When my partner and I got together, one of the hardest adjustments she had to make was to do with spelling. Not how to spell, but how to tell me how to spell a word. She comes from a family where verbal word play and doing crosswords were an everyday part of life. Not surprisingly her spelling and that of everyone in the family is fantastic. On the odd occasion when someone needed help with the spelling of a word, they were only interested in the difficult bit. A typical exchange would be:
“How do you spell ‘accessible?”
“With two C’s and two S’s'”.
With me being dyslexic, this approach did not work. When I wanted help spelling I needed the word spelt out slowly and carefully. It took a while for her to understand quite how simple she had to keep things in order for me to follow.
This need for absolute simplicity and clarity is something many teachers and parents just don’t understand. Especially as this applies not just to spelling but to everything in life. Most dyslexics have problems with situations where they have to keep up with fast changing or complex information.
I was reminded of this by a post on Eide Neurolearning Blog about The Science of Visual Organization and particularly this sentence: “As it turns out, most young children are much better at analyzing ‘big pictures’ over ‘details’. This is true for normal development as well as for some people who have a strong preference for visual simplicity due to a limited visual memory span“.
Though this is visual information rather than audio, the principal is the same, too much information too fast overwhelms the dyslexic brain. Exactly the same way as young child can be.
When you consider it, many of the symptoms of dyslexia are just normal behaviour but normal for much younger children. An example of this is letter reversal, often taken as symptom of dyslexia but in fact is perfectly normal for someone with very poor spelling skills such as the average four year old. This model of dyslexia is promoted by INPP as Neuro Development Delay and by DDAT as Cerebellar Developmental Delay.
This approach is important as it gives parents and teachers a way of understanding how the dyslexic brain thinks but more importantly it shows that a ‘cure’ is possible. If dyslexic is just a delay in learning to read rather than a permeant disability then all that is required to treat dyslexic is the right training to stimulate those underdeveloped areas of the brain.
Nowadays, thanks to my experience with DDAT and light therapy I’m not dyslexic. I know I’ve beaten dyslexia because when I have problems spelling a word I just ask my partner about the difficult bits.
Previously on Myomancy: Keep It Simple, Learning and Visual Noise, Visual Noise Hard for Dyslexics to Cope With and Background Noise, Dysleixa and Earobics