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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1TsiJwH:
wisekrakens reblogged your post and added:
My husband is dyslexic, and I’ve… read up on it. Pretty extensively.
Assuming dyslexia is not Widely Understood:
Screen readers would help, but it’s likely he’d feel weird about them because of bad experiences of people (teachers) reading things out to him and then getting teased/bullied by the other kids for it. Likewise, he’d probably have been put in remedial classes as a kid, because adults wouldn’t have understood that it’s anintake problem, not a processing problem. There’s a good chance he hates school and most of the things it stands for, but he can read. It just takes a while.
In the same vein, he might be inclined towards a STEM or visual art career, because less reading. He’d probably have been extremely active as a kid, because why stay inside to do something he’s not good at?
Possible “helpful corrections” might include glasses, maybe ADD/ADHD meds/counseling, teachers talking to him like he’s slow.
Actual helpful corrections include fonts where the letters look different from each other (I’ve learned to look at comic sans in a whole new appreciative light) and color schemes so it’s easier to find where he left off. Check out the chrome extension BeeLine for a good example. And, clearly, not being rushed when they have to read things. It’s likely that Kes would only be cool with certain people (like his ladyfriend? maybe a parent, a really good friend) reading to him, but idk what his pride looks like. Possible vision therapy for focusing problems, like tracking a swinging ball.
Kes’s memory would absolutely be above-average. He’d be memorizing children’s books and parroting them back to people when they ask him to read for them. Some of that would go away as he grew up and learned to partially depend on written notes, but not all of it.
My husband describes dyslexia as like a staggered-depth phenomenon: some letters float off, some letters float down. Personally, I think at least some of the word-scrambling is due to muscle memory from trying to track down floating letters, but I have no research to prove it. He likes laughing at the things the dyslexia thinks signs say, which are similar but markedly different to the things I see when I read signs too fast.
That’s all I can think of right now.
This is so helpful.
Complication in Kes’s case: he had no formal schooling. His family moved around a lot and so he was taught mostly by his mother and his auntie, and they had never encountered dyslexia before. So on the one hand, at least they knew he wasn’t stupid and didn’t treat him badly. But on the other hand, they had no idea how to help him except maybe ask him to work harder, and it was probably torture for everyone involved.
(Another complication: his first language isn’t Basic. Iberican tends to have pretty predictable word endings; the verbs conjugate regularly, the nouns end in predictable vowels mostly. So my initial concept would be that Basic was much harder for him because he’d lose track of where words began and ended. I feel like Aurebesh is a particularly horrific font, but I’m not sure of that.)
He works a fairly physical job that involves reading mostly in signing work contracts at the beginning of a gig, and reading lists (cargo manifests); his family tends to book gigs together for safety so he can almost always have someone else present to read the contract, and lists are easier for him than chunks of text, especially since they’re often repetitive. (Seems reasonable, no?)
ohhhh my god i just thought about him reading kids’ books to Poe and hurt myself. That hurt me. Oh my gosh I just hurt myself. I’m sure he does it, I’m sure he does, and I’m sure Poe loves it, but I’m also sure Poe eventually notices that he only reads the same ones over and over and won’t read new ones, because Poe is a sharp-witted little jerk. (Nooooo I hurt myself. :( :( :( ) (Guess whose niece is a sharp-witted little jerk and figures out which of her books I deplore the messages of and makes me read those over and over. She has no mercy. Jake the Pirate is a credit-stealing jerk and I hate the velveteen rabbit so much. She literally cackles at me. She is two! This is only going to get worse.)
It’s a minor plot point, I just thought it would be a neat character note. (It came up when in a stressful and emotional situation a character he likes a lot but who doesn’t know him well shoves a datapad at him and says “sign this” and he looks at it and recognizes that it is a legal document but has no idea what it says, it’s legalese words he doesn’t know and and and the character is standing there impatiently and he thinks, possibly, that he would like to die now please. I was writing the scene and just– couldn’t put in what the document said, and had to think about that for a while and a reading disability seemed like the probable answer.)
I’d already kind of put in a tension between Kes being a physical kind of outdoorsy type and Poe being a nerd, and this seemed like a good kind of grounding for that?
It’s fascinating to me just on a brainmeats level, because dyscalculia has no visual components at all– the numbers stay put, I just can’t remember where they were. I reverse them but it’s not at all visual, they just come out wrong when I’m trying to keep track of them. And like, I viscerally do not understand the difference between 345 and 534 unless I take a moment to kind of visualize their relative sizes. I cannot remember a number for any longer than it takes to write it down, and sometimes not even that long. I’m super good at the spaces between things, but not any of the numbers. I absolutely one thousand percent cannot tell analog time because by the time I have worked out the minutes I have forgotten what the hour was. I have developed a habit of dividing small numbers in two by simply folding a measuring tape in half and reading off the number that gives me. If I randomly guess the answer to a problem without having thought about it, I have an uncannily high probability of being correct (though if I’m wrong, I’m wildly wrong); if I work it out properly with arithmetic, I am almost certain to get the wrong answer. It’s weird. And there’s basically 0 scholarship on the disorder so the only coping mechanism advice I’ve ever gotten is a repeated “well everyone’s bad at math so suck it up”.
I encountered an excellent theory that ADHD and dyscalculia could be intertwined, in my case; the numbers don’t float but I am literally incapable of concentrating long enough to read them, and that’s got to be something to do with my attention span.
But doctors tend not to diagnose women with ADHD, or anyone at all with dyscalculia, and what good would a label really do me, said my mother who did not pursue diagnosis when I was a child and only told me when I graduated college that she had been sure I wouldn’t be able to do it. !!! Thanks?
wisekrakens reblogged your post and added:
My husband is dyslexic, and I’ve… read up on it. Pretty extensively.
