Understanding my dyslexia the early years

When I was in elementary school I was always considered a slow learner, in the bottom two classes. I was never like my older brother who was always charming my parents with a’s and b+’s. All the teachers had the same thing to say about me, he does not work hard enough, plus he is a hand full, incapable of sitting still. Reading was a nightmare for me. I was taught to read using a Vassal Model for reading instruction. Which had sentences like Run Tito run, and Tito loves Mota. Tito plays with his ball. Tito plays with Rosa. I used to have a secret cruch for Tito. But then there were far more complex sentences like. Rosa visits her grandmother. By then I was lost. For the light of me I could not register what the words meant. Even though it was really simple, reading sentences, I could not get reading. This is of course my first grade experience.

It was not until 7th grade that a biology teacher caught on to the fact that I did not know how to read. How did I make it to 7th grade without reading comprehension? By cheating, and lying my way out of tests exams and by listening very carefully. So I was good at telling stories. But with all the negative feed back that I was getting, most of my interaction with teachers meant that I was distracting the students, and disrupting the classes, I was always acting out. How did she find out? She used to like me a lot and during lunchtime she will often buy lunch for me from a restaurant near the school and we will eat together and we will have really smart conversations. She was gorgeous too, so I used to feel good about hanging out with her. One day in preparation for her after lunch class, she had asked me to read the newspaper for her, while she was writing on the black board. I started reading the paper, phonetically decoding word by word. Here I am putting my best effort to read the paper, when I noticed that she was growing more and more impatient with me, to the point that she said. “Enough” looking, very hasty at me, “my god you really do not know how to read.” I did not get angry with her, I just felt a sense of relief that someone had noticed that I could not get reading. Words meant nothing to me unless I hear them. The following day she brought with her a bunch of fairy tales (I wonder now if those Fairy tales had something to do with my being queer nowadays, lol), from her preschooler daughter at home. She asked me to decode the first word and I did which was long, then the second world and I did which was Time then the third word, which was ago. And she told me what does that mean. I will reply to her well that this is something that happened way back. She helped me make the transition from understanding syllables, to understanding words, to understanding sentences, to understanding stories. I remember like if it was yesterday, the first book had this beautiful illustration with this gorgeous beautiful princess that was taken away from her father to a land where a nasty witch had her imprisoned. Then this old lady came by and gave her three chicks and told her that if she ever wanted to go back to her father all she needed to do was to feed the chicks some grains of corn while the nasty witch was eating her meal. So when the evil nasty witch came back home and sat down to eat her supper, the princess decided to feed the chicks some kennels of corn. The chicks grew up to be three knights brothers, that slaughtered the witch. The princess married the oldest of the three brothers; he was a hunk.

I believe that the difference between the simple language in the fairy tale, versus the language of the Vassal Reading books, is that the fairy tale story was told as if someone was actually talking. Unlike the Vassar reader, with its emphasis on phonetics, the attention was given to sound production. Yet I never heard anyone talk Tito run to your ball, or Tito plays and plays. Who talks like that? Not even the first graders in my school, we had stories, wonderful stories to tell. To read about a boy that loves a cat, it was meaningless to me. So I could not make a connection between letters and language, or even between sounds and language. I think that I could have been one of those students, that whole language approach and direct book immersion would have been more beneficial. After my biology teacher intervention, I learned to read but not without some big comprehension problems.