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Sean McDonald
Professor Cassandra Blandford
English 1103
14 September 2015
Literacy Memoir Assignment
Elementary school teachers constantly associated one word with me when they say my
name. Every time the teachers mentioned this word out loud, I became instantly uncomfortable
and the students around me looked at me differently. Its almost as if they have never heard the
word before. In second grade I had an English teacher Ms. Kelly, who was the one who helped
discover this word about me. Our class would constantly have pronunciation assignments where
we would read words from a piece of paper and pronounce the words in front of the teacher. To
me, this was exceptionally challenging for unknown reasons. Although I thought of this as
challenging, my teacher at the time thought I just lacked motivation. I continued to have this
challenge almost a whole quarter through the school year until my teacher and my parents had a
meeting with me. That's when I first heard the word, this word was dyslexia.
For those who do not know, dyslexia is a learning disability that causes difficulty when
reading words. It causes me to become confused between words such as basketball and baseball
and sometimes mix up the definition of words as well. Although I have trouble with these
specific words, it doesnt mean other people with dyslexia have the same problems with the
words I use. They could have a whole other issue when reading other words. A really good
description of dyslexia is the following, Dyslexia is not a disease that must be cured; it is a lifelong learning difference. With the right kind of teaching, most dyslexics are able to learn to read
and write. Dyslexic students require a systematic, multisensory, explicit, highly structured

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teaching of the English language (in the U.S.) (An Explanation of Dyslexia). To me, dyslexia
was not as much a learning disability now compared to when I was younger. It was instead
something that improved my problem solving abilities and expanded my creativity. Dyslexia
helped with problem solving because it made me approach problems in general differently. My
brain instead of taking a route from point A to point B when solving an issue, my brain would
instead go from point A to point C. Once it reaches those points, it then tries to figure out point B
almost like reverse engineering. After the meeting I had with my parents and teacher, I was
enrolled in a gifted program. This program helped me from second grade to fourth grade to solve
one problem, the way in which my brain read and processed words.
Though I was involved in this program, I was still afraid to read paragraphs out loud in
front of the class because of the fear of mispronouncing something and then being made fun of
by other students. This fear caused a decline in my grades because I did not want to read a
selection from a book at home and possibly learn to mispronounce a word permanently. I would
instead wait until the end class to listen to how other students pronounced these words. This
would enable me to learn how to pronounce words which I was unsure about. The gifted program
I attended started at the end of one class and ended halfway through my next class. I worked with
the teacher, Mrs. Shote, to learn to adapt to my dyslexia. Mrs. Shote would get the homework or
classwork from the classes I missed and helped me if I had any questions. This program was
considered as my own personal safe zone. It would keep me away from the students that would
laugh at me if I did not know how to pronounce a simple word like button. She made me feel
comfortable by allowing me to work at my own pace on assignments and she also always had
food/drinks as a distraction from the amount of work needed to be done. When remembering this
program, I thought about the similar scenario from the text Go Carolina by David Sedaris. With

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the differences being my teacher comforted me and got to know me while the teacher in Go
Carolina did not attempt to connect as well with her students. Slowly this program started to
advance my reading ability and boosted my overall confidence.
Through this gifted program, I had reading assignments given to me every week where I
was instructed to read a Sci-Fi book of my choosing and reflect upon the reading and pronounce
what I wrote in front of the instructor. The reason Sci-Fi books were used was because of the
heavy use of higher vocabulary to describe futuristic objects the author was trying to portray
allowing for me to build upon my miniscule vocabulary. After a couple of these assignments, my
reading skills and pronunciation improved heavily. Although through pronouncing these
assignments we also discovered a speech impediment I had with the letters th in words. I
would pronounce them with an f sound instead. This yet again was another small setback, but
knowing how to deal with dyslexia, the same learning techniques came of use, and was able to
help stop the impediment issue. Another assignment I had through this program is similar to our
daily entries in our journals. I was instructed every other session I had with Mrs. Shote to write a
story that had a page in length and the content could be about anything I wanted. Since I liked
Sci-Fi books, I would write about me being stuck in of the characters situations, and what
decisions I would make that the character failed to make. A book series I constantly wrote about
was Ender's game and imagined me being in the situation of Ender going through battle
simulators. After I wrote my story, Mrs. Shote and I would read it out loud together to make sure
my pronunciation was correct, and also to make sure I was not misreading words.
Now dealing with dyslexia is next to nonexistent. I have not needed to go into any other
programs since middle school. Occasionally I might have a slip up after reading pages and pages
of text but that's a lot better than every other sentence having a slip up occur. Dyslexia made me

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think more analytically when I was younger which I think is one of the reasons as to why I like
programming. When debugging a program, I tend to think differently than another programmer.
Instead, I think outside the box instead of a linear approach like most people do. I do think
though that my issues with grammar is directly related to when I struggled a lot with dyslexia.

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Works Cited
"An Explanation of Dyslexia." Bismarck Tribune. 25 Oct. 2010. Web. 14 Sept.
2015.