So I was diacnosed with dyslexia at age 8. Then at age 9, my family moved. I think I wasted most of my time in third and forth grade climbing trees and hecking the neighbor kids. But the thing I remember most clearly about my families move shortly before my 10th birthday, was my discovery of audiobooks.
It took me a while to make friends at my new school. So I had a lot of free time on my hands. Fortunately, my new house was only a couple blocks away from the public library. I may have undergone a couple hundred hours of private tutoring by then. But that just meant I was starting to get down letter combonations like ch and th and all that fun stuff. I was still years away from picking up a good book and actually reading it. So my parents showed me which shelf in the library held all the audio books.
I fell in love immediately. I would go to the library two or three times a week to check out more books-on-tape. Since I couldn’t read the dust jackets, there was no way for me to know which books I would enjoy. So I decided to just listen to them all. I worked through the audio section systematically, checking out each audiobook in alphabetical order. It took me about six years. But by my sophmore year of high school, I’d listen to every single audiobook the Lake Oswego Public Library had to offer.
During that six years of hard core listenage, I also managed to graduate from tutoring. That happened when I was 12. At that point in time I knew everything there was to know about phonix and could sound things out well enough to survive. Meaning I could sound things out well enough to read the assignments on the board, or to write myself a note and then read it again later. I read about as well as the average second grader. But I didn’t read books. Why would I want to do that? I was listening to an average of 200 books a year. Who had time to read amidst all that listening? Certainly not me.
Joke of the Day
Dyslexics of the world UNTIE.
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