Has anyone out there read his book "The Gift of Dyslexia"?

It sounds too good to be true.

The Davis Dyslexia Correction® Program is given in a five-day period of
time. We work one-on-one with our clients. Generally, the hours are
Monday through Friday 9:00 am to 4:00 pm with a one-hour lunch
break. We can be flexible with the hours if required. Parents are invited
and encouraged to be in attendance for the entire week.

The afternoon of the final day of the program week is devoted to support
training with parents and/or other individuals who would be supporting
the client at home. If requested, a teacher or school staff member who
would lend support to the student at school may be included in the
support training.

The price for the program is $2,300. A $300 deposit is required at the
time of scheduling the week. The deposit is refundable or transferable
until two weeks prior to the beginning of the scheduled program week.
The balance is due on the first day of the program week. Sorry, but we
do not accept credit cards.

The price of the program for a second person in the family is $2,100. A
$300 deposit is required at the time of scheduling the week. The deposit
is refundable or transferable until two weeks prior to the beginning of the
scheduled program week. The balance is due on the first day of the
program week. Since there are two of us at the Center, we can
schedule the two family members simultaneously.

The price includes all the materials needed to work the program,
support training, three

1 to 2 hour return visits for review (no time limit), and unlimited
telephone and/or e-mail follow-up consultations.

In my own research, I have found othere cures like "Brain Gym".  If you
have heard of anything like these, please let me know.

ADHD resources

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ADHD_Bulletin_Board/

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/adhd/adhd.htm

Have you ever tried anything like Strattera to see if it will help?  I believe
that there are coaches out there that can lend a hand also, you might find
something on the internet about different little things to do to help you
remember.  Best of luck.

Carol


Angie <eieionrochester@...> wrote:

Hello all i just read a bit of your messages and it made me
cry....ALLOT! I am a mom with dyslexia and ADHD with four kids who
also have a bit of this and that....I have recieved one battery of
test for the adhd and now I am working for the complete workup on
the rest.... I get so upset with my ability and my husband loves me
allot but I drive him crazy...I cannot go more than 20 min away from
home without getting lost....and then scared to death...I am afraid
if I push it too much and tell tooo many they will take my licence
away. holding jobs welll doesnt go well at all....i forget to do
things, or do them backwords, people dont believe me on how hard I
actully try cause i look to nice and dress nicly and hold myself
proper,,,infact the tester said to me she was surprised I have made
it as far as i have with the severity of my adhd let allone
forgetting and getting lost everyday when I go somewhere. It makes
me want to stay in the house and never come out...however my locic
is tooo good to do that. I would love to chat with many otherss who
goes threw the same and maybe find somthing that will help with the
ruff times.....sorry this is sooo long i am sooo giddy inside that
thier are others with this too.
Angie




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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hello all i just read a bit of your messages and it made me
cry....ALLOT! I am a mom with dyslexia and ADHD with four kids who
also have a bit of this and that....I have recieved one battery of
test for the adhd and now I am working for the complete workup on
the rest.... I get so upset with my ability and my husband loves me
allot but I drive him crazy...I cannot go more than 20 min away from
home without getting lost....and then scared to death...I am afraid
if I push it too much and tell tooo many they will take my licence
away. holding jobs welll doesnt go well at all....i forget to do
things, or do them backwords, people dont believe me on how hard I
actully try cause i look to nice and dress nicly and hold myself
proper,,,infact the tester said to me she was surprised I have made
it as far as i have with the severity of my adhd let allone
forgetting and getting lost everyday when I go somewhere. It makes
me want to stay in the house and never come out...however my locic
is tooo good to do that. I would love to chat with many otherss who
goes threw the same and maybe find somthing that will help with the
ruff times.....sorry this is sooo long i am sooo giddy inside that
thier are others with this too.
Angie

Great article.

--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "Samuel" <sampageuk@h...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> Im from the UK, so I am not too hot on US law. >
> Regards
> Sam
>
> Author: www.beingdyslexic.co.uk


Thank you for your overseas input.  I will ck the link above.  Trudy

--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, Mabraig@a... wrote:
> Hi Trudy,
   I treat children with dyslexia with a individual stimulation o
their hearing after having taken their audiometric test.
  The method has also a name
  Dr. Kjeld Johansons dyslexia training.

I don't know anything about this training but I do know of something
called the Listening Program.  How would I find the program you are
talking about do you have a link, could not find it on my own?

The problem I see is the SD does not see how his dyslexia could
cause problem later in his life?  Trudy

Hi Trudy,
great that your child is doing so well that there is no pressured need to act...
That is one of he nice things parents micht hear, now imagine those who really
get slashed in their faces ...
  I treat children with dyslexia with a individual stimulation o their hearing
after having taken their audiometric test.
The child received a CD with music which is just adjusted or the childs hearing
and has to be heard at home with earphones over a time of 8 weeks.
The next test shows measurable changes but also the childs perception and the
observations of the parents give a complete picture of changes.
Normally this training can be finished after 4 to 5 CD.
Feels free to come and see me,
I live in germany if that matters (sorry for this joke).
Is there any one in the US who is doing the same ?
I travel a lot because I teach in Honduras, Guatemala and Salvador and I just
crosseed Houston and stay for a couple of days in San Francisco to  work with a
student of mine.
The method has also a name
Dr. Kjeld Johansons dyslexia training
I would be thankful to knwo who is using that incredible therapy.
Manfred

Hi,

Im from the UK, so I am not too hot on US law. However I woudl say
it is important to get systems of support in place while he is doing
well. This is so that you aim to keep him at a level. School gets
hardr and harder and usually the further into education dyslexics
get, the harder it becomes. I know that is what I found when I
reached my A levels, having no support in place, I nearly failed!

Hope that helps.

Regards
Sam

Author: www.beingdyslexic.co.uk

--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "christal1155q" <christal@r...>
wrote:
>
> What do you say to the SD, when you ask for Dyslexia help for your
> child and they say the following:  but he is doing so well right
> now, where do you see his dyslexia as causing problems?  We are
> being careful not make him feel any more special need than he
> already feels.  There are not enough hours in the day to cover
extra
> work.  This is the kind of response I get when I asked for help
for
> my childs dyslexia.
>
> I live in Texas if that matters.  Thanks for any input.  Trudy

What do you say to the SD, when you ask for Dyslexia help for your
child and they say the following:  but he is doing so well right
now, where do you see his dyslexia as causing problems?  We are
being careful not make him feel any more special need than he
already feels.  There are not enough hours in the day to cover extra
work.  This is the kind of response I get when I asked for help for
my childs dyslexia.

I live in Texas if that matters.  Thanks for any input.  Trudy

Would help if I posted address!! :)

http://www.beingdyslexic.co.uk/documents/drivingtest.php

--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "sampage_db" <sampageuk@h...>
wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Just thought this document may be useful for anyone dyslexic takign
a
> driving test. Tells you all about additional help you are allowed
> etc...
>
> Cheers
> Sam
>
> --- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, don_nairn <no_reply@y...>
wrote:
> > Hi Danielle,
> >
> > What is eye peripheal testing?
> >
> > If you friend has vision problems I doubt that dyslexia
strategies
> > will help.
> >
> > Personally I had about the same difficulty learning to drivea
> car/fly
> > a plane as my fellow students. After 25 years of driving i have a
> > clean driving record.
> >
> > --- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "blesdmomwithfour"
> > <Blesdmomx4@a...> wrote:
> > > Hi everyone! My name is Danielle and I am trying to research
this
> > > topic for a friend of mine who lives locally but doesn't have a
> > > computer. She is an adult with dyslexia, and is desiring a
> drivers'
> > > license. She took a test about 19 years ago (she is 39 now) and
> > > failed the eye peripheal testing. She was told that she would
> never
> > > pass and believed this for years. Now she is determined to
learn
> > how
> > > to pass the test and attain her license. Has anyone else
> > experienced
> > > this problem? What schools or special classes did you or your
> loved
> > > ones have to take before the test? I am not sure where to go
with
> > > this, so I thought I could ask the list. Thank you for your
input,
> > >
> > > Danielle  Smith
> > > Great Lakes, IL

Hi there,

Just thought this document may be useful for anyone dyslexic takign a
driving test. Tells you all about additional help you are allowed
etc...

Cheers
Sam

--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, don_nairn <no_reply@y...> wrote:
> Hi Danielle,
>
> What is eye peripheal testing?
>
> If you friend has vision problems I doubt that dyslexia strategies
> will help.
>
> Personally I had about the same difficulty learning to drivea
car/fly
> a plane as my fellow students. After 25 years of driving i have a
> clean driving record.
>
> --- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "blesdmomwithfour"
> <Blesdmomx4@a...> wrote:
> > Hi everyone! My name is Danielle and I am trying to research this
> > topic for a friend of mine who lives locally but doesn't have a
> > computer. She is an adult with dyslexia, and is desiring a
drivers'
> > license. She took a test about 19 years ago (she is 39 now) and
> > failed the eye peripheal testing. She was told that she would
never
> > pass and believed this for years. Now she is determined to learn
> how
> > to pass the test and attain her license. Has anyone else
> experienced
> > this problem? What schools or special classes did you or your
loved
> > ones have to take before the test? I am not sure where to go with
> > this, so I thought I could ask the list. Thank you for your input,
> >
> > Danielle  Smith
> > Great Lakes, IL

www.disabilityfilmfestival.net, www.ldaf.org
Email: caglar@... or cristina@...

6th Disability Film Festival

London Disability Arts Forum’s Film Festival Showcasing Film by Disabled
Filmmakers

The London Disability Arts Forum (LDAF) in collaboration with the National Film
Theatre (NFT) would like to announce that its 6th Disability Film Festival will
take place on 1 – 5 December 2004 at the NFT, South Bank, London.

LDAF’s Disability Film Festivals have previously taken place during the summer,
but this year the 6th Disability Film Festival moves to December to coincide
with World Aids Day on 1st December and the International Day of Disabled People
on 3rd December.

