Any dyslexia success stories?

<p>I’m looking for a little encouragement.</p>

<p>My daughter is severely dyslexic. She is in fifth grade but reads at a mid-second-grade level. Her reading is laborious, with lots of pauses and mispronunciations, and her writing can be very hard to read, with lots of inventive spelling and oddly-formed letters.</p>

<p>The good news is that she is really bright in every other way. She has a big vocabulary and a sparkling wit (if I do say so myself). She grasps mathematical concepts just fine. She also has the patience to muddle for an hour through a homework assignment that would take her classmates fifteen minutes, perseverance that I hope will carry her far. I sure don’t have it, and neither does her academically accomplished older brother.</p>

<p>I keep hoping that one day she’ll magically improve, but instead it just continues to be a long, slow grind to attain each little, incremental improvement. And if those improvements aren’t continuously reinforced, she regresses. It’s tiring.</p>

<p>My son gets these mailings from Texas A&M Galveston, where all the majors are marine-related. I show them to my daughter, and she says she would love to become a marine biologist and get to play with dolphins. I want to dream of her achieving such a goal, but I am afraid that her disability will hold her back.</p>

<p>So, I’m looking for good news. Is anyone here severely dyslexic, or have a child who is, who has gone on to graduate from college and have an enjoyable career in spite of it? Also, she is in the appropriate special-ed programs, but I wouldn’t be discussing it here if your suggestions weren’t welcome.</p>

<p>I don’t know how dyslexic my friend was, but he almost repeated 3rd grade because he couldn’t read. He eventually was an econ major at Harvard, graduated summa cum laude, went to med school and is now a successful doctor.</p>

<p>Look into some of the newer adaptive technology, too. The voice recognition stuff is getting much better now. When she is working on content it can read to her and she can speak into it to have it translate to writing. It can relieve some of the tedium. </p>

<p>The challenge with kids like this is that their minds are way ahead of their reading. You do not want to lose them while they work it out.</p>

<p>Mantori, my youngest is/was about where your’s is at the same point in life. Unfortunately he is in high school so not in college yet. He’s a high IQ (not Mensa high but high) and severely dyslexic. Interestingly he would make these quantum leaps over a short period of time then no gains for awhile all through elementary school, then quantum leaps again. We had him reading about 50th percentile by 8th grade. We did not focus on writing and he entered 6th grade writing about 3rd grade level but again with concentration on that he made spurts of progress. One thing that will help immensely is the concentration, drive and focus. This son has far more study skills, drive and ability to persevere than his two older brothers (with no LDs) ever had. His comphrehension and ability to verbalize everything he hears and reads is just fine. He does take college prep curriculum (we have no honors at our school) and has a 3.97 with no accomodations currently except for help editing his writing by the teachers (no accomodation for content). He has not yet tackled an AP class and I don’t know whether he will or not. He studies twice as long because he does everything slower in the very same classes with the very same teachers his brothers had. I wasn’t going to seek accomodations for him on the ACT, but decided I would as clearly he is smart enough for college and I want him to have every opportunity to go to a school that will fit him and I want the ACT to reflect his comphrehension and retention, not his “slow speed.” Remember, in college, the kids are in classes not that many hours of the day which leaves lots of hours for the “slower” kids to get the work done. Keep the faith. It’s a different world after two kids that were reading before kindergarten.</p>

<p>My younger daughter didn’t know letter sounds in third grade.
She was never identified as dyslexic because then the district would have to implement specific techniques that might actually be helpful.
I agree that there is great support technology for learning differences- and also would add that of the several biology profs/instructors I have met- most I suspect have some sort of learning difference themselves and so are more flexible than you would think.</p>

<p>Have you tried Lindamood Bell? It is an amazing program. It has to be delivered at one of their centers though…don’t let someone tell you they are LMB trained.</p>

<p>I have known some amazing success stories, and I have known parents that move somewhere for the summer so that their child can do the program. I personally know one child whose reading level went from the second to the fifth grade level in three weeks. I highly recommend the program.</p>

<p><a href=“Lindamood-Bell Instruction for Reading & Comprehension”>Lindamood-Bell Instruction for Reading & Comprehension;

<p>Emerald, my second son was not a phonetic learner. He had to learn to read visually. Thankfully, his first teacher picked that up and went forth from there. I don’t think it is an LD, but schools teach phonetically these days the kids that learn to read visually are disadvantaged, especially if the teachers don’t pick up on it.</p>

<p>S had an unspecified combo of dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADD and other LDs that was severe enough for him to repeat third grade.</p>

<p>He just graduated college in three years and is working in a field that he loves.</p>

<p>I wish I had a magic secret I could share with you, but at least it does seem to get easier as the kids get older. For us, those late elementary school years were the most frustrating in terms of translating the intelligence inside his head into a form that school recognized.</p>

<p>Is there any way your D can get involved with marine biology a little bit now? A local aquarium or something?</p>

<p>Look into a book called “The Gift of Dyslexia.” The davis method outlined in the book made a reader out of my non-reading child in a week! No joke. My father, who is also dyslexic and was a non-reader then went and saw the same tutor for week. You should see it when a 60 year old man starts to be able to read for the first time in his life. Can’t get his nose out of a book, these days. For our family it was fantastic. :)</p>

