One of her sons, Cooper, is severely dyslexic. He was expelled from 3 preschools. The teachers said he was difficult to understand and couldn’t communicate. She’d always get called to the office because he wouldn’t listen or he would sit there and draw lines. She didn't know what to do, so she went to experts to figure out what was wrong. What was Cooper’s 1st diagnosis? ADHD. If you can’t process your native language, people see it as an attention problem. So, they medicated him at age 4. Within 6 weeks it wasn’t making a difference so they took him off medication. His teachers didn’t like that, and he was expelled from his 3rd preschool.
At 4 ½ years old, his preschool teacher told him he would have something called dyslexia. He’s smart, but doesn’t compute and follow directions. The teacher encouraged her to see the first 10 doctors – adenoid doctor, tonsils doctor, psychologists, a few psychiatrists, ear, throat, etc. They spent a ton of money. People would tell her, “He’s just not ready” or “He’s a boy” or “It’ll click one day” (all things I’ve been told). But, it wasn’t until he threw up every single day of first grade, while at school, that she knew he needed intervention. 15% of Cooper’s body weight was gone. He had 2 exploratory surgeries. Once they started intervention, the throwing up stopped.
She worked with Cooper every day for four years. Private schools wouldn’t take him. She would go up to the public school and work with him in the hallway or library, during school. You shouldn't "punish" children by making them work even more after school. Early intervention is best. And if it’s intensive, kids will flourish.
In high school, she “paid” another boy in Cooper’s class with pizza, so he would come over after school and go over his notes with Cooper. Eventually, he learned how to thrive by listening to books or lectures. He became extremely good at math and was given a drafting calculator because he was good at head math. Calculators are key for dyslexic children. They found an advanced math teacher to tutor him. He took trigonometry in high school, graduated from a university, and now she still feels that he is still destined to be a scientist one day.
Dyslexia is inherited. Cooper's mom (the one telling this story) is dyslexic. She guessed on her SAT, but she got caught, as it was the lowest score in her entire high school. The second time she took her SAT, she cheated. Just hearing her personal dyslexic stories was inspiring to me.
Cooper's older brother has it, but it's much milder. He has some spelling problems with words like "does" or "because", but he was always tagged as lazy. In his senior year in high school, he had to write a 37-page paper and he wouldn’t let his mom read it before he turned in his first draft to the teacher. He spelled "does" wrong. He spelled "dose" instead. Spell check didn’t pick it up because it’s a word too. The professor circled it on about every page of that entire paper and at the end wrote “Does??? Dose???” He came home and cried, saying, “I’m stupid”. Even though he graduated and is a marine biologist, he still has never gotten over “does”. He’ll say things like, “I don’t know how I got through college. I’m not that smart.” As his mom will tell you… he’s brilliant, but you never forget things like that.
The best part of sitting through the 3 hour seminar the other day was the speaker’s own personal story. I also learned a ton of other information that will help Jared (and hopefully others reading this), but I’ll post that in another blog entry soon.
Let us discern for ourselves what is right: let us learn together what is good. Job 34:4 (NIV)
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