taught to read by the right coach, their reading will improve. And I can appreciate the fact that reading has become an integral part of life in the modern world. But does it have to be as integral as we force it to be? I don’t think so.

Before the digital age, when printing presses were our only option, being an excellent reader was quite essential to the acquisition of certain kinds of knowledge. But now we have the ability to record everything on audio. And artificial intelligence can transcribe the spoken word with amazing accuracy! We live in the golden age for dyslexics! Transitioning schools to Orton-Gillingham based approaches to teaching reading, embracing accommodations, and changing our thinking about how knowledge is acquired, can resolve the stigma.

When my son was in second grade I finally decided something must be wrong with his eyes. I admit there was no reason for me to suspect this aside from the fact that he just couldn’t seem to pick up on reading. I was just grasping at straws. Maybe the doctor would discover something, correct it, and my son would be reading overnight!

Of course the doctor didn’t discover anything major. This particular eye doctor had been recommended to me because she would run some other “brain” tests in the process and give me the scoop. The “scoop” amounted to her telling me what I already knew… he was two grades behind in anything related to language, grade level in math, and fifth grade level in his spacial intelligence. “Your son will be an architect,” she stated emphatically. I wasn’t impressed.

My poor son… I feel so bad looking back. I was so obsessed with his inability to pick up reading, that I never celebrated his strengths. Of course I knew he could assemble complicated structures and characters with his legos that were advanced for his age. Of course I knew he could visualize scenes in the clouds that baffled me. I didn’t appreciate his superpowers! At least not yet…

When the eye doctor didn’t provide any answers, I started pursuing my suspicion of dyslexia. The leader of my homeschooling program had already turned me on to an Orton-Gillingham program when Micah was in first grade. I didn’t know what a gift that was at the time, and the program was not an easy one to implement, but looking back I’m so grateful to her. But now I started doing my own research. And I purchased a book on Amazon that finally opened my eyes to appreciate his talents.

The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain, by Eide & Eide, was a balm to my soul. For the first time in my life I thought of my son’s weakness as the map to his success. If it hadn’t been for his dyslexic tendencies, I would have never celebrated and encouraged his strengths like I should have been doing all along.

I understand when parents are stressed out and dismayed by the possibility that their child is dyslexic. I understand because I’ve been there myself. But for your child’s sake, stop obsessing about the problem and start obsessing about what the problem reveals. Dyslexics are generally super-talented in areas where non-dyslexics are often weak. Of course not every dyslexic’s strengths are the same, and of course non-dyslexics can have strengths in the same areas, but there is a consistent trend.

I fondly recall the evening I was playing the card game SET with my husband and a friend. Micah walked past us on his way to the kitchen and asked what we were playing. He’d never played it before and my friend invited him to join us. Micah was already a teen at this point and I’d already embraced his dyslexic strengths and weaknesses. SET is all about recognizing similarities and differences in certain patterns. I knew this was one of Micah’s strengths and warned my friend that she might regret the offer. Sure enough, he played four games with us and won three of them. First time playing.

I didn’t tell you that story so you would run out and buy the game and force it on your kid. Every dyslexic carries their own combinations of strengths. But I do want to encourage you to explore the strengths of the dyslexic mind. Yes, your child needs to learn to read. And yes, the Barton program is an excellent choice to accomplish this goal. But for every hour you spend working on his weakness, you should spend three times as much time enhancing and celebrating his strengths! It’s the key to freeing him from the stigma associate with dyslexia!

In addition to Micah’s spacial intelligence and pattern recognition, he’s also artistic and musical. Nowadays, when someone comments on one of Micah’s strengths, he sometimes jokingly replies, “it’s because I’m dyslexic.” He understands that his dyslexia is a gift, not a curse.

One last thought… Many adults with dyslexia also have another superpower that, unlike their dyslexia, is not inborn but will serve them very well in life: tenacity and grit. When humans encounter something that is very hard for them, it’s only natural to give up and move on to something that comes more naturally. This is often an option if their weakness is in athletics or art or math. But if their weakness is reading, there’s an understanding that they have to persevere and overcome the weakness as much as possible. For years, they work harder and longer than their peers. And more often than not, their perseverance pays off! But more importantly, in the process, they develop character traits like tenacity and grit that give them the edge when faced with some of life’s greatest challenges. And that, perhaps, is the greatest gift of dyslexia.