dyslexia is a blessing

Disguised as misfortune, You may be fortunate in the opportunities hardship unmasks.

Dyslexia…impaired ability to understand written language: a learning disorder marked by a severe difficulty in recognizing and understanding written language, leading to spelling and writing problems. It is not caused by low intelligence or brain damage.

I started this piece over a year ago and lost interest. I heard a report on the learning disability today. Something positive I already knew about myself and feel sort of vindicated and served to validate my thinking
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I never learned English too well because I had undetected dyslexia. The basic rules were not imprinted in my early education. I had major problems in grade school. I can still remember how terrified I was just thinking about it, afraid to read aloud and the cruel ridicule because I couldn't. Back in 1965 nothing was known about this learning disability, the condition was not available for me to have at the time, unrecognized, therefore untreatable. I had to make do as best I could thinking I was stupid. At ten years old and I could barely read. I couldn't associate letters that made words and was prone to read skipping ahead or up or down one or two words or lines. Sentences didn't make much sense to me and I couldn't get the comprehension part down. I taught myself to read mostly by listening to spoken words and tying them to the actual sentence as whole units. When I looked at a sentence I read the whole thing at once like being one word. I would ask teacher or a classmate to read it to me and I would memorize that sentence while it was spoken right then right there on the spot.
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As I got older and studied this impediment to learning, I managed to pinpoint when my trouble started. I didn't go to kindergarten and in first grade my teacher tried every way in the world to make me right handed, additionally she tried to reinforce my second and third grade year teachers as well. Thank God they finally gave up! Which led to shame for not being able to comply and guilt and embarrassment, lack of self confidence, a host of inferior feelings. I struggled all the way through grade school, I learned in a speed reading class to read for comprehension, in the eighth. They called the class speed reading but it was for what they label now days…learning disabled, stupid. But I still had to lead and trail a sentence with both hands to read, one finger blocking the work ahead and the other finger to keep my place on the right line I was reading. I learned to multitask, efficient use of memory and problem solve. I got by marginally at best until I got to the tenth grade when I moved away.

In Muskogee my electives where mostly French and choir, I had taken two years of French, and three years of voice, mixed choir, no books for me meant better grades. I chose those because both classes had all the hot girls that out numbered the guys three or four to one. I never learned to sing or speak French that well, probably read French as well as English back then, none of it made much sense to me anyway. Looking back at my old annuals it looks like I scored very high marks for flirting and other female biological studies. Started to develop excellent social skills that would serve me well in the future. I made up verbally what I lacked in the reading and writing skills. Anyway, no science, history or math because of the reading handicap/blessing. I made up for those deficits later. I didn't take much shop, between my dad, uncle and grandfather I grew up in a woodwork, mechanic and upholstery shop, that was my playground at home. I know I knew how to use more tools, power or otherwise, than the shop teacher. I was quite precocious in those hands-on areas, to say the least. Just stupid when it came to English, still am, as far as grammar rules, punctuation, and stuff like that. No telling where I'll put a comma needed or not or when to end a sentence. (that's why I like to read German, because they don't either) My spell checker fails to mind read homonyms for me, where, wear, we're …there, their, they're? So when writing there is no telling which one I'll or it will use for the other. It is worth noting, in my years of adult life, not once have I ever been asked to diagram a sentence, not for a job, a date, a beer, not once. Not that I could but, Wtf? What was so important about that business anyway?

Besides in life, I got better uses for my dangling participle. I still have inferior feelings about the rite write, right? Mrs. Wright. How do you like me now Mrs. Hill? I learned the survival game early, out fox, out play, out wit, when all those didn't work, to out bullshit.

