Don M. Winn: Inspirational Role Models for Children with Dyslexia

What did Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, John Lennon, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have in common? They all had a learning difficulty. They were either dyslexic or had to deal with different traits associated with dyslexia.

One common misperception about people who have a learning difficulty is that they are less intelligent than other people. In fact, people with learning disabilities can be academically gifted and highly motivated achievers. Two in particular – Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein – have always stood out to me.

I know there is some debate about whether these two actually were dyslexic, but the reason I include them here is that as a young man, I found their examples encouraging and they inspired me to keep on working hard and putting my all into everything I did. So here are two extremely short histories of these two men.

About Albert Einstein:

He was a daydreamer. His teachers in Germany told him he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed class discipline, that he would be better off out of school. Yet Albert Einstein went on to become one of the most famous scientists in world history.

About Thomas Edison:

When Thomas Edison was 7 years old (in 1853), his teacher considered him “an hyperactive stupid” because he was too curious, asked too many questions and was a slow learner. He was terrible at mathematics, unable to focus, and had difficulty with words and speech. His mother finally decided to school him at home where he could learn in his own way and at his own pace.

By the age of 31 he had invented the phonograph and from that point on he founded 14 companies, registered 1,093 patents, and had employed over 35,000 people in an industrial empire that brought affordable, centrally generated electricity to the world.

Two great Edison Quotes: I have always liked these because they show his perseverance and willingness to try many different approaches to a matter:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Why Edison and Einstein?
Now of course I’m no Edison or Einstein, but you might wonder why it was so necessary for me to find role models like these who were not afraid to learn and do things differently than other people.

Well, by the time I was 15 years old, I was already programming computers (before PCs). I remember one time an older friend told me that he never thought I would ever be able do anything but simple manual labor and that he was dumbfounded by what I was doing. This was an attitude that I frequently encountered as I grew up.

Such negative stereotypes are not only demoralizing to a child, but they belie the very reality of many kids with learning difficulties. They have the intelligence and in many cases, the necessary motivation to succeed in anything they choose to pursue. In my case, such negative comments only made me more determined to “show them,” mostly because I was very stubborn. But it also made it more difficult for me because I had to figure things out for myself, without any encouragement. Although this didn’t prevent me from progressing, it did delay my progress significantly. Not only did I have a learning difficulty to contend with, but I also had to swim upstream against a lot of negative feedback. Belief in oneself is about 90% of the battle.

So I would say to children with dyslexia, don’t give up. Believe in yourself. You can do whatever you are willing to work hard at. And that is true for everyone.

Source: Don M. Winn - January 11, 2013

Sally Gardner: Dyslexia is not a disability – it's a gift

Source: The Guardian - Monday 24 June 2013

So much has changed since I was an undiagnosed dyslexic at school, but its wonders and contradictions remain hard to convey

Steve Jobs, a famous dyslexic. Photograph: James Leynse/Corbis

Sally Gardner

At school I was the outsider, the odd one, the word-blind child who didn't fit in. I lived in my head – a dreamer, a dyslexic teenager, a round peg in a square hole who was told I would be lucky to get any qualifications, let alone a job. My education was a comedy of errors. It took place in the era of those two-dimensional technicolour children, Janet and John. Janet and John were my nightmare, a reading scheme that I couldn't get out of, which I was forced to stay on until the age of 11, getting no further than "Janet and John had a ball."

I can definitely assure you that not one of us had a ball. Not them, not me. If it hadn't been for my imagination and my ability to dream my way out of the narrow confines of Janet and John and their ball, I would have proved Miss Bell right and probably ended up working in a supermarket, which would have been a disaster, because I was no better at maths than I was at reading.

Schools back then didn't know about dyslexia. All I knew was that I wasn't like everyone else, and that made me stupid. Today I see that Janet and John have grown up – John advises Michael Gove on his education policy, while Janet works for Ofsted, enjoying the terror her department can bring to schools and teachers alike. Both Janet and John agree with Gove that learning by rote (or by rope, as I call it, the gallows for the inquiring mind) is the only answer. Cut down on creativity, give the little blighters exams, exams, exams until they all become good sheep.

I eventually ended up in a school for maladjusted children, because no other school that would take me. I suppose this was the equivalent of what would now be a school for kids with Asbos. I had been classified as "unteachable", but at the age of 14, when everyone had given up hope, I learned to read. The first book I read was Wuthering Heights, and after that no one could stop me. My mother said that if I got five O-levels I could go to art school and, much to my teachers' chagrin, I did just that.

Dyslexia is not a disability – it's a gift. It means that I, and many other dyslexic thinkers can portray the world through images because we think in images. I can build worlds, freeze the frame, walk around and touch. I can read people's faces, drawings, buildings, landscapes and all things in the visual world more quickly than many of my non-dyslexic friends. I paint with words; they are my colours.

