I Am Dyslexic

Today I have my first ever guest blogger! Yes my very own sister! Sis (because she is sis to me, but Phaedra to the rest of the world) indulges me often by listening to me talk through my ideas on education, what I want for my children in their education, researching pre-schools, wondering if the experience I want for my children actually exists within a school building, etc. I also spend a lot of time ranting to Sis about the pre-school programs I find - that brag about how they will prepare my child for kindergarten by teaching him phonics and letters - when I think (after reading Mem Fox's Reading Magic) guessing how words is just as important (just watch a small child try to sound out the -tion sound). Because Sis is dyslexic, she too rants about the over-emphasis on phonics and how she always found it frustrating in learning foreign languages.

Sis started thinking about her experience growing up dyslexic and asked if she could write an essay for my blog as part of my ongoing considerations about education (and had me think about spending my entire blogging week thinking and writing about education). So here she is, my fantastic dress making sister, who made my wedding dress (in eight days and made it so it fit inside a Priority Mail envelope) and who I think in all ways is a genius and certainly the (first) best thing to happen to me (second and third of course is husband and son and fourth the soon to be baby). You can see her blog and work here.

 

I Am Dyslexic

By Phaedra Elizabeth Paulson

I am dyslexic.

When I was about 6, my dad pulled me out of one elementary school where my 1^st grade teacher wanted to hold me back a year, and put me into an elementary school where the school principle (Ms. Betty Campbell, you were an angel) had me tested for all kinds of “learning disorders”. It was her that got me the early diagnosis of dyslexic.

So really, I’m a lucky dyslexic.

The diagnosis of dyslexic I imagine was a relief to all my parents. From my dad and my step-mom it seemed like their mentality was: okay, this is the problem, we can address that. And they did. I was taken weekly to a tutoring company (called Learn to Learn, no judgment there) that apparently specialized in kids like me, “Bright kids that are ‘slow learners.’’ From this company I had nearly an hour of tutoring every night from my dad and step-mom, after school and through the summer.

By the time I was in the 4^th grade, I was pulled out of class for my remedial spelling lessons, where I was tutored one on one with a special ed teacher. Then later, I was pulled out of class for my reading lessons, again, one on one. (oh, public school system of 25 years ago, how we miss you.) It wasn’t until the end of the school year that I was told my reading lessons were actually above my grade level. I was reading for comprehension above the rest of my class, just spelling below my grade level.  I was main-streamed the next year.

Technically from the fifth grade forward, I was a “normal” kid, just a really bad speller.

Like I said, this makes me a lucky dyslexic.

What’s interesting to me looking back, is how often I have been labeled by others and labeled myself as a “slow learner” without thinking for a second what that actually means.

What is actually true is I struggled with reading and languages. In other areas I actually learn very quickly.

Years ago, someone asked me how I felt about the label, of learning disabled that is applied to dyslexia and I said, that label gets schools money to help the kids that are.

But it’s not that simple.

At the time, it never occurred to me that I had any negative repercussions on my psyche. Now I’m not so sure.

While I did fairly well in school, I definitely started to give up by high school. Yes, I’m sure normal teenage angst and rebellion played a part in my disinterest in school. But so did feeling like I’d never be put in an advance class due to my “issues” and that I had to sit through my English classes with my fellow class mates, that somehow never seemed to be able to remember what they had read and understand it. And yet, they had never had their own special ed teachers.

While my high school teachers likely didn’t know I was a “slow learner” or  “learning disabled”, I think I had a fair chip on my shoulder that academia had given up on me. Or, at the very least, had let me down.

So then, the sewing.

Once I had taught myself how to do this thing, that was to make the things in my head, well, I guess you could say I was hooked. I was 15 and it’s been a life long love affair ever since.

Sewing, pattern drafting, building the garment was something that came easily to me and I think my relief at having found something that I could excel at was actually profound.

