Book: Please Don't Call Me Dumb! Memoirs of Unique Cognitive Processing: Dyslexia, Sequencing, or What?

Please Don't Call Me Dumb! Memoirs of Unique Cognitive Processing: Dyslexia, Sequencing, or What? 
 

Preface

To be a member of this intense and gifted tribe:

Awareness of cognitive uniqueness,

Admit your uniqueness,

Celebrate your uniqueness,

Share your uniqueness,

Include the gifts of others' uniqueness.

The unfolding of understanding cognitive processing has come from my involvement as a special
education teacher. The purpose of this book is to share what I have come to know. I feel that we are
working ourselves out of the “dark ages” of education. Let us continue the positive direction and change
the picture! The jargon in this book comes from the specialized language of the educational and medical
professions, which is unavoidable but understandable. Jargon can be helpful because it consists of unique
words either borrowed or created to help one understand and apply concepts to a particular field of study.

I am not an expert in any field; however, this book is an expression of my experiences. I have been
influenced by those who know much more about brain processing than I. Becoming aware of learning
challenges has taught me a lot about me. And others!

I know some of our brightest, most creative, and gifted people are often misdiagnosed and misclassified
with terms that revolve around behavioral and emotional challenges. Labels are generously used, such as
Bipolar, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder, and the list can go on and on. The uniqueness of each person finds ways to explain differences. Cognitive processing differences!

The labels don't stop. The experts point fingers and define a person: Learning Disabled! Dyslexia!
Asperger's! Gifted! Retarded! Autistic! And again the list can go on and on. Labels can be overwhelming
and sometimes ridiculous! The essential question I ask, “Why do we need to label?” Labeling can be
positive, but it is more often negative. It may even create an overwhelming false sense of identity. Are the
many associated behaviors defined as symptoms, syndromes, disorders, or what? Where on the continuum of severity do the behaviors fall? Dig deeply to find the causes and the effects! Explore the subjects that grab your interest: study, ponder, and continue to read. Connect the dots.

Can one identify the problem, design the intervention, and move on with or without a label? Can a label
be carried like an unwanted wart on the face or a blister on the heart? For me, learning about and
understanding an identifier called dyslexia brought massive relief that redirected my thinking to know why I had labeled my cognitive processing as a monster. I can now call it dyslexia. I am relieved. I found it is also a gift. As you find your gifts, you will be inspired and relieved.

Do we process information differently? Processing information in a different way can be an admirable
thing. I have a son who picked up this book and said, “If this book had only one sentence on each page, I would read it!” I missed my chance! That would result in reading about three hundred sentences. That's
commendable and comfortable! I should have taught my son that reading one sentence on each page was
acceptable and even could be outstanding. He would have then begun on the path of learning to learn!
When do we start to teach an individual how to learn, and whose responsibility is it?

How do we learn to learn? I was born with what some would label dyslexia including a deficit of not
being able to sequence. I didn't know what my brain was doing until I became a mature adult. As I
academically stumbled through kindergarten to high school, I concluded that the struggle was firmly in
place because I felt both dumb and smart. My 3rd grade teacher voiced that I would never graduate from
high school. Ouch! On the other hand, I have had experiences in my adult life, which when pieced
together, seemed to make it clear that I am not dumb; I might even be smart. Yes, smart! What a confusing and burdensome dilemma! Can you have it both ways: dumb and intelligent?

This book will open a door through which others who think they are dumb can pass. Such an
unanticipated passage can give them an understanding of their unique talents. These can be a platform
from which they can craft an ultimately successful approach to a challenging life. They will master the
essential skills of learning to learn by understanding the way their brains are wired to receive information.
Understanding the nature of cognitive processing is critical. Knowing how we think and what we can
do with that thinking is the beginning of the story. I heard words at an International Dyslexia Association meeting that described the process: acquisition, interpretation, organization, application, and recall of sensory input. Wow! Is there more? Cognitive processing is a collection of mental skills that are essential to our functioning. Intelligence forms the foundation.

The reason I wrote this book will be understood as we journey, day after day. Are there questions about
cognitive processing? Yes, perhaps someday, someone will say, “I understand now! Aha! I knew there was
an answer!” Keep looking! It will matter. I have contemplated what I know, what to do with what I know, and what I am not sure I know. I shout, “Heaven forgive me as I stumble.”

It would be well to write a book for the student audience, a different version for parents, another for
teachers, and one for everybody else. Therefore, my goal is to roll the essence of what is appropriate into
one book. As I look through my lenses, I desire that we will emerge with an understanding of how we
process information. I will share how accepting differences in processing is an essential key. I am
passionate about this subject. As we deepen our understanding, our empathy will increase, and we can
bring the message of Hope.

I know of cases where not understanding how the brain is processing information has led some, stepby-
step, to prison, to suicide, and others to murder. Hopelessness! My tears care, and I am grateful for you! 

If you have been one of my students from 33 years of teaching, please send me your address and I will gift you my book. argie.ella@gmail.com  I taught in Arizona, Utah and Hawaii.

