It all started 25 years ago, when Araceli Salas, a teacher and educator, noticed certain strange behaviors in Samuel, the youngest of her two children, a very happy boy until he went to school.
He began to bite his nails, to behave in a very different way when he went to school and when he was on vacation, to show very low self-esteem.
At the age of six he had innumerable physical symptoms, headaches, contractures, migraines, all the product of the tension generated by the colossal effort he had to make when he went to class, an effort, for the worse, without results.
When the boy was nine years old, Araceli, desperate — "I saw that Samuel was sinking" — began to seek a diagnosis in Mallorca, the island where she lives.
Fortunately, because at that time it was hardly talked about,
He hit on a good psychologist and got the answer.
“I told Samuel, we already know what's wrong with you: you have dyslexia.
Ah, so I'm not stupid?, he replied.
No, you just have a different way of learning things."
Dyslexia is not a disease.
It is a specific neurological structure, a different way of processing information.
And it does not only consist of having reading and writing problems (recognizing signs, connecting these signs with their sound), but it can also involve short-term memory difficulties, spatiotemporal conflicts, comprehension and organization problems. or confusion between right and left.
Every dyslexic, on the other hand, is unique.
And they abound: they are between 10% and 15% of the population.
Most undiagnosed.
Many are discovering now, with their children's dyslexia, that they also have it, as happened with Samuel's father, who fell off the cherry tree and understood the reason for many of the things that were happening to him.
Specifically, dyslexia has devastating consequences because it hinders or prevents learning in an educational system that, like ours, is focused on reading and writing.
As, on the other hand, they are kids with normal or higher intelligence, they arrive at school and become depressed and anguished, because they realize that what for others is something very easy, for them it is like giving classes in Chinese.
“He is very clumsy, he is lazy, he is intelligent but lazy, he has to try harder, he seems stupid…”.
These topics are still common.
Poisonous words that ulcerate the spirit, that corrode self-esteem, that lead to defeat, suffering and even self-hatred.
"Dyslexia is a thief of childhoods," says Araceli beautifully, this wonderful warrior Araceli who 21 years ago, after her son's diagnosis, discovered that there was no legislation in Spain and that there was very little knowledge among teachers.
She studied, consulted, investigated and in 2002 she created DISFAM, the first association of Spanish-speaking families of dyslexics (later a federation, FEDIS, would also be created).
Threatening to go and denounce the issue in Strasbourg (“although I didn't even know where Strasbourg was, I made a big deal”), she managed to get DEA (specific learning difficulties) officially recognized in educational laws and the matter began to be taken into account. Serious.
But much remains to be done, and the consequences of not doing so can be very serious.
Official US figures show that 60% of prisoners are functionally illiterate, and that between 30% and 60% of young people incarcerated have AEDs.
It's a vicious circle: you can't study, others laugh at you, you feel humiliated and useless, the system spits on you and you end up on the sidelines.
And yet it would be so easy to avoid it!
It would be enough to use new technologies, reading programs that convert texts into voice.
It would be enough to educate educators so that they know what those special needs consist of.
It would be enough for society to understand it.
Einstein, Pierre Curie, Newton, Mozart, Galileo, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, all of them have been or are dyslexic.
Normality does not exist.
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