Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Unity in Multeity (if you get this reference before the end of the post you should be an English major)

I know it's been a while since I've last written...mainly because I've been busy with work and playing, but since my mom came into my room tonight and told me I should write again I thought I better.  Who cares if it is 1:20 in the morning?  I'm a college student; I thrive on 3 hours of sleep a night.

Well I'm going back to my favorite internet source of wisdom for this blog post.  Wikipedia, along with the symptoms (wow...I just had a brain fart/dyslexic moment with that word.  I just spelled it simtums.  Thank you spell check even though I had to try spelling it four different ways before it actually could detect what I was trying to write and give me the correct spelling.) of dyslexia also gives some other learning disabilities that usually go along with it which I just happen to have.

Here they are:

Cluttering--a speech fluency disorder involving both the rate and rhythm of speech, resulting in impaired speech intelligibility. Speech is erratic and nonrhythmic, consisting of rapid and jerky spurts that usually involve faulty phrasing. The personality of people with cluttering bears striking resemblance to the personalities of those with learning disabilities.


Dysgraphia— a disorder which expresses itself primarily through writing or typing, although in some cases it may also affect eye–hand coordination direction or sequence oriented processes such as tying knots or carrying out a repetitive task. Dysgraphia is distinct from dyspraxia in that the person may have the word to be written or the proper order of steps in mind clearly, but carries the sequence out in the wrong order.

Dyscalculia— a neurological condition characterized by a problem with learning fundamentals and one or more of the basic numerical skills. Often people with this condition can understand very complex mathematical concepts and principles but have difficulty processing formulas or even basic addition and subtraction.
 
So here I go again listing times where I have demonstrated these very qualities:
Cluttering--Well this is an easy one to remember.  It pretty much haunted my childhood and haunts me to this day.  Almost every time I opened my mouth my parents would tell my to slow down and speak clearly.  I would jumble my words because my head would travel faster than my mouth.  I could never get the words out quick enough.  This came back to hit me just a few weeks ago at work.  I work at Home Depot for the summer to earn money for school.  I started out in the garden department but was transferred over to cashiering to receive more hours.  One of the first days as a cashier I was asking a man if he wanted to open a Home Depot credit account (against my will.  I hate having to ask that stupid question).  It was early in the morning and my mind wasn't fully awake and so I blurted out the schpeal, "Would you like to save ten dollars on your purchase today and open a home depot account?" but I'm pretty sure it ended up coming out along the lines of, "woulda lita save ten dollars onurpurase today and opena home depot account?"  Well the guy was rude about it and said to me, "You got to speak clearly if you want my to buy anything your selling.  Talk slowly or I'm not going to listen.  Now say that again and clearly this time."  Gahhh...I wanted to slap him.  Couldn't he have just said, "Could you repeat that?"  Did he really have to make me feel like an idiot.  So there I was blushing while being chastised by a guy who didn't know me from Adam, having to repeat myself with a smile on my face pretending what he said to me didn't hurt.
 
Dysgraphia--This one is a hard one to pin point.  I think it comes out most evidently when I play the piano.  It says that it demonstrates itself while typing, but I think the process for fingering piano keys and keyboard keys are the same.  I love to play the piano but I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, amazing.  But then again, I'm not horrible.  I'm okay for having taught myself after only about a year of lessons.  Even though I know I song and I have played it for years, I can never quite get it perfect.  No matter how hard I try, I can't get my fingers to go in the correct order or at the right speed.  They are simple mistakes that I know I can do correctly but I never am able to.  But I really don't care because I just love to sit at the piano and learn new songs.  Along with reading, writing, and swimming, piano playing is one of my favorite escapes.
 
Dyscalculia--Wow...I have this one to a T.  Junior year in high school I took AP Calculus while at the same time I took AP Physics calculus based.  I passed the calc test with a 5 (for those who don't know the rating system,  a 5 is the highest you can get and a 1 is the lowest) and I failed the physics with a 1.  The difference between these two classes wasn't the math: it was the setting up of formulas.  I understood the math perfectly.  Rotate a curve around the Y axis and ask for the area...no problem.  Ask me to set up a formula of a mass of a car traveling around a loop at 10 miles an hour and wanting to know where the force equals 0 (don't know if this problem is plausible) I couldn't tell you cause I didn't know how to set the equation up.  I could do the math for the problem, I just couldn't get to the part where I could do the math.  I just always thought I was retarded when it came to physics but having read that there is a disorder for the problem I had it makes perfect sense now.  Yay for justification!  I have an excuse for bombing physics now.  For years I had wondered about why I couldn't do the formulas.  I had commented on it with friends in my physics class and people I had met in college.  I honestly had no idea why I could do the math without a problem but for some reason the supposedly easiest part I failed at.
 
Well there's some more from the wonderful life of Katie.  I'm not going to lie...dyslexia and all the other problems that come with it suck, but guess what?  You can look that annoying old guy in the face and say, "Yeah, I talk funny cause of dyslexia.  What's your excuse?"  Scapegoats are awesome.  Haha...just kidding.  But really.  There are reasons you are they way you are and your not alone in it.  It's nice knowing I'm not the only one you can't figure out a formula even if it was tattooed on the inside of my eyelids or are butter fingers when it comes to typing/keying. 
 
As Coleridge says, "Unity in Multeity"  both in those who suffer from dyslexia and the other problems that come with it.  "Dyslexics of the World, Unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!  And your poor grammar!"  :)