Non-dyslexic people often challenge my dyslexia – they don't believe I write my books, or they think I have a ghost writer. Many dyslexic people also look at me with doubt – how do I do it? A published author can't possibly be severely dyslexic. Many of them have been made to think there's no point in trying to be a writer, even if that's what they passionately want to be. The key is not to listen to what they are told. If I had listened I wouldn't have become a writer.

I do think there really need to be more publicly dyslexic role models for children and adults today. Lots of famous dyslexics are not open about it. Richard Branson has never proudly claimed his dyslexia, nor did Steve Jobs; Keira Knightley is more open about it. Then there are my personal favourites: F Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, John Lennon and Einstein – who said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." These are what I call "outside the box" thinkers, and never has there been a time, with the technology we have, and the world in the muddled up state it is in, when we have had more need to be thinking outside the box.

Happily, over the past two years, I've gradually been seeing people open up to and become more interested in the contradictions that are associated with being a dyslexic novelist. After all, you can spell every word in the dictionary and know every grammatical rule in the world, but this does not make you a writer, nor does it give you an imagination; an imagination is something quite unique to every individual and it needs to be treasured.

Source: The Guardian - Monday 24 June 2013

Ricardo Semler: «How to run a company with (almost) no rules» and, how do we redesign school for wisdom?

What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question:

What if schools were like this too?

 
Ricardo Semler at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design):
«How to run a company with (almost) no rules»
Oct 2014

The Company ...

«02:04 ... This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. ... 02:28 ... we said, let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, this is what you don't say, and let's see what's left. ... Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, why don't you do it next week? And we'll do it like this, we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. So now, if you were going to be a violinist, which you probably weren't, you go and do this on Wednesday. ... 03:12 ... So we started saying things like, why do we want to know what time you came to work, what time you left, etc.? Can't we exchange this for a contract for buying something from you, some kind of work? ... 03:48 ... How do we find people? ... come have your interviews. Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person. And then, come back. Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. Make sure we are the bride you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. ... 04:33 Slowly we went to a process where we'd say things like, we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company if they haven't been interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. Every six months, everyone gets evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, which is many times situational, as you know. And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent of a grade, they don't stay, ... 05:11 ... why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago. ... 05:46 ... we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department ... 06:19 ... let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday. ... 07:26 ... our board had two seats open with the same voting rights, for the first two people who showed up. (Laughter) And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. And the fact is that they kept us honest. ...».

The result ...

Semler believes in a decentralised, participatory business style in which employees are trusted to exercise freedom and autonomy, setting their own working hours and even their own salaries. For those who might be sceptical of this approach, the figures speak for themselves: Semco’s revenues increased from $4 million in 1984 to $212 million in 2004. After achieving this success, Semler turned his attention to education: what would happen if he applied similar principles of autonomy and democracy to schools?

«Innovation in education for work: The Lumiar schools, Sao Paolo, Brazil» http://www.innovationunit.org

The School ...

«... 08:15 ... we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. ... we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, what would it look like? ... 09:05 ... so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, (http://lumiar.org.br/), one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar. ... 10:23 And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most important things in life. The very important things in life, we know nothing about. We know nothing about love, we know nothing about death, we know nothing about why we're here. ... why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide. ... 11:30 ... we keep a digital mosaic ... It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum with 600 tiles of a mosaic, which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say, you're not interested in this now, let's wait a year. And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. Now, try to build a bicycle without knowing that pi is 3.1416. You can't. And try, any one of you, using 3.1416 for something. You don't know anymore. So this is lost and that's what we try to do there, which is looking for wisdom in that school....

20:26

Chris Anderson: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here?

20:38

Ricardo Semler: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, «Dad, why do we exist?»

20:50

There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy -- how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something -- to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.

CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end this penultimate day of TED. Ricardo Semler, thank you so much.

21:30

RS: Thank you so much. (Applause)

Source: http://www.ted.com

Take the “DYS” out of DYSLEXIA

By definition, the term dyslexia indicates illness, defect, a problematic situation (dysentery, dysplasia ... dystopia!). The educational environment of modernity, a genuine “child” of the industrial revolution and a direct descendant of the Cartesian anthropology (“I think therefore I am” ), which fantasizes that rational thought is the highest human function that differentiates man from animals. Therefore, having given absolute value by thinking in words, has diagnosed thinking in pictures as a disease.

On the other hand, in postmodernity the advantages of thinking in pictures gains in recognition and the education community already argues about “The Gift of Dyslexia” ¹ , “The Advantage of Dyslexia” ² . However, the derogatory term DYS-lexia is still in common use!

