In her book Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level, Sally Shaywitz says, …Dyslexia can infiltrate every aspect of a person’s life. It is often described as a hidden disability because it was thought to lack visible signs, but dyslexia is hidden only from those who do not have to live with it and suffer its effects (Shaywitz, 4). Shaywitz says further that dyslexic children are often misjudged on the level of intelligence due to the difficulty of reading.
For example, when a child’s progress seems impeded, the blame is usually set on sociological or educational issues. Even though the general public is more aware of dyslexia and its effects, not enough people recognize it in small children. Given the ‘normal’ issues teachers face on the preschool level, sometimes dyslexia will be diagnosed as something else pertaining to learning difficulty (e. g. attention deficit disorder). The purpose of this essay is to engage the reader in the different aspects of this unique condition.
It is not uncommon for dyslexic people to be seen as having an attention deficit disorder when the reality is that they are having difficulty seeing the letters the same way as the other children in the classroom. Some letters in a word are reversed or rearranged giving a preschool child an erroneous symbol for specific letters of the alphabet. Other issues accompanying letter distortion include poor organization and introversion due to the ‘difference’ realized in the mind of a dyslexic child. The word ‘dyslexia’ actually comes from a Greek word which means difficulty with words.
It includes a wide range of learning difficulties where a person of normal intelligence has persistent and significant problems with reading, writing, spelling and sometimes mathematics and musical notation (Hicks, www. bbc. co. uk/health ). It should be known that people in the past have associated poor parenting as a cause of dyslexia. This could not be further from the truth. Although a cause has not been pinned down yet, there are a number of ways to detect dyslexia in children and adults none of which has to do with the way they are treated. Some of these include phonics, letter identification, and even counting.