It's been well over six months since I've blogged anything. The ensuing months brought life-changing news concerning loved ones, broken bones, broken wallets, loss of much-loved pets and loss of dear, close friends.
During all the upheaval I continued to teach. I have several students who've been officially diagnosed with dyslexia. Kids who've been told what they can't do, why they "can't learn normally". They've been told they trend towards being hyper, have the focus ability of a gnat, demonstrate abnormal coordination issues. In truth their de-coding abilities are slower because their brains must re-rout to comprehend the input.
Why must students possess rapid de-coding abilites in order to be considered "normal" learners?
Dyslexic kids are brilliant. Their minds never stop, and every week their keen, unusual observations amaze me. Their enthusiasm, their progress despite their struggles have brought a smile to my face and happiness to my heart when I really wanted to just spend the day in bed. Watching their weekly lessons have also brought back memories of my own struggles as a child and my continued struggles as an adult who plays piano just fine but will never conquer reading issues.
These kids work harder than any "normal" thinking kid. They want the success. Badly. Too often they're working so hard their efforts become frantic because they're impatient with their brains. So I encourage them that it's okay to slow down and take their time, and I watch them think through which hand they need to use, which finger on which hand they need to play, which lateral direction to go on the keyboard when notes on the page are going vertically up and down. One student had issues seeing the pattern of two and three black keys on the keyboard, so I turned the three black keys into a "house" with a front door for "F", a back door for "B", and a roof in the middle. It created a visual image and solved the problem. Another student flips right and left all the time, so when this student starts playing a right-hand part with the left hand, I chuckle and say, "One more time with your other right hand." The resulting grin turns into a laugh, and my day is brighter. Rhythm issues are solved not by counting until I'm blue in the face but by chanting "half-note-DOT"; or "h-o-l-d" (for longer note values like whole notes); or "short-long" (for quarter/half-note rhythms); "quarter-dot-short" (for dotted quarter-eight rhythms). Rests are reinvented as "play-wait-play-wait" because they seem to process better the idea that "wait" means silence. I supposed "rest" also means silence, but in daily life resting isn't always quiet. Neither is waiting, but waiting includes (at least briefly) a command to pause, and so far that term works really well. Come to think about it, "rest" is actually a longer sounding word than "wait". There's four letter sounds, and for kids who already have decoding issues, cutting out excess sounds seems like a great idea.
None of this is in textbooks, classrooms, or online. It's things my old brain thinks up because it's easier for me to understand, and it seems to help the student. All of them are reading, all of them are playing hands together. And all of them are grinning when they leave their lesson.
And you know what? I'm grinning, too.
Very well written!
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