Zitat des Tages von Philip Schultz:
Letter scrambling and trouble reading is just a small part of dyslexia. It is also an auditory processing problem.
I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.
Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
Suddenly, I was reading these comics. I was looking at those bubbles, those dialogue bubbles, and suddenly there were words... recognizable words.
Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!
When a child knows that he or she is dyslexic, that it's the way their brain is programmed, and it's not their fault, that makes all the difference in the world.
I do think that there is a profound reservoir of creativity and imagination in everyone I've ever met, and sometimes if someone is persistent and perversely obstinate enough to persevere, then they want to be helped. There is a way to help them.
If I get the idea, and I get some clarity on how I feel about that idea, then I can safely assume I'll find the right words. I do have that confidence.
Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.
I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.
I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.
I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.
I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
I know it sounds strange to say, but the very technologies that have made traveling easier for most people - GPS, automated ticket machines, online schedules and ticketing, boarding passes you can print out at home - have actually made things harder for me.
I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.
Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the 'dummy class.'
