Dyslexia
Do you remember the old Etch-a-Sketch toys, where you turned the two dials to draw lines and designs on the screen? Rebekah brought it to me to show that she had written her name. I was shocked—astounded, actually. She had written her name beautifully, in cursive, but it was exactly backwards.
When our daughter Rebekah Joy was just four years old, I knew that she saw the world differently. Do you remember the old Etch-a-Sketch toys, where you turned the two dials to draw lines and designs on the screen? Rebekah brought it to me to show that she had written her name. I was shocked—astounded, actually. She had written her name beautifully, in cursive, but it was exactly backwards. When viewed in the mirror, it looked entirely normal. I kept it to show to everyone. Mike said his daughter was a genius. But then we noticed that she had other “seeing” problems. I soon decided that it was not an ability, but a disability; at least that is how I thought of it at the time. That was over 30 years ago, when there were no Internet websites on which to do research.
Thinking she had a vision problem, I called the eye doctor for an appointment. He told me it wasn’t in her eye, but in her brain. I went to the library and asked for books on the subject. The librarian gave me the name of a program at the local university that was studying a weird thing called dyslexia, something we’d never heard of before. I got hold of the right department, and, by God’s grace, a highly motivated student who was writing a paper on dyslexia answered the phone. She was full of information, and was excited to see if her suggestions would actually work. Among other things, she told me to use flash cards with words and pictures. “Have her do finger painting, sand drawing, work with Play-Doh, and give her music instrument lessons.” Of course, any child would love this kind of schooling, so, in time, I decided to use this style with all my children. Rebekah’s brain was soon reprogrammed, and she functioned quite normally, with a few quirks that were not bothersome. The neat part of this teaching style was that it did not hamper her creative writing, music, and art, which she so loved.
All these years, I continued to think of dyslexia as a handicap that had to be overcome in order to function well academically. I now know better. History teaches us that most of the unusually brilliant scientists and thinkers over the last several hundred years have had the same “handicap” reflected in their reading, writing, and math. Researchers have now discovered that the dyslexic person views life in a much more complex way than the average person. This view explains why some of these truly special people have excelled beyond others in many creative endeavors, including science. People like Einstein could understand physics in a way that seemed almost supernatural; Edison could see possibilities in communication; Beethoven could hear six different melodies working together as one. Yet none of these famous people found simple math and reading easy. It is these examples of excellence that have helped educators understand that the dyslexic mind magnifies a kind of genius in certain areas, but often leaving a deficit in others.