<p>Oh, yeah, and I forgot…D just started college this year. graduated high school with high honors.</p>

<p>Here’s a list of [famous</a> dyslexics.](<a href=“http://www.dyslexia.com/famous.htm]famous”>http://www.dyslexia.com/famous.htm)</p>

<p>My nephew, who is now 30 something, is dyslexic and is a working engineer; college took him longer, but mainly due to working full time and putting himself through. He graduated, got a job out of school and has passed all his state board exams on the first try.</p>

<p>I do not know any details as to how they handled it, but I do know he is a strong math person!</p>

<p>m.s</p>

<p>It sounds like you are still in good shape, it sounds like your daughter hasn’t become discouraged. My DW is dyslexic and wasn’t diagnosed until much later - after she developed self-defeating negative attitudes towards herself and her skills. Much harder to fight once you go there.</p>

<p>You sound like you are doing the right thing - being encouraging, as often the frustration of parents is the start of the negative attitude in the child.</p>

<p>I take it that you are not satisfied with the special ed help you are receiving through your school and are asking here for ideas. Make sure you keep pushing your school for better. You do not have to be satisfied with their offering and can demand more. It is in your rights to not approve their ideas for an IEP. But you do need to bring ideas to them. </p>

<p>A little encouragement - My DW works as an instructional assistant in the local public school system. She has spent most of her career in special ed, but believe it or not was very successful a couple of years ago running a supplemental computer-based reading skills lab for kids who were struggling with reading (until the district cut the program) - not bad for a dyslexic.
I think the best tools for helping dyslexics are the ones that work to the child’s strengths to compliment the “decoding” of written language. The “aural” learner may benefit from listening to what s/he is reading, for example. </p>

<p>I would seek external professional diagnostics for the best advice. You might find a good psychologist for a referral. Learning specialists are generally well-networked and know who can do an honest assessment of her learning level and more importantly “how” she decodes language.</p>

<p>Most importantly, as a parent, you need to understand how any proscribed “program” is supposed to work, so you can observe to what degree it is hitting its target and so you can be a part of the solution. It is important for a child to know that their parents are involved in this important part of their development and are sensitive to their vulnerability.</p>

<p>Most importantly, your window of opportunity (to keep your daughter on the same page as you) will close soon. She is fast approaching the age where peers become more influential on their self-image and tweens can be very insensitive to a kid struggling with what appears to be easy work.</p>

<p>You might find posting on the learning differences subforum yields even more stories.
My husband is bright and dyslexic, and so is our daughter.
My husband is a successful lawyer despite very serious struggles in elementary school. Reading slowly and carefully as a corporate lawyer is just fine…he bills by the hour!
Our approach with our daughter has been to intensively remediate weaker areas and at the same time, give her opportunities to develop her strengths. We talk a lot about how as an adult, what really matters is what you are good at and passionate about.
Your daughter’s tenacity will get her through.</p>

<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>

<p>The best way students can get around disabilities like the ones mentioned are to instead of actually learning how to read, Simply create a database in your head of word matched to pronunciation. It may not be the best way, or the right way, but it works. If they are having trouble with math, tell them they need to always check over there work, only after going over another problem first.</p>

<p>I don’t know how severe the dyslexia is, but here’s another story:</p>

<p>[Atlanta</a> Metro News | ajc.com](<a href=“http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/05/23/grad0523.html]Atlanta”>http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/05/23/grad0523.html)</p>

<p>In Atlanta, we are blessed to have several outstanding private schools for children with language based learning disabilities and dyslexia. Most students attend only two years or so but learn outstanding coping mechanisms and make great gains. Do you have anything like that?</p>

<p>My husband and I have invested heavily in the early education of our middle school child. While the public schools may be great at many things, educating children with dyslexia is generally not one of them. He doesn’t have much in terms of college savings but we have insured that he can be successful once he gets there with some ease.</p>

<p>While he was in public school, we used tutors from the above mentioned private school. He made incredible gains. I know many other families who have done the same and have the same experience.</p>

<p>What private resources have you tapped into?</p>

<p>What a supportive community this is! So many thoughtful replies and suggestions! I won’t be able to properly read through them until tonight, but thank you all so much. I’ll have more to say then.</p>

<p>Yes. If there is one thing I can say for sure, after attending a seminar about kids with LD, which I thought was about how to HELP them…the public schools are strapped for funds, and while as PEOPLE, the teachers really do want to help, they are very much encouraged and taught HOW to deny services wherever they can. The more you can offer to do yourself, the better. For example, D uses technology because of writing issues, and the school was very resistant to that…A friend suggested that they didn’t want to pay for the computer and I was like, “WHY would they have to PAY???” It hadn’t crossed my mind. When we went back, with the computer in our hands, and said, “This is what we want her to use,” it was immediately put into the IEP.</p>

<p>Also, never sign an IEP or 504 until you’ve looked it over at home and had a cooling off period and had a chance to sit down with her and ask if “this is everything, everything” you need? In the final analysis, the kids really do know the best what it is they need.</p>

<p>But, the more you can do privately, the better off she will be. (I know, advicey, but some things I wish I’d known earlier :))</p>