Re-Defining Success with Dyslexia

Those with physical, emotional, and mental challenges are granted the critical opportunity to re-define "success".  It is obvious why traditional expectations won't work, and efforts are rewarded by supportive, impressed, and deeply moved family/friends/teachers whenever someone with special needs reaches beyond their physical, emotional, and/or mental challenges.

Except for those with dyslexia.  Our challenge is not visible.  Nothing is missing; our physical, emotional, and mental development has been normal.  Too often family/friends/teachers look at us with confusion and irritation.  Why is reading such an issue?

Excellent question.  One that we ask ourselves all the time when we're struggling with written language or music scores. Why won't our brains kick in and interpret what our eyes are telling us?  There is no (apparent) physical reason why reading is so difficult.  So the alternative is that we're not trying hard enough, we're not practicing enough, we're not reading ahead enough.  It's GOT to be something that we're not doing, when in actuality the problem is neural wiring.  We lack that right-to-left brain transfer that occurs in children around 7-8 years old, the age when reading issues begin to become apparent.

And so, because we don't have any physical, emotional, or mental issues, we are not allowed a re-definition of reading success.  We are put into special classes, given special assignments, allowed extra time.  But the definition remains the same, and our reading ability is compared to those who have "normal" neural wiring.

Please, if you work with a dyslexic student, delete your definition of reading success and start with a blank slate.  Whether you are working with music reading or language reading, understand that those symbols do not magically start making sense to the dyslexic student in the same way as non-dyslexic students.  Understand that success may be the music student who has watched you draw treble clefs week after week for six months.  And at a lesson one day he/she looks at you and says, "I can do that," and draws a stick and a circle that, if you use a generous dose of imagination, could resemble a very surreal version of a treble clef.

But the fact that your dyslexic student has just demonstrated willingness to try, and saw the stick and the circle that creates the treble clef symbol ...
... THAT is success.