There were not many electives to take in a small rural school system of Gore Oklahoma. The tenth grade was the turning point because I took typing, the class met all my adolescent requirements….girls, new girls, and a bonus, a very hot redheaded young typing teacher. It was amazing I could even say my name when she bent over me to show me how to type, much less learn anything. Why, on a chilly day I had to be careful not to turn around too fast, could've cost me an eye, it da been worth it. She was blessed, and so was I! She always wore low cut blouses and my buddy facing opposite in front of me worked out a plan when we needed help. Depending on what she was wearing, depended on how helpless we were that day. When she leaned over me, he got a peak and she over he, my turn to ogle. Hey, we were not perverts, we where fifteen. The luckiest boys on the planet!

Back to the story, I learned to type somehow that semester. Something happened when I did, it was like the missing piece of my learning puzzle was found in learning to keyboard. A light came on and bam, I started the tenth grade struggling to read at maybe seventh or eight grade level, after six months typing, I was at first year college level. Memorizing the keyboard somehow worked to organize written and to comprehend words in my head. So because of all the things I did to compensate for my poor reading skills before had became my greatest asset, learning to speed read, I relied heavily on my memory before, my cognitive skills were a few years ahead of my peers. Things I learned independent of things I was taught to adapt I learned from inside me to do my own way. The confidence boost was tremendous and profound, I wasn't stupid anymore. My grades never got any better though, except for maybe history, that was my favorite class, after typing, of course, but I never ever took home another book again. I could usually read the lesson or ahead in class and would finish all my homework during study time provided. I got board bored with school real quick after that. The ninth grade was the highest grade of public school I completed and I never looked back with regret. I didn't miss anything, as a sophomore, I took seniors girls to proms at three different schools in three different cities. The army was my high school.

I couldn't wait to join the army. A week after my 17 birthday I was taking the test to get in. Passing my GED two years before my class graduated, the state would not give me my certificate until after my class graduated, but the army accepted my state scores as evidence of high school graduation.

All of the hardships I had from the very beginning of my education, I later learned, were probably due to my first grade teacher trying to teach, or unsuccessfully tried to make me right handed. I learned to process information differently and perhaps more creatively, to look at things and problem solve another way than most. All she did was add another extra unnecessary layer of guilt and shame during a critical stage of early childhood development. For that, I forgive Mrs. Hill, the bitch. She was impatient and downright mean to me sometimes, but it really did turn out to be an unseen blessing, now looking back. Thinking yourself stupid for the first nine years of school done some damage to my fragile eggshell mind, I was also to learn more about later.

 Overcoming the hardship set me up for future academic success, and the confidence that there was nothing I couldn't do. I wasn't stupid anymore but the old thinking caused me to be more driven, and suspicious of authority. I see trying to make a left handed person a righty a form of psychological abuse. Man, I am left handed all the way. My right is useless to me. A stranger of sorts, I cannot still, to this day, properly pick my nose or comfortably scratch my ass with it, among other things.

In high school I made c's and d's, I made a perfect 4. 0 the first three years of college. I haven't looked at my college transcript in a while, but I know I have over two hundred hours undergrad and twenty or thirty post grad work. As a matter of fact this work right here is part of my thesis. But I studied only the disciplines that interested me, nursing, business, psychology, early education, comparative religion.  Most of my social science and history came from my independent study outside of school proper, that I didn't have to pay for or still owe on. I really am that pragmatic, a body of knowledge has to give me some practical application. If I wanted to pay for the paper to hang on the wall, to impress, I could. I see know reason for it. I got all the information I was after and if I cant apply any of it, its useless to me and totally worthless to the world. I am like Henry Thoreau in that regard.  "Let the sheep keep their skins"

I worked my ass off though to get and keep my grades. I don't want to come off boastful, I earned everything, even today, there is nothing to compare the feeling of walking out of a classroom knowing you nailed a hard test, or even better, not knowing and learning the grade, the personal self satisfaction, for me, was something money cant buy and would be worthless if you could. That kind of pride is a healthy reward, it is the result of sowing sweat to reap joy. My personal fight, me against my ignorance. Won by solving complex problems with only the tools you brought with you into the room, my mind and a pencil. Sometime I forgot one or the other and still managed.