Over the past five years, the Disability Film Festival has screened over 200
films. Many of them have toured nationally and internationally. The Disability
Film Festival is unique in several features:

·The festival only screens films in which disabled people have had creative
control. This means that the majority of films have been written directed or
produced by disabled people or have been made collaboratively with disabled
people.

·This festival represents some of the finest talent amongst disabled artists and
filmmakers on these islands and worldwide. The festival strives to provide
disabled filmmakers and artists with an atmosphere where they can exchange ideas
and network with each other.

· The subject and style of all of the films is diverse. Contrary to popular
belief, disabled artists are creating extraordinary work that doesn’t
necessarily focus on disability.

· Access is a priority. This year, LDAF will continue to work with the NFT to
improve the accessibility of the viewing experience. Each film will be
soft-titled, audio-described and BSL-interpreted. Palantype transcription will
be simultaneously projected at all panel discussions. The Disability Film
Festival is increasingly viewed as a model of good practice for those
organisations who wish to be proactive in embracing the law. In October this
year, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 is implemented,
stipulating that ‘all leisure venues must make reasonable adjustments for
disabled people’.

· It is the only Disability Film Festival of its kind in the world, because it
is produced by disabled artists and has been used as a model of good practice
for disability film festivals in cities including Helsinki, Melbourne, Paris,
Berlin, Moscow, Calgary, Toronto, Tampere and Beirut.

“Lovely, friendly atmosphere”
“I finally made it for your film festival. ….very impressed, moved and inspired
by all the films.” Audience members at 5th Disability Film Festival

“Extraordinary! I’ve been aiming to get here for some time. I’m so pleased we
made it!” Faye Ginsburg, New York University

“This is the best event I’ve been to in a long while.” Philip Barden, Deloitte &
Touche

“This festival is an event of national significance. A brilliant idea.” Joe
Bidder

“That a weekend of films like these can be shown in a high profile central
London venue is sensational”.
Kate Ansell, BBC’s disability website (www.bbc.co.uk/ouch)

The 6th Disability Film Festival Programme will include the feature films
‘Afterlife’ starring Paul Sage and ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ starring Derek Jacobi;
short films, including ‘Not The Usual Victim’ and ‘I’m not From Hear’ and panel
discussions, including ‘Access Some Areas’ – about work and training
opportunities in film and video (in association with BECTU) and ‘Creative
Survival’ – about the barriers experienced by filmmakers who are mental health
service users (in association with Mental Health media).

For further press information contact:
Caglar Kimyoncu and Cristina Perezzani

LDAF’s Disability Film Festival Office
T: +44 (0)20 7691 4203
T: +44 (0)20 7383 3131
Fax: +44 (0)870 168 8073
Email: caglar@... or cristina@...
www.disabilityfilmfestival.net
www.ldaf.org






http://www.danda.org.uk/
DANDA – the Developmental Adult Neuro-Diversity Association

---------------------------------
  ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi to all I am someone that has dyslexia . And hope to talk to
anyone that love to talk . Or with anyone from anywhere that likes to
talk.

Thanks.  Tracee

simonjames30 <no_reply@yahoogroups.com> wrote:Sorry, i didnt copy the whole
article will try again.....

