the value of different thinking

factoring in dyslexics' contributions

Thank you to each and every one of you who read this column, even if it’s several days after it appeared. It means a great deal to know it’s worth your effort. I know it’s available in a couple of locations but adding your name matters.

Thank you especially to those of you with subscriptions to ActionsCreateConsequences. I write daily because I take your commitment seriously. We value those things where we invest time and resources so I know I am giving you something you value. I spend a lot more time writing this than I expected but I also feel unshackled after years of watching many trends I did not feel I should comment upon. I deeply appreciate the subscriptions! I still welcome any and all suggestions on topics.

The primary value of social media for me these days is to satisfy my ‘fix’ for seeing other photographers’ work. Don’t get me wrong: I open those sites/apps hoping to see how my friends are—which certainly does happen. But increasingly what pops up is adverts (no surprise) or the groups I have signed on for to remind me how appealing the beaches of Hawai’i, the recipes I wish I could sample but know I won’t use because we all know I am congenitally incapable of following instructions, and the cats I wish I could add to our home but know we already have sufficient interfeline challenges between the two we rule us. Yes, occasionally I see a friend who I haven’t heard from in ages (Congratulations, Laura Manning Johnson on your new spy novel) or a reminder that someone has a birthday.

Over the past week or so, I increasingly come across messages from Dyslexia Inspired, an education website on Facebook. I am not sure how they found me or me them but their content absolutely appeals to me. Dyslexia is a perfect example of what we so often say we respect but rarely bother to celebrate: the thinkers who approach ideas from different perspectives because they are wired differently.

Each of us really does have unique looks, speech, interpretations, skin colour, religion, gender, and everything else. But, schools are charged with bringing all kids along at the same time to educate an age cohort for simplicity’s sake. Elementary school teachers have enough to cope with in every increasing classes where they are trying to satisfy parents, school boards, state regulators, advanced learners or slower learners; dyslexics sometimes cross all of those lines.

Kids additionally are sensitive to fiting in rather than stand apart in most cases. For a dyslexic, this is painful as they cannot do what the others in a classroom do with some facility. That doesn’t make them stupid but it makes them different, and not in a good way. How does that work? What happens when a child does not process as the other 25 around the room do? What happens when the child, already feeling so awkward about simply being a wee one, figures out that she is not succeeding at the same pace or altogether? Kids act out. Kids stand out. Kids hate everything about school. The teacher, often in utter frustration, reaches for other help but at what emotional cost to others in the class, to the student, to the school administrators, and to the bewildered parents who wonder if their child was abandoned in the process?

It is so hard being a child. Sensitivities, awkwardness, slight deviations in speech patterns or hair colour or even the pants he is wearing on any particular Wednesday can prove so frustrating. I wonder why it would ever occur to a child in second grade that he is dyslexic? I cannot imagine it would.

Dyslexia is not stupidity. I personally wish we called it ‘different processing’ rather than a ‘learning disorder’ because alternate terminology allows those with the diagnosis to reach the same ends but in different manners from the ‘average’ student. In a nation where we say we want everyone to advance to have a better life, the reality of needing to work with youngsters (or oldsters who received inappropriate help decades ago) takes time and effort. Traditional learners and those with dyslexia can succeed equally well but the latters require some different assistance to get to the same ends. Thank goodness for the Special Education community committed to these students!

But Special Education, like so much else, is underfunded in our schools, seen as special treatment to people who vary from the average. Average is not the same as normal. Average is one approach while dyslexics, many of whom are wildly successful in life, are simply different in their approach.

Why do I claim dyslexics are so often successful? Oh, there is a long list of individuals who have come forward to acknowledge they survived the indignities, shame, and frustration of this processing. Google it when you are bored. A few names immediately pop up. New York City Mayor Eric Adams acknowledges to dyslexia and, while you may or not like his politics, he has had a successful career in some pretty hard jobs in the police force and now running one of the planet’s largest metropolitan areas. The superb actress Keira Knightley and the prominent economic analyst Diane Swonk are dyslexics. Coloradans Senator Michael Bennet and former Senator John Hickenlooper are both dyslexic. And Lee Kuan Yew, often seen as ths single most effective statesman of Asia in the past century, was dyslexic. And this is from a cursory look through the dreaded Wikipedia.

