My Dyslexia | Philip Schultz

Schultz says that growing up with dyslexia is "a form of exile." When he was in junior high in Rochester, his teacher sat him at the Dummy Table with two other students. They stayed there each day while the class went on. Occasionally, the teacher gave them a picture book to study.

Finally when he was fifty-eight years old, Schultz found out why he had so much trouble reading. It was after, despite the odds, he had gone on to university and became a poet. His son is diagnosed with dyslexia; as the boy's condition gets defined by his doctors, Schultz figures out it's been his own problem all along.

In my day, the main way of dealing with dyslexia --- the inability to read for people with so-called "normal" IQ --- was by labeling the child retarded, or by the cure-all from that era, a good whipping. My cousin Hans, my best friend when we were seven-years-old, was thus brought to heel by his father, Uncle Hans. He decided that the boy was not reading because he was contrary, or lazy, or maybe to make the family look bad. So Uncle Hans applied the belt to Hans' backside, liberally, to the point I suspect that my cousin made a decision early on: He decided to play stupid. His mouth started to hang open, he developed terrible posture, made dumb-cluck sounds. My other friends mocked him for being so slow. Chicken me: I certainly wasn't going to be out there defending Hans from the cruel world. We drifted apart.

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Schultz handled it differently. He dug in. He became tough. At his school, whenever his peers called him "dummy" or talked about how stupid he was, he beat up on them. He fought his way through the streets of Rochester and all the way through high school. He seemed destined to be a drop-out for the rest of his life until one day he discovered the novel that changed his life, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.

Here's the paradox, one that is not very well addressed by Schultz: he is dyslexic, which means he can barely read. And all of a sudden he is staying up two nights in a row to read a book from cover to cover. The only explanation he offers comes a series of quotes from a book called Overcoming Dyslexia: "we arrive in the world knowing how to speak, but reading is an acquired act, 'an invention that must be learned at a conscious level.'

It is the naturalness of speaking that makes reading so hard, a reader must "convert the print on the page into a linguistic code --- the phonetic code," and if he can't, these letters remain a blur devoid of any recognizable pattern, or meaning.

(As I was typing out these words my hands got shifted over to the left on the keyboard ... as they sometimes do ... so the words came out on the screen xibvcwet rgw oeubr ib rgw o fw ubri kubfyuarux xisw ... and suddenly I looked up from the keys and I was there with Schultz and his son and cousin Hans, for a moment not being able to figure out what these funny-looking curlicues were supposed to mean.)

The word "dyslexia" has been part of our vocabulary since 1887, but just defining it was not enough to help Hans or Schult. However, it has been an enormous benefit to those dyslexics who now, it is esrtimated, consist of at least five percent of the population. According to the author, the common problems are "terrible handwriting, misnaming items, low frustration tolerance for reading and most homework assignments."

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My Dyslexia suffers from a touch of attention deficit disorder towards the end when the author goes off on a riff about his poetry, quoting several pages of it, letting us know how many people have been moved by it. But this is a small matter for the book is a tribute to a person who bullied his way through his anger and frustration to make his own way, become successful at the very hard goal he set for himself. His discovery of falling in love with The Moviegoer is as good as the classic pages of discovering books in Richard Wright's Black Boy. My cousin Hans, unfortunately, chose another path. When no other school would accept him, he dug up a fundamentalist college that would. Over the five or six years he was there, he dutifully took their words to heart and spent the final years of his life fulminating against communists, liberals, and other ne'er-do-wells. Like me.