I had no difficulties learning to read. My mother had pulled me out of school for safety reasons shortly after entering grade one. I knew that my peers were learning to read, and I did not want to be left behind. So, I decided to teach myself. I did so in a very short time and with minimum assistance from my older brother. When I returned to school months later, I was puzzled why many of my classmates read in a staggering way when the text looked continuous to me. I could read fluently. Only many years later did I realize that maybe not all was well with my literacy skills.
I always had difficulties with spelling. Even simple words that I have seen hundreds of times and looked up repeatedly do not leave a stable image in my memory. My mother tongue is German. In that language, when you see how a word is written, you know how to pronounce it. But when you hear a word, there may be more than one way of spelling it. During my childhood, I often lost marks in my written work because of spelling errors. At the time, this did not bother me much since my essays still got fairly high grades. I attributed my mistakes to the fact that words were hard to spell; there was nothing personal about it.
Another problem started in grade five when German children enter middle school and begin to learn foreign languages. I had great difficulties in English and French. I could not figure out when a word ended, and a new one started. My teachers ruled out that I could ever be admitted to a high school that required Latin, as most high schools did. I failed grade eight with rock bottom marks in both English and French. According to the German law of the time, I had reached the age where I could leave school. So, I refused to go back and was heading towards a future of a grade eight drop-out.
My mother urged me to continue in a different school where I could complete grades eight, nine and ten and graduate from middle school. I passed these three years not because my skills in foreign languages improved. They did not. I got through because I was good at mathematics, and my two classmates on either side of me were not. The three of us came to an agreement. Friedel, to my left, helped me with my English exams, Hanna, to my right, helped me with my French and in exchange, I provided both of them with the solutions for their math tests.
Cheating on exams is common in German high schools, and teachers give different versions of exams so that students cannot copy each other. I became very fast and managed to write three exams in the time given for one. I never felt any guilt about the way I made it through that school. I saw it as a case of skill exchange, and I worked very hard to do my part. As an aside, the arrangement I made with my classmates paid off in more than one way. In the immediate present, it allowed me to get through middle school. While doing so, I took special care polishing my math skills, with which I paid for the help I needed. Working very fast further increased my fluency in math as well as my confidence.
Years later, when I had to take a statistics course from an instructor who was not very good, I skipped his classes and figured things out on my own. I did very well on my final exam and was offered a position as a teaching assistant. The well-paying job allowed me to support myself throughout my years of university studies. Teaching statistics became a good source of income on various occasions. My first job as a new immigrant in Canada with limited knowledge of English was that of a teaching assistant in statistics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.
Sailing through middle school made me want to continue my education and graduate with a high school diploma. The only high school without Latin was a residential convent school. It was too far for daily commuting. As a non-Catholic, I was not eligible for residency in the school. The only alternative was moving into a rented room in town.
It was a relief that I did not have to learn French anymore. As for English, I had to come up with a new strategy. The Franciscan nuns were serious about their job. They liked to be proud of their student’s achievements, and they did not tolerate any slack. It was difficult to improve my English spelling while living alone without anybody to give me dictations. I tried memorizing passages from a book written in English, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I then wrote the text down from memory and checked my spelling. I don’t remember how much this practice helped my spelling or even if I kept it up for long. The book was very well written. I later learned that its author had received the Nobel Prize in literature for it. I became totally carried away by the story. It was a work of several hundred pages, but I read it from cover to cover, without bothering to look up all the unknown words. I then went to find another book, East Wind West Wind, by the same author and read it as well.
By this time, I had picked up the meaning of many words from context. I had also become more accustomed to English sentence structures. One day, my teacher remarked that I seem to have a knack for English. Her remark stunned me. I had always been told that I had no talent for languages at all. As it turned out, the Franciscan nun was right. I sometimes wonder whether Friedel and Hanna, my two partners in crime in middle school, ever got a handle on math. As for me, I became fluent with relative ease in both French and English, so that I could study and later teach in these languages.
In my mature adult years, I enrolled in several university courses in linguistics as well as in Italian and Spanish languages and literature. I did so for the sheer fun of it. I took and passed the required exams to earn certificates of proficiency in Spanish and Italian. I also scored high marks in my university Latin course. I acquired the basics of the living languages through immersion into oral conversation and literature before taking formal lessons. Latin was primarily a matter of logic, which was easy for me.
In essence, I could learn languages as well as other people, if not better; I just could not learn the way they were taught in school. Perhaps it was my good luck that I only attended grade one for a few days and then taught myself to read in a way that worked for me. If I had relied on school instruction, I might have suffered years of frustrations as a dyslexic, just as my son did.
Margarete Wolfram, Ph.D. is an educational psychologist and the mother of a son who had severe difficulties learning to read. Margaret’s son, Antonio Pascual-Leone is now an internationally renowned professor of clinical psychology at the University of Windsor, Ontario. They are both believers in the fact that the problem is not the individual with a different style but the environment that forces teaching designed for the norm onto those who learn in ways that are different from those of the majority.
“My son became successful not despite his style but because of it. He has a distinct facility to look at problems from angles that are different from the norm. His difference serves him well, and it enriches society.”