<p>As someone who’s been living through the process of educating and guiding my son, I have some experience in this domain, but let me take a step back. My father-in-law was told he was stupid and never graduated from college but took an IQ test which showed him to have a high IQ. He was a very successful entrepreneur who built several companies and supported his extended family. Three of his four kids are dyslexic. One is a professor of biology at the University of Toronto. My wife is a pretty well-known artist. She never learned to write adequately but now loves reading. When she was in school, instead of telling her that she was dumb, they said, “You have such a high IQ, how come you aren’t trying?” She’s had a slow-building career but this year had a one-person show at a high-end gallery on 57th Street in NY this year and is being represented by another gallery next month in an international art fair. Museums and collectors buy her work.</p>
<p>My son has MENSA level IQ (just looked up their min and he’s well above) and is severely dyslexic. [Even that is tricky because they don’t think a full scale score is valid because he had a 50 point gap between Verbal and Performance IQ.] A neuropsychologist who saw my son’s 2nd grade WISC test results said, “We call kids like that severely gifted.” He was so obviously bright it was painful. But, he didn’t really learn to read until 3rd/4th grade. I remember that at the beginning of fourth grade, it took him an hour just to hand copy a paragraph and he was so exhausted that he couldn’t do anything else for the rest of the day. Even now, after years of remediation, he says that the page starts to get blurry after 20 minutes. He didn’t learn to write well until we set up a partial homeschooling program for him in HS and he also decided to compete in Moot Court. </p>
<p>The good news: He graduated between 3rd and 5th in his class of 300 from a very competitive, highly regarded public high school in the Boston area. He is a very goal-oriented kid and he knows that he has to work harder than everyone else and is willing to do so. In HS, his objective was to start each course with an A+ in the first quarter and then ask the teacher not to make him do the busywork. He knew he had to get high scores on the SAT/ACTs. He studied for a full three weeks taking tests and reviewing the results. He told me he would do well as a result but he surprised me. he got very high scores on SATs and ACTs (amazingly enough, with his accommodations, he got 99+ percentile on each part of the SATs). This contrasts with mid-forties percentile on ERBs (private middle school standardized tests) with no accommodations. He was exhausted by taking the SATs as reading and writing fatigue him, but he wanted a high score. He got into very good colleges (including Ivy and NESCAC schools). He’s working hard right now as a freshman at Amherst, in part because the audio versions of books haven’t all come in yet. But, it can be done. But, it won’t always be easy for him because he isn’t going down an engineering or science route. Lots of dyslexics become engineers to avoid the reading, but he likes bigthink and social sciences more than physical sciences.</p>
<p>We worked to get an IEP (they wanted to deny it in part because he was so bright). He had lots of attempts at remediation and lots of accommodations. I figured that HS was the worst possible place for a kid like him – to get into schools where the kids are as smart as he is, he couldn’t do badly at anything. My job was to get him through HS and hopefully guide him to a school that would be flexible enough to design a curriculum that would work for him. Once he is playing to his strengths, he’ll be successful in life. I agree with siliconvalleymom, tenacity is critical but it also needs to be linked to strategy. </p>
<p>He uses Dragon, [Download</a> Audio Books, iPod And Digital Audio Books | Downloadable Online Audio Books | Audible Audiobooks | Audible.com](<a href=“http://www.audible.com%5DDownload”>http://www.audible.com), Ghostreader or Kurzweil, [Recording</a> for the Blind & Dyslexic: Accessible Audiobooks for students with visual impairment, dyslexia or learning disabilities](<a href=“http://www.rfbd.org%5DRecording”>http://www.rfbd.org), etc. The school provides notetakers. He gets extra time on tests. He did Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Language, worked on his reading at Tufts, worked with various people on writing, … . I don’t know whether he could have learned to read with less fatigue if we’d gotten better help earlier. Could be.</p>
<p>So, I think I’ve given you a few examples of success at different levels. It wasn’t an easy road for any of them. I know of others (David Boies, the famous litigator; a friend who was the general counsel of a very large company; Richard Branson; Charles Schwab, …). Is that what you had in mind?</p>