Dyslexia Disability or Different Ability
[Music]
this
is my brother eli he is a hard-working
personable young kid and i’m lucky to
call him my brother
he is so so musically gifted he can play
literally every instrument and
is so self-motivated that he took a
semester off college
just to teach himself japanese four
different coding languages
and the art of day trading clearly he’s
an incredible kid with
many talents but unfortunately for eli
he cannot draw he struggles with
creating steady straight lines
artistic perspective and shading
yeah eli felt pretty bad about his
artistic abilities
and those feelings were only exacerbated
every time he walked into the art studio
for class
no matter how much i tried to help he
really just couldn’t get the hang of it
but the good news for eli is that
art only took up about 45 minutes of his
days back in high school
and once he graduated he never really
had to deal with those feelings of
inadequacy ever again
for the remainder of his time his days
were filled with classes where his
logical thinking abilities and natural
academic intellect could shine through
classes like math and english for
example so all in all
this struggle withdrawing or inability
to draw
didn’t really impede a sense of
self-confidence all that much
it was just a skill that he would try to
avoid
well what if i told you i had a very
similar story
like my brother i consider myself to be
a bright student
and also like him i struggle with
something but for me
that thing is reading i have dyslexia
so similar to how eli struggles with
artistic perspective and shading
i struggle with spelling and reading
fluency those feelings of inadequacy
that eli felt every day during art class
is how i felt about pretty much every
other class that wasn’t art or physical
education
i noticed very early on too that
everyone
parents teachers alike seem to care a
lot more about the things that eli was
good at
than the things that i was good at so
even when i excelled in art
for example it just never felt good
enough
because it wasn’t math
so as you can see i couldn’t just follow
in the footsteps of my brother and
dismiss my struggles with reading
or wait till i graduated high school to
escape it
no i had to face my struggles for hours
a day
every day and still do because my one
weakness
is the very foundation of our education
system
in other words if you struggle to read
you’re struggling to learn
but at the end of the day though both
reading and drawing are
just skills so why is it that i’m
labeled as disabled
am i disabled or am i just differently
abled
let’s look at the brain so our brain is
divided into two hemispheres
right and left this left hemisphere of
the brain is specialized for activities
like reading and spelling
so for non-dyslexic people like my
brother for example
they utilize this area of the brain to
read write and spell with relative ease
my brain works a little differently so
instead of experiencing this increased
activation on the left side
it’s actually happening on the right now
this right hemisphere is not specialized
for reading and spelling
but rather for more holistic non-linear
abstract thought
so how does this affect reading um well
imagine trying to use a spoon to cut a
steak
it’s possible but it’s by no means the
most efficient way of getting the job
done
similarly that’s how the dyslexic brain
works we’re using the part of our brain
that’s not specialized for the task at
hand
which then makes the overall task of
reading something that’s a lot more
laborious and frustrating
and this gives rise to things like
spelling errors
and misreading words out loud which you
know granted
might not seem like the biggest deal but
i can tell you this it is not the best
feeling
in fact it’s kind of a bad feeling when
you’re a senior in college
and still struggle to spell the word
comfortable reliably
it’s pretty uncomfortable actually now
for me in art class
this is not an issue but as soon as i
walk into english class or
am assigned an essay for homework i’m
once again forced to confront my
struggles
and i’m not alone it’s estimated that as
much as 17 percent of our population
has dyslexia and with many more cases
unreported
although dyslexia is highly heritable
there’s really no way to know at birth
if you have dyslexia or not if your
parents have it
you have a good chance of having it but
you can’t just know straight out of the
womb
and so the only way to know is through
going through school and then showing
signs of struggle which are usually
detected around ages seven or eight
and so up until this point and in many
cases even after this point
many students go through school hearing
things like oh
she’s really bright she’s just lazy
or you know if she would just try a
little bit harder and be less sloppy
with her work
she would do great in school and
i can tell you from personal experience
hearing these and all these things
throughout your childhood
and into your adult life is totally
crushing when you are actively trying
your hardest
a sense it crushes your sense of
self-worth and self-confidence
and without diagnosis or a strong
support system at home helping you
through school
many dyslexic students feel so hopeless
as to drop out completely