simon

Consider the following four dead-end kids.
One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial
English and came perilously close to flunking out of college. The
third feared he'd never make it through school--and might not
have without a tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade,
devouring Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help
him untangle the words.
These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles
Schwab, John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson
developed one of Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and
Virgin Atlantic Airways. Schwab virtually created the discount
brokerage business. Chambers is CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated
trial attorney, best known as the guy who beat Microsoft.
In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw,
who pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank
to the top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed
Ford Financial; Gaston
Caperton, former governor
of West Virginia and now
head of the College Board;
Paul Orfalea, founder of
Kinko's; Diane Swonk,
chief economist of Bank
One. The list goes on (see
table, Dyslexic Achievers).
Many of these adults
seemed pretty hopeless as kids. All have been wildly successful in
business. Most have now begun to talk about their dyslexia as a
way to help children and parents cope with a condition that is still
widely misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even
today," says Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is
100% for the kids and their parents."
What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a reading
disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with
god, say, or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists
believe it has to do with the way a developing brain is wired.
Difficulty reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms.
But dyslexia often comes with one or more other learning problems
as well, including trouble with math, auditory processing,
organizational skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--
each has his own set of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to
6% of American public school children have been diagnosed with
a learning disability; 80% of the diagnoses are dyslexia-related.
But some studies indicate that up to 20% of the population may
have some degree of dyslexia (see How to Help).
Ageneration ago this was a problem
with no name. Boies,
Schwab, and Bill Samuels Jr., the
president of Maker's Mark, did
not realize they were dyslexic
until some of their own children
were diagnosed with the disorder,
which is often inherited. Samuels
says he was sitting in a school office, listening to a description of
his son's problems, when it dawned on him: "Oh,
shit. That's me." Most of the adults Fortune talked to had diagnosed
themselves. Says Branson: "At some point, I think I decided
that being dyslexic was better than being stupid."
Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According
to a March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still
associate learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's
probably because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through
conventional methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies.
"It is not an intelligence disability.
It doesn't mean you can't
think."
He's right. Dyslexia has nothing
to do with IQ; many smart,
accomplished people have it, or
are thought to have had it,
including Winston Churchill
and Albert Einstein. Sally
Shaywitz, a leading dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the
disorder can carry surprising talents along with its well-known
disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective,
who think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.
Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
learning disabilities."
HEALTH
Overcoming Dyslexia
FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
the limitations of dyslexia.
Monday, May 13, 2002 By Betsy Morris
Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea
(Photo: Meredith Heuer)
This Forune report & associated articles are available at the
following web site:
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=207665
Reporter associate Lisa Munoz
Research associate Patricia Neering
There's an irony here: "Look if I had
been any good at math, I probably
never would have started an airline."
Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Records
Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that
allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either defeated
by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don
Winkler, a top financial services executive at Bank One and then
at Ford Motor, remembers
coming home
from school bloodied
by fights he'd had with
kids who called him
dumb. Kinko's
founder, Paul Orfalea,
failed second grade
and spent part of third
in a class of mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read,
despite the best efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors,
therapists, special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young
classmates read aloud, Orfalea says it was as if "angels whispered
words in their ears."
In his unpublished auto biography, Orfalea says that to a dyslexic,
a sentence is worse than Egyptian hieroglyphics. "It's more
like a road map with mouse holes or coffee stains in critical
places. You're always turning into blind alleys and ending up on
the wrong side of town." He finally graduated, but not before
being "invited to leave ... practically every high school in Los
Angeles." One principal counseled his mother to enroll him in
trade school, suggesting that Orfalea could become a carpet layer.
His mother went home and tearfully told her husband, "I just
know he can do more than lay carpet."
Charles Schwab was very strong in math, science, and sports
(especially golf), which helped him get into Stanford. But anything
involving English "was a disconnect." He couldn't write
quickly enough to capture his thoughts. He couldn't listen to a
lecture
and take legible notes. He couldn't memorize four words in a
row. He doesn't think he ever read a novel all the way through in
high school. He was within one unit of flunking out of Stanford
his freshman year. "God, I must just be really dumb in this stuff,"
he used to tell himself. "It was horrible, a real drag on me." So
horrible that Schwab and his wife, Helen, created a foundation to
help parents of children with learning disorders.
It was as if Schwab and the others were wearing a scarlet letter: D
or dumb. Until about five years ago Chambers kept his dyslexia a
secret. As CEO, he says, "you don't want people to see your
weaknesses." One day a little girl at Cisco's Bring
Your Children to Work Day forced him out of the
closet. Chambers had called on her, and she was trying
to ask a question before a crowd of 500 kids and
parents. But she couldn't get the words out. "I have a
learning disability," she said tearfully.
Chambers Cannot tell this story without choking up
himself. "You could immediately identify with what
that was like," he says. "You know that pain. She
started to leave, and you knew how hurt she was in front of the
group and her parents." Chambers threw her a lifeline. "I have a
learning disability too," he said. In front of the crowd, he began
talking to her as if they were the only two people in the room.
"You've just got to learn your way through it," Chambers told her.
"Because there are some things you can do that others cannot, and
there are some things others can do you're just not going to be
able to do, ever. Now my experience has been that what works is
to go a little bit slower
It was the kind of coaching that proved crucial
to nearly everybody we talked to:
mentors who took a genuine interest, parents
who refused to give up, tutors who didn't even
know what dyslexia was. Wink-let recalls that
his parents refused to let their fear of electrocution
stand in the way of his fixing every iron
and toaster in the neighborhood. "I wired every
teacher's house," he says. "I got shocked all the time." His parents
owned a mom-and-pop shop in Phillipsburg, N.J. His mother
cleaned houses to pay for his tutoring. chambers, who read right
to left and up and down the page, says his parents, both doctors,
claim they never once doubted his abilities, even though "I
absolutely did." His parents' faith was important to him. So was
his tutor, Mrs. Anderson. Even today Chambers remembers tutoring
as excruciating: "It might have been once or twice a week," he
says, "but it felt like every day" Nonetheless, he adds, "Mrs.
Anderson had an influence on my life far bigger than she might
have ever realized."
If you could survive childhood, dyslexia was a pretty good business
boot camp. It fostered risk taking, ~ problem solving, resilience.
School was a chess game that required tactical brilliance.
Schwab sat mostly in the back of the room. But he was conscientious
and charming, I and gutsy enough to ask for extra help.
Boies took Paul a minimum of math and Santa avoided foreign
language and anything involving spatial skills. Orfalea worked
out a symbiotic relationship with classmates on a group project at
USC's Marshall Business School; they did the writing, he did the
photocopying (and got the germ of the idea that led to Kinko's).
At Vanderbilt Law School, Samuels spent a lot of time in studygroup
discussions. "That's how I learned the cases," he says. His
friends helped with the reading; he paid for the beer. Better than
most people, dyslexics learn humility and how to get along with
others. It's probably no accident that Kinko's, Cisco, and Schwab
have all been on FORTUNE's list of the best places to work. "I
never put people down, because I know what that feels like," says
Branson, who seldom asks for a resume either, "because I haven't
got one myself."
By the time these guys got
into business, they had
picked themselves up so
many times that risk taking
was second nature.
"We're always expecting
a curve ball," says
Samuels. Schwab remembers
how hard it was to
watch his friends receive awards and become "General Motors
Scholars, Merit Scholars, Baker Scholars. I was so jealous," he
says. Later on, though, some of the prizewinners had trouble dealing
with adversity.
"I'm not in the consensus a lot.
In fact, being in the concensus
makes me really uneasy."
Diane Swonk, chief economist of Bank One
As young classmates read
aloud, it was as if "angels
whispered in their ears."
Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's
If, as kids, the dyslexic executives had learned the downside of
their disorder inside out, as adults they began to see its upside: a
distinctly different way of processing information that gave them
an edge in a volatile, fast-moving world. Bill Dreyer, an inventor
and a biologist at Caltech, recalls a dinner-party conversation
years ago in which he told a colleague how his dyslexic brain
works: "I think in 3-D Technicolor pictures instead of words."
"You what?" replied the incredulous colleague. The two argued
the rest of the night about how that was possible.
Dreyer believes that thinking in pictures enabled him to develop
ground-breaking theories about how antibodies are made, and
then to invent one of the first protein-sequencing machines, which
helped to launch the human genome revolution. "I was able to see
the machine in my head and rotate valves and actually see the
instrumentation," he says. "I don't think of dyslexia as a deficiency.
It's like having CAD [computer-aided design] in your brain. I
bet these other guys see business in 3-D too. I bet they see graphs
and charts of how trends will unfold."
In his office, Chambers goes from
wounded to animated as he heads
to the dry-erase board to show
that's exactly what he does. "I
c a n 't explain why, but I just
approach problems diff e r e n t l y, "
he says. "It's very easy for me to
jump conceptually from A to Z. I
picture a chess game on a multiple-layer dimensional cycle and
almost play it out in my mind. But it's not a chess game. It's
business.
I don't make moves one at a time. I can usually anticipate
the potential outcome and where the Y's in the road will occur."
As he's talking, he's scrawling a grid depicting how Cisco diversified
into switches, fiber optics, and wireless by acquisition,
internal development, or partnering. It was a picture he used to
explain
his vision to the board of directors back in 1993, when he
was an executive vice president and Cisco was a one-product
company. It became a road map. "All we did was fill in the chart,"
he says.
Barely pausing, he's drawing again, this time a picture showing
the evolution of networking, including the commoditization of
telephone services. He first drew this picture in 1995. "I'm not
always right," he says. He did not foresee the extent of last year's
economic downturn or the subsequent collapse in demand. "But
we knew there would be industry consolidation and a chance for
us to break away"
Like Chambers, Schwab fast-forwards past the smaller, logical
steps of sequential thinkers. "Many times I can see a solution to
something and synthesize things differently and quicker than
other people," he says. In meetings, "I would see the end zone and
say, `This is where we need to go.' " This annoys sequential
thinkers, he says, because it shortcuts their "rigorous step-by-step
process."
Diane Swonk's former boss and mentor at Bank One always
thought Swonk had a "third eye." Swonk, an economist, says it's
dyslexia. Although she has worked in the same building for 16
years, she still has a hard time figuring Out which track her commuter
train is on and which way to turn when she leaves the office
elevator. She can't dial telephone numbers. She has a hard time
with arithmetic, reversing and transposing numbers.
But she revels in higher-level math concepts, and in January 1999,
when almost everyone was bemoaning the global financial crisis
and fretting about the stock market—then trading at around
9300—she told the Executives Club of Chicago that the Dow
would break 11,000 by year-end. The prediction seemed so surprising
that the moderator made her repeat it. She was right then
and right again last year. when she insisted—even after Sept. 11—
that the economic downturn would not be as bad as feared. Why
not? Because consumers would keep spending. Which they did.
"I'm not in the consensus a lot," says Swonk. "In fact, being in the
consensus makes me really uncomfortable."
Sometimes dyslexics are utterly incapable of seeing things the
way others do. Craig McCaw could not understand conventional
wisdom that said cell phones would never amount to much. "To
me it just seemed completely
obvious that if you
could find a way not to be
tethered to a six-foot cord
in a five-by-nine office,
you'd take it. Maybe if
your mind isn't cluttered
with too much information,
some things are obvious."
McCaw built the first almost-nationwide cellular company,
which he sold to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion. Now he's trying
to build a global satellite system to make the Internet as pervasive
and portable as cell phones—another seemingly impossible feats
Bill Samuels Jr. couldn't see the improbability of turning tiny
Maker's Mark into a national brand in 1975, even though bourbon
sales were in a decade-long slump. "I can't write," says Samuels,
"but I can organize old information into a different pattern easily"
The old pattern was to advertise to the trade. The new one: to
bypass both the trade and Madison Avenue with homespun ads to
consumers that Samuels wrote himself. Within ten years Maker 's
Mark had become "perhaps the most fervently sought bourbon in
the U.S.," according to AdAge. "Many times in business, different
is better than better," says Samuels. "And we dyslexics do different
without blinking an eye."
David Boies turned dyslexic deficits into advantages. Because of
his difficulty reading from a script, he makes an outline of his
basic points and commits it to memory Then, unlike trial lawyers
who work from a script, he is free to improvise. That enables him
to be more dramatic, more flexible. He can break the cardinal rule
of cross-examination, which is never to ask a question if you don't
know the answer (it messes up the script). He can wander around
themes, trap witnesses. "It cuts down on the time the witness has
to think and predict where you're going," says Boies.
On a recent trip to Boston, Richard Branson arrives in a spray of
champagne to open a Virgin Megastore. He is a true business
celebrity, having come straight from hosting a party in London
celebrating the honorary knighthood of Rudy Giuliani (Sir
Richard, too, is a knight) and going later that evening to address
"Many times in business, different is
better. We dyslexics do different
without blinking an eye."
Bill SamuelsJr.,president of maker's Mark
the blue-blood Chief Executives'Club of Boston.
Branson's success and his dyslexia seem like such a disconnect.
He never made it through high school. He has a wickedly unreliable
memory; because his mind goes blank at the most inopportune
times, he writes important things—like names—in black
ink on the back of his hand. He wont use a computer. He's terrible
at math. Until recently, he confesses, he was still confusing
gross profit with net. He'd been faking it, but not too well. One of
his board members finally pulled him aside to give him a
mnemonic, or memory aid, which often comes in handy for
dyslexics. Pretend you're fishing, the board member said. Net is
all the fish in your net at the end of the year Gross is that plus
everything that got away.
Branson approaches business
completely differently from
most. "I never, ever thought
of myself as a businessman,"
he tells the Boston CEOs, "I
was interested in creating
things I would be proud of."
He started Vi rgin A t l a n t i c
because flying other airlines
was so dreadful. He knew he could provide better service. There'
s an irony here, says Branson: "Look, if I'd been good at math, I
probably never would have started an airline."
Branson is not the only dyslexic CEO who has tried to bluff his
way through problems. For years, Orfalea says, "I was a closet
bad reader ... I never showed anybody my handwriting until I was
in my 40s." He cultivated a casual, can't-be-bothered-with-it
management
style that allowed him to avoid the written word. If he
received a long letter, for instance, "I'd just hand it to somebody
else and say, `Here, read it.' "He mostly avoided the corporate
office and instead went from Kinko's to Kinko's, observing, talking
to customers, making changes. He wasn't goofing off; he was
vacuuming up information in his own way—orally, visually,
multisensorily.
For most dyslexic business leaders, reading is still not easy They
tend to like newspapers, short magazine articles, summaries. Says
Chambers: "Short reading is fine'. But long reading I just really
labor over." His staff knows to deliver summaries in three pages
or less, the major points highlighted in yellow. McCaw says he
can read and write. "But to do either requires a lot of energy and
concentration." He and the others are information grazers. "You
learn for self-preservation to grasp the maximum amount of
meaning out of the minimal amount of context," says McCaw,
describing his reading like this: "You don't really view the piece
of paper. You scan. You may pull something out of it," all the
while alternating between "apparent disinterest and maniacal
focus." Once McCaw makes short work of the short stack of
papers in his in-box, they disappear. When government investigators
asked to see his files during a routine antitrust inquiry in
1985, there were none. "Craig and a piece of paper do not remain
together for very long," his COO told the investigators.
Bojes calls dyslexia "primarily an input problem." He is highly
selective about the information he takes in and constantly makes
judgments about what's most important: the five or ten most relevant
cases, the key points in those cases. Always, always, Boies
says, he's looking at the big picture, at how the story will end.
"You are always trying to figure out where something's going—
to put it in context," he says. "It's harder to just read it
straight."
Seeing the big picture early on may be the dyslexic's best shortcut:
If you know where you're going, you can figure out how to
get there. "One of the things dyslexics do is learn to get the big
picture, to grasp things very quickly rather than seeing the ittybitty
part," says Shaywitz. "They have no choice. It's a survival
skill. But I've been struck by the perceptions and relationships
they're able to see."
Dyslexics learn to soak up information in other ways than print.
"When you're not
focusing, you're
grabbing at the
abstract information
in the atmosphere,"
says McCaw. "Yo u
d o n 't even know
where it comes from.
But the receptors are
highly reactive
because they're trying to overcome what we'll call the lack of
reading input." Schwab learned the plots and characters of Moby-
Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and other great books by reading
Classic comics, which told the stories in pictures. Chambers
prefers voicemail to e-mail because "it's so much easier for me to
understand and visualize by hearing." Boies flourished in law
school (Yale, magna cum laude) in part because he could learn by
listening. "We all associate reading with knowledge and wisdom,"
he says. "But the Socratic Dialogues are dialogues. Teaching
tools. There is a difference between knowledge and the means of
acquiring knowledge."
Managing dyslexia is a lifelong effort. Winkler, who now teaches
a leadership course at the University of Michigan Business
School, starts his day with brain exercises he calls Wink's Warm-
Ups. Sometimes he uses multiplication and division flash cards.
Other mornings he practices "trigger" words, like "won't" or
"didn't," that confuse him. The College Board's Caperton says he
almost always has to redial phone numbers, often more than once.
Swonk rechecks her calculations five times.
Chambers relies on his wife, Elaine, to help him navigate a phone
book. He's terrible with written directions. He'll never forget the
wild ride he gave Tom Ridge one night. Ridge, then governor of
Pennsylvania, had come to Silicon Valley on an economic development
mission. After the event, he asked Chambers for a ride to
the restaurant where they were to have dinner. "I thought, `Oh,
no!'" says Chambers. He knew immediately that he would get
lost. Sure enough, he led Ridge and an entourage of police escorts
on a wild goose chase, crossing lanes and stopping at not one but
two gas stations for directions. The next day he bought a GPS. "I
can laugh about it now,'says Chambers.
The Cisco CEO does something else every successful business
leader should do, but often doesn't: He builds a team to shore up
his weaknesses. "I will not spend as much time on individual
When everyone grows up, said Orfalea's
mother, "The A students work for the B
students. C students run the businesses. D
students dedicate the buildings
details," Chambers says, so he hires detail people "who are able to
go Ato B, B to C, and to take the components apart." McCaw says
dyslexics need a translator "who can take that conceptual or intuitive
idea and get it into a form that's usable." Because he's more
conceptual than analytical, he needs someone who can communicate
with people who are the opposite. "One on one, you just
drive them crazy," he says. "You come up with a pronouncement,
and you have no facts to back it up. It just irritates the daylights
out of them. You really need a translator with a foot in both
camps."
At Maker's Mark, Samuels surrounds himself with "very verbal
people who like to communicate what they're doing." Even his
production vice president and his CFO—positions that don't normally
attract chatty types—are that way because, he says, "I knew
I'd have to find people who would tolerate my need to be talked
to a lot." Orfalea recalls that his mother used to console him by
saying that when everybody grows up, "the A students work for
the B students. The C students run the businesses. And the D students
dedicate the buildings."
Possible clues to the differences between A students and dyslexi -
cs can be seen under a microscope at the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center in Boston. Some of the most interesting research
on the disorder occurs here and at the Shaywitzes'Yale center. In
Glen Rosen's Harvard lab, a slide shows how dark clouds of neurons
have strayed from their normal path, probably during fetal
development, and ended up in tiny clumps called ectopias (ectopia
is Greek for "out of place"). Rosen, an associate professor of
neurology,
theorizes that the wandering neurons cause a "cascade of
connectional differences" in brain wiring. Because the ectopias
prevent some nerve fibers from going where they should, they
migrate at random, wiring regions of the brain not normally connected.
Scientists believe this might explain why no two dyslexics
are alike and why one, like Branson, might be terrible at math but
a good writer, and why another, like Schwab, might be quite the
opposite.
Researchers used to think that many more boys than girls were
dyslexic. (Schools were identifying four times as many boys as
girls a decade ago.) But an ongoing study at Yale of 400
Connecticut children indicates that the numbers are about equal.
The Shaywitzes believe that most discrepancies in diagnosis are
social: Dyslexic girls tend to behave better and work harder than
dyslexic boys, and therefore often escape detection.
Magnetic-resonance imaging at the Yale lab has shed new light on
how the brain works, bolstering the belief that dyslexics have
difficulty
decoding the smallest meaningful segments of language,
called phonemes. (The word "cat" has three phonemes: kuh, aah,
and tuh.) When dyslexic subjects are asked to sound out words,
MRI technology, by measuring blood flow, shows relatively less
activity in the back of the brain and more activity in the front. In
good readers, most of the activity occurs in the back of the brain.
Despite all the unknowns, dyslexia is clearly better understood
and treated today than it was a generation ago. Yet in a high-pressure
society where straight A's and high test scores count for so
much, the disorder still carries a heavy penalty. Boies says nothing
has been harder for him than watching the struggles of two of
his own children who are dyslexic. "It is awful. Awful. The most
difficult thing I've ever done he says. One of the boys is in high
school. The other graduated from Hamilton College summa cum
laude and from Yale Law School— despite childhood testing,
recalls Boies, that "was not very optimistic in terms of what he
would be able to accomplish." Boies wishes that society allowed
more room and more time for late bloomers. "In this environment,"
he says, "you get children who think they are masters of
the universe, and children who think they are failures, when
they're 10 years old. They're both wrong. And neither is well
served by that misconception."
Where would we be, after all, if the bar had been set so high that
none of these guys—not Schwab, not Chambers, not Boies, not
Branson, not Dreyer, not McCaw—could have cleared it?
Monday, May 13, 2002 By Betsy Morris
Dyslexic achievers
Scott Adams, "Dilbert" creator
Dr. Barul Benaceraff, Nobel Prize winner
James Carville, political consultant
Cher
Charles `Pete" Conrad Jr., astronaut
Erin Brockovich Ellis, activist
Dr. Fred Epstein, brain surgeon
Fanny Flagg, actress
Brian Grazer, producer
Whoopi Goldberg
Reyn Guyer, Nerf ball developer
Dr. Edward Hallowell, psychiatrist
Florence Haseltine, M.D., Ph.D.
Bill Hewlett, co-founder, HP
John R. Homer, paleontologist
Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist
Thomas Kean, former governor
Sylvia Law, professor
Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show
Paul B. MacCready, inventor
David Murdock, CEO, Dole Food
Nicholas Negroponte, director, MIT Media Lab
Robert Rauschenberg, artist
Nelson Rockefeller
Nolan Ryan, Baseball Hall of Famer
Raymond Smith, former CEO, Bell Atlantic
Wendy Wasserstein, playwright
Thomas J. Watson Jr., former CEO, IBM
Henry Winkler, actor, director
Did they or didn't they have dyslexia? Probably they did.
Winston Churchill
Leonardo da Vinci
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Michelangelo
General George S. Patton
Woodrow Wilson
W.B. Yeats


