The unfair advantage of having dyslexia

An educator reflects on his experiences with this learning difficulty and how he learnt to work with incomplete information and draw inferences.

- Issac Lim

I was sacked from my school's prefect council in Primary 3. My form teacher asked me to walk to the front of the class and instructed me to remove my prefect tie. As I undid it, she told the class she would consider making me a prefect again if I changed my ways. Although this episode happened nearly 40 years ago, the humiliation still feels fresh.

My crime? Untidy handwriting. What also remains vivid from that day was a classmate who consoled me when I returned to my chair. Her empathy made a horrible situation bearable, and provided a comfort that has lasted a lifetime.

Yes, a lifetime. It turns out that I have dyslexia. This is a learning difference that is not something you grow out of, but adapt to. It has meant that I have always struggled with school tasks and have sometimes been branded unintelligent.

People with dyslexia have brains that process words on the written page differently. However, the problem is linguistic, not visual. When people without dyslexia read a word, their brains process the sounds of the letters (phonemes) and the written symbols (alphabets) instantly. There are 44 phonemes in the English language. When they see the word "bat", their brains quickly identify the sounds of the letters "b", "a", and "t" and blend them automatically. For us dyslexics, this process is much more circuitous. The meanings of words do not come automatically. We have to rely heavily on recognizing the overall shape of a word, contextual clues, or the big picture to guess the meanings.

I'm sharing my story to raise awareness, as October is World Dyslexia Awareness Month. In Singapore, it is estimated that 10 per cent of the population has dyslexia. In a class of 40, an average of three to four students could be dyslexic.

'MUST TRY TO IMPROVE'

Early identification is vital, but this was not around in my day.