Monday, February 11, 2008

Turning over a new Leaf (or maybe that should be snowball)

I've be berating myself for not posting anything lately. You know the whole story the best laid plans ..... something about not hatching. At least I started a few and well they will find there way and get posted I'm sure. But I have come to the discovery of one truly important thing in my life, and that is of course my daughter.

Now I'm sure if you have read a previous post you would know that my daughter was finally assessed with Dyslexia, of course to be politically correct and to not want to put a label on anyone of course they didn't exactly use those terms. So for the sake of political correctness she has some learning disabilities. Hmmmm....... I don't know I think I would rather people know I'm dyslexic than well just make things even more difficult and make it even broader by not giving people a clue. Just my two cents. The thing is it's been a bit of a roller coaster not only for my daughter but for me. Which was a shock for me. I am surprised by my reaction and discovery that I really truly don't know much about learning disabilities or dyslexia or the such. However, this has given me the opportunity to - in support of my daughter - learn.

There are a few amazing facts that I am learning, one is that roughly 20% of the population is affected by some type of learning disability. My assumption would be though that this would be of those tested. So in a population of 32 million people that would mean that 6.4 million people have some form of learning difficulties.

Now one thing I have learned and learned very quickly is that learning disabilities are not really disabilities if anything it is the common learners that indeed have the disability in not being able to view a different perspective. So it turns out, it really should be viewed as a gift. For instance dyslexics are three dimensional viewers. Imagine if you can when you look at something, anything that in order for you to actually process the information it would be much easier for your brain if it would literally jump right off the page such as a 3 dimensional hologram.

Now the number one most difficult issue I have as well as I'm sure most parents of these types of learners has is wanting to see them learn, seeing them accomplish good grades and many other things what we would call regular everyday normal childhood experiences. I think as common thinkers we have lost sight of the fact that indeed we are the ones who have much to learn here and really why is it that we must put people in a box and label it in order to make ourselves feel better. It's very unenlightened. Especially if you take into consideration that there have been many great wonderful outside of the box thinkers in history, not to mention the ones we don't know about. For a list of famous dyslexics all you have to do is just Google, but for me the most impressive of them would be Da Vinci mostly I would think for the reason he would see no barriers in terms of his thinking. Anything was Possible!

The challenge as i see it is to be able to learn as much from the dyslexic and learning challenged point of perspective and to employ more three dimensional type learning into everyday life. And though most people would have to say "why?" my response would inevitably be that the world is changing, faster than we truly know and it could very well be that 3 dimensional thinkers would be the ones to lead us forward in leaps and bounds. Instead of making everything conform for our own comfort why not take the challenge.

Let's face it I've gotten a little ahead of myself. not unusual for me, there is no massive millions of disposable income rattling around me at the moment to ensure this kind of change. A catalyst maybe, inspiring change would be a joy. And this is in fact one of the reasons I am writing this and that would be to raise money which is something I can do.


Thanks with much love.
Lily