A Gift of Dyslexia.

“Can you write your name?”

I was five years old when my first grade teacher asked me this question.  I felt embarrassed, ashamed and angry because I didn’t understand how to begin to write anything at all.  There was no name for my condition. It would later become know as dyslexia.  When I was five, teachers and parents called it being “slow”.  People don’t understand that those of us who suffer from dyslexia cannot connect sounds with letters.  Miss Coleman, my teacher, pointed to the spread of individual letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case, across thetop of the blackboard.  She was valiant in her efforts to get me to understand.  She would ask, “which letter do you think the name Irene starts with?”  I couldn’t begin to figure out which one it was.  She seemed concerned even bothered as she went to help some other children. I glanced at the girl’s paper next to me.  I remember that her name was Joan Petix.  Joan had scrawled her letters across the whole paper.  She looked at my blank sheet of paper and in a warmly sympathetic gesture she straightened my grip on the pencil and began to guide my hand in writing the letter “I”.  Then she released her hand and smiled at me.  I dropped the pencil and gazed up at the letters wondering which one I should attempt to copy next. Miss Coleman came back to me and asked me to recite the letters of the alphabet.  I sang the alphabet song to her.  Then she asked me what letter came before the letter J.  I needed to start from the beginning again in order to answer her question. Later that morning the Principal came into our classroom and asked me if I could spell my name.  I answered that I could not. She and my teacher began whispering and I knew their conversation was about me.  Now I was overcome with worry.  Would I need to leave the class?  Would I be moved away to another school?  They seemed to disagree and finally the principal left. Miss Coleman asked me to stay after school.

 When all the children left for the day, she asked me to come sit near her desk.  She asked me to raise my right hand.  I couldn’t figure out which one was my right.  She said, “Irene, I’m going to show you how to remember which is your right hand.  You’ll never forget this trick.  You and I are going to stand up now and say the pledge of allegiance as we do every morning at the start of school.”  We stood up together facing the flag which was hung high above the blackboard in the center of the room. She said, “Always remember where we’re standing right now.  The windows are on our right side and that’s the hand you raise to put over your heart when we recite the pledge together.”  She told me to always visualize myself back in her classroom, facing the flag with the windows on the right.  We sat down together at her desk again and she asked, “Okay now, which is your right hand?”  I finally knew.  It was like being struck by lightening.  I finally knew!  The struggle to learn to read and write was enormous.  I didn’t understand the connection the letters had to sounds.  It was a mystery.  I could listen to music and play the piano by ear but it was so frustrating to see a bunch of letters and not be able to understand their meaning.  We tried using phonetics and breaking down words to buh, aah, guh for the word bag.  It still made no sense to me.  I didn’t understand why some letters had bumps or sticks or curves to the right and some went to the left.  I had a similar problem with numbers. I was terribly confused by the whole process.  When our classmates were asked to read aloud, I simply could not.  When other children would read a sentence I couldn’t always comprehend its meaning or retain the information.  Nor did I understand anything in sequence.  It was all a giant muddle to me. Miss Coleman worked with me twice a week after school.  My brother, who was ten years older than I, took over for my mother and tutored me with great patience every afternoon.

He would have me look at certain letters, write them down, then read a sentence pointing to each word in my first grade reader.  Then he would ask me to write down the whole sentence in my composition book.  We continued to repeat the process every day.  After about eight or nine months I had a huge breakthrough and began to read and write on my own.  My brother never gave up.  We continued working together every single day and I continued to improve.  Miss Coleman encouraged me too.  She nearly cried with joy when I passed first grade.  I still visualize that flag and have never forgotten that incredible trick of using imagery.  I use it most every day re-creating people's faces and places in my mind.

I still suffer glitches occasionally and even now I reverse numbers or letters.  Over the decades I’ve come to admit that I suffer from dyslexia.  The symptoms never completely disappear but I’m comforted in the knowledge that I have lots of excellent company. A partial list of others who suffered from dyslexia are: Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, John Lennon, Alexander Graham Bell, Jay Leno, Nicola Tesla, Robert Rauschenberg and Steven Spielberg.  As a final word on the subject I recall an incident several years ago. I was exiting a screening of a soon-to-be-released movie with a group of people.  During the closing credits there had been something a little puzzling to me but I kept it to myself thinking it was my gift of dyslexia.  Stephen J. Cannell mentioned the very same point that had bothered me.  He blurted out, “It’s probably just me – I suffer from dyslexia.”  For once in my life I stepped forward and said, “I’m dyslexic too!”  We grinned that knowing grin and gave each other a high five.  For a moment I felt a great sense of pride in having overcome such a monstrous problem.  Now I see it as a gift.