--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, Tracee Storms
<traceestorms@y...> wrote:
> there is more.  The article is about 8 pages long.  T
>
> simonjames30 <no_reply@yahoogroups.com> wrote:I think below is a
full copy of the article, sorry if theres any
> missing:
>
> Simon
>
>
> HEALTH: Overcoming Dyslexia
> FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
> the limitations of dyslexia.
> FORTUNE
> Monday, May 13, 2002
> By Betsy Morris
>
>
> Consider the following four dead-end kids.
> One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
> He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and
> came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared
> he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a
> tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring
> Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle
the
> words.
>
> These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles
Schwab,
> John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one
of
> Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic
Airways.
> Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers
is
> CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as
the
> guy who beat Microsoft.
>
> In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
> in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw,
who
> pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank to the
> top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed Ford
> Financial; Gaston Caperton, former governor of West Virginia and
now
> head of the College Board; Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's; Diane
> Swonk, chief economist of Bank One. The list goes on (see table,
> Dyslexic Achievers). Many of these adults seemed pretty hopeless as
> kids. All have been wildly successful in business. Most have now
> begun to talk about their dyslexia as a way to help children and
> parents cope with a condition that is still widely
> misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even today,"
says
> Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is 100% for the
kids
> and their parents."
>
> What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a
reading
> disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with god,
say,
> or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists believe it
> has to do with the way a developing brain is wired. Difficulty
> reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms. But dyslexia
> often comes with one or more other learning problems as well,
> including trouble with math, auditory processing, organizational
> skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--each has his own
set
> of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to 6% of American public
school
> children have been diagnosed with a learning disability; 80% of the
> diagnoses are dyslexia-related. But some studies indicate that up
to
> 20% of the population may have some degree of dyslexia (see How to
> Help).
>
> A generation ago this was a problem with no name. Boies, Schwab,
and
> Bill Samuels Jr., the president of Maker's Mark, did not realize
they
> were dyslexic until some of their own children were diagnosed with
> the disorder, which is often inherited. Samuels says he was sitting
> in a school office, listening to a description of his son's
problems,
> when it dawned on him: "Oh, shit. That's me." Most of the adults
> Fortune talked to had diagnosed themselves. Says Branson: "At some
> point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being
> stupid."
>
> Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According to
a
> March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still
associate
> learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's probably
> because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through
conventional
> methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies. "It is not
an
> intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think."
>
> He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ; many smart,
> accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it,
including
> Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Sally Shaywitz, a leading
> dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the disorder can carry
> surprising talents along with its well-known
> disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
> people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective,
who
> think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
> Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
> Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.
>
> Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
> remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
> tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
> out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
> then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
> kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
> learning disabilities."
>
> Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society
that
> allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either
defeated
> by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler,
a
> top financial services executive at Bank One and then at Ford
Motor,
> remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with
> kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea, failed
> second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally
retarded
> children. He could not learn to read, despite the best efforts of
> parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special
reading
> groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalea
says
> it was as if "angels whispered words in their ears."
>
>
>
> --- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "Shelli" <merk4@i...> wrote:
> > I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching
> for it and since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here
it
> is:
> > http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
> > Shelli
> >   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world
> were "C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school -

> let alone college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May
13,
> 2002 called Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of
> Richard Branson (Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab
> (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry)
John
> Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.    So don't
> get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything -
> the will to make something of yourself
> >   is.
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>    To visit your group on the web, go to:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/
>
>    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
Service.
>
>
>
>
> Tracee Storms
> Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
> 331 E. Main Street
> Turlock, CA 95380
> 209-669-9000 (work)
> 209-535-3680 (cell)
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT


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Tracee Storms
Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
331 E. Main Street
Turlock, CA 95380
209-669-9000 (work)
209-535-3680 (cell)

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Sorry, i didnt copy the whole article will try again.....

