Dose Daily With Dyslexia

The early morning caller sounded relieved because she had a diagnosis.   Her child has dyslexia – and ADHD – or maybe even Aspergers Syndrome.    I could hear her breathe several huge sighs of relief.  She said that at least now she understood why learning was so difficult for him.

I was pleased for her too because having been through much the same quagmire myself with one of my own sons I felt in a position to advise. 

I chattered happily on about the many children who went on to achieve significant successes in life but had first to struggle with major learning difficulties.

Her boy couldn't cope with mathematics - a subject that proved to be beyond many of them, including Schubert, Gogol, Wagner, Conan Doyle, Ghandi, Alfred Adler, Picasso, Epstein and Jung. But mathematics is not the basis of every satisfactory career I assured her. 

And never mind that her son was doing poorly in his weekly German class. Wellington, Thomas Carlyle, Darwin, Nehru and Churchill had all found languages all but impossible and it hadn't held them back had it?

As for reading,  spelling and grammar, so many students had suffered sleepless nights on their account – George Stephenson, Henry Ford, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Napoleon.  They all did all right in the end didn’t they?

And what of those who were very slow to speak or had major speech impediments – Alessandro Volta, Einstein, Somerset Maugham, Emile Zola, Michael Faraday for example?  They overcame their difficulties too as did the clumsy kids at the back of the class – Napoleon, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton, Leonardo, Branwell Bronte and Baden-Powell.

My caller was growing more relaxed by the minute because her boy was no longer a complete oddity.  He was in excellent company.

Finally she asked how my own son had fared in the end, the boy with all the difficulties, the quagmire one.  I told her he had become a violinist. She was impressed and said she had often thought about signing her lad up for violin lessons.

When I put the phone down, I began to wonder exactly how it was he had managed mastery over the violin.  He had certainly been a very clumsy child, totally unable to manage a knife and fork, unable to write more than his name with any legibility.  And yet, somehow or other he had indeed learned to play the instrument to a significantly high standard, performing virtuoso pieces seemingly with considerable ease.   It didn’t make sense, even after all the intervening years,  even to me.