It all started 25 years ago when Araceli Salas, a teacher and educator, noticed certain strange behaviors in Samuel, the youngest of her two children, a very happy boy until he went to school. He started biting his nails, behaving very differently at school and on vacations, showing very low self-esteem. At the age of six he had myriad physical symptoms, headaches, contractures, migraines, all products of the tension generated by the colossal effort he had to make going to class, an effort for the worse, with no result. When the boy was nine, Araceli began desperately — “I saw that Samuel was sinking” — to seek a diagnosis in Mallorca, the island where he lives. Luckily, since it was hardly talked about at the time, he met a good psychologist and got the answer. “I told Samuel we already know what’s going on with you: you have dyslexia. Ah, so I’m not stupid? he replied. No, you just have a different way of learning things.”
Dyslexia is not a disease. It’s a specific neurological structure, a different way of processing information. And it consists not only of literacy problems (recognizing characters, associating those characters with their sound), but can also involve short-term memory difficulties, spatiotemporal conflicts, problems of understanding and organization, or right-left confusion. Every dyslexic, on the other hand, is unique. And they are plentiful: they make up between 10% and 15% of the population. Most undiagnosed. Many are now discovering with their children’s dyslexia that they have it too, as was the case with Samuel’s father, who fell from the cherry tree and understood the reason for many of the things that happened to him. Crushed by the iron rule of supposed and lying normality, all these natural differences in humans were and are the source of much pain.
Dyslexia in particular has devastating consequences as it hinders or prevents learning in an education system that is literate like ours. On the other hand, since they are children of normal or higher intelligence, they come to school and become depressed and anxious because they realize that what is very easy for others is like Chinese lessons for them. “He’s very clumsy, he’s lazy, he’s intelligent but lazy, he needs to try harder, he seems stupid…”. These themes are still common. Poisonous words that corrode the spirit, that corrode self-esteem, that lead to defeat, suffering and even self-loathing.
“Dyslexia is a thief of childhood,” says Araceli beautifully, that wonderful warrior Araceli who discovered 21 years ago after her son’s diagnosis that there was no legislation in Spain and that there was very little knowledge among teachers. He studied, consulted, researched and in 2002 he founded DISFAM, the first association of Spanish speaking families of dyslexics (later a federation, FEDIS, was also founded). Under the threat of going into Strasbourg and denouncing the problem (“although I didn’t even know where Strasbourg was, I turned a blind eye”), he managed to get DEAs (specific learning disabilities) officially recognized in education law, and the thing began to be taken seriously. .
But much remains to be done and the consequences of not doing so can be very serious. Official US figures show that 60% of prisoners are functionally illiterate and between 30% and 60% of incarcerated young people have AEDs. It’s a vicious cycle: you can’t learn, others laugh at you, you feel humiliated and useless, the system spits on you, and you end up on the sidelines. And yet it would be so easy to avoid! It would be enough to use new technologies, reading programs that convert text into speech. It would be enough to educate educators to know what these special needs are. It would be enough for society to understand. Einstein, Pierre Curie, Newton, Mozart, Galileo, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, they all were or are dyslexic. Normal doesn’t exist. You have to respect the difference.
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