NPR recently reviewed the book, My Dyslexia by Philip Schultz.
As a child, Philip Schultz couldn’t understand why he couldn't learn. Why trying to learn to read was a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Schultz was held back twice in school and he was considered an outcast by classmates and teachers.
Schultz went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet for his book Failure. But it wasn't until his young son was diagnosed with dyslexia that Schultz, then 58, had a name for the disorder that had plagued him his entire life.
The International Dyslexia Association estimates that nearly 1 in 5 people suffer from dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading difficult. Like Schultz, many people with dyslexia go undiagnosed.
The NPR interview is, at times, poignant and painful.
"I would remember wanting to will myself into being able to read ... I was now in the fifth grade; I'd been held back ... technically twice; kicked out of one school; going to another one. And there was no third school to go to.”
“And my mother's disappointment — I was an only child, and she was living through me with a sense of expectation. And she had had to leave school in the tenth grade and she wanted the world for me. So here I was, as much for her as for myself, wanting to learn to read, and I had no idea how to go about it.”
"And there were these words, and there were sounds. And I had no idea, of course, that I had trouble with word retrieval or even hearing what people were saying to me, or not able to recognize sounds of words...”
“So I remember struggling to look at words — I had no idea what a syllable was, or a phoneme — and try to reproduce the sounds she was saying, and recognize the marks on the page, as words.”
“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.”
In his book, My Dyslexia, Schultz shares his childhood struggles, how he coped and what he hopes others can learn from his experience:
I mentioned the fact that I didn't discover I had dyslexia until I was fifty-eight years old, when my oldest son was diagnosed with it in the second grade. I learned from his neuropsychologist's report that we shared many of the same symptoms, like delayed processing problems, terrible handwriting, misnaming items, low frustration tolerance for reading and most homework assignments involving writing, to name a few.
Before long I was being asked about my dyslexia in every interview, the first question often being: How did someone who didn't learn to read until he was eleven years old and in the fifth grade, who was held back in third grade and asked to leave his school, come to be a professional poet?
There are still too many misunderstandings when it comes to dyslexia. Hear what our Dyslexia Specialist, Shantell Berrett, has to say about real solutions for students with dyslexia in this free webinar >