simon

Consider the following four dead-end kids.
One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial
English and came perilously close to flunking out of college. The
third feared he'd never make it through school--and might not
have without a tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade,
devouring Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help
him untangle the words.
These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles
Schwab, John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson
developed one of Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and
Virgin Atlantic Airways. Schwab virtually created the discount
brokerage business. Chambers is CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated
trial attorney, best known as the guy who beat Microsoft.
In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw,
who pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank
to the top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed
Ford Financial; Gaston
Caperton, former governor
of West Virginia and now
head of the College Board;
Paul Orfalea, founder of
Kinko's; Diane Swonk,
chief economist of Bank
One. The list goes on (see
table, Dyslexic Achievers).
Many of these adults
seemed pretty hopeless as kids. All have been wildly successful in
business. Most have now begun to talk about their dyslexia as a
way to help children and parents cope with a condition that is still
widely misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even
today," says Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is
100% for the kids and their parents."
What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a reading
disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with
god, say, or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists
believe it has to do with the way a developing brain is wired.
Difficulty reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms.
But dyslexia often comes with one or more other learning problems
as well, including trouble with math, auditory processing,
organizational skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--
each has his own set of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to
6% of American public school children have been diagnosed with
a learning disability; 80% of the diagnoses are dyslexia-related.
But some studies indicate that up to 20% of the population may
have some degree of dyslexia (see How to Help).
Ageneration ago this was a problem
with no name. Boies,
Schwab, and Bill Samuels Jr., the
president of Maker's Mark, did
not realize they were dyslexic
until some of their own children
were diagnosed with the disorder,
which is often inherited. Samuels
says he was sitting in a school office, listening to a description of
his son's problems, when it dawned on him: "Oh,
shit. That's me." Most of the adults Fortune talked to had diagnosed
themselves. Says Branson: "At some point, I think I decided
that being dyslexic was better than being stupid."
Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According
to a March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still
associate learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's
probably because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through
conventional methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies.
"It is not an intelligence disability.
It doesn't mean you can't
think."
He's right. Dyslexia has nothing
to do with IQ; many smart,
accomplished people have it, or
are thought to have had it,
including Winston Churchill
and Albert Einstein. Sally
Shaywitz, a leading dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the
disorder can carry surprising talents along with its well-known
disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective,
who think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.
Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
learning disabilities."
HEALTH
Overcoming Dyslexia
FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
the limitations of dyslexia.
Monday, May 13, 2002 By Betsy Morris
Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea
(Photo: Meredith Heuer)
This Forune report & associated articles are available at the
following web site:
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=207665
Reporter associate Lisa Munoz
Research associate Patricia Neering
There's an irony here: "Look if I had
been any good at math, I probably
never would have started an airline."
Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Records
Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that
allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either defeated
by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don
Winkler, a top financial services executive at Bank One and then
at Ford Motor, remembers
coming home
from school bloodied
by fights he'd had with
kids who called him
dumb. Kinko's
founder, Paul Orfalea,
failed second grade
and spent part of third
in a class of mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read,
despite the best efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors,
therapists, special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young
classmates read aloud, Orfalea says it was as if "angels whispered
words in their ears."
In his unpublished auto biography, Orfalea says that to a dyslexic,
a sentence is worse than Egyptian hieroglyphics. "It's more
like a road map with mouse holes or coffee stains in critical
places. You're always turning into blind alleys and ending up on
the wrong side of town." He finally graduated, but not before
being "invited to leave ... practically every high school in Los
Angeles." One principal counseled his mother to enroll him in
trade school, suggesting that Orfalea could become a carpet layer.
His mother went home and tearfully told her husband, "I just
know he can do more than lay carpet."
Charles Schwab was very strong in math, science, and sports
(especially golf), which helped him get into Stanford. But anything
involving English "was a disconnect." He couldn't write
quickly enough to capture his thoughts. He couldn't listen to a
lecture
and take legible notes. He couldn't memorize four words in a
row. He doesn't think he ever read a novel all the way through in
high school. He was within one unit of flunking out of Stanford
his freshman year. "God, I must just be really dumb in this stuff,"
he used to tell himself. "It was horrible, a real drag on me." So
horrible that Schwab and his wife, Helen, created a foundation to
help parents of children with learning disorders.
It was as if Schwab and the others were wearing a scarlet letter: D
or dumb. Until about five years ago Chambers kept his dyslexia a
secret. As CEO, he says, "you don't want people to see your
weaknesses." One day a little girl at Cisco's Bring
Your Children to Work Day forced him out of the
closet. Chambers had called on her, and she was trying
to ask a question before a crowd of 500 kids and
parents. But she couldn't get the words out. "I have a
learning disability," she said tearfully.
Chambers Cannot tell this story without choking up
himself. "You could immediately identify with what
that was like," he says. "You know that pain. She
started to leave, and you knew how hurt she was in front of the
group and her parents." Chambers threw her a lifeline. "I have a
learning disability too," he said. In front of the crowd, he began
talking to her as if they were the only two people in the room.
"You've just got to learn your way through it," Chambers told her.
"Because there are some things you can do that others cannot, and
there are some things others can do you're just not going to be
able to do, ever. Now my experience has been that what works is
to go a little bit slower
It was the kind of coaching that proved crucial
to nearly everybody we talked to:
mentors who took a genuine interest, parents
who refused to give up, tutors who didn't even
know what dyslexia was. Wink-let recalls that
his parents refused to let their fear of electrocution
stand in the way of his fixing every iron
and toaster in the neighborhood. "I wired every
teacher's house," he says. "I got shocked all the time." His parents
owned a mom-and-pop shop in Phillipsburg, N.J. His mother
cleaned houses to pay for his tutoring. chambers, who read right
to left and up and down the page, says his parents, both doctors,
claim they never once doubted his abilities, even though "I
absolutely did." His parents' faith was important to him. So was
his tutor, Mrs. Anderson. Even today Chambers remembers tutoring
as excruciating: "It might have been once or twice a week," he
says, "but it felt like every day" Nonetheless, he adds, "Mrs.
Anderson had an influence on my life far bigger than she might
have ever realized."
If you could survive childhood, dyslexia was a pretty good business
boot camp. It fostered risk taking, ~ problem solving, resilience.
School was a chess game that required tactical brilliance.
Schwab sat mostly in the back of the room. But he was conscientious
and charming, I and gutsy enough to ask for extra help.
Boies took Paul a minimum of math and Santa avoided foreign
language and anything involving spatial skills. Orfalea worked
out a symbiotic relationship with classmates on a group project at
USC's Marshall Business School; they did the writing, he did the
photocopying (and got the germ of the idea that led to Kinko's).
At Vanderbilt Law School, Samuels spent a lot of time in studygroup
discussions. "That's how I learned the cases," he says. His
friends helped with the reading; he paid for the beer. Better than
most people, dyslexics learn humility and how to get along with
others. It's probably no accident that Kinko's, Cisco, and Schwab
have all been on FORTUNE's list of the best places to work. "I
never put people down, because I know what that feels like," says
Branson, who seldom asks for a resume either, "because I haven't
got one myself."
By the time these guys got
into business, they had
picked themselves up so
many times that risk taking
was second nature.
"We're always expecting
a curve ball," says
Samuels. Schwab remembers
how hard it was to
watch his friends receive awards and become "General Motors
Scholars, Merit Scholars, Baker Scholars. I was so jealous," he
says. Later on, though, some of the prizewinners had trouble dealing
with adversity.
"I'm not in the consensus a lot.
In fact, being in the concensus
makes me really uneasy."
Diane Swonk, chief economist of Bank One
As young classmates read
aloud, it was as if "angels
whispered in their ears."
Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's
If, as kids, the dyslexic executives had learned the downside of
their disorder inside out, as adults they began to see its upside: a
distinctly different way of processing information that gave them
an edge in a volatile, fast-moving world. Bill Dreyer, an inventor
and a biologist at Caltech, recalls a dinner-party conversation
years ago in which he told a colleague how his dyslexic brain
works: "I think in 3-D Technicolor pictures instead of words."
"You what?" replied the incredulous colleague. The two argued
the rest of the night about how that was possible.
Dreyer believes that thinking in pictures enabled him to develop
ground-breaking theories about how antibodies are made, and
then to invent one of the first protein-sequencing machines, which
helped to launch the human genome revolution. "I was able to see
the machine in my head and rotate valves and actually see the
instrumentation," he says. "I don't think of dyslexia as a deficiency.
It's like having CAD [computer-aided design] in your brain. I
bet these other guys see business in 3-D too. I bet they see graphs
and charts of how trends will unfold."
In his office, Chambers goes from
wounded to animated as he heads
to the dry-erase board to show
that's exactly what he does. "I
c a n 't explain why, but I just
approach problems diff e r e n t l y, "
he says. "It's very easy for me to
jump conceptually from A to Z. I
picture a chess game on a multiple-layer dimensional cycle and
almost play it out in my mind. But it's not a chess game. It's
business.
I don't make moves one at a time. I can usually anticipate
the potential outcome and where the Y's in the road will occur."
As he's talking, he's scrawling a grid depicting how Cisco diversified
into switches, fiber optics, and wireless by acquisition,
internal development, or partnering. It was a picture he used to
explain
his vision to the board of directors back in 1993, when he
was an executive vice president and Cisco was a one-product
company. It became a road map. "All we did was fill in the chart,"
he says.
Barely pausing, he's drawing again, this time a picture showing
the evolution of networking, including the commoditization of
telephone services. He first drew this picture in 1995. "I'm not
always right," he says. He did not foresee the extent of last year's
economic downturn or the subsequent collapse in demand. "But
we knew there would be industry consolidation and a chance for
us to break away"
Like Chambers, Schwab fast-forwards past the smaller, logical
steps of sequential thinkers. "Many times I can see a solution to
something and synthesize things differently and quicker than
other people," he says. In meetings, "I would see the end zone and
say, `This is where we need to go.' " This annoys sequential
thinkers, he says, because it shortcuts their "rigorous step-by-step
process."
Diane Swonk's former boss and mentor at Bank One always
thought Swonk had a "third eye." Swonk, an economist, says it's
dyslexia. Although she has worked in the same building for 16
years, she still has a hard time figuring Out which track her commuter
train is on and which way to turn when she leaves the office
elevator. She can't dial telephone numbers. She has a hard time
with arithmetic, reversing and transposing numbers.
But she revels in higher-level math concepts, and in January 1999,
when almost everyone was bemoaning the global financial crisis
and fretting about the stock market—then trading at around
9300—she told the Executives Club of Chicago that the Dow
would break 11,000 by year-end. The prediction seemed so surprising
that the moderator made her repeat it. She was right then
