Tuesday, February 26, 2008 Tacio: Overcoming dyslexia By Henrylito D. Tacio Health 101
CONSIDER the following four dead-end kids.
One was thrown out of school when he was 12. He was noted to be terrible at mathematics, unable to focus, and had difficulty with words and speech. Another did not do very well in school getting mainly C's and D's.
The third grew up being called dumb and stupid because she had a lot of problems reading. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle the words.
The four losers are, respectively, Thomas Edison, Jay Leno, Whoopi Goldberg, and David Boies.
Over the course of his career, Edison patented 1,093 inventions. Edison believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a day. He has been quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
Despite his poor grades, Leno was determined to attend Emerson College in Boston. While told by the admissions officer that he was not a good candidate, he had his heart set on attending the University and sat outside the admission officers' office 12 hours a day 5 days a week until he was accepted into the University.
Goldberg had a lot of difficulty in school, but it was clear to her teachers and family that she was neither slow nor dumb, but had some problem that had not yet been well defined. The Oscar-winning actress of 'Ghost' was already an adult when she learned what she was suffering from.
Boies is a celebrated trial attorney in the United States. He is best known as the guy who beat Microsoft.
These four people have one thing in common, though; they are all dyslexic. So is Nobel Prize winner Baruj Benaceraft, brain surgeon Fred Epstein, singer Cher, comedian Robin Williams, Olympic gold medalist Steve Redgrave, philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, film producer Brian Gazer, television chef Jamie Oliver, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that manifests primarily as a difficulty with written language, particularly with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction.
To most dyslexics, going to school is not a pleasant experience. "I never read in school. I got really bad grades -- D's and F's and C's in some classes, and A's and B's in other classes," recalls the Oscar-winning singer-actress Cher.
"In the second week of the 11th grade, I just quit. When I was in school, it was really difficult. Almost everything I learned, I had to learn by listening. My report cards always said that I was not living up to my potential."
Evidence suggests that dyslexia results from differences in how the brain processes written and/or verbal language. Dyslexia occurs at all levels of intelligence, average, above average, and highly gifted. There is also a change in judging speed and distance.
Stupid, dumb, and retard -- these are the words most dyslexic kids hear from their classmates or teachers. A poll conducted in the United States showed that almost two-thirds of the people still associate learning disabilities with mental retardation.
That's probably because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through conventional methods. "It is a disability in learning," points out Boies. "It is not an intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think."
He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ. In fact, many smart, accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it, including Sir Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Michelangelo, General George S. Patton, American president Woodrow Wilson, and W.B. Yeats.
Dyslexia comes from the Greek word, which means "difficulty with words." It was first suspected in 1896, when Dr. Pringle Morgan published an article in the British Medical Journal on "A Case of Congenital Word Blindness." But the word "dyslexia" didn't become commonly used in the United States for more than five decades. For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
