Understanding dyslexic children

I discovered that my son had dyslexia three years ago. He had joined Class One in one of the best primary schools in Kisumu, having passed the interview with flying colors.

After the first term, the teacher recommended holiday tuition. I refused. I did not see why a Standard One pupil needed that kind of grilling.

The following term, he was moved from the front of the class to the back.

On parents’ day, while I was checking on my son’s progress, the teacher told me she had moved him to a desk at the back of the class because he was naughty.

Mkora is the word she used.

Most of his sentences were incomplete, while others were incomprehensible.

I asked him what the problem was, and he said the teacher cleaned the board before he was done copying the sentences.

But the teacher denied this, attributing his slow progress to the fact that he skipped holiday tuition.

She again recommended that my son go for extra tuition. Again, I refused.

This disturbed me. The teacher was telling me that my son was slow, but in my interactions with him, he came across as a pretty sharp boy. I watched him create things with his hands while thinking out of the box, like sticking a piece of cloth to a carton box using candle wax, or using the clothesline to hoist a flag made of empty cement bags.

One time, he made a house that he would crawl into in the backyard. It was made of wood and had a mabati roof, complete with gutters. There was a latch on the door and the floor was made from leftover ceramic tiles from a nearby construction site.

I tried to teach him how to read, but ended up getting really upset with him. Why was he having difficulty reading even the simplest of words, like ‘bed’, ‘saw’ and ‘was’? I shared my frustration with a friend, who suggested that he may be dyslexic.

I spent hours surfing the Internet on dyslexia. Some of the characteristics matched. He would confuse ‘b’ with ‘d’, ‘w’ with ‘m’ and ‘6’ with ‘9’. He was assessed and found to have dyslexia, although mild.

But the challenge is not in diagnosis. It is in living with and understanding the gift that dyslexia is. After enrolling him in a school that takes in dyslexic children, I started noticing the difference in how their minds operate. We see in two dimensions; they see in three dimensions. In short, they have a photographic memory.

I once sent him to the shop to buy maize meal. I showed him the old packet and gave him the money. He came with a packet of maize meal all right, with similar colors to the one I had asked him to buy, but it was a different brand.

Of course, I was furious!

But just before I reprimanded for not being able to read the different names, I remembered all the times his photographic memory had been of great help.

Like when we were trying out a recipe we had watched on a TV cooking show and it ran too fast for me to copy everything. He recorded everything in his mind and was able to recall every step.

Or when he was recording ‘Willice the Word Master’ on his camera and I was in the kitchen using a blender – the noise would be picked up by the in-built microphone and the static would make the picture shake. He asked me to stop, but I could not because that would mean delaying dinner.

Instead, he took the earpiece from my phone and attached it by duct tape to the television. To remove the static, he used a shiny cardboard box that had been used as the base of a cake as a reflector. And just like that, the shaking of the picture he was recording disappeared.

I could give you a host of examples of how brilliant he is.

I have come to understand that even if his mind operates in a different dimension from mine, it still adds up to the total picture of life. Instead of boxing him into what I think should be, I let him express life as he sees it.

After all, the world needs different brains.