and right again last year. when she insisted—even after Sept. 11—
that the economic downturn would not be as bad as feared. Why
not? Because consumers would keep spending. Which they did.
"I'm not in the consensus a lot," says Swonk. "In fact, being in the
consensus makes me really uncomfortable."
Sometimes dyslexics are utterly incapable of seeing things the
way others do. Craig McCaw could not understand conventional
wisdom that said cell phones would never amount to much. "To
me it just seemed completely
obvious that if you
could find a way not to be
tethered to a six-foot cord
in a five-by-nine office,
you'd take it. Maybe if
your mind isn't cluttered
with too much information,
some things are obvious."
McCaw built the first almost-nationwide cellular company,
which he sold to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion. Now he's trying
to build a global satellite system to make the Internet as pervasive
and portable as cell phones—another seemingly impossible feats
Bill Samuels Jr. couldn't see the improbability of turning tiny
Maker's Mark into a national brand in 1975, even though bourbon
sales were in a decade-long slump. "I can't write," says Samuels,
"but I can organize old information into a different pattern easily"
The old pattern was to advertise to the trade. The new one: to
bypass both the trade and Madison Avenue with homespun ads to
consumers that Samuels wrote himself. Within ten years Maker 's
Mark had become "perhaps the most fervently sought bourbon in
the U.S.," according to AdAge. "Many times in business, different
is better than better," says Samuels. "And we dyslexics do different
without blinking an eye."
David Boies turned dyslexic deficits into advantages. Because of
his difficulty reading from a script, he makes an outline of his
basic points and commits it to memory Then, unlike trial lawyers
who work from a script, he is free to improvise. That enables him
to be more dramatic, more flexible. He can break the cardinal rule
of cross-examination, which is never to ask a question if you don't
know the answer (it messes up the script). He can wander around
themes, trap witnesses. "It cuts down on the time the witness has
to think and predict where you're going," says Boies.
On a recent trip to Boston, Richard Branson arrives in a spray of
champagne to open a Virgin Megastore. He is a true business
celebrity, having come straight from hosting a party in London
celebrating the honorary knighthood of Rudy Giuliani (Sir
Richard, too, is a knight) and going later that evening to address
"Many times in business, different is
better. We dyslexics do different
without blinking an eye."
Bill SamuelsJr.,president of maker's Mark
the blue-blood Chief Executives'Club of Boston.
Branson's success and his dyslexia seem like such a disconnect.
He never made it through high school. He has a wickedly unreliable
memory; because his mind goes blank at the most inopportune
times, he writes important things—like names—in black
ink on the back of his hand. He wont use a computer. He's terrible
at math. Until recently, he confesses, he was still confusing
gross profit with net. He'd been faking it, but not too well. One of
his board members finally pulled him aside to give him a
mnemonic, or memory aid, which often comes in handy for
dyslexics. Pretend you're fishing, the board member said. Net is
all the fish in your net at the end of the year Gross is that plus
everything that got away.
Branson approaches business
completely differently from
most. "I never, ever thought
of myself as a businessman,"
he tells the Boston CEOs, "I
was interested in creating
things I would be proud of."
He started Vi rgin A t l a n t i c
because flying other airlines
was so dreadful. He knew he could provide better service. There'
s an irony here, says Branson: "Look, if I'd been good at math, I
probably never would have started an airline."
Branson is not the only dyslexic CEO who has tried to bluff his
way through problems. For years, Orfalea says, "I was a closet
bad reader ... I never showed anybody my handwriting until I was
in my 40s." He cultivated a casual, can't-be-bothered-with-it
management
style that allowed him to avoid the written word. If he
received a long letter, for instance, "I'd just hand it to somebody
else and say, `Here, read it.' "He mostly avoided the corporate
office and instead went from Kinko's to Kinko's, observing, talking
to customers, making changes. He wasn't goofing off; he was
vacuuming up information in his own way—orally, visually,
multisensorily.
For most dyslexic business leaders, reading is still not easy They
tend to like newspapers, short magazine articles, summaries. Says
Chambers: "Short reading is fine'. But long reading I just really
labor over." His staff knows to deliver summaries in three pages
or less, the major points highlighted in yellow. McCaw says he
can read and write. "But to do either requires a lot of energy and
concentration." He and the others are information grazers. "You
learn for self-preservation to grasp the maximum amount of
meaning out of the minimal amount of context," says McCaw,
describing his reading like this: "You don't really view the piece
of paper. You scan. You may pull something out of it," all the
while alternating between "apparent disinterest and maniacal
focus." Once McCaw makes short work of the short stack of
papers in his in-box, they disappear. When government investigators
asked to see his files during a routine antitrust inquiry in
1985, there were none. "Craig and a piece of paper do not remain
together for very long," his COO told the investigators.
Bojes calls dyslexia "primarily an input problem." He is highly
selective about the information he takes in and constantly makes
judgments about what's most important: the five or ten most relevant
cases, the key points in those cases. Always, always, Boies
says, he's looking at the big picture, at how the story will end.
"You are always trying to figure out where something's going—
to put it in context," he says. "It's harder to just read it
straight."
Seeing the big picture early on may be the dyslexic's best shortcut:
If you know where you're going, you can figure out how to
get there. "One of the things dyslexics do is learn to get the big
picture, to grasp things very quickly rather than seeing the ittybitty
part," says Shaywitz. "They have no choice. It's a survival
skill. But I've been struck by the perceptions and relationships
they're able to see."
Dyslexics learn to soak up information in other ways than print.
"When you're not
focusing, you're
grabbing at the
abstract information
in the atmosphere,"
says McCaw. "Yo u
d o n 't even know
where it comes from.
But the receptors are
highly reactive
because they're trying to overcome what we'll call the lack of
reading input." Schwab learned the plots and characters of Moby-
Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and other great books by reading
Classic comics, which told the stories in pictures. Chambers
prefers voicemail to e-mail because "it's so much easier for me to
understand and visualize by hearing." Boies flourished in law
school (Yale, magna cum laude) in part because he could learn by
listening. "We all associate reading with knowledge and wisdom,"
he says. "But the Socratic Dialogues are dialogues. Teaching
tools. There is a difference between knowledge and the means of
acquiring knowledge."
Managing dyslexia is a lifelong effort. Winkler, who now teaches
a leadership course at the University of Michigan Business
School, starts his day with brain exercises he calls Wink's Warm-
Ups. Sometimes he uses multiplication and division flash cards.
Other mornings he practices "trigger" words, like "won't" or
"didn't," that confuse him. The College Board's Caperton says he
almost always has to redial phone numbers, often more than once.
Swonk rechecks her calculations five times.
Chambers relies on his wife, Elaine, to help him navigate a phone
book. He's terrible with written directions. He'll never forget the
wild ride he gave Tom Ridge one night. Ridge, then governor of
Pennsylvania, had come to Silicon Valley on an economic development
mission. After the event, he asked Chambers for a ride to
the restaurant where they were to have dinner. "I thought, `Oh,
no!'" says Chambers. He knew immediately that he would get
lost. Sure enough, he led Ridge and an entourage of police escorts
on a wild goose chase, crossing lanes and stopping at not one but
two gas stations for directions. The next day he bought a GPS. "I
can laugh about it now,'says Chambers.
The Cisco CEO does something else every successful business
leader should do, but often doesn't: He builds a team to shore up
his weaknesses. "I will not spend as much time on individual
When everyone grows up, said Orfalea's
mother, "The A students work for the B
students. C students run the businesses. D
students dedicate the buildings
details," Chambers says, so he hires detail people "who are able to
go Ato B, B to C, and to take the components apart." McCaw says
dyslexics need a translator "who can take that conceptual or intuitive
idea and get it into a form that's usable." Because he's more
conceptual than analytical, he needs someone who can communicate
with people who are the opposite. "One on one, you just
drive them crazy," he says. "You come up with a pronouncement,
and you have no facts to back it up. It just irritates the daylights
out of them. You really need a translator with a foot in both
camps."
At Maker's Mark, Samuels surrounds himself with "very verbal
people who like to communicate what they're doing." Even his
production vice president and his CFO—positions that don't normally
attract chatty types—are that way because, he says, "I knew
I'd have to find people who would tolerate my need to be talked
to a lot." Orfalea recalls that his mother used to console him by
saying that when everybody grows up, "the A students work for
the B students. The C students run the businesses. And the D students
dedicate the buildings."
Possible clues to the differences between A students and dyslexi -
cs can be seen under a microscope at the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center in Boston. Some of the most interesting research
on the disorder occurs here and at the Shaywitzes'Yale center. In
Glen Rosen's Harvard lab, a slide shows how dark clouds of neurons
have strayed from their normal path, probably during fetal
development, and ended up in tiny clumps called ectopias (ectopia
is Greek for "out of place"). Rosen, an associate professor of
neurology,
theorizes that the wandering neurons cause a "cascade of
connectional differences" in brain wiring. Because the ectopias
prevent some nerve fibers from going where they should, they
migrate at random, wiring regions of the brain not normally connected.
Scientists believe this might explain why no two dyslexics
are alike and why one, like Branson, might be terrible at math but
a good writer, and why another, like Schwab, might be quite the
opposite.
Researchers used to think that many more boys than girls were
dyslexic. (Schools were identifying four times as many boys as
girls a decade ago.) But an ongoing study at Yale of 400
Connecticut children indicates that the numbers are about equal.
The Shaywitzes believe that most discrepancies in diagnosis are
social: Dyslexic girls tend to behave better and work harder than
dyslexic boys, and therefore often escape detection.
Magnetic-resonance imaging at the Yale lab has shed new light on
how the brain works, bolstering the belief that dyslexics have
difficulty
decoding the smallest meaningful segments of language,
called phonemes. (The word "cat" has three phonemes: kuh, aah,
and tuh.) When dyslexic subjects are asked to sound out words,
MRI technology, by measuring blood flow, shows relatively less
activity in the back of the brain and more activity in the front. In
good readers, most of the activity occurs in the back of the brain.
Despite all the unknowns, dyslexia is clearly better understood
and treated today than it was a generation ago. Yet in a high-pressure
society where straight A's and high test scores count for so
much, the disorder still carries a heavy penalty. Boies says nothing
has been harder for him than watching the struggles of two of
his own children who are dyslexic. "It is awful. Awful. The most
difficult thing I've ever done he says. One of the boys is in high
school. The other graduated from Hamilton College summa cum
laude and from Yale Law School— despite childhood testing,
recalls Boies, that "was not very optimistic in terms of what he
would be able to accomplish." Boies wishes that society allowed
more room and more time for late bloomers. "In this environment,"
he says, "you get children who think they are masters of
the universe, and children who think they are failures, when
they're 10 years old. They're both wrong. And neither is well
served by that misconception."
Where would we be, after all, if the bar had been set so high that
none of these guys—not Schwab, not Chambers, not Boies, not
Branson, not Dreyer, not McCaw—could have cleared it?
Monday, May 13, 2002 By Betsy Morris
Dyslexic achievers
Scott Adams, "Dilbert" creator
Dr. Barul Benaceraff, Nobel Prize winner
James Carville, political consultant
Cher
Charles `Pete" Conrad Jr., astronaut
Erin Brockovich Ellis, activist
Dr. Fred Epstein, brain surgeon
Fanny Flagg, actress
Brian Grazer, producer
Whoopi Goldberg
Reyn Guyer, Nerf ball developer
Dr. Edward Hallowell, psychiatrist
Florence Haseltine, M.D., Ph.D.
Bill Hewlett, co-founder, HP
John R. Homer, paleontologist
Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist
Thomas Kean, former governor
Sylvia Law, professor
Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show
Paul B. MacCready, inventor
David Murdock, CEO, Dole Food
Nicholas Negroponte, director, MIT Media Lab
Robert Rauschenberg, artist
Nelson Rockefeller
Nolan Ryan, Baseball Hall of Famer
Raymond Smith, former CEO, Bell Atlantic
Wendy Wasserstein, playwright
Thomas J. Watson Jr., former CEO, IBM
Henry Winkler, actor, director
Did they or didn't they have dyslexia? Probably they did.
Winston Churchill
Leonardo da Vinci
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Michelangelo
General George S. Patton
Woodrow Wilson
W.B. Yeats


