Putting this in context at the start - My husband and I are both retired educators and we unschool/homeschool our teenage children (daughter, age 17, and son, age 14). This is not for religious reasons, although in Texas you might not want your children exposed to the religious ideas actively promoted in public schools. My children have dyslexia. Both attended public elementary school. We quickly discovered that there was something fishy going on, but it wasn't until the summer before my daughter entered 3rd grade, that she was officially diagnosed with dyslexia at the Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas.

Before we go further, I need to define dyslexia. In the last ten years there have been tremendous advances in our scientific understanding of dyslexia, but the public at large, and still most educators, do not understand what it is. Defining dyslexia in very simple terms:

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is not a deformity. It does not make you see things backwards. It is a brain style. Probably about half of us have this brain. (After I learned about dyslexia and while I was still teaching, I counted the number of students in my classes who had dyslexic learning styles. There were 53 out of 114.) Dyslexic persons are right-brained individuals whose brains do not convert symbols to sounds. It has nothing to with vision. It is auditory, but not related to hearing. The section on the left side of the brain that takes the text you see, and matches it to phonetic sounds, does not work. However, the right hemisphere of the brain in dyslexics is larger than the left, and larger than those without dyslexia. It is simply a brain style. Everyone is either right-brained, left-brained, or somewhere in between.

The degree to which a right-brained/dyslexic person will have difficulty with reading varies. All will read slower, but some will mostly have trouble reading at the beginning. They won't be in the first reading group. And although dyslexia will mess things up for them for the rest of their lives, they probably won't know they are dyslexic because they have been able to get by. I am personally in this category. It wasn't until after I learned about dyslexia with my children that I was able to look back on my life and see the reason for so many quirky things. I confuse left and right, could read music but didn't know the letter names of notes, can't do solfege, my reading slows way down in unfamiliar literature, naturally disorganized, etc. That's dyslexia light. On the other end of the scale, profound dyslexia will inhibit useful reading skills into high school and sometimes adulthood.

And this brain style really never starts converting symbols to sounds. There are some reading strategies based on the Orton-Gillingham Method, that teach phonemes. Those are the sounds that are the building blocks of phonetics. (If you haven't caught on to this by now, phonetic reading methods do not work with dyslexic children.) Scientists know that right-brained/dyslexic individuals store words as pictures in the general memory area in the front part of the brain. Left-brained people store words like text files in the lower left rear section. I have never actually read anywhere that scientists know exactly how the picture words come to be stored in dyslexic people. As cool as the Orton-Gillingham method is because it helps students with the function of reading, it does not guarantee that the words read will be stored. This means that they can physically read but there is no reading comprehension.

It almost seems like magic . . . once a dyslexic has enough stored words . . . Poof! They can read! Both of my kids hit that mark at the end of seventh grade. My daughter became a reading machine, the walls of her bedroom now covered with bookshelves and books. There is a catch, however. She has the sufficient number of appropriate words stored to read and enjoy books of the teenage/vampire/romance genre. But does she want to read her history book? No! There are too many words that are not stored and require decoding. At my last teaching job, I discussed this with my principal and he said, "OMG, that is why I can read the sports page of the newspaper with no problem, but other reading is very slow for me!" He had been a coach and an athletic director, with consequently a great collection of stored athletic terminology. My son's reading skills are still not that useful. He can read most things, but it is not enjoyable. Plus he always needs to read carefully. My theory is that in his case, his collection of stored words is less focused and more general.

Tragically, yes tragically most educators and even those who specialize in dyslexia do not have this information. No other area of educational pedagogy has been cursed with more misinformation. We all know about this because everyone has always thought that dyslexic people see backwards. Most still believe that to be true. Teachers in Texas try to help dyslexic kids by putting colored transparencies over their textbooks. Yikes!

Why is everyone ignorant about dyslexia? At this stage, it isn't completely anyone's fault. The science is new. It is little more than ten years ago that Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale University ( http://dyslexia.yale.edu ) published her groundbreaking work in her book Overcoming Dyslexia. For the first time they were able to take functional MRIs of children while reading. Scientists compared those who read without difficulty, to those who were diagnosed with dyslexia. They could see the heat of brain activity on the left side of the brain on the children who read well. For the dyslexic kids, the heat activity was on the right, in the front, but not on the left.

