Challenge Your Perspective
By: Karrie Brass
Have you wondered what the best way is to understand how your child or spouse processes information? Do you have a desire to have a more thorough understanding of their strengths, and not just their weaknesses? Being a wife to a dyslexic husband, parent to four children, all who have their own challenges with dyslexia, and a tutor for seven students at Dyslexia Reading Connection, I am surrounded by dyslexia! At times, it has me focused, frustrated, curious, and amazed.
So much information has been printed over the past 20 years explaining dyslexia. We have learned that it is primarily a right-brain dominant development, which is the big picture, 3-D, artistic side. We also know this has exposed a major problem in the classroom regarding the methods used to teach students how to read. Often this leads to painful, agonizing, and frustrating dyslexic challenges.
With that in mind, I ran across a wonderful, uplifting book about the advantages of having right-brain dominance. I would highly encourage you to explore the book, The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain, by Brock Eide, M.D., M.A. and Fernette Eide, M.D.
The overall approach of this encouraging book is to show the amazing and relevant contributions that dyslexic learners add to our lives. It is very similar to studying the four main personalities and their strengths and weaknesses. The four dyslexic strengths are: Material, Interconnected, Narrative, and Dynamic; creating the acronym M.I.N.D. There is also an appendix that lists occupations and fields of study that are good choices for each of the dyslexic strengths. Here are a few examples:
Material: Related more to math and science, 3-D, and spatial. Career professions could be an engineer, mathematician, airline pilot, or architect.
Interconnected: Ability to detect relationships between phenomena, like objects, ideas, and events. Career professions could be a zoologist, museum director, historian, physicist, computer software designer, or chef.
Narrative: The ability to connect a series of mental scenes to tell a story. Career professions could be an author, songwriter, psychologist, coach, or attorney.
Dynamic: The ability to explain historical facts with present day knowledge, to develop a narrative to a “scene” that could have probably happened. Career professions could be an entrepreneur, farmer, business consultant, economist, or medicine: (immunology, oncology).
This book is sure to challenge you to look at dyslexia with a different perspective. It is very encouraging and presents many real-life examples of people who are successful and put their dyslexic strengths to great use. I hope you enjoy the discovery. I certainly did!