Dyslexia Fact Sheet

It's been a challenging start to a new decade but this is a Blog about keeping things positive and looking for ways to make things better for all our children.  Let's start the year with some fact sheets from understood.org that have basic information about various learning and thinking differences.  Share these posters with teachers, family members, and friends.  

I was going to include all six fact sheets in one post but realized that that would be too overwhelming for all of us (writer and reader!).  So let's do just one each week.  

I've included the link to the PDF for the fact sheet in the title of the section. Sidebar - I love it when I find a typo in these professionally produced illustrations.  Can you spot the typo in this first one?  (Corrine - you'll find it right away).

DYSLEXIA

Famous People with Dyslexia

1. Jennifer Aniston - Aniston didn’t know she was dyslexic until she was in her 20s. She says finding out explained why it was so hard to read back in school and why she chose the role of class clown over teacher’s pet. The diagnosis answered a lot of questions. "I felt like all my childhood trauma-dies, tragedies, dramas, were explained."
2. Steven Spielberg - The movie mogul has had his own close encounter with dyslexia, though he didn’t know until he was 60 that he had the disorder. Bullied as a kid, he struggled through school and dropped out of college in 1968. Since then, the famed filmmaker has fought back using the big screen. The Goonies, a cult classic he co-wrote and produced, reflects Spielberg’s teen years as a self-proclaimed “nerd” and “outsider.”
3. Whoopi Goldberg - class bullies called her “stupid.” The multi-talented Goldberg didn’t even find out she had dyslexia until well after she dropped out of school. 
4. Henry Winkler - Best known as “The Fonz” on Happy Days, this actor-turned-author was always one to improvise on the set. Winkler confesses his trouble reading was a big reason for going off-script. He says dyslexia also taught him kindness. You can see that when he talks about Hank Zipzer, “world’s greatest underachiever” and the main character in the children’s books he’s written about dyslexia.
5. Richard Branson - The head of his high school predicted this British entrepreneur would end up in prison or become a millionaire. Try billionaire, with a “b,” many times over. Branson says dyslexia and what he describes as “a different way of thinking” have helped him succeed. Branson stars in a 2012 movie called The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia. 
   
6. Jay Leno - The comedian and former host of The Tonight Show says there wasn’t really a name for dyslexia when he was in high school -- everyone just told him to smarten up. It all turned around when a creative writing teacher suggested he put some of the funny stories he was always telling on paper. “That was the first time in my life I really focused on something.”
7. Danny Glover  didn’t get the acting bug until his late 20s, and he didn’t know he was dyslexic until he was 30. Not having a diagnosis back then he felt “unworthy to learn.” But Glover found an escape in acting, which, he says, “gave me a way of expressing some of that inner life that was raging inside of me.”
8. Kiera Knightley - Dyslexia was both the carrot and the stick for this British-born Academy Award nominee. Getting good grades earned her time on stage, so she was eager to please. Behind the scenes, though, some classmates were just as eager to tease. “It’s amazing what a child calling you stupid would do to make you read pretty quickly,” Knightley recalls. She says dyslexia has made her the actress she is today.

Dyslexia was not well understood until the late 20th century. Even today it can be hard for doctors to diagnose. Given what we know now, many famous people may have had dyslexia, including Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Teresa, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison.

As I read the mini-bios of the eight personalities I was saddened by the similarity of their stories - feeling less than positive about themselves, being bullied, not knowing about dyslexia until later in life, and the feeling of relief once they did know.  It's so important to follow up on your instincts if you suspect a child you know and love might be having trouble because of this learning difference.  

 

Finally, sometimes identifying with a character in a book can be helpful.  Check out these books that feature characters with dyslexia or ADHD.

Understood.org has over 525 links to searches about dyslexia on its website.  If you're having trouble filtering where to start, what to read, send me an email (gerriestorr@rogers.com) and I'll try to help.  

And really finally - this cartoon doesn't get it; dyslexia is not about reading words backwards.