At the writing of her book, Dr. Shaywitz increased the projected percentage of dyslexics from the formerly believed ten percent to twenty percent of the population. Since that time MIT scientist, Dr. John Gabrieli ( http://news.mit.edu/2011/dyslexia-iq-0923 ), conducted a study where they took functional MRIs of a large group of students who all had difficulty reading, but not all had been diagnosed with dyslexia. All children tested had the exact same pattern of heat activity in their brains with nothing happening on the left side. His conclusion was that if a child has trouble reading, he/she has dyslexia. This greatly raises the percentage.

Educators, students, parents and the public must awaken to the fact that almost half of society has issues with reading, but it is completely unrelated to intelligence, ability, and comprehension. The smartest kid in your school might be a senior who can't read.

What are the implications for teachers? About half of the kids in school cannot read to learn.

They can't do worksheets. They can't do written tests. They can't read their textbooks. They can't read the stuff you write on the board or all of the dumb shit you plaster on your walls. (I understand the administration is probably making you do it!)

Unfortunately, because of the rise in standardized testing requirements, schools have become worksheet schools. Teachers are constantly teaching to the test, so classwork has to look like the test.

I created an exercise to do with educators to help them understand the impact of worksheets on kids. Roughly half of students are left-brained and do not have trouble completing worksheets. The other half will have difficulty decoding them to varying degrees. Below I have posted four versions of the same worksheet. XXXX represents words dyslexic students have to decode before they can complete it. In a teachers meeting, make equal copies of each version, pass them out at random, and instruct the teachers to complete their worksheet on their own. When everyone is finished, exchange papers and grade it. Then have a discussion about how it made them feel. Strongly emphasize that half of their students are experiencing those same frustrations.

What are some other conclusions we can draw?

• Half of the kids in school are treated with less dignity and respect than they deserve.
• Students are regarded as stupid, when they are not.
• When these students are expected to read to learn they don't even have access to the information.
• Dyslexic kids in a worksheet school are bored.

Back to my own kids. For years I fought with the system and even lobbied the state government to change the laws. They later invited me to testify and ultimately passed decent legislation. You can see/listen to my testimony and that of many others here = http://www.senate.state.tx.us/75r/Senate/commit/c804/c804_81.htm In Texas, we probably have the best laws for dyslexia in the country. The big problem is that naturally they did not fund it, nor implement a system to monitor progress. There are currently more positive things happening for dyslexic kids in Texas, but the schools are worksheet schools, therefor ultimately the children are screwed.

So . . . we just pulled our kids out of school. We are both retired teachers and there is so much good free stuff online, why not? Our son (14) started homeschooling at the beginning of sixth grade. He had been begging us to homeschool him for several years. He really enjoyed the social part of school . . . all the activities and the other kids. But his dyslexia made it impossible for him to function academically. Now he does the coursework on Khan Academy, and watches every documentary he can find. This spring he is focused on the election videos of YouTube. Our daughter (17) has only been homeschooling for a year. Her situation in school was different. Her second grade teacher wanted to retain her. But we had her diagnosed that summer and gave her third grade teacher Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Shaywitz. Her teacher, Mrs. Fisher, followed that book to the letter and taught Hannah how to manage school. Hannah was commended on the state tests at the end of the year with dyslexia accommodations and has been an "A" student all of these years. Often, dyslexic kids are also introverts, so the social anxiety eventually became too much. She is going to take the GED this spring and spends her time in artistic endeavors, piano, and dress design. Our local school has very little to offer creative kids, so in my opinion, this a good alternative.

Most parents can't or shouldn't homeschool their children, so hopefully something happens to change our educational paradigm. No Child Left Behind took us in the wrong direction and the Every Student Succeeds Act will not save dyslexic students.

There are efforts that stand out, however. Here is a list of people, organizations, and resources that helped us on our journey.

• Harvey Hubbell and his movie Dislecksia: The Movie = http://www.dislecksiathemovie.com/
• Dr. Sally Shaywitz and her work at Yale = http://dyslexia.yale.Education
• Dr. John Gabrieli at MIT = http://news.mit.edu/2011/dyslexia-iq-0923
• Susan Barton, who has created an excellent reading program for tutors and parents who are homeschooling their younger children = http://www.dys-add.com/
• Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas = http://www.tsrhc.org/dyslexia

Also, there is definitely an upside to being dyslexic. The right hemisphere of our brain is bigger!! Whoo hoo!! That means we are more naturally creative and are great holistic thinkers. This is what we need to teach our right-brained children in school!

I guess that's it for now. Sometime I am going to write about a similar way we fail our children in schools = we try to turn them all into extroverts.

Looking forward to reading some comments and personal stories!

Marilyn