My interest in this field began over thirty years ago when I volunteered for the not-for-profit Recording for the Blind. Two absolutely magnificent Chicago natives had been helping translate books into oral educational materials for those who returned from conflicts with impaired sight. These women ran one of the several recording studios across the country where assigned readings for college level courses became available on reel-to-reel tape.

It was a rigourous process for the reader and for the monitor, both required to assure we read each and every book faithfully to the publication’s material. We deviated on nothing, even errors in the text. Readers sat in a closed booth with the book, reading it word for word, describing each and every photograph, graph, chart, and citation. The monitor sat outside with an equally important role: she or he monitored each and every word read to assure it slavishly adhered to the publication. Doing a seamless recording was harder than I ever thought.

One did not just read: one had to test to a level of fluency in reading. Monitors would tell a reader of an error when doing a book for a student but the testing phase had no monitor to ‘clean up’. The individual read a portion of the book (including describing photos or cartoons or something that showed the reader really understood what was going on in the book) which then went to the headquarters in Princeton for approval or rejection. Indeed, if a prospective reader failed the test once, she or he could only retake it once. If that individual failed the second time, the only option to volunteer was as a monitor as one could not retake the test at any later point. For the record, I passed my Spanish the first time but only barely scraped through English on a second try.

The most elite readers were the engineering people. A man I think named Vince was so valuable that upon his daily arrival over lunch hour, the booth was well ready for him with book marked at the last syllabus where the monitor had turned off the tape and the monitor was in place so that no time would pass without Vince reading. The room came to a halt until we got Vince started as we needed whatever he could read inthat hour, perhaps 15 pages of dense text. The back log of readerings was years’ long so we wanted to be as productive as possible with his time.

And he rarely made mistakes. I mean maybe a mistake every couple of weeks. This man knew how to read, how to explain math equations, and everything else. It was a treat to be preparing to go into my booth as I watched Vince and his monitor charge through his hour in the studio. Have you ever read a 509 page book aloud without making a mistake but once a fortnight?

Reading foreign literature had its own challenges. I was reading Isabel Allende Llona’s La casa de los espíritus with some relatively forthright sex scenes. My monitor, whose name I believe was Ollie, was a kindly Christian preacher who wasn’t someone I knew well so I sure did not enjoy to reading the scenes involving physical intimacy but the Chicago studio had waited months for someone to certify in Spanish so I had to read the book. I imagine Ollie and I were equally uncomfortable but we got through it, often as few as five or six pages daily as my time did not allow me much more time than the engineering whiz.

The point is that someone made the time to read these books so visually-impaired folks could continue education. Within a year of my departure from Chicago, Recording for the Blind altered their name to Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic as a tribute to the centrality that oral books played in college education for dyslexics.

My time at RFB, as I knew them, was the most gratifying volunteer work early in my life because I knew I was helping real people who needed real time. Today, I am delighted that a probable dramatic advancement learning for dyslexia must result from AI programs offering a much more rapid manner of reading texts. Those improvements allow dyslexics to not only keep up more effectively with their classmates but also to leverage more of their time the the enhanced variety of verbal transmission sources for their books. Yay for technology!

I won’t pretend to evaluate whether Special Education approaches this question differently as I simply have no basis to evaluate. I do know, from the experience of someone in my close circle, that when a individual education program works with a child, that specialist education can open doors the child and family previously saw as forever closed. The stigma will take much longer to erase but dyslexia is no longer a disaster for the entirety of one’s life.

As we ponder what we as a society are willing to support, we need think broadly about the benefits of different thinking in our world. Different vectors bring different solutions and, as we discuss here so often, we have plenty of challenges requiring dramatically new thought.

We got 1.42 inches of rain in our ‘gullywasher’ last night. The smokey skies are back but least we made one step forward with the rain. And tomorrow is another day. Eastport looked more satisfied this morning.FIN