One man’s journey through dyslexia

Jim Kable explores dyslexia, self-discovery, and the many forms intelligence can take in author Peter Wilson’s memoir.

MY BROTHER believed himself to be somewhere on the dyslexic spectrum in later adulthood.

At least he always had trouble spelling, and I don’t think he read much during his school days, but there was nothing unintelligent about him. As a builder and cabinet maker he earned the title of Works Clerk and traveled the world for nearly two years working on yacht building in Germany, Ireland, London and the south of France.

He was drafted into the armed forces before the change of government and our withdrawal from the American War in Vietnam. He built or converted three houses and Department of Community Services and as a youth worker. He read many books in his later life.

I was an English, history and, to some extent, language teacher. He teaches English in secondary schools and briefly at TAFE level in NSW, but also in Spain, Germany and for many years Japan. I have taught native English speakers and immigrants/refugees in rural and urban NSW.

I have taught students with all kinds of apparent difficulties and at all levels of test-based results (the unfair grading of students on their so-called intelligence levels), but the one thing I did not believe in (from my excellent Dip Ed studies at the University of Sydney in 1970) was the unfair, class-based system of measuring intelligence colloquially known as IQ.

In my 40 years of teaching, I have seen evidence that intelligence is exhibited in many different ways, and so I have not been fooled into thinking that aptitude in school is synonymous with “intelligence,” with its limitations on testing and examination. Rather than proving intelligence, this test actually narrowed that concept down to success on the test.

peter wilson She wrote a book based on her experiences of difficulties reading and writing and feeling stupid, compounded by unsympathetic teachers and classroom bullying. He also writes about the events and insights that eventually came to him and were tested by him, enabling him to achieve the level of success in his college and professional life.

Wilson also sought to help others struggling with the condition called dyslexia, eventually leading to writing this book. Journeying with Dyslexia: Alienation, Assimilation, Practice It is a slim volume of only 69 pages, with the last 12 pages consisting of Appendices providing analysis of dyslexia. Negative a disease – Symptoms (or recognizable aspects), along with a discussion of those symptoms and a useful Bibliography.

But the real heart of this book is Peter Wilson’s journey to discover himself – his own intelligent, innate self – as opposed to how the system makes him feel. From the preface onwards, all chapters (or chapters) do not exceed one or two pages in length. It begins with a brief history of the earliest descriptions in Germany in the 19th century. He then continues his personal journey. He touches on his achievements with the Boy Scouts and Boy Scouts during his childhood and teenage years, and the frightening nature of a dyslexic diagnosis or awareness for a child.

Wilson also writes that he discovered that he could see better with one eye closed. Although he was later ridiculed by a construction site foreman, he had come up with his first real strategy. Later, he attended a Rotary Youth Leadership Award lecture given by an educational psychologist who talked about the left brain and right brain, how the eyes work with those hemispheres, and his own ambidexterity.

A change in business leads to the first self-developed strategy. At home, he copies a sentence on the board. He closes his left eye and reads the sentence out loud. He repeats this by closing his other eye. He then reads the sentence out loud with both eyes open, in a sense proving to both sides of his brain that they are seeing the same thing. This leads to further self-discovery and he is well on his way to reading. I’ll let the reader figure out what these are.

This is an important first-person account of how one man found his way.

Journeying with Dyslexia: Alienation, Assimilation, Practice Available at: xlibris.

This book was reviewed by an IA Book Club member. If you want to buy free get high quality books and your review It was published On IA, subscribe to receive your email free IA Book Club membership.

Jim Kable was a secondary school teacher of English (including EAL), History and Japanese before spending the last two decades teaching English in Japan in the 1990s and 2000s. For a short period of two years, from 2020 to 2022, he was a member of the now-defunct New Liberals. He has a sharp and knowledgeable perspective on politics.

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