--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, Tracee Storms
<traceestorms@y...> wrote:
> there is more.  The article is about 8 pages long.  T
>
> simonjames30 <no_reply@yahoogroups.com> wrote:I think below is a
full copy of the article, sorry if theres any
> missing:
>
> Simon
>
>
> HEALTH: Overcoming Dyslexia
> FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
> the limitations of dyslexia.
> FORTUNE
> Monday, May 13, 2002
> By Betsy Morris
>
>
> Consider the following four dead-end kids.
> One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
> He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and
> came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared
> he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a
> tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring
> Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle
the
> words.
>
> These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles
Schwab,
> John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one
of
> Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic
Airways.
> Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers
is
> CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as
the
> guy who beat Microsoft.
>
> In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
> in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw,
who
> pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank to the
> top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed Ford
> Financial; Gaston Caperton, former governor of West Virginia and
now
> head of the College Board; Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's; Diane
> Swonk, chief economist of Bank One. The list goes on (see table,
> Dyslexic Achievers). Many of these adults seemed pretty hopeless as
> kids. All have been wildly successful in business. Most have now
> begun to talk about their dyslexia as a way to help children and
> parents cope with a condition that is still widely
> misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even today,"
says
> Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is 100% for the
kids
> and their parents."
>
> What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a
reading
> disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with god,
say,
> or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists believe it
> has to do with the way a developing brain is wired. Difficulty
> reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms. But dyslexia
> often comes with one or more other learning problems as well,
> including trouble with math, auditory processing, organizational
> skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--each has his own
set
> of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to 6% of American public
school
> children have been diagnosed with a learning disability; 80% of the
> diagnoses are dyslexia-related. But some studies indicate that up
to
> 20% of the population may have some degree of dyslexia (see How to
> Help).
>
> A generation ago this was a problem with no name. Boies, Schwab,
and
> Bill Samuels Jr., the president of Maker's Mark, did not realize
they
> were dyslexic until some of their own children were diagnosed with
> the disorder, which is often inherited. Samuels says he was sitting
> in a school office, listening to a description of his son's
problems,
> when it dawned on him: "Oh, shit. That's me." Most of the adults
> Fortune talked to had diagnosed themselves. Says Branson: "At some
> point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being
> stupid."
>
> Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According to
a
> March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still
associate
> learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's probably
> because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through
conventional
> methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies. "It is not
an
> intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think."
>
> He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ; many smart,
> accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it,
including
> Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Sally Shaywitz, a leading
> dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the disorder can carry
> surprising talents along with its well-known
> disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
> people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective,
who
> think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
> Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
> Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.
>
> Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
> remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
> tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
> out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
> then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
> kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
> learning disabilities."
>
> Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society
that
> allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either
defeated
> by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler,
a
> top financial services executive at Bank One and then at Ford
Motor,
> remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with
> kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea, failed
> second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally
retarded
> children. He could not learn to read, despite the best efforts of
> parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special
reading
> groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalea
says
> it was as if "angels whispered words in their ears."
>
>
>
> --- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "Shelli" <merk4@i...> wrote:
> > I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching
> for it and since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here
it
> is:
> > http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
> > Shelli
> >   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world
> were "C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school -

> let alone college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May
13,
> 2002 called Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of
> Richard Branson (Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab
> (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry)
John
> Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.    So don't
> get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything -
> the will to make something of yourself
> >   is.
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>    To visit your group on the web, go to:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/
>
>    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
Service.
>
>
>
>
> Tracee Storms
> Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
> 331 E. Main Street
> Turlock, CA 95380
> 209-669-9000 (work)
> 209-535-3680 (cell)
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

there is more.  The article is about 8 pages long.  T

simonjames30 <no_reply@yahoogroups.com> wrote:I think below is a full copy of
the article, sorry if theres any
missing:

Simon


HEALTH: Overcoming Dyslexia
FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
the limitations of dyslexia.
FORTUNE
Monday, May 13, 2002
By Betsy Morris


Consider the following four dead-end kids.
One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and
came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared
he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a
tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring
Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle the
words.

These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles Schwab,
John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one of
Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers is
CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as the
guy who beat Microsoft.

In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw, who
pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank to the
top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed Ford
Financial; Gaston Caperton, former governor of West Virginia and now
head of the College Board; Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's; Diane
Swonk, chief economist of Bank One. The list goes on (see table,
Dyslexic Achievers). Many of these adults seemed pretty hopeless as
kids. All have been wildly successful in business. Most have now
begun to talk about their dyslexia as a way to help children and
parents cope with a condition that is still widely
misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even today," says
Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is 100% for the kids
and their parents."

What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a reading
disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with god, say,
or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists believe it
has to do with the way a developing brain is wired. Difficulty
reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms. But dyslexia
often comes with one or more other learning problems as well,
including trouble with math, auditory processing, organizational
skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--each has his own set
of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to 6% of American public school
children have been diagnosed with a learning disability; 80% of the
diagnoses are dyslexia-related. But some studies indicate that up to
20% of the population may have some degree of dyslexia (see How to
Help).

A generation ago this was a problem with no name. Boies, Schwab, and
Bill Samuels Jr., the president of Maker's Mark, did not realize they
were dyslexic until some of their own children were diagnosed with
the disorder, which is often inherited. Samuels says he was sitting
in a school office, listening to a description of his son's problems,
when it dawned on him: "Oh, shit. That's me." Most of the adults
Fortune talked to had diagnosed themselves. Says Branson: "At some
point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being
stupid."

Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According to a
March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still associate
learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's probably
because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through conventional
methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies. "It is not an
intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think."

He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ; many smart,
accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it, including
Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Sally Shaywitz, a leading
dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the disorder can carry
surprising talents along with its well-known
disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective, who
think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.

Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
learning disabilities."

Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that
allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either defeated
by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler, a
top financial services executive at Bank One and then at Ford Motor,
remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with
kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea, failed
second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally retarded
children. He could not learn to read, despite the best efforts of
parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special reading
groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalea says
it was as if "angels whispered words in their ears."



--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "Shelli" <merk4@i...> wrote:
> I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching
for it and since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here it
is:
> http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
> Shelli
>   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world
were "C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school -
let alone college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13,
2002 called Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of
Richard Branson (Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab
(Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry) John
Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.    So don't
get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything -
the will to make something of yourself
>   is.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT


---------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links

    To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

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dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

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Tracee Storms
Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
331 E. Main Street
Turlock, CA 95380
209-669-9000 (work)
209-535-3680 (cell)

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I think below is a full copy of the article, sorry if theres any
missing:

Simon


HEALTH: Overcoming Dyslexia
FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond
the limitations of dyslexia.
FORTUNE
Monday, May 13, 2002
By Betsy Morris


Consider the following four dead-end kids.
One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude.
He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and
came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared
he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a
tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring
Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle the
words.

These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles Schwab,
John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one of
Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways.
Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers is
CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as the
guy who beat Microsoft.