I clept out of a few classes only because I knew how to take tests and nothing on the subject before. I didn't like the way it made me feel though, I was robbed of the classroom experience and the interaction.

 Being in college for awhile I used to play a game of stump the teacher, and when they ran out of answers I knew the game was over and time for this grasshopper to find another teacher, subject or discipline. Or a job….I had an anatomy instructor in nursing once that finally told me if I really wanted to know I needed to graduate and get a job in a research lab to understand why the 'islets of langerhorns' function is so poorly understood. I remember thinking….well, if I find out I'm renaming the pancreatic cells the 'atolls of assholes' …….after you then. Langerhorn only found them…… I just found out what they do. Diabetes mellitus was important for me understand, I had lost one grandmother from it and the other was in a nursing home blind and missing a leg because of it, at that time. Today I got it(sugar die-beatus)

Today I don't always win but I do try harder when I don't. My personal philosophy is I don't have to be right and there is no one best way to do anything…. only what is right for me inside and outside. I carried a lot of resentment about the petrified opinion of my first grade teacher. Her for me and mine for her. Had I been a normal right hander I might never have had the opportunities and learning experiences I've had. Those early hardships truly helped me more than hurt. I wont ever say anything bad about that bitch Mrs. Hill, only the truth.

As individuals we must not be satisfied with just becoming like everybody else. We must fight the system.! Here comes my rant from Leo Buscaglia, about natures animal school….. A fabulous story that educators have had around for years. We may laugh about it but sadly will never do anything about it. A rabbit, bird, fish, squirrel, duck, and so on, all decided to start a school. Everybody sat down to write a curriculum. The fish insisted that swimming be in the curriculum. The squirrel insisted perpendicular tree climbing be in the curriculum. All the other animals wanted their specialty to be in the curriculum, too, so they put everything in and then made the glorious mistake of insisting all the animals take all of the courses. The rabbit was magnificent in running; nobody could run like the rabbit. But they insisted that it was good intellectual and emotional discipline to teach the rabbit to fly. So they insisted that the rabbit learn to fly and they put him on this branch and said, "Fly, rabbit! And the poor old thing jumped off, and broke a leg and fractured his skull. He became brain damaged and then he couldn't run very well either. So instead of an A in running, he got a C in running. And he got a D in flying because he was trying. And the curriculum committee was happy. The same way with the bird….he could fly like a freak all over the place, do loops and loops, and was making an A. But they insisted that this bird burrow holes in the ground like a gopher. O f course he broke his wings and his beak and everything else and then he couldn't fly. But they were perfectly happy to give him a C in flying, and so on. And you know who the valedictorian of that graduating class was? A mentally retarded eel, because he could do almost everything fairly well. The owl dropped out and now votes 'no' on all tax elections that have to do with schools. Their was a moment of silence at graduation to remember those that never learned to swim or float and are no longer with us. Sadly the ones that could not master a particular discipline the way we think they should are the ones that go into schools and mall with automatic rifles. Society says, 'why didn't we see this coming we gave him every opportunity to fit in.' Truth is we didn't and he never had a chance. He was labeled by the system and tossed aside because he wasn't able to conform to the system, the reality is the system failed to make room for him. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but the fault lies much deeper.

We know this is wrong, yet nobody does anything about it. You may be a genius. You may be one of the greatest writers in the world but you cant get into a university unless you can pass trigonometry. For what! You can't get out of high school without passing this and this and this! You can't get out of elementary school without doing this and this! Being right handed? Why? It isn't a matter of who you are. Look at the list of dropouts: William Faulkner, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Edison. It was a bummer. I don't want to learn perpendicular tree climbing. I am never going to climb a tree perpendicularly. I'm a bird. I can fly to the top of the tree without having to do that. Never mind, it's good intellectual discipline….sit down and shut up.

Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!!

……………………….kosmicdebris……………………………….....
Let us put our minds together and see what life we will make for our children. Tatanka Lotanka