Basic Skills (Part 1)

It’s important to recognize that for people with dyslexia, academic challenges arise mostly from problems mastering low-level basic skills. These basic skills are supported in part by centers of the brain that specialize in creating automatic, habitual, or reflex like responses to inputs, and these kinds of automatic responses are typically less easily mastered by dyslexic individuals. As a result, many people with dyslexia can understand word-based information quite well when it is spoken to them, but they can’t grasp it when it is written; or they can demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of many complex ideas in speech that they cannot express in writing; or they can show a strong ability to reason mathematically, but struggle to perform seemingly more simple arithmetic calculations. It is absolutely crucial that we don’t let dyslexic people be stopped from doing the many amazing things they can do by the few simple things they can’t.