My grade one teacher, Mrs. Blue, wrote a comment on my report card, 'Leanne tries very hard but...' and advised my parents to have me tested at the children's hospital in Winnipeg.
Over fifty years later, this is my account of being assessed with dyslexia.
The Children’s Hospital
Dad parks the car. I hop out and wait for my parents. We walk together to a big building that's as square as a building block.
“What’s that sign say?” I ask.
“The first word is Children’s. The second word is Hospital. It’s a special hospital, only for children.” Mom explains.
Hospital? But I’m not sick.
Dad holds the door open, and Mom leads me to a room with chairs. Dad goes to talk to a woman behind a desk. Books, games, puzzles and stuffed toys are on a low shelf. I want to play, but I’m too worried about my parents. All day I’ve asked, “What’s wrong?” But they just tell me, “Nothing”—which I know is a lie. So I sit here waiting for… Who?
Tap, tap, tap. I hear his shoes, and then I see him. He’s tall with a friendly face. “Hello, Leanne.” He squats to look at me--eye-to-eye. “My name is George. Would you like to come and play with me?”
That sounds fun, but I look at my parents. How can I go play when they look so worried?
But mom says, “Leanne, go play with the nice man.”
I follow George into a small white room with a window. When I look out the window, all I see is a night sky. George invites me to sit at the table with him and gives me some Play-Dough. I like how it feels as I squeeze through my fingers. I make a long snake.
“How many brothers do you have?” George asks.
“Three.” I like talking about my family. “Rick, Randy and Keith.”
“Are you the youngest?”
“Nope. Sam is.”
He flips through some papers in a file, searching for information. “Who’s Sam?”
“My dog. She’s the youngest.”
He laughs, but not in a mean way. “I like dogs. Is she a little dog?”
“She was little, but then she grew and grew and grew and now she’s big.” I throw my arms out so George can see how big.
“Do you like living with your family? Are you happy?”
I quickly say, “Yes.” Taking more time to think, I change my answer to, “Not always. Like one time when all my brothers wanted to watch hockey on TV, and I wanted to watch my show. I wanted my mom to tell them to watch what I wanted to watch. But she didn’t. That made me really mad. So I marched into my bedroom and slammed the door. Later, when I’d cooled down, Mom came in to talk to me. She asked me why I got so mad, and so I told her. She told me that we all have to share the TV. She said that sometimes we watch what I want to watch, and sometimes we have to watch what someone else wants to watch. She asked me if that sounded fair. I said, yes. And then we hugged. I played in my room until it was bedtime. The next day, everyone watched what I wanted to watch.”
George is really easy to talk to. He listens not only with his ears but also with his eyes. When I finish my story, he picks up a pen and writes something.
“Do you like playing with blocks?” George replaces the Play-Dough with a pile of red and blue wooden building blocks. “What can you build?”
I make a tower by stacking two blocks and a house with three blocks.
“That’s neat,” he says, “Look what I can build.” He lines up four blocks end to end, sets two blocks on top of them and one block on the very top. “This is called a pyramid. Can you build one?”
“Sure, that’s easy.” I stack the blocks like he did.
“How about this?” He makes stairs.
I think I’ve stacked the blocks like he did, but George says, “Look closely. Is yours the same as mine?”
I’ve done it wrong. I’ve failed. And I know what happens when I fail. It’s like the papers I bring home without stickers and the report card that made Mom cry. And I worry that George will get mad at me like my teacher does. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“Hey, there’s no reason to be sorry. All I want you to do is try. I’m here to help you.”
That makes me feel better.
George turns a two-piece puzzle upside down on the table. The circle and square clatter out.
Putting the pieces back into the puzzle is so easy.
“Wow, you did that fast. You’re so smart. You need a harder puzzle.”
The more puzzles I do, the harder they get until they get too hard.
“Can we play with the Play-Dough again?” I ask.
George makes a bunny with long ears, and I roll the dough into a carrot and feed it to the bunny. Then I make a cookie as big as my hand. We play until George says, “It’s time to find your parents.”
Before we leave that room, George gives me a happy face sticker. “This is for being so smart,” he tells me.
My parents are waiting for me in a room that looks kind of like a living room. There’s a sofa but no TV.
“Look what I got.” I pull on my t-shirt so my parents can see the sticker.
“I had a lot of fun playing with Leanne,” George tells my parents. “She’s a smart girl. You should be very proud of her.”
My parents smile, but I can see that they’re still worried.
Mom almost whispers. “Is there a cure for her dys—, for her learning disability?”
“We don’t use labels here,” George tells her with a frown, like maybe he’s mad. “There’s no cure, but there are things you can do to help her.”
“Anything. We’ll do anything,” my parents say together.
“Do you enjoy reading?” George asks.
Dad always had a stack of books by his bed. Mom reads book after book after book. And they take turns reading to me. “Very much,” they say.
“Your good example will help,” George tells them. “And do what you can to build Leanne’s self-esteem. She needs to know that she is smart, capable and competent.”
We say goodbye to George and leave the building that looks like a block. We get into the car, and no one says anything until Mom mumbles something from the front seat. I listen carefully and hear her say, “It’s my fault. I should have known something was wrong. I should have… There must have been something I could have done.”
"You know, as they were talking about...about..." Dad stops talking, thinks a little and then says, "I kept thinking I had that. I had those problems. And it took me a while, but I excelled in school. I was too smart for my own good. And many of those things... I did many of those things."
I don’t know if they hear each other, but I hear them.
‘Dyslexia influences as many as 1 in 5 people and is a genetic difference in an individual’s ability to learn and process information. As a result, dyslexic individuals have differing abilities, with strengths in creative problem-solving and communication skills and challenges with spelling, reading and memorising facts.
Generally, a dyslexic cognitive profile will be uneven when compared to a neurotypical cognitive profile. This means that dyslexic individuals really do think differently.
Traditional benchmarking disadvantages dyslexics, measuring them against the very things they find challenging.’
“21st century definition of dyslexia”, Made by Dyslexia
‘No two people with dyslexia will look exactly alike in their symptoms and the manifestations of those symptoms. There are multiple symptoms, and they can range from mild to severe. The more severe the symptoms the earlier they will become apparent.’
“Learned Helplessness” Identifying The Symtoms of Dyslexia
by Tracy Block-Zaretsky, co-founder of the Dyslexia Training Institute
‘Having a child diagnosed with dyslexia can be a traumatic experience…
Parents...should seek out reading instruction that is based upon a
systematic and explicit understanding of language structure, including
phonics.’ “Dyslexia at a Glance”, The International Dyslexia Association
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Sunday, June 22
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Two Tricksters Find Friendship by Johnny Aitken and Jess Willows
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Sunday, June 29
My fingers
on my keyboard
My head
in the clouds
I relish
my days
