"OK," I told her while handing her a new notebook with a cute, bedazzled Minnie Mouse on the cover. "Today you are going to start writing. And you are going to write every day for the entire summer. Just a few sentences. No worries about spelling at all. Just write something nonfiction. About your life. How you are feeling, what's going on. Once you have filled half a sheet of paper, you can draw anything at all. You can draw all you want."
It took her a long time. She fought it. I knew she could do it, but she sure didn't want to. She kept asking me how to spell everything. This was taking forever. I explained to her about freewriting as a stage of the writing process that comes even before outlining and drafting. It's not a time to edit. It's a time for stream-of-consciousness dumping of thoughts. I wanted her to practice putting her thoughts on paper, not writing perfect sentences. This wasn't a grammar lesson.
But she seemed stuck.
Finally she said, "But it's going to be all wrong." "No it's not. It's going to be great for a dyslexic." "But I don't want to be great for a dyslexic. I want to be great for real." I explained to her that all this work we were doing is because she just plain can't write down words as well as most people, that this is life, that it's not really a disability but it is a problem that we need to solve because we live in a society where writing is the prized form of communication and that if she had lived in ancient Greece she would be considered super brilliant for her oratory and logic skills and that da Vinci was dyslexic and people laughed at Einstein, etc., etc.
"When I work hard to change your brain a little bit, I'm not trying to FIX your brain, you know. Because nothing is broken. You were dyslexic already when you were in my tummy. You don't have a disease, remember. You just have a problem that is this: dyslexics don't get along so well in modern society because their strengths don't lend themselves to the kinds of learning that are most common. So I'm helping you to avoid frustration later in life." I had told her all this before, but it seemed to be sinking in. We got out the "Gift of Dyslexia" book again, and I read to her about how creative dyslexics are, and how good they are at solving problems.
Then I tried the "perspective" tactic. SOME people have REAL problems. Some people can't read because of brain injury, not learning difference. Some people can't see! Some people can't walk. THOSE are real challenges, I told her. This? This is just an inconvenience.
It seemed to work. She wrote some beautiful sentences about how now that the tree in our front yard is chopped down, she notices just how many more clouds there are in the sky than she could see before. I think she spelled one word right. Good job, I told her. You did it! You got down some great thoughts.
"You know, mom, I've decided I don't want you to praise me any more. Not unless I do something really worth praising," she said. "I want to earn it."
That's my girl.
