Neurodivergent Rights...

[shadowkat]

Found on Face Book of all places:

Apparently, I'm neurodivergent - since I have a grab bag of a lot of these:



For those who can't see it? It breaks down visual and audio coordination issues into categories:

1. Dyscalculia - Difficulty with visual/spatial coordination, counting, doing numbers in sequence or sequencing (example? Unable to count by sevens), difficulty working word problems...

2. Dyslexia - difficulty reading aloud, mis-pronouncing words (often substituting words or finding another word), difficulty reading aloud, problems retrieving words, difficulty with writing or spelling, slow and labor intensive reading

3. Dysgraphia - symptoms include cramped/sore hand, poor spatial planning of sentences and margins, frequent erasing, inconsistent letter and word spacing, poor spelling and missing words and letters

4. Dyspraxia
Symptoms include: difference in speech, perception problems, poor hand-eye coordination, poor balance and posture, clumsiness, fatigue.

Better late than never, I guess? But I wish this information was more accessible and prevalent in the 20th Century and early 00s? Along with the advocacy.

Comments

[cactuswatcher]

Well, I guess I'm not the only one who'd call my problem "dysgraphia." I always had a suspicion I was just guessing at the word from my symptoms!

When I was little, the teachers understood poor hand-eye coordination, but that was it. And they were a little dismissive about it. I guess they figured "good students" would grow out of it, like athletically, I grew from being a terrible batter in soft ball to a pretty good one. If I'm not very careful I still have trouble with word and letter spacing, which the teachers called poor hand-eye coordination.

And yes, if you have one of these four, the symptoms may seem like they belong in one or more of the other three.

[shadowkat]

That's pretty much my guess as well. I didn't know about dysgraphia, just dyslexia and discalcia.

And I was just told that I had poor hand-eye coordination, and had to work to overcome it.
Or audio-visual coordination. I wasn't given these words for it, and no one else knew about it either in the schools that I attended.

[slaymesoftly]

That one rang so true for me!!!! Wonderful to have a name for it.

[shadowkat]

Thought the same. Somehow audio/visual coordination disorder seemed a bit long and...sigh too demeaning for words.

[conuly]

Did you not already know this? I thought you knew this! I mean, I just assumed...?

[cactuswatcher]

Shadowkat can speak for herself, but it was not that I didn't recognize I had difficulties, but all the way into college, teachers and professors were likely to overlook the problems as "normal," when they actually weren't. Don't know if their knowing would have helped. I got mostly good grades anyway. But it would have done good things for my mental state, if both they and I understood it wasn't in any sense 'normal' or due to common carelessness.

[shadowkat]

Yes, pretty much this.

While I struggled with various things, I managed to pass well enough, that the teachers didn't see it as out of the ordinary. They really only picked up on the students who "obviously" flipped letters around, or numbers, or couldn't read or write at all.

For example - in the fifth grade, I remember getting a poor grade and the teacher being furious with me for coping the bibliography from the blackboard all wrong. She thought I was being lazy. I did a good job on the paper, but I mis-copied the bibliography. Because I wrote the paper well, she didn't understand why I screwed up the bibliography - since all I had to do was copy it from the blackboard. This was a teacher who prided herself on picking up on students with dyslexia and helping them. She didn't pick up on me.

I honestly didn't know - until a poetry teacher that I had in undergrad - told me I was dyslexic (1988). Then in law school - they diagnosed me with audio/visual coordination - they didn't have these words for it, nor did they use them. It was 1992.

So, no, I didn't know - I just knew about dyslexia back in the 1970s - but I didn't think I had it.
I didn't see letters backwards. And I didn't know the others existed until somewhere around 2008.

[cactuswatcher]

I just knew about dyslexia back in the 1970s

Me too. I have an unabridged dictionary from the 1970s and it is the only one of the four to show up. A professor, who became my good friend, and I were chatting one day in the late 1960s. She started mentioning the things (particularly missing syllables in Russian words) that she found amusing about my work. It suddenly dawned on me that if it happened enough that it was odd and funny enough she'd mention it, it wasn't that normal. And dysgraphia or no, I was one of her best students. She thought it was funny, something to laugh *with* me about. I was just stunned.

Yes, I knew that I had problems writing, but until then I didn't know it was anything unusual. I'd dreaded every time a teacher said "I'll be grading this (written assignment) on neatness," never knowing it was worse for me than most.

Then too, there were times in school when I had something very boring to read, my eyes would glaze over and could barely read at all. So after college I'd tell people I had minor dyslexia, since I didn't know the word dysgraphia anyway. (On some standardized tests a passage would be so dull, I'd give up and skip to the questions. As long as they were asking about facts I could just go back skim and find something.) Philosophy class had the worst reading. I could sit and listen to the professor lecture and get everything and enjoy it. But I don't know if I ever got through any complete reading assignment in that class!

[shadowkat]

Had similar issues and very similar experiences - although much later - in the 1970s and 80s, and in the 1990s. (So this went on for all the 20th Century.)

I had a poetry professor pick up on it in undergrad. I was reading a poem aloud and she was sitting next to me and caught what I was doing. I wasn't even that aware of it. I was running my finger beneath the line, sub-vocalizing it under my breath, then when I thought it was right saying it a loud. She pulled me aside and pointed it out to me, and said she thought I was dyslexic.

And I often rewrote papers six times, until my hands were sore, to ensure they were neat. (They never were - I always was using white out. I still write the wrong words now - if I'm handwriting. Typing? I proof as I type? I run my eyes back over the text, and correct it as I'm typing it. Then run it over again. And then a third time - often without thinking about it. And get really annoyed when I leave out a word or use the wrong one.) I also read it back to myself.

I didn't know it wasn't normal. I thought it was. I remember a college friend discussing her dyslexia with two people who were doing a study on it. They asked her what it was like, and she said, from her perspective, normal. It's how she sees things. She doesn't know it's different from how others see them? She doesn't know there's another way of seeing them? From her perspective - and her brain - that's how the word looks. I've never forgotten that statement - it really resonated. We see the world differently, and most of us don't realize that everyone does. That perception varies.

[shadowkat]

In the 1970s-1990s, it wasn't clear. Nor called any of this. In 1970, unless you obviously flipped letters around and couldn't read or write at all - you were norma.

Very few educators knew about it.

So, no. I didn't know until I was in my 20s that I had any of this, and I didn't know what to call it until recently. I didn't know dysgraphia existed. I only knew about dyslexia and dyscalcia, and only recently that one. I was told it was an audio-visual coordination issue.

[slaymesoftly]

Interesting! I'd not heard of these four categories (except the dyslexia one) but one of them I fit right into!

[shadowkat]

Same. I only knew about dyslexia. Also didn't know it was neurodivergent, I thought that meant something else entirely.