Black Ram Farm

Musings from Rural Vermont

lysdexia is no joek

Posted by blackramfarm on May 29, 2008

my sheep don\'t careI am goint to write this post just the way i would if there wasn’t spell check.  It will drive Lilli crazy.  she is a freind of mine that is a good speller, which really bugs me because she is Swiss and shold’t be such a good speller in english, but she is.  she reads my blog every day and tells me when I have missed a word. she will have a spazz after she gets through this.

computors didn’t realy come in to my shcool scene much before my senior year in collage.  Even then, there was a comptuer lab that we had to sign up to use and there wasn’t spell check. Spell check is great if you get the work spelled wrong, but if you manage to put the wrong word in and you spell it right, then you are hosed.  you don’t knwo you put it in wrong.

I got throughth high school by paying the scoool scretatry to proff my papers and fix the typos and spelling erros.  It worked but was expensive.  In college I did the same thing.  I wrote the dang things, but then paied throught the nose to have it edited.

I graduated 2nd in my class with a 3.98 gpa.   go figgure.  I still cant spell, and here is the proof.

I am really dyslexic, which means that my brain is organized a bit differtently then most peolpe.  As wyou can see I can misspell basic words.  I am pretty articulate and gregarious, so people who don’t really know me think that I normal.  What they don’t see is how much I struggle to get the words right when I wright.  When I thell folks that I am dyslexic thay ask if I have problems reading.  I dont’.  I read all of the time, several book are stacked by my bed and I swithch off.   Right now I am reading the holly bibble,  genisis again.  I try to read throght it every couple of years.   I am also reading an american tragidy and the registrer fof the vermont merino association, published in 1879.   it is stacked ontop of my copy of womens work the first 20 thousand years and the prasie of folly and other papers by bliss perry.

Bliss was a step great grandfather.  he was the editor of the Atlantic and wrote a ton of books.  There are a bunch of wrtiters in my family,  cousin Krissy is really anne stuart, the romance novel writer.  my othre cuousin audrey has wrtitten a bunch of boodks about authors.  She teaches down in atlanta. both my mother and step father were teachers.   my step grandfather was teh headmaster at milton academy.   I couln’t cut it there acadmeically.  I went to academy  andover nh.  best thing that ever happend to me.

there they tought us how to think.  why waist time in trying to fix something that was ntever broken, just configured differetly.  use your time to get the end product correct in the best manner.  I am able to come off as confident in speaking to folks becuase it is an adaptation to not being able to spell.   I pracitce at writing all the tiem, but speeling is a flook.  i spell my name wrong alll of the time.   so it had nothing to do with if I know the word or knot, it has to do with the connection between my symbolic memory and my fine muscle recall and my ablitiy to recognize the error in print.    it is ot jeok.   it is no joke.  this is really how i write.

I have gooten used to it.  the sheep don’t care.

5 Responses to “lysdexia is no joek”

  1. Hi Kim,

    I had problems with patterns too. Friends around me sometimes say my dyslexia is catching when they are having problems, I think they are green with envy of the way I think:) Thanks for the post.
    Alexandra

  2. Kim said

    I pretended I could read when I was a little girl and was terrified someone would find out. It’s not the same as being dislexic I know. I have it to a small degree though. I also have trouble seeing patterns, I seem to see them in reverse or something which was stressfull when doing the pattern drawing course a few years ago.

    Dislexia is nothing to do with intelligence. I thought your post most charming!

  3. Lilli, there is always more then one way to spell a word, the question is which way is accepted, for example colour and color, def and deaf. I absolutely hate absolutes :)

    Becky, my grandmother was dyslexic, then me and one of my daughters. We all think outside the box, and completely get each others humor. Generally it runs on the male side of families, but lucky us.

  4. Becky said

    My kids are all dyslexic. My husband is, too. I’m not. It does make it harder to teach people to learn to read, etc. their minds really do work differently. One friend says, “Emma thinks outside the box. Chris says, ‘There’s a box?’” I enjoy them very much.

  5. Lili said

    You just made my week! Reading your blog today, I was laughing so hard, I was (figuratively speaking) rolling in spasms on the floor.
    I will be chuckling to myself all day, everybody at work will think I, finally, have gone completely nuts!!
    You know, of course, that I love you, whether you can spell a word correctly or not. To me, being a good speller is not a defining character trait in a person.
    See, my brain just works different: just like there is only one correct answer to the equation 2+2, there is only one correct way to spell a word. So there you have it, Lili in a nutshell.

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