When her eldest daughter Emily was in her first years of elementary school, Jane Crooks was mystified about why she would bring home stacks and stacks of homework daily.
“When there was a spelling test on Friday, we worked on the words,” recalls her Mom in the family home in the new section of Old Meadowvale Village. She pauses a second for emphasis. “It was the most painful thing you ever want to go through.”
Emily was obviously bright but she was getting Ds in reading and writing. A succession of teachers at St. Richards, St. Albert of Jerusalem, St. Barbara and St. Julia suggested she wasn’t applying herself enough, but Mum knew best. There was a bigger issue.
A little research on the Internet and Crooks had a potential diagnosis of dyslexia.
An assessment by a woman in Oakville named Cathy Dodge Smith, who works using a special program developed by dyslexic American Ron Davis, confirmed Emily had the condition, often described as a learning disability.
Tonight, a confident 14-year-old Emily, now getting good marks in Grade 8, will meet Ron Davis for the second time. She will give her speech about dyslexia – the one that won the school contest and took her to the regional finals – and she will close it with her trademark trick: reciting the alphabet backwards.
In an interview after school yesterday at her home, Emily explained how she came to stop regarding dyslexia as a problem and started thinking of it as a gift.
Dyslexics have the ultimate visual learning style. As Emily explains in her speech, for dyslexics, “letters appear to be backwards, upside down, sideways, moving around or even floating in the air.”
That creates pure terror when they are asked to read aloud because they do not have the advantage of being able to “sound out” words. And the toughest words are often the shortest ones. That’s why Emily had to bring everything home from school to try to figure out what it meant.
Davis, a dyslexic himself, was age 38 when he came up with his own system of using the ability of dyslexics to think in pictures to their own advantage, by creating symbols for about 200 “trigger words” that give people the most problems.
When Emily sat down with her facilitator in Grade 4 for a week of work, they tackled the word “the” first. They looked up the meaning in the dictionary, Emily spelled it backwards and forwards, and they each used 10 examples of sentences with the word.
Then Emily took out the modelling clay and used one of those sentences to create the “trigger” that would shoot the daylights out of her problem with “the” every time she met it again. She modelled a man standing underneath a shower to symbolize the sentence “In The Shower.” Now, unconsciously, that trigger clicks in every time she sees the word. Within a few days of starting the program, her reading was markedly improved.
She and her Mum developed the other trigger words in days and days of review.
Tonight from 7-9 p.m. at the Mississauga Convention Centre on Derry Rd. W., Davis, who eventually became an engineer, author and sculptor will explain how he developed his method and why he thinks it should be in much broader use.
Emily, who would one day like to get into film-editing or something else very creative, says people underestimate, “all of the good things about dyslexia.” It helps her designing and executing assignments at school, like the xylophone she made for music class which earned an ‘A.’
When the math teacher asks student to manipulate shapes in their minds to figure out all the angles in geometry, Emily is always the first one with the answer.
In fact, some of the greatest artists and inventors in the world used their dyslexia to their advantage, people like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso (that explains a lot) and Thomas Edison.
Not bad company at all for Emily.