| 
(back to current newsletter)
THE DYSLEXIA
SOLUTION
Volume 2 • #4 • December
2002
NEWSLETTER
When Christopher Reeve was thrown from a horse, breaking
his back and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down,
nobody that I know of termed the accident a “gift”.
On the other hand, when he displayed superhuman strength
and perseverance to make gains that no doctor ever thought
possible, the mindset and mental strength that enabled
him to do this certainly was a gift.
When someone can “make a silk purse out of a sow’s
ear,” or “make lemonade when life has dealt him
a lemon,” we do not consider the sow’s ear or
the lemon gifts. But the ability to make the best of a bad
situation certainly is a gift.
Why, then, do you hear people talk about the “gift
of dyslexia”? Partly because of a misunderstanding
of what dyslexia is and what causes it. The claim is made
that dyslectic people are intuitive and highly creative,
which is not necessarily true at all. It is also claimed
that reversing letters and the like are the result of distorted
perceptions. But this is not true, either. Dyslectic people
see the same things that everybody else does. There is nothing
wrong with their eyeballs or ears. The reason they reverse
letters in words is because they are processing the words
with the right hemisphere which does not associate a sound
with a letter and therefore doesn’t care about letter
order. There are no “positive talents that give rise
to dyslexia” as one person has claimed. Dyslexia occurs
when a person is born with a faulty corpus callosum and a
wiring pattern that causes him to use the right hemisphere
rather than the left for reading. The truth is that it has
nothing whatever to do with talent or native intelligence.
The right hemisphere is responsible for artistic talent,
spatial sense, intuition and emotions. When you gum it up
with an attempt to resolve letters into the sounds of words,
you only use up its neural space with clutter. My own experience
has been that if you get the verbal processing out of the
right, you free it up to do its own job better. This value
of isolating a certain kind of processing to the proper hemisphere
has been validated in a most interesting book by Betty Edwards
called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” As
an art teacher, she does exactly the reverse of what we do
with Reading from Scratch. She minimizes all verbal activity
that she can when a student is drawing. No one is allowed
to talk, and she does things like having the student copy
something upside down so he can’t verbalize what he
is copying but must just duplicate the shapes and colors
he sees. She gets results that can only be described as spectacular
.
There are two kinds of gifts after all: the ones we give
to each other at Christmas and the talents and mental power
that are sometimes vouchsafed us which enable us to exceed
normal expectations. Dyslexia is no gift, but the ability
to neutralize it and increase normal functioning of both
sides of the brain certainly is.
That is the gift that Reading from Scratch wishes it could
give to everyone burdened with this nuisance. Happy holidays! Teaching Tip:
Haven’t got one. Nobody is trying to
teach much over the holidays anyhow. I will get organized
and cook up something for January.
|