Assuming dyslexia is not Widely Understood:
Screen readers would help, but it’s likely he’d feel weird about them because of bad experiences of people (teachers) reading things out to him and then getting teased/bullied by the other kids for it. Likewise, he’d probably have been put in remedial classes as a kid, because adults wouldn’t have understood that it’s anintake problem, not a processing problem. There’s a good chance he hates school and most of the things it stands for, but he can read. It just takes a while.
In the same vein, he might be inclined towards a STEM or visual art career, because less reading. He’d probably have been extremely active as a kid, because why stay inside to do something he’s not good at?
Possible “helpful corrections” might include glasses, maybe ADD/ADHD meds/counseling, teachers talking to him like he’s slow.
Actual helpful corrections include fonts where the letters look different from each other (I’ve learned to look at comic sans in a whole new appreciative light) and color schemes so it’s easier to find where he left off. Check out the chrome extension BeeLine for a good example. And, clearly, not being rushed when they have to read things. It’s likely that Kes would only be cool with certain people (like his ladyfriend? maybe a parent, a really good friend) reading to him, but idk what his pride looks like. Possible vision therapy for focusing problems, like tracking a swinging ball.
Kes’s memory would absolutely be above-average. He’d be memorizing children’s books and parroting them back to people when they ask him to read for them. Some of that would go away as he grew up and learned to partially depend on written notes, but not all of it.
My husband describes dyslexia as like a staggered-depth phenomenon: some letters float off, some letters float down. Personally, I think at least some of the word-scrambling is due to muscle memory from trying to track down floating letters, but I have no research to prove it. He likes laughing at the things the dyslexia thinks signs say, which are similar but markedly different to the things I see when I read signs too fast.
That’s all I can think of right now.
This is so helpful.
Complication in Kes’s case: he had no formal schooling. His family moved around a lot and so he was taught mostly by his mother and his auntie, and they had never encountered dyslexia before. So on the one hand, at least they knew he wasn’t stupid and didn’t treat him badly. But on the other hand, they had no idea how to help him except maybe ask him to work harder, and it was probably torture for everyone involved.
(Another complication: his first language isn’t Basic. Iberican tends to have pretty predictable word endings; the verbs conjugate regularly, the nouns end in predictable vowels mostly. So my initial concept would be that Basic was much harder for him because he’d lose track of where words began and ended. I feel like Aurebesh is a particularly horrific font, but I’m not sure of that.)
He works a fairly physical job that involves reading mostly in signing work contracts at the beginning of a gig, and reading lists (cargo manifests); his family tends to book gigs together for safety so he can almost always have someone else present to read the contract, and lists are easier for him than chunks of text, especially since they’re often repetitive. (Seems reasonable, no?)
ohhhh my god i just thought about him reading kids’ books to Poe and hurt myself. That hurt me. Oh my gosh I just hurt myself. I’m sure he does it, I’m sure he does, and I’m sure Poe loves it, but I’m also sure Poe eventually notices that he only reads the same ones over and over and won’t read new ones, because Poe is a sharp-witted little jerk. (Nooooo I hurt myself. :( :( :( ) (Guess whose niece is a sharp-witted little jerk and figures out which of her books I deplore the messages of and makes me read those over and over. She has no mercy. Jake the Pirate is a credit-stealing jerk and I hate the velveteen rabbit so much. She literally cackles at me. She is two! This is only going to get worse.)
It’s a minor plot point, I just thought it would be a neat character note. (It came up when in a stressful and emotional situation a character he likes a lot but who doesn’t know him well shoves a datapad at him and says “sign this” and he looks at it and recognizes that it is a legal document but has no idea what it says, it’s legalese words he doesn’t know and and and the character is standing there impatiently and he thinks, possibly, that he would like to die now please. I was writing the scene and just– couldn’t put in what the document said, and had to think about that for a while and a reading disability seemed like the probable answer.)
I’d already kind of put in a tension between Kes being a physical kind of outdoorsy type and Poe being a nerd, and this seemed like a good kind of grounding for that?
It’s fascinating to me just on a brainmeats level, because dyscalculia has no visual components at all– the numbers stay put, I just can’t remember where they were. I reverse them but it’s not at all visual, they just come out wrong when I’m trying to keep track of them. And like, I viscerally do not understand the difference between 345 and 534 unless I take a moment to kind of visualize their relative sizes. I cannot remember a number for any longer than it takes to write it down, and sometimes not even that long. I’m super good at the spaces between things, but not any of the numbers. I absolutely one thousand percent cannot tell analog time because by the time I have worked out the minutes I have forgotten what the hour was. I have developed a habit of dividing small numbers in two by simply folding a measuring tape in half and reading off the number that gives me. If I randomly guess the answer to a problem without having thought about it, I have an uncannily high probability of being correct (though if I’m wrong, I’m wildly wrong); if I work it out properly with arithmetic, I am almost certain to get the wrong answer. It’s weird. And there’s basically 0 scholarship on the disorder so the only coping mechanism advice I’ve ever gotten is a repeated “well everyone’s bad at math so suck it up”.
I encountered an excellent theory that ADHD and dyscalculia could be intertwined, in my case; the numbers don’t float but I am literally incapable of concentrating long enough to read them, and that’s got to be something to do with my attention span.
But doctors tend not to diagnose women with ADHD, or anyone at all with dyscalculia, and what good would a label really do me, said my mother who did not pursue diagnosis when I was a child and only told me when I graduated college that she had been sure I wouldn’t be able to do it. !!! Thanks?
