Defeating Dyslexia Stereotypes #2

In my last blog post I talk a lot about why I am doing my topic on dyslexia stereotypes.  Here is my last blog post.  I was asked a couple of questions from my last blog post that I am able to answer now that I did my original research.  One of the questions asked by Ms. Giknis was “What resources are available for dyslexic students in school?” Well it depends on the school that you go to.  But for instance SLA has Mr. Ames and Ms. Menasion who are special education workers.  They help with children who either have special needs or reading and writing disabilities.  For people who have a learning disability they have to go to a class called study skills where the teacher helps the students with their homework and any work.  At my old school we had a special tutor for dyslexics.  She worked with a company called wilson.  You can read more about the wilson program here.  What I am still wondering about dyslexia is, why does SLA not have a tutor for dyslexics?

For my original research I interviewed Mr. Ames one of the special education teachers about what he knows about dyslexia from working with dyslexics.  Mr. Ames has been working with dyslexics for 15 years.  Here is the transcript for the interview.   

This helped me understand more about how the stereotypes can affect someone with dyslexia by the stories he told me about students with dyslexia.  A story he told me is one student was really smart and learned things great orally.  But when it came to letters and words he couldn’t identify them.  He used to not be able to identify the letters in his own name. This is because he didn’t know the rules of spelling and reading.  That’s the thing with dyslexia, people think that all it is, is that you see words backward and letters float off the page, but the main thing with dyslexia is that the rules just don't come easy for reading and spelling.  We just have a harder time memorizing the rules.  Another story Mr. Ames told me was there was an amazing students.  This student had straight A’s and got accepted to college.  This is what happens when you don’t give up on yourself even though you have dyslexia.  Some of my personal opinions of how students are treated with dyslexia, is that they are given very low expectations by peers and even teachers and this can cause a student to do very bad in school and give up.  Giving up can cause them to have anxiety attacks or just give up on life.  But the reason why peers and teachers give dyslexics lower standards is because they don’t understand dyslexia.  And that is what my agent of change is going to do.  Its going to inform students and teachers about dyslexia.  And I will teach them the positive outcomes of dyslexia.  Here is some positive outcomes.  So keep tone for my agent of change project and blog post!

Annotated Bibliography