Barber, 1

Dyslexia, the never-ending writer, and reader's block

Dyslexia is a cognitive/ learning disability that makes the afflicted have difficulty with

learning and performing, reading, writing, and spelling. Dyslexia affects around five to fifteen

percent of Americans, which comes out to roughly fourteen to forty-three million people in

America alone. (Society for Neuroscience). I am one of the millions of people afflicted by this

cognitive abnormality, and it has been the leading factor in shaping my literacy and learning.

From a young age, I struggled with reading in Munich, where I was born and went to a

bilingual kindergarten; when the teachers would have "quiet reading time" in either language, I

would either pretend to read or drop reading altogether for Legos or any other building toy.

Though I could speak in both English and German, I could not comprehend the little squiggles in

black that lay in front of me in either language. I could somewhat comprehend writing when in

singular, broken, apart, words, but fi teyh lalcame (note for future this is supposed to be like

this) together in a sentence, they began to meld. Though I loved learning about the world around

me, mainly mechanically and technologically complex systems, reading in any extended form

was a chore to me and was a boundary that I could not and eventually would not cross to find my

questions about the world answered. Though I knew the knowledge I sought so heavily after was

in the dreaded books, I could not bring myself to be able to read one and, for a long time,

couldn't read them at all anyway. So, if I wanted to know something, I'd usually ask my teachers

or someone else whether the question came in the form of; Wie sind Berge enstanden? Or how

do levers work? I had so many questions about the beautiful world I lived in but could not bring

myself to read about it.

Around the first grade, my family moved back to the U.S. With this change of curriculum

came the inkling in my parents' minds that I may be troubled by literary aspects. In Germany,
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kindergarten is considered more of an area for children to play and gather social skills, with

many not starting to truly learn any form of the subject until higher schooling. So, I was just seen

as an extremely energetic and social child who just needed more social time before starting his

learning. In my school in Germany, since I was inherently "forced" to read, I feel it also partially

stunted my growth in the subject. Once I hit the first grade in the U.S., this stunting of growth

and only being able to perform constructive, creative, and mathematical things became much

more of an issue. I was behind in everything but math and science. I struggled through first

grade, and in second grade, I was diagnosed with dyslexia. Following this diagnosis, my parents

found a school that could help me. It was and still is called the Hillside School. Hillside was a

smaller private school where kids would usually go for half a day while spending the other half

at a public/ main school. It had smaller classes of only four students, letting the teachers cater to

each student individually while also having open placements so any student could work at any

level they needed to. The school only focused on reading, writing, and math, leaving the rest to

the other main school students went to. Here I learned to spell by sounding out words and many

of the rules of the English language, most of which I can't recite any more. I learned to read more

fluently through learning to spell and hours of practice. Writing and grammar never fully came to

me though I would probably be utterly unable to do them otherwise without the school's help. I

spent two years going to Hillside before the public school system saw my reading and writing

proficiencies as barely passable in comparison to the standards for my age. I spent three years in

total at Hillside, and in sixth grade, I went back to school full-time, leaving Hillside.

Though this all sounds like a success story, I did have to make sacrifices to get to that

level. At the time, I was also trying to learn and keep up my German proficiency but was

struggling to learn two languages at the same time, so I stopped learning German. I still regret
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doing this, even though I know it was necessary for my success in English. I regret stopping my

learning of German because I am now astonishingly behind where I should be and have almost

become worse than when I first went to school in Germany.