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A graduate student with dyslexia offers suggestions for teaching dyslexic students.
Introduction
I always hated school. Dreaded it. Looking back, I know why. Reading, writing, math. I couldn't get it. I'd try, then try harder. Every time I went to read aloudI'd stutter and stammer, in an effort to make out each word-I'd hear the snickers and laughter.
My earliest memory of school is a spring day in 1975. 1 was in kindergarten and the class was writing the lower-case letter d, while I continuously scrawled b. Time and time again. Embarrassed, frustrated, eventually humiliated, I left school that day in tears. It would not be the last time. My teacher had written a note, sealed the envelope, and asked me to carry it home and deliver it to my parents. I had been singled out for poor academic performance for the first time. For me, days like this were all too frequent, and they continue to be for many children growing up with dyslexia.
Later, in the fourth grade-after failing math and continuing to struggle in my other courses-my mother requested a meeting with school officials, during which she was told to just accept the fact that her son was "slow."
Thankfully she did not. My parents took me to the Boston Children's Hospital. I was diagnosed as having a learning disability. Later, when more was known about dyslexia, an education specialist appeared at my elementary school and said, according to the symptoms of that specific disability, I was a poster boy. I have grown up with the disability and persevered.
I no longer dread school; in fact, as a teaching assistant and an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, I instruct two sections of basic composition. Here I want to draw on my research and experiences with dyslexia and offer suggestions for instructing dyslexic students to write.
What is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a learning disability, believed to stem from a neurophysiological flaw in the brain's ability to process language. It is not a disease. It is a disability which can be overcome. The disability afflicts many individuals possessing above-average intelligence (Simpson 41). Dyslexia is believed to be inherited and to affect 5% of...