The Gift of Dyslexia - By Mia Stainsby

Printed with permission by Mia Stainsby, The Vancouver Sun

A new treatment program is teaching children with dyslexia that their reading disability is actually a gift.

“ I really, really, really love reptiles – snakes, turtles, everything. When I grow up, I want to become famous and save the tuatara – they’re almost extinct and they’ve been here for about 200 million years and they live on a tiny island. There are only about 65 tuatara left and I want to bring the numbers up. I want them to survive.”

It’s not hard to see that Daniel Scott, who adores his pet gecko, Gex, came into this world to make a difference. Here is a smart, chatty boy with a mission to rescue an endangered creature. Maybe it’s because for a time, he, too, was on an endangered list.

Daniel is dyslexic, although the definitional currency today would be reading and writing disorder or learning disability, or in some cases, ADD or ADHD. At school in Squamish, where so much of his life takes place, there were more brutal schoolyard names for it. Idiot. Stupid. Dumb.

It was the nightmare he woke up to every morning. “He hated school. I couldn’t wake him up,” says his mother, Janice Scott. There were days he was just bereft of strength: “Mom,” he’d say in utter defeat. “I wish I was dead. I wish I’d never been born.”

Written words, to him, were like hieroglyphs. He couldn’t put pent to paper, he couldn’t read, and he produced virtually no work. He was considered emotionally immature. It was attributed to his temperament. Then, when he’d borne all the frustration he could take, he dug in his heels and became defiant, a behavior problem. His school file measured three inches thick. And in Grade 3, he was suspended after a schoolyard fight.

“It was like he walked into a boxing ring daily, his self-esteem taking blow after blow. His mother remembers his vivid description of how he felt: “It’s like, you know, a butterfly in a cocoon. I’m trying to get out and I’m stuck and I can’t get out the rest of the way and there are bugs ripping at my wings and tearing them. I’m scared when I grow up I’m going to be stuck.”

“You are going to get out,” she promised him. “Everything will be okay,” she soothed him as she put him to bed.

Meanwhile, Daniel was a talented little artist and had an incredible memory. He was a walking encyclopedia on the subject of reptiles. “I watched shows. I’d go to pet stores and talked to people,” he explains.

To her enormous relief, Scott was able to keep her promise to her son, after three years of helplessly watching him flail away in the school of hard knocks. After one $1,500 series of private testing, one small sentence in the report stood out. It advised her to keep an eye on his reading and writing because there was dyslexia in his hereditary past. “The suggestion at the time was that Daniel was ADD or ADHD (attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity disorder) and suggested he might try Ritalin if for no reason than to rule it out,” says Scott.

When he got in for a comprehensive test at B.C. Children’s Hospital, Scott made a point of asking that he be assessed for dyslexia since that was one stone that hadn’t been turned. When it didn’t show up, she phoned to ask about it and it turned out he had “severe reading and writing disorder.”

“Now I had a measuring stick,” Scott says and set to work. She researched the programs available for his dyslexia and wasn’t satisfied.

“They treat the symptoms and Daniel would have become an incredible memorizer,” she felt.

She typed in www.dyslexia.com on the Internet one day and found the Davis Method for correcting dyslexia. And she found Sue Hall of Positive Dyslexia, who had just started teaching this method in West Vancouver. It was founded in California in 1982 by Ron Davis who was dyslexic and an engineer with a genius IQ. There are now 377 Davis learning centers around the world with four across Canada. Proponents claim there is a 98 per cent success rate in helping dyslexics read and write. So far, there is only one such centre in B.C.

“When Daniel came out of the program after five day, he’d gone from thinking he had a handicap to thinking he had a gift. His change in attitude has been noticed by teachers in the school system,” says Scott. A math tutor she had hired to help Daniel was so impressed with the change that she decided to become a facilitator.

“I’m dong better in school,” Daniel says proudly. “I’m getting just awesome grades. I used to get Fs and the C+s that I’m getting now are like As to me because I used to do so terribly. It was worse than Fs.”

“His teacher told him he could easily turn them not Bs,” adds his mother. “We still have work to do but he’s on an upswing and I do believe he is an A/B student. He still struggles socially and he’s catching up emotionally. He’s been rejected for so long and made to feel different. He’s not sure how to be with other kids. He tries to hard and over-compensates so it’s going to take a little longer to level out.”

In Saxnichton, on Vancouver Island, Bob and Susan Lee tell a parallel story about son, Matthew, 13. When they went through a checklist of 37 common characteristics of dyslexia last year, he exhibited most of them.

Reading and writing exhausted him as he tried to keep up in school with this huge handicap. “He made valiant efforts. We could count on one hand the number of outbursts he had at school, so it was difficult for the school to understand. But he’d get in the card to come home and he’d be a volcano and just explode,” says Susan. “If you touched him, looked at him the wrong way, there was just rage. He’d want to jump out of a window. Sometimes, he’d take a knife and want to stab himself. Life was just awful. Every morning it was a fight to get him to school. He wouldn’t get dressed and I’d have to say I’d have to take him in his pajamas.”

As is common with dyslexia, Matthew is extremely bright. He built extravagant catapults and trebuchets in the back yard, furniture for his Mom and toys for his sisters. “And he is so witty, he’s a natural stand-up comic. When we go camping, he puts on a one-man show and has us all rolling with laughter,” says Lee. “And he knows so much. Sometimes I’ll just look at him, amazed.”

Matthew went through the Davis program last May and this year, in Grade 8, he is on the honor roll. He still struggles, says Lee, but it takes a year to 18 months to complete the self-directed program.

“The school system,” Scott says, “cannot and does not look after people who do not fit into the school of little fishes. If anything is out of the ordinary or out of the box, you are in big trouble. There’s no funding, no staff, no abilities.”

The Davis method works with adult, too, as Clinton Pazdrierski, 29, of North Vancouver discovered. He went through public school on his intelligence and wits by asking questions and using his highly developed memory and listening skills. “Until I took the course one year ago, it was torture to look something up in the dictionary r telephone book. It didn’t make sense,” he says “I was labeled disruptive because I was always talking to classmates to get information. It was like I was being taught in Russian. I went through most of my life finding ways to get by, reading things three or four times to eventually understand it.” His self-esteem, he says, was bolstered by excelling n sports. “When it was recess, when teams were being picked, I was always the first one picked, so I had that satisfaction. If I didn’t, I would have found myself in the very same situation,” he says, referring to Daniel and Matthew.

“Four, five days with Sue (learning the Davis method) was a 360-degree turn, then another 360, It was just, ‘Wow!’ Everything came together.”

“This thing really rears its ugly head at the end of Grade 3 or 4,” says Scott. “That’s when they reach a place where they’re just ready to tear their hair out and don’t know what to do. I could see that clearly with my son. I could clearly see it wasn’t going to matter how good a parent I was or what I did, his self-esteem was going to be severely affected. We were headed for drugs and alcohol and a life where Daniel would be struggling to fit in, no matter where.”

“You can just imagine the number of kids swept into this river and rushed downstream into a life of Ritalin and other drugs because ADD and ADHD may actually be dyslexics.”

“I would say, if you’re a parent and you know and have always know, that you have a bright, intelligent, loving, caring child who fro some reason isn’t making it in school in reading, writing and spelling, and you’ve put him through different assessments and can’t put a finger on it, and you know you’re a good parent, have them assessed for dyslexia,” says Scott.