Bonnie Bing: Here’s what it is like to have dyslexia

My new saying is “simulation is stimulation.” Before you roll your eyes, yes, I saw that, I’m going to give you an excellent example.

I’ve always been curious about dyslexia so when I got an email from Fundamental Learning Center, offering a simulation workshop, “Dyslexia: A Walk in Their Shoes,” come see what it’s like to be a child with dyslexia, I signed up myself and my husband Dick Honeyman.

The email explained we would do exercises that would show us how people with dyslexia process differently what they see and hear.

On our way to Fundamental Learning Center my husband asked once again, “Now, what is this we’re doing?” Bless his heart, he never knows what I’ll drag him to next.

We arrived early, thanks to me thinking it started 30 minutes earlier than it did, so co-founder and executive director Jeanine Phillips, was kind enough to give us a tour of the school. Immediately it was abundantly clear that I knew very little about dyslexia. And what I knew was incorrect.

I always thought dyslexia had to do only with what a person saw when they tried to read. Wrong. I think it was in about the 8th grade someone told me that dyslexia meant the person read from right to left or saw all the words backwards. Wrong. Dyslexia is a processing problem. And it’s far more prevalent than you might think. Dyslexia affects one in five people in the United States. I also didn’t know it was hereditary.

When everyone else who signed up arrived we did the first exercise which had to do with hearing. After three tries I got two out of 10 words correct. Dick got eight out of ten correct. He got a star. If you did well you got a star on your name tag. At the end of the evening there was nothing on my name tag except my name. Dick had one star — a fact he mentioned several times over the next few days.

We divided into smaller groups and then came the exercise I most wanted to cheat on. It was reading a story that had symbols instead of words. The story told you ONCE the word the symbols represented. We could not turn back to refer to the words. When I tried it again at home, I did look back and it took me 20 minutes to read a very short story.

It was stressful when it was my turn to read aloud to the group. It reminded me of the time in 4th grade I had to stand up and read. I couldn’t pronounce aluminum. And the time when I was a junior in high school standing alone at the black board in algebra with not a clue how to solve the problem.

But the most difficult exercise for me was standing at a desk with a paper that had a star on it. There was a panel over the paper so you couldn’t see the paper if you looked down. You had to look in a mirror and draw between the lines of the star. I only had one line drawn between the lines of the star and it was about an inch long. I would have to say it was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever tried to do. I’d see that I was drawing the wrong way and try to reverse it, but that didn’t work. Nothing seemed to work.

I found it difficult not to use unladylike language. I griped the pencil so tightly my hand ached. Dick said on the way home he couldn’t believe how difficult and frustrating it was.

When all the groups gathered again, I was relieved to see everyone looked as weary as I felt.

Jennifer Remsburg, director of marketing and communications for Fundamental Learning Center asked, “Are you tired?” I think everyone responded “yes.” Then she said something I’ll never forget. “Then how would you like to go home and work at least three hours on homework, then get up, go back to school and do it all again?”

Thankfully there’s a school where instructors understand what that would be like.

If you’ve ever been curious about dyslexia, the staff at Fundamental Learning Center can answer your questions. Not only do staff members change lives, they educate people who aren’t dyslexic about those with a learning difference.