Editor’s Note: This story is is the second in a series and details one local family’s struggle with dyslexia. October is National Dyslexia Awareness Month.

Was JT’s dyslexia problem solved?  No, just more time for understanding and hard work.

On to the hard work … for five six-hour days, during Christmas break 2009 in Huntsville, using the Davis Dyslexic Method, JT learned his letters and even mastered his hard words like “the, a, an and at.” He started with his ABCs and used clay to mold and make each letter.  

The capital letters were no problem, but the lowercase letters he had to make from “z to a” (so his brain would not automatically revert to the ABC song). This is where he discovered the difference between all the letters that had a “circle and a stick” such as letters a, b, d, g, p and q. He also finally got the “i” and “l” correct then discovered the “lmn” problem he had always had.   

All it took was just a different method, hands-on (visual and kinesthetic), for his dyslexic mind to grasp it. We were taught that dyslexics are great at visualizing or creating, so he needed a visual picture of words like “the, a, an, at” that have no visual picture.  (Visual pictures words would be dog, brown, jump).  

JT first defined the word in a dictionary which also showed the word being used in a sentence. Then he made up his own sentence such as “My hunting gun is propped up on THE shooting stick.” He now had a visual picture of what “the” meant.

Even to this day, when JT has to spell or write “the,” he says he still visualizes the word with his shooting stick sentence and clay creation.  

We were encouraged to continue this method for all the non-visual elementary school (DOLCHE) words and to start reading comic books as they used a lot of elementary words.

Understanding dyslexia took time. JT and I went through the questioning and blaming game, such as: Why when learning to read was he taught to just guess at the word and keep on reading, and then go back and replace the word until it made sense in the sentence?  Why when he wrote his b and d’s backwards (still in third grade), were we told he would grow out of it?  

I want to publicly apologize to all elementary teachers, as I “blamed” them for not catching JT’s dyslexia problem. But after a summer of researching dyslexia, I have discovered that the early education programs at universities do not teach dyslexia awareness for the pre-teachers to study.  

Until July 2007, Alabama grouped dyslexia under other learning disabilities, and many teachers were told they could not mention “dyslexic” as it had to be a medical diagnosis. The state changed its definition of learning disabilities to align with the federal definition, which specifically recognizes dyslexia. However, the dyslexia training for teachers in Alabama is very slow.

As of June 2009, nine states have statewide dyslexia laws, with four more states making their way through the legislature. Is Alabama anywhere close? See http://www.dys-add.com/myths.html#states.