Signs of Dyslexia – How would you know if someone is dyslexic?
Over my many years as an educator, I have often been asked by parents and teaching colleagues how would they know if a person is dyslexic.
Let me start where it started for me.
Long ago I met a man who was genuinely warm, funny, sensitive, compassionate, gentle, kind, and loving, and I fell in love with him, my soul mate, midway through our first date. Of course, I married him!
Soon after we were married, I started noticing little things as we began filling out written forms, writing checks, writing shopping lists, and writing cards to relatives and friends.
I noticed how he wrote with a mixture of capital and lowercase letters, with many letters reversed: notably “a”, “b”, “d”, “p”, “q”, “F”, “P”, “E”, as well as many numbers. I remember being rather surprised. I hadn’t known anyone who reversed so many letters.
As time went along, I became used to being the one who did the writing; filling out forms for us and writing personal notes in cards, so all he had to do was sign his name.
You might assume having only to sign his name would be quite simple, but the stress he feels to make all of the letters correctly causes him to make errors about 50% of the time.
To this day when he writes, he has a “death grip” on his pencil. He complains to me that his hand and arm hurt badly after just writing a few words. He often says that he has always felt that pain. Further, his writing contains many errors forcing him to start over—a cause of much frustration.
As you can imagine, his struggles in school began in Kindergarten. Unfortunately, he was retained in third grade. Emotionally he has never gotten over this feeling of failure. He often says, “If my teachers had just had your reading program when I was little, my whole life would have been different.”
Once at one of his class reunions, I met many of his high school teachers His most loved teacher said to him that evening, “Frank, I often think of you. You are brilliant. I didn’t know about dyslexia when you were in my class, but now I know you are dyslexic. You always got every question correct that you completed on a test, but you never completed a test. If I had just given you enough time to complete each test, you would have had perfect scores. I’m so sorry I didn’t do that for you!” It was good for him to hear those words even after so many years.
Today my husband is a highly skilled retired jet engine mechanic for the U.S. Air Force. During his training, he aced all of his practical tests but struggled completing the written exams. They were mostly multiple-choice tests.
He shared one exasperating testing experience. He was working on the written multiple-choice portion of an exam one day. His commanding officer was standing over his shoulder. “Frank,” he said, “what’s wrong? You know the answer. You just did everything perfectly in the cockpit.”
He did know which sentence contained the correct answer, but he was not able to visually line up the “a.”, “b.”, “c.”, and “d.” with the sentences that were the possible answer choices, so he didn’t know which letter to pick. He explained this to his commanding officer who encouraged him to do what he needed to do to line up the answers. He placed a piece of paper under the sentences so his brain would line them up.
Today my gifted husband is a river guide, a designer of custom-built homes, an amazing finish carpenter, a construction manager, and a pilot building a four-seater plane for our kids. Who would doubt his intelligence with his astounding vocabulary and abilities and success at everything he has turned his mind to? Yet all his life, he has had to work around and work with his dyslexia.
Even at home while reading to our children, he had to think to process what he was reading. I remember listening to him read to our kids every night, as he would cuddle them before bedtime. He read slowly but comprehended everything and used beautiful expression. They loved it, as did he.
My purpose for sharing these personal stories about my dyslexic husband is to help guide you in discovering possible signs of dyslexia in your family members and students.
Often times, the subtle signs of dyslexia are hard to pinpoint, even though they are right in front of us. As with my husband, some of the more obvious signs are:
· Ability to give intelligent clear articulate answers to oral questions.
· Need to read and reread until words are thoroughly decoded in order to comprehend what they are reading.
· Struggles with spelling.
· Struggles with writing.
· Letter and/or number reversals past the age of 9.
· Difficulty with multiple choice and true/false test formats but given as essay format with ample time or if given the option of an oral exam, will generally score very high.
Thoughts to keep in mind:
· People with dyslexia are extremely intelligent.
· Dyslexia is very individual in each dyslexic person. For instance, some dyslexics do not reverse letters.
I’m hoping that as you read this, it may explain experiences you’ve had with family members and students and that it may help you gain a new perspective on observations that you previously did not realize may actually have been signs of dyslexia.
I want to end by sharing that I’ve found living with a dyslexic person can have amusing moments. One time my husband and our son were off to a construction convention in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Before he left, my husband had written down their motel’s phone number in case I needed to reach him.
He called me each night to share what they had been learning, but on the last day, I decided to call him. To my shock, I reached a lady on the East coast. “Isn’t this a motel in Jackson Hole, Wyoming?” I asked.
“Oh, heaven’s no!” she said. “I live in South Carolina.”
“Wow. I’m trying to reach 555-555-5555.”
There was a long pause. “That’s so interesting,” she said. “That’s my phone number exactly reversed!”
“Well, that explains it.” I giggled. “My husband is dyslexic!”
If you are questioning whether someone in your life is dyslexic and you’re not sure what to do, feel free to contact us.
Linda Katherine Smith-Jones Nina Henson