What is curious to me, is there are designers and highly skilled seamstresses and engineers and carpenters and makers of all things on both sides of my father’s family. My dad and uncle have built and rebuilt airplanes. My uncle IS an aeronautical engineer.  The similarities in the problem solving that gets a dress or a corset built is not dissimilar to my way of thinking then what gets an airplane or a house built. It’s almost like “thinking as an engineer” is a genetic trait. So is dyslexia. Dyslexia gets passed down, while a daughter can get it from either parent, a son will only get it from his mother. From the experience of my dad teaching me how to drive, I promise you, I got this genetic trait from my dad. Neither one of us seemed to be so solid with our right and left. But they didn’t have this diagnosis when he or his brother were kids. That the family stories were about how neither of them seemed to do well in school despite clearly being bright and capable is, well, curious.

Last night, my sister was relating a story at her dinner party of how when we were kids, she thought I was being difficult or lazy, maybe that I was just trying to get attention with my reading struggles. The discussion got me to thinking. (hence this essay) Am I still nervous about this kind of judgment? Even though I have no fear that she thinks this now?

In this climate of our currant education system, my heart breaks at the idea of all kids being pushed into this box of teaching to the test and that all intelligence is based on reading and language and math. I never would have survived school like that. I love learning. I love working on challenging design projects and figuring out new ways of solving design problems. All of this I learned outside of my public school education. But I did learn it.

25 years after being labeled “normal”, I am still grateful everyday that I found something that proves those other labels wrong.  I don’t think anyone in my life needs me to be a talented designer to be reassured that I am not a slow learner, I’m sure my siblings and all my parents think I am quite bright. When I tell people that I am dyslexic they often ask, “really?”So it’s interesting to me that my natural tendency is to do what I do out of the sight of others. I did not thrive in the corporate design world, yet, people like, even love what I design and make. This last year I quit my corporate design job to finally focus on what I really wanted to do, to work for myself making custom things, to work one on one with my clients. I know this is the right place for me to be, working with my hands, bringing my ideas to fruition, working with a client to create the best thing for her and her event. There are so many things about this job that feels like it’s a good fit for my skill set. However, there is a part of me that wonders, am I, maybe a little, hiding from the judgment of those labels? Do I still feel that fear of people thinking I’m stupid? And the best way to hide from that is to work on my own, behind closed doors? Where I can’t be judged? Where what matters is the end result, not how I got there, not how I figured it out?

I think so, a little bit, yes.

People often seem to be uninformed about what dyslexia is. They think it means I can’t see the letters on the page or that I just, still as an adult with 2 college degrees, can’t read. They think it means that I am actually learning disabled.

I’ve met parents of young children that share stories that they fear their kid might be dyslexic, it’s an odd conversation that follows when I say, ‘your kid will be fine, I’m dyslexic’. “But did you recover? Are you still dyslexic?” . Um, yes. but you memorize the letters and use spell check and move on. It comes out really, like an old accent, when I’m really tired or drunk (If your kid is writing school papers while drunk you have bigger problems.) or when I’m trying to learn second languages, oh so help me with the foreign languages.

Now I wish I could reverse the label. I can’t speak for any other kind of “learning disabilities” or “learning disorder” but those categories really piss me off.

I didn’t fit into the box that said, I should have been a lawyer or professor, or any other kind of reading focused career. But I do belong in this box, the one about working with shapes and materials and the physics of how x will effect y if I do this. None of that makes me learning disabled. Clearly, I have learned to read and write. Clearly I have learned how to learn.

Like I said, I am lucky. I’m lucky for 2 reasons. The first being that Ms. Betty Campbell said, “there is nothing wrong with that child”. And the second is that my dad as a (highly likely) undiagnosed dyslexic himself, understood exactly the way I understand my world and believed and agreed with her.

There’s room for all our learning. We need both people like me and people like Tara, my writer and English professor sister that didn’t get it then, but knows now, I wasn’t being lazy. I just see things from a different point of view.

And I am thriving in my skill set.