Today! This has been an exciting day for my new book. This book: Please Don't Call Me Dumb! Memoirs of Unique Cognitive Processing: Dyslexia, Sequencing, or What? has been a difficult book to send to the market because it has been wrapped in tears of joy and sadness. The book is a pledge of HOPE for those who have felt the pain of not understanding why intelligence has not been rewarded—Smart but feeling Dumb! Please join with me on a journey to celebrate our gifts of thinking in a very special way. We are a brush stroke of beauty on the colorful tapestry of life. Rejoice!—Know you and me, More alike than unalike, Intriguing gifts are we, Search and you will find, A bit of everthing in me and thee.— As we struggle with the challenges of living, my desire is that we will discover some threads which will tie us together and find some answers as to WHY we cognitively process the way we do. The brain is a complex and fascinating Control Center to be studied and understood. I am grateful that I have my particular brain, and I now understand how it processes as it carries me through the steps of life. If you have ever been one of my students, please email me: argie.ella@gmail.com as I would like to gift you this book. I know that I have lots of students from my 33 years of teaching. For others, you will find my book on   Amazon.com    Createspace.com bookstores and online retailers. Libraries and Academic Institutions can buy through Ingram Distributors. Enjoy and let me know how you feel about the book. Thank you for making it a friend. Yes! I am working on another book:  Mother.

Have a good day,

Argie Hoskins Shumway

Cover design:  Daniel Reneer

I am hoping that you are also enjoying my other book: More Than a Ticket Memoirs Flying with American Airlines from Props to Jets.

Cover design: Daniel Reneer

Feel free to share this information.

 

SOMETIMES READING DIFFICULTIES ARE NOT DYSLEXIA

In the previous post, I said I would answer questions about what is on your mind. So each time I post I will address a question before I tell you what is on my mind.
Question: How do you know what to write?
Answer:  I hope to get questions which will lead me into my next post. I, having cognitive processing challenges and learning how to compensate, has led me into becoming a special education teacher with years of experience and now writing a book; I feel that I would like to share and perhaps I could help.

Not every child has Dyslexia

The following story is about a person who became an accomplished university professor, who had a reading difficulty.

   "I'm Jimmy. I do not have any specific identifiable language disabilities. January of 1955, at age 17 years of age, in the last month of my senior year in high school, I left public education and entered the Air Force. I guess you could say I was technically a “high school drop-out.” My mother went to the principal and obtained my graduation certificate while I was in Basic Training. I was not overly anxious about my lack of academic preparation. I had no planned career counseling, no real understanding about education and its relationship to future work. I had no academic pursuits. I didn't know nor care what my grade point average was. I was bored with school work and was looking forward to a new adventure. I had learned how to relate well with people and was not afraid to leave my home on my own. I had done so the last summer taking a farming job up in Canada. I did not at the time realize that I simply did not have a good preparation in the basic language skills of reading for understanding, writing a coherent paper with correct spelling and punctuation. I could read well enough to get a decent score on the Air Force entrance exam to be accepted into that armed service. I went on to be a successful airman in my four years of military service. I earned the rank of Airman 1^st class.

Experiencing Public School

My language skills were not developed mostly because of the lack of teaching. In grade school I learned to “word call,” i.e., say the name of a written word, but was very slow at this “word calling.” “Breaking the code” was mostly taught by memory or “sight reading” of the good ole “Dick and Jane” basal series and using picture clues to get the meaning of the narrative. The phonetic decoding I picked up was incidental and not from consistent, organized teaching. Because of this lack of phonetic instruction I was also a poor speller. Spelling for me was mostly from sight memory.

Because of my poor decoding skills, my reading comprehension was also slow and tedious. After slowly reading a paragraph, I had difficulty in re calling the meaning of that paragraph and would have to go back several times to get the meaning. As I got into the higher grades and had to read in the different content areas, I remember many times I would “read” a paragraph and then think, “Now what was that I just read?”

My dear mother was working full time to feed and clothe our family of four young children. She and my father were divorced when I was eight years of age. She also went to night school at a junior college in the evenings. She was my best “language arts” teacher. She would correct me in my usage of language as all good parents do. I learned to speak correctly through the everyday speaking in our home. I learned the correct conjugation of verbs not by understanding the tenses and persons but by experiencing spoken and listening language in my home. Again, this is the way most children learn to speak their native tongue.

Mom had little time to monitor what we did at school. She left us to do our school work. Most of the time I would bring schoolwork home and put it on the dining room table so she would notice it. Much of the time I never looked at my school work until I picked it up and headed out to school.

