Letter from a dyslexic student

Letter from a dyslexic student

Dear ASB Community,

I would like to write a few lines to talk to you about dyslexia, a learning difficulty that affects about 10% of the world’s population. That means that, by probability, in our ASB community there must be at least 2 or 3 dyslexic students per class. If we put all the dyslexic kids in the school together, we would probably fill a whole class. Unbelievable.

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that affects the identification of speech sounds and their correspondence with letters and words. This difficulty means that dyslexics are very slow at reading and find it very difficult to understand texts, as we spend a lot of mental effort just decoding letters and transforming them into sounds. For the same reason our written expression is not very good, and we make many spelling mistakes.

Dyslexia is not a disease. Dyslexics are completely healthy people. We see and hear perfectly. Being dyslexic is not being less intelligent, either. Dyslexics have normal and, in some cases, above-average intelligence. What happens is that our brains are a bit different from other people’s; we can say that our brains work in a different way. We do not read well, but we are better at other tasks than others; for example, we are very creative, and we have great spatial and problem-solving skills. Our thinking is said to be “out of the box”. Dyslexics are not lazy either; I can assure you that we work twice or three times as hard as others to achieve acceptable results.

Unfortunately, dyslexia will be with us the rest of our lives, and we will have to work hard if we want to continue our studies. On that road, we only ask for your respect and understanding. If we ever read aloud in class, and read slowly or make mistakes, don’t laugh at us, and don’t think we are stupid. A great part of our success and improvement in life will lie in our personal work, and in feeling supported by people around us. Please, help us.

If you are curious to know more about dyslexia, you can visit the website  Made by Dyslexia and listen to the testimony of the British actress Keira Knightly.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Made by Dyslexia