In general, the prefix dys- carries a negative meaning. Particularly in Greek, it means “hard, bad, unlucky, etc., destroying the good sense of a word, or increasing its bad sense: hence, joined even to words expressing negation” (Liddell & Scott). But the mental function that provokes the symptoms characterized as dyslexia is literally, a gift for those people whose brain works this way. Usually these people have an increased awareness of their environment, they are more curious than the average person, mainly think in pictures rather than in words, have the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, are genius at divergent, at “out of the box” thinking, they are extremely intuitive and clairvoyant, they perform better in Multi-dimensional thinking (using all of their senses) and have vivid imagination. If not oppressed, overturned or destroyed by parents or teachers, their scores appear to be higher than average and are unusual creative.

The teacher enters the class and starts to teach Addition:
“1 plus 1 equals 2”.
The next day, the teacher asks:
“Children, what does 1 plus 1 equal?”
Johnny looks around looking lost.
The teacher looks at him and thinks: “the child is stupid!”
But Johnny’s mind is on fire:
1 + 1 = 2 as the teacher said but he have had enough with “logical” thinking. He is attracted by the divergent thinking, the “out of the box” thinking, the “mad”, the inventive, creative thinking, so:
1 + 1 = 11 (if you put them side by side) ...
1 + 1 = 1 (if put one on top of the other) ...
Johnny remembers the teacher’s “reasonable” addition, but he is attracted by his “crazy” images and he is unable to pick up a choice ...

The brutal intervention of the educational systems, on the gifted as to the functions of the right hemisphere children, often causes the symptoms we call DYSLEXIA

A child’s mind who thinks in words, that is verbally, works as a train moving on rails, or it works as a serial electronic processor. The mind of the dyslectic, the one who thinks in pictures, works as a parallel electronic processor, moving in space, flying, running like a wild horse ... It is more difficult to tame, but when tamed, when someone manages to control it, then it is more efficient, it is creative, inventive, innovative.

Current educational systems tend to cultivate and assess verbal thinking, either exclusively or as a priority.

Current educational systems cultivate exceedingly our LEFT hemisphere and leaves the RIGHT stunted!

About 15% of the population, are gifted at thought in pictures. This percentage when asked to join in an educational system that mainly cultivates and assesses verbal thinking, because of their difficulty to cope with, usually they develop defense mechanisms. These defense mechanisms most of the times are grouped under the derogatory term “dyslexia”. It's as if basketball couldn’t be considered a worthwhile sport and anyone who could become a talented basketball player could spend his life carrying the title of “A Bad Football player!”.

In the beginning there was a request for the prefix dys- to be removed from the term dyslexia and be replaced with a term that indicates the ability to think in pictures. For the language orientated people the charismatic visual thinker is considered dyslexic, while if the dominant model was that of thinking in pictures, the gifted in verbal thinking child would be called “dis-visual”.

Initially there was a thought to use a word that charges dyslexia with a positive meaning, e.g. to use a compound term that begins with the prefix Eu- and then a word related to the picture could be used ... However the result would not even sound nice: euicon, euimage, eupicture ... bliach ... deadlock, embarrassment, wonder and ..., dyslexia ... OK, let's replace the "d" to "b" as many dyslexics do:

bislexia or bilexia

The prefix bis- in Latin mean double. A dyslectic person instead of having one word, one answer, like it is requested in verbal thinking, he/she has invented another “word”, his/her creativity has found one more answer, so he/she has two words (bilexia) and as long as he/she hasn’t learn to “control” his/her gift, he/she loses it, he/she feels awkward and he/she doesn’t know which answer to choose, he/she is getting confused.

bilexia = two words!

The number 1,000,000,000 is called a billion, literally “twice million” however, in this case, it means a thousand millions. So bilexia can also mean “a thousand words” ... or rather “an image”, as the wise saying goes: “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

bilexia = thousand words! (one picture)

Take the “dys” out of dyslexia. Let’s turn the dyslexia to bilexia or bislexia, that is, talk about two or a thousand words, or talk about an image. The issue is not simply to discharge a 15% of students of a slanderous classification. The issue is not even simply reconsidering our views on educational systems that suppress creativity. The issue is to focus equally both to “football” as well as to “basketball” that is in cultivating the function for both of the left and right cerebral hemisphere. The aim is to enable humanity to liberate itself from the tight corset of morality and naive faith in ideologies, which follows the absolutism of the function of the left hemisphere, in order to pass to the next stage of self-consciousness: that is, a stage where a complete human being would be perceived as someone able to exploit the function of both the cerebral hemispheres. The one who lives in the present (NOW) a life filled up with meaning. The one who enjoys finding a meaning in everyday life, the one who feels connected with the environment and fellow human beings and flies with the strong wings of inspiration, hope and love, dancing to the rhythms of universal music harmony.

---

  1   The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read...and How They Can Learn, by Ronald D. Davis (Author), Eldon M. Braun (Contributor). A Perigee Book 1994/1997/2010.

---

  2   The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain, by Brock L. Eide M.D. M.A. (Author), Fernette F. Eide M.D. (Author). A Plume Book 2012.

Download