Your Dyslexic Kid: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Hello, and welcome to Dyslexia Journey with Sonja and Nick. This is the show where we discuss topics related to supporting the dyslexic child in your life. And today, our title is, You Don't Know What You Don't Know. So basically, what we're getting at here is the challenge of understanding your child's experience when, you know, we're not really inside of their brains. Exactly. So we have three things that we didn't know until we knew that we're going to cover today. The first is something that I think can happen maybe early on in your journey of dyslexia with your dyslexic child, which is how much, even from an early age, the child with dyslexia is using various compensation measures.

Right. So there are all kinds of ways that children with dyslexia might be compensating in order to deal with school or what they're supposed to be doing or just the actual learning. Maybe sometimes because they're trying to sort of hide, I think we have a perception that it's like about hiding, hiding their weakness in these ways. And sometimes I think it is. I think it's also purely strategies for learning, right? They're sort of trying to figure out their own ways to learn in their own way.

So one example we have of that was our daughter, you know, very early on in the reading journey of school, I guess kindergarten and first grade in particular. Yeah. So our daughter, I think in first grade, I think she was preparing to read a book aloud in class. And we didn't realize until later that she she had actually memorized the book. And I think this is fairly common among children with dyslexia.

And it's just something dyslexia wasn't even on our radar yet at that time. This was several years before she was actually diagnosed. And so we we really I mean, we'd read the book to her a few times. And I think often one compensatory measure that dyslexic children do is their sort of oral comprehension and their memory really, really picks up the slack. And it will be different for everyone. It will be, of course, depending on their.

Yeah. And so in her case, and I think this is true for a fair number of people with dyslexia. I mean, they can actually memorize a short picture book like that after just a few readings. In that case, of course, you have the pictures as a visual cue, too. But an interesting thing about it is that in one of the first testing she did later, and I don't know if this is how that she's learned to read, read better.

So she hasn't had to rely on memory as much. But because she'd been strengthening that skill so much, they said that she was at like a graduate school level in memorization. Right. So she had this she'd been strengthening that skill so much that it was just off the charts, which is kind of an interesting tidbit about that. So compensation and all these different kinds of ways that you might not realize are happening is one particular thing where you might not realize what's going on.

So another one is what the actual experience of trying to read feels like for someone with dyslexia. And there's really no way that we're ever going to completely, you know, be in someone's brain or be able to have their perceptual experiences for this. But what's interesting is and I think this is just a psychological bias everyone has as a human. You know, it's the you don't know what you don't know thing you think, you know, just because we make assumptions based on even knowing that it's different.

We make assumptions based on what what we think it might be like. Right. Or even even knowing that that I don't have dyslexia, but my daughter does and knowing that she that reading feels different to her. I still still have a hard time really conceptualizing how how different that is. Right. So so so if she's reading along or something, you know, I'll say it's just the next line like and it doesn't it's really hard for me still to put myself in her shoes.

And for me, because I often work on some of the more, you know, English type type activities with her. I remember there was a time not even that long ago, I can't remember if it was a year or two ago when I felt frustrated because I felt like she was jumping ahead. I think it was. And and then she just said to me, I just saw that part already because I'm seeing the whole page at the whole time at the same time.

And even though I had kind of known that already, it's not like she'd never said that phrase. I see the whole page at the same time before. But it just making that connection when I wasn't seeing it that way was really difficult. So it's just it's important to sort of almost keep a sense of humility about it, I guess, if we can or just remembering that we don't know a lot of things and trying to which is again.

Like we're sort of fighting our natural impulse there. So we have to give ourselves some grace about it. But that is one thing to consider. Right. And the third you don't know what you don't know for today is continuing with the theme of humility is something that I also kind of just, you know, I feel I feel kind of chagrined now that it didn't occur to me. And maybe this will be obvious to those of you out there watching and listening.

But one effect of having dyslexia is that copying problems out of a book, like a math problem or something like that, can be much more error prone than for someone without dyslexia. And so our daughter often asks us to, when she's doing, say, math problems, to like read the problem to her and then she'll write it down or something like that. And I didn't realize for the longest time that that's because sometimes if she's just doing that on her own, she'll just copy the wrong problem and then do the whole wrong problem and then check the answer in the back of the book in the case of a math book.

And it's totally wrong. And then maybe I'll come and check her work and say, well, that looks right to me. Like, it must be wrong. And, you know, maybe the book has a mistake. And then I'll realize, oh, wait, like you actually did the wrong problem because it was the one right below the one that you were supposed to do. And maybe you even started sometimes, sometimes even I've seen her start to copy the correct problem and then sort of jump to the problem below.

And then it's maybe a mishmash. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to to realize that that was another effect of the dyslexia. Well, and I think it's really easy to also because when you're saying that I can't think of a specific example for me, but I know that a lot of the times, you know, you wonder, is it the confidence thing? Is it should I just be encouraging them to do it on their own? I mean, because there's all these other emotional and other factors as well.

So I can see how you could also easily think, oh, you can read that problem to yourself or something. But then, you know, in that case that you're talking about, look at how much extra time that would be to do an entire other math problem that you didn't have to do. So it can be important to keep in mind that there can be those kinds of things that they just really like the extra help can can really just make things so much more efficient.

Right. For them. Right. Yes, it does feel like sometimes that we want to be encouraging them to do more and more on their own. And it's always a balance between they do need to be able to know how to read a math problem to themselves and solve it because you're not going to be there with them on their test. Although when we talk about accommodations, we can talk about some accommodations that that some children might might need around even exams in math and science.

But that aside, it is tempting sometimes to say, well, you know, you you should get practice reading that to yourself. But but really, you need to think about what what your problem you're trying to solve. And if they really just need to get through their homework, you don't want them to do twice as much work because they wrote down the wrong problem. Right. So hopefully giving you some very specific examples like this is helpful for all of us trying to get our mind around some of the ways this can crop up.

I mean, I think it's impossible to foresee all of them, but I think it can be helpful to have the mindset of sort of being on the lookout for them when possible. So. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for listening or watching today. We really appreciate your support. Yeah. And we're doing this both as a podcast and on YouTube and we're trying to reach as many people as possible. So if on YouTube you could give us a like and subscribe, that would be really helpful.

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