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My son is dyslexic; by the time he got to high school he had overcome the reading problems, but still had his dyslexic moments. He learned to spot when he had a teacher who was dyslexic as well, something teachers would tend to try to hide. He had an incredibly gifted high school math teacher and he knew the teacher was dyslexic because of frequent misspellings … but the guy knew his math and was able to easily offer multiple different explanations or strategies for any concept, so he was able to make difficult math comprehensible for all of his students. </p>
<p>I think we need to be careful about recognizing issues that truly go to competence or ignorance, and making fun of people for problems that are either the type of normal slip-ups that happen on occasion or are a manifestation of an issue that does not impair teaching. I mentioned Oliver Sacks above and I think it is beyond dispute that he is a brilliant man – but he also suffers from severe prosopagnosia (face blindness), and has written about it in his most recent book, because obviously it has caused embarrassment. For example, he could easily spend 45 minutes in consultation with a student one day, and then not recognize the same student the next. </p>
<p>My mom also had severe word retrieval issues – difficulty remembering common words - which was a running joke in our family. She always attributed it to a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, but my son had similar symptoms along with his dyslexia, so in hindsight I wonder if there is a genetic connection. Fortunately for my son, my upbringing prepared me to handle those word gaps in good graces. These are issues that can plague highly intelligent people and probably stem from temporary disruptions in neural connections --it’s kind of like having a powerful computer and database in the brain with a clunky indexing and search mechanism. </p>
<p>This stuff also tends to be more frequent with aging – we call it “senior moments” but it also seems to be a normal part of the aging process, that occurs simultaneously with the brain becoming more capable in other areas. Barbara Strauch wrote about this in her book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain – in our 50s on up, we find it harder to remember and retrieve names and details, but are much more astute at sizing up a situation and problem solving. </p>
<p>My kids certainly have had their share of bad teachers, but its a mistake to jump all over a teacher because of a slip of the tongue. There’s a difference between gross misinformation (like the teacher who said that the indians killed off the dinosaurs) – and a simple lapse or mistake. </p>
<p>I’d also point out that people who get a lot of their information through reading often make some very embarrassing errors of pronunciation, simply because English words aren’t always pronounced the way they look and sometimes the person’s first and most frequent exposure to some words is through reading. I include myself in that category – I read a lot as kid and sometimes failed to recognize words I heard as being the same as the ones I saw in print. I was probably in law school before it dawned on me that the word I heard as “in-dite” was the same as I saw in print and understood as “indict” (which I thought was pronounced “in-dikt”, kind of like the word “indicate”.) </p>
<p>So it really wouldn’t bother me too much if a non-Californian didn’t know how to pronounce “San Jose” or “Yosemite”. I’d also point out that the correct Spanish pronunciation of Los Angeles is NOT the pronunciation commonly used by Americans, including LA residents; and I was a little irked when my kids would “correct” me on my pronunciation of Cabrillo, which I pronounced Cah-bree-yo, but apparently is Ca-brill-oh to all the locals. I went to school in Berkeley which everyone pronounces as “Burk-lee” – but which actually is properly pronounced “Bark-lee”.</p>