My Dad was amazing in some areas of his life. He loved to trouble shoot why small electronics didn’t work right and get them working again. This typically meant telephones. He would hunt garage sales to find broken ones, fix them, and give them to people. This directly tied into his skill set he needed for his job. He called himself, “a telephone man.”
He was, indeed, a telephone man. He went from doing it in the military to doing it as a civilian. It paid the bills and put food on the table. He could listen to someone dialing numbers and tell you each number they dialed. In a room full of machines clacking away, he could go straight to the one that wasn’t working right and get it working. He loved his job.
School, on the other hand, was a place of torture. When you ask him about it, the first thing he’ll tell you about are the things they did to him to force him to use his right hand as he was born left handed. They would smack his hand with a ruler, tie his hand to the chair, and so on until he finally, slowly, learned to write with his non-dominant hand. He went on the rest of his life using his right hand for writing, but other wise he used his left.
Then he will go on to tell you about his experiences learning to read. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get a very good grade on spelling tests or on assignments that required spelling. He was bright, so no one could figure it out and assumed he was just playing around and/or being stubborn. Eventually, he spent plenty of time sitting in front of the class with a large “dunce” hat on, which humiliated him. Dad said no matter how hard he tried, he could just not spell words. He never did learn. There wasn’t a single thing I saw that my Dad wrote that didn’t have at least one spelling error in it.
Interestingly enough, Dad did learn to read and he loved reading. He stuck to non-fiction and 90% of the time it was history related. Usually around World War II. He also read up on airplanes. From research I’ve read, it isn’t unusual for someone with dyslexia to learn to read in a specific genre. No matter what other books we tried to give him, he stuck to the history books and set aside the others.
I’m glad my dad was able to overcome being put down for his spelling mistakes as a young person and become successful in something he loved. It is too bad he didn’t have access to the right support to keep him from the front of the classroom wearing a dunce hat.