because they don’t feel like they belong
in fact some of our world’s most
extraordinary minds gave up on a classic
education
because they failed to think in this
linear way
what does the model t automobile
incandescent light bulb
indiana jones and the theory of
relativity all have in common
they were all created by dyslexic
geniuses who struggled and in some cases
even failed out of school
so what does this say about our
education system why is it that some of
our world’s most successful people
felt so unsuccessful in their education
system
as to give up completely in order to try
and succeed in something else
i think these success stories are
particularly interesting when juxtaposed
against the estimate
that 50 percent of prison inmates have
dyslexia
now that’s not to say that dyslexics
have this innate predisposition to be
criminals
but rather to illustrate the potential
and severe consequences of growing up
feeling like your best isn’t good enough
and that you will never be enough
our education system grades our students
ability to think and perform within a
box
our understanding of material is graded
by our ability to regurgitate
momentarily memorize information onto an
exam in the course of an hour
our intellectual capacity is measured by
our ability to compute math equations or
read
as quick or quicker than our peers even
our sense of self-worth is indirectly
determined by something as trivial as
being able to shade in the right bubble
on an answer sheet
but what is this really testing i
believe that the reason why people with
dyslexia opt
out of trying to succeed in the system
is because
our thinking doesn’t work in this
mechanical linear way
we constantly think and perform outside
of this box
and go through school getting penalized
for it with bad grades and persistent
feelings of inadequacy
there’s an old quote i recently learned
that says if you judge a fish on its
ability to climb a tree
it will grow up its whole life believing
it’s stupid
i mean yeah it’s a seemingly ridiculous
quote why are we speculating about the
metacognitive abilities of a fish let
alone its ability to be out of water
long enough to climb a tree but
that’s exactly what i’m trying to say
it’s ridiculous we are literally judging
a human’s intelligence based off of its
ability to perform a single task
that doesn’t even directly prove the
very thing it claims to be testing
so working with this metaphor
what if we taught in a way that didn’t
exclude 17
of the population what if we nurtured
this difference
like a gift and taught dyslexic students
how to take advantage of their
different ability instead of letting
them think they have a disability
don’t get me wrong i’m not trying to
discredit the struggles of dyslexic
students
i am very familiar with the
disadvantages that come along with
struggling to read
write and spell in our classic education
system what i am trying to do
is shift our definition of dyslexia away
from focusing on the one associated
weakness
and start to finally highlight the
unique exceptional abilities that the
dyslexic mind
truly possesses what do those look like
you might ask
well let’s ask magic johnson magic
johnson
is one of the world’s most successful
athletes he’s a famous point guard
and he was in fact able to succeed on
the level that he did in part due to his
dyslexia
so one of these dyslexic gifts is this
enhanced sensitivity and awareness for
peripheral motion
and so he was able to utilize this skill
in order to carry out these sneaky
no-look passes where he wouldn’t even
have to move his head
to shoot the ball with somebody to the
other side of the court
and these gifts don’t just stop in the
world of athletics
translates into art and something that i
thought was super interesting was
astrophysics so in a study conducted by
scientists at the harvard smithsonian
center for astrophysics they found that
dyslexic astrophysicists were able to
pull out
graphical simulations of black holes
amongst a bed of noise
much quicker and more accurately than
the non-dyslexic astrophysicists
all right i’m no pro in the world of
astrophysics but from my research i have
conducted that this was a very desirable
trait for the industry so
two points dyslexia in fact galileo
the very father of observational
astronomy was speculated to have
dyslexia
and it was because of his holistic wide
lens way of thinking and seeing
that he was literally able to see
patterns in the stars
which then led to the discovery of
jupiter’s four moons
when you think about the sheer number of
scientific breakthroughs
number one hits revolutionary inventions
and ingenious works of art that have
been
carried out created or developed by
dyslexic thinkers
it’s truly remarkable and perhaps the
most paradoxical part of it all is that
most all of these people
were made to feel inadequate or stupid
in school
maybe even disabled but were these
people disabled
was cher disabled was muhammad ali
disabled
as matthew schnepps an incredibly
successful dyslexic astrophysicist once
said
it’s not that i did all these things and
just happened to have dyslexia
it’s because i have dyslexia that i was
able to do all these things
and i resonate with that imagine if we
had
a specialized institution like that