By the time I went into the Air Force, my math skills were as poor as my language arts skills. Early on I learned to dislike math mostly because of how it was presented to us. Math was taught by rote memory. I remember trying to memorize the multiplication facts. The teacher would have an oral drill at the end of the week. The person who could recite that week's facts received a sucker. My best friend who lived across the street from me was good at memorizing math. He would always win the sucker. I never won one. When I got into algebra and geometry, I could do the problems but in my own way. I would always try to visualize in my mind the problem using diagrams, visual time lines, etc. I remember taking a standardized achievement test at the end of Junior High. When I got to High School the geometry teacher said I had a really interesting test results profile. I did poorly on simple tasks like computing percentages, yet could do problems that required spatial relationships reasoning."

At this point I would like to inject a brief comment:

Although, the previous story does not express a specific challenge, it does point in the direction of a weakness in auditory processing, rather learned or unlearned as a behavior.

Exploring the Oral and Written Language Errors

Made by Language Disabled Children

by Hyla Rubin

and Isabelle Y. Liberman

Is there a naming problem? The pattern of results indicates a problem specifically with naming, rather than a more general vocabulary deficit.

 

This is a quote by Katz, 1982; Wolf, 1981. This is stated to be a short term memory function; efficient phonetic coding seems crucial for both initial storage and eventual production of language segment. 

This is interesting to me, because this has often been my problem, which has effected both the ability to use written and oral language. It is very frustrating to understand a concept and not be able to express it in words. I have called it, an auditory memory problem, however knowing that it is also associated with visual memory, because of the lack of ability to pull the word out of visual memory. However for me it is the auditory, which fails before the visual.  

While teaching in Hawaii, I had the opportunity to work with students who could not read standard English, but look at the words, read them in Pidgin and then tell me what it meant in standard English.  Wow!  Anyway, I want to hear questions?

 

It is obvious to me that Jimmy had a visual strength and he learned to use that cognitive visual strength to learn to read. After reading this story, let us talk about it.  argie.ella@gmail.com  I will post your questions and if I have an answer, I will also write that here. 

DYSLEXIA, PERHAPS YES OR PERHAPS NO

 I will cover many aspect of this dilemma as the posting progresses. As your questions surface, I will address them.

We have now heard that it, whatever it is, is a gift. I would like to talk about this gift which can cause the heart to break, the mind to exploded, the eyes to tear, and the soul to rejoice. When and where in the forest do I choose to walk. Do I see the forest or the trees? Do I see the roses or the thorns. Does this journey make me bitter or better? Please join me!

I have been thinking. WOUNDED CHILD

As I, a kindergartener, pulled myself up the hill from Sully Elementary School to our company owned house, tears held back in my eyes flooded my heart. The Santa Rita Kennecott open pit mine, large as it was, couldn't contain the feelings of disappointment which filled my soul as I told myself that I never wanted to return to that place where monsters lived. This is the place that mother had prepared me in a lovely new hand sewn dress, white socks and brown leather shoes with a pimento and cheese sandwich in my hand to be excited and to amount to something. 

Mother had sewn my lovely little dress and curled my hair to look like a doll.

For me, that day changed everything; especially my future. I raised my hand and the teacher called on me. Replying as taught to do, always say the name of the person to whom you are speaking, “Teacher, may I take the paper roll to the office?” The stinging reply pierced the silence of the room, “Don't you ever call me Teacher, my name is Mrs. Travaro!” And the sound was not muffled, but loud, clear and well defined. She meant it! I could not remember the name Travaro but teacher worked just fine in my mind. I could not remember her very difficult name. Other students seem to do fine with the name. For the school year, she was Teacher.

On another occasion when in the fourth grade, “You will never graduate from the eighth grade, let along high school.” I could not read! The words rang through my head as I stood there in front of the whole class trying to read the word A-W-F-U-L on the printed page of the book which had been assigned to me.I understood the word but could not bring it to memory. I could not remember the sounds, place them in sequence or any of those other things which the teachers had been trying to fill my mind. Finally, by the 8th grade, I had learned enough sight vocabulary that I could read, somewhat. I knew that I was smart, but why couldn't I read!

Those were some of the recurring nightmares at the beginning of my tender years in something called school. Back in the 40s when I was five years old, a man by the name of Samuel Torrey Orton (1879-1948,) was working with brain-damaged adults. Samuel Orton attempted to explain the occurrence of language disabilities in children who had not suffered brain injury yet displayed symptoms similar to those exhibited by the adults who had sustained language loss. Orton's hypothesis was that children who do not establish hemispheric dominance in particular areas of the brain display specific developmental language disabilities such as reading disability ((Myers & Hammill, 1976, p. 258.)
This interest came to Orton because of his daughter's difficulties in learning to read (Wingate, 1997, p.150.)

My world did not know of Orton nor did Orton know of me, however he was studying children who were like unto me. Later as a teacher myself, I used the Slingerland screening tests for identifying children with specific language disability. Dyslexia because of the several identified kinds and with a continuum of mild to sever needs specific screening for the strengths and weaknesses to design the proper intervention. I have experienced the need to know the strengths in cognitive processing in order to develop the appropriate intervention.

Ask questions?  Tomorrow, I will talk about having a difficult challenge learning to read without being Dyslexic.