which we have for the musically gifted
that work towards nurturing the dyslexic
abilities i mentioned before
imagine if we had a juilliard school of
music
but for the talent of dyslexia
instead of identifying these people as
having disabilities
what if we recognize and foster their
unique abilities
how many more einsteins or edisons would
we have sitting in our school system
rather than our prison system think
about that
it’s possible that the very person who
might grow up to discover the next major
planet
might not be reliably able to spell the
word astrophysics
but why does that matter what is that
even measuring
it may seem to be the best option to
educate for the masses
but when you think about thousands of
kids struggling through school
believing that they are handicapped in
some way
we might just be excluding the next f
scott fitzgerald or
henry ford from pushing and advancing
our societies forward
we really need to change the way that we
think of education from this
one-size-fits-most
model to a more holistic well-rounded
collection of styles
for every dyslexic genius like walt
disney or
louis pasteur who reinvented their field
through sheer dedication and intellect
there are thousands of kids who feel
hopeless and lost
just because they struggled in school
and as a result feel they don’t have a
place in our society
i can say that from my personal
experience as a dyslexic learner
simply typing my notes re-reading
textbooks and taking written exams
won’t cut it for me i failed enough
exams to say that confidently
what took me until freshman year of
college to realize is that
the way i study looks a whole lot
different than the way that i was taught
to study in school
and what i’m still learning till this
day is that’s okay
through my research i have found that
dyslexics have this natural affinity for
colors and shapes whereas non-dyslexics
might have it for letters and numbers
letters and numbers are what are seen as
practical and thus are valued more in
our society and we’re taught to forget
about
you know colors and shapes and grow up
out after elementary school become
adults
but what why that’s not how i work
that’s not how dyslexic people work when
were you ever given a proper lesson
on the art of color coding in school or
how to use image associations to study
for an exam
never right these are both very valid
ways and
for some people more valid than a study
guide ways of studying for an exam
but we’re just not taught them in school
so through my own collection of trial
and error throughout my entire academic
life
i have finally found the most effective
way for me to study
and i can tell you this it is not
through typing up my notes
it’s through the use of these things
called mind maps
now mind maps are artistic
representations of how terms and
concepts connect
so pretty much by sketching them out
shading them in turning them into art
i’ve been able to commit years of
material to memory
that i can still retrieve till this day
now i cannot say the same about the
hundreds of study guides i made back in
high school
so to my brother or maybe even to you
a non-dyslexic thinker this collection
of drawings
might look like complete chaos but to me
this makes sense
to me a full page of a textbook looks
like complete chaos but
to each their own is this better or
worse
than a study guide no it’s just
different
is eli less intelligent than me because
he struggles to draw
of course not that’s ridiculous so
why is it that i should feel less
intelligent than him when i struggle to
read
see what i’m saying here spelling and
reading fluency are not the only two
ways of measuring intellect
and we’re finally starting to realize
this and make the necessary changes to
include other thinking styles
for example stem an interdisciplinary
curriculum designed to educate students
for careers in
science technology engineering and math
is
largely now being changed to steam to
include an a that represents the arts
this is a step in the right direction
but there’s still so much that needs to
be done
if you do not have dyslexia and you’re
watching this
the next time you see a classmate or a
colleague maybe stumble on a word or
spell something wrong
know that there’s more than what meets
the eye she’s not stupid or incapable
if she was she wouldn’t be giving you a
ted talk today
and to those of you with dyslexia no
matter your age
the next time you fail an english exam
or spell something wrong in a
professional email for the
15th time this week i hope that you feel
proud before you feel embarrassed
you have worked twice as hard to get to
where you are today and no one can take
that away from you
it is through these struggles that you
have built the perseverance and
character that are trademarks of a
person with dyslexia
my ultimate goal is that our education
system
diversifies its teaching methods to
match the neurodiversity of its students
there’s not one brain type so let’s stop
educating people and teaching them as if
there is
i believe the first step in doing this
is changing our framework with regards
to dyslexia
and other learning differences for that
matter let’s stop looking at them as
disabilities and finally start to
recognize
and foster their unique different
abilities
thank you