In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something
in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw, who
pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank to the
top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed Ford
Financial; Gaston Caperton, former governor of West Virginia and now
head of the College Board; Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's; Diane
Swonk, chief economist of Bank One. The list goes on (see table,
Dyslexic Achievers). Many of these adults seemed pretty hopeless as
kids. All have been wildly successful in business. Most have now
begun to talk about their dyslexia as a way to help children and
parents cope with a condition that is still widely
misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even today," says
Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is 100% for the kids
and their parents."

What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a reading
disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with god, say,
or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists believe it
has to do with the way a developing brain is wired. Difficulty
reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms. But dyslexia
often comes with one or more other learning problems as well,
including trouble with math, auditory processing, organizational
skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--each has his own set
of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to 6% of American public school
children have been diagnosed with a learning disability; 80% of the
diagnoses are dyslexia-related. But some studies indicate that up to
20% of the population may have some degree of dyslexia (see How to
Help).

A generation ago this was a problem with no name. Boies, Schwab, and
Bill Samuels Jr., the president of Maker's Mark, did not realize they
were dyslexic until some of their own children were diagnosed with
the disorder, which is often inherited. Samuels says he was sitting
in a school office, listening to a description of his son's problems,
when it dawned on him: "Oh, shit. That's me." Most of the adults
Fortune talked to had diagnosed themselves. Says Branson: "At some
point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being
stupid."

Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According to a
March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still associate
learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's probably
because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through conventional
methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies. "It is not an
intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think."

He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ; many smart,
accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it, including
Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Sally Shaywitz, a leading
dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the disorder can carry
surprising talents along with its well-known
disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of
people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective, who
think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the
Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband,
Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology.

Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually
remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft
tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff
out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school,
then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with
kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have
learning disabilities."

Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that
allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either defeated
by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler, a
top financial services executive at Bank One and then at Ford Motor,
remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with
kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea, failed
second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally retarded
children. He could not learn to read, despite the best efforts of
parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special reading
groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalea says
it was as if "angels whispered words in their ears."



--- In dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com, "Shelli" <merk4@i...> wrote:
> I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching
for it and since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here it
is:
> http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
> Shelli
>   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world
were "C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school -
let alone college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13,
2002 called Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of
Richard Branson (Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab
(Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry) John
Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.    So don't
get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything -
the will to make something of yourself
>   is.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks Tracee. I realized after I sent the link that it was only part of the
article. I emailed them to see if they would send me a copy. If not, I'll check
the library.
Shelli
   ----- Original Message -----
   From: Tracee Storms
   To: dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com
   Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 10:31 AM
   Subject: Re: [Dyslexia Club] Fortune magazine article


   This is only a portion of the article.  I wrote Fortune magazine and they sent
the whole thing to me.  My contact was kelly_champion@... (hopefully
she is still there)  It is in the May 13, 2002, Vol. 145 No. 10 Magazine if you
want to look it up on archives in the library.  The article was written by Betsy
Morris.  Tracee

   Shelli <merk4@...> wrote:I was interested in the article you
mentioned so I went searching for it and since I found it I figured I would
share the link. Here it is:
   http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
   Shelli
     Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were "C"
students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone college. 
Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called Overcoming
Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson (Virgin Records and
Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered
cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.
So don't get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the
will to make something of yourself
     is.

   [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


   Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT


   ---------------------------------
   Yahoo! Groups Links

      To visit your group on the web, go to:
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

      To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
   dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

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   Tracee Storms
   Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
   331 E. Main Street
   Turlock, CA 95380
   209-669-9000 (work)
   209-535-3680 (cell)

   [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


         Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
               ADVERTISEMENT





------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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     a.. To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

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     dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

     c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

My brother, who also had some language disabilities, and was happy to pass with
a C or D is now the owner of a very sucessful business.  He is creative and
thinks out of the box. School is important and that piece of paper that states
you passed is invaluable but it is not everything.  Get through school one way
or another and get on with life.  T

Jesse Lex <the_lex@...> wrote:Another comment about '"C" students.'  I
remember back in high school when
an English teacher of mine remarked that she thought the students in her
"average" class students generally showed more creativity than her "honors"
students.

At 10:56 AM 9/16/2004, you wrote:
>Try getting a reader for your text through the tutoring service.  Then you
>can just listen to the book and concentrate on the text and not the
>reading.  Also, the day before the test, make a 2 x 2 inch piece of
>paper.  Write as much as you can on the paper.  (DO NOT take this paper
>into your test) For some reason, the process of writing it all down on
>this little paper helps me retain it all.  WEIRD but it works for
>me.  Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were
>"C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone
>college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called
>Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson
>(Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial
>Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank)
>and many others very successful people.    So don't get down and just keep
>plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the will to make something of y
>  ourself
>  is.
>
>tutsy56 <tutsy56@...> wrote:Hello
>
>
>Yesterday I got back my humanities test in class I did ok, but not
>good. I am very mad about the grade I got on the test, I could have
>done much better. The test was read to me and I had the extra time
>for the test as well. My main problem seems to be my reading
>comprehension and trying to remember things that I need to know for
>the test. This week I started working with a tutor and so far it is
>going good. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can handle this
>situation any ideas would be appreciated.
>
>
>Thanks
>
>Trish
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>    To visit your group on the web, go to:
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/
>
>    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
>dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
>
>
>
>
>Tracee Storms
>Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
>331 E. Main Street
>Turlock, CA 95380
>209-669-9000 (work)
>209-535-3680 (cell)
>
>[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>


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---------------------------------
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    To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

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Tracee Storms
Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
331 E. Main Street
Turlock, CA 95380
209-669-9000 (work)
209-535-3680 (cell)

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

This is only a portion of the article.  I wrote Fortune magazine and they sent
the whole thing to me.  My contact was kelly_champion@... (hopefully
she is still there)  It is in the May 13, 2002, Vol. 145 No. 10 Magazine if you
want to look it up on archives in the library.  The article was written by Betsy
Morris.  Tracee

Shelli <merk4@...> wrote:I was interested in the article you mentioned
so I went searching for it and since I found it I figured I would share the
link. Here it is:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
Shelli
   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were "C"
students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone college. 
Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called Overcoming
Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson (Virgin Records and
Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered
cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.
So don't get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the
will to make something of yourself
   is.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT


---------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links

    To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.




Tracee Storms
Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
331 E. Main Street
Turlock, CA 95380
209-669-9000 (work)
209-535-3680 (cell)

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I just realized this is only part of the arcticle. You have to be a subsriber to
read the whole thing. Darn it!
Shelli


   I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching for it and
since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here it is:
   http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
   Shelli

     Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were "C"
students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone college. 
Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called Overcoming
Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson (Virgin Records and
Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered
cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.
So don't get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the
will to make something of yourself
     is.

   [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



         Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
               ADVERTISEMENT





------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Yahoo! Groups Links

     a.. To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

     b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

     c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I was interested in the article you mentioned so I went searching for it and
since I found it I figured I would share the link. Here it is:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373085,00.html
Shelli
   Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were "C"
students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone college. 
Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called Overcoming
Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson (Virgin Records and
Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered
cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank) and many others very successful people.
So don't get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the
will to make something of yourself
   is.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Another comment about '"C" students.'  I remember back in high school when
an English teacher of mine remarked that she thought the students in her
"average" class students generally showed more creativity than her "honors"
students.

At 10:56 AM 9/16/2004, you wrote:
>Try getting a reader for your text through the tutoring service.  Then you
>can just listen to the book and concentrate on the text and not the
>reading.  Also, the day before the test, make a 2 x 2 inch piece of
>paper.  Write as much as you can on the paper.  (DO NOT take this paper
>into your test) For some reason, the process of writing it all down on
>this little paper helps me retain it all.  WEIRD but it works for
>me.  Also remember that most of the successful people in the world were
>"C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school - let alone
>college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002 called
>Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson
>(Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial
>Planner),  Craig McCaw (pioneered cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank)
>and many others very successful people.    So don't get down and just keep
>plugging along.  Grades are not everything - the will to make something of y
>  ourself
>  is.
>
>tutsy56 <tutsy56@...> wrote:Hello
>
>
>Yesterday I got back my humanities test in class I did ok, but not
>good. I am very mad about the grade I got on the test, I could have
>done much better. The test was read to me and I had the extra time
>for the test as well. My main problem seems to be my reading
>comprehension and trying to remember things that I need to know for
>the test. This week I started working with a tutor and so far it is
>going good. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can handle this
>situation any ideas would be appreciated.
>
>
>Thanks
>
>Trish
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups SponsorADVERTISEMENT
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>    To visit your group on the web, go to:
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/
>
>    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
>dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
>
>
>
>
>Tracee Storms
>Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
>331 E. Main Street
>Turlock, CA 95380
>209-669-9000 (work)
>209-535-3680 (cell)
>
>[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>

Try getting a reader for your text through the tutoring service.  Then you can
just listen to the book and concentrate on the text and not the reading.  Also,
the day before the test, make a 2 x 2 inch piece of paper.  Write as much as you
can on the paper.  (DO NOT take this paper into your test) For some reason, the
process of writing it all down on this little paper helps me retain it all. 
WEIRD but it works for me.  Also remember that most of the successful people in
the world were "C" students.  Many of them never made it through high school -
let alone college.  Look up the Fortune Magazine article from May 13, 2002
called Overcoming Dyslexia.  It discusses the hardships of Richard Branson
(Virgin Records and Virgin Air), Charles Schwab (Financial Planner),  Craig
McCaw (pioneered cellular industry) John Reed (Citibank) and many others very
successful people.    So don't get down and just keep plugging along.  Grades
are not everything - the will to make something of yourself
  is.

tutsy56 <tutsy56@...> wrote:Hello


Yesterday I got back my humanities test in class I did ok, but not
good. I am very mad about the grade I got on the test, I could have
done much better. The test was read to me and I had the extra time
for the test as well. My main problem seems to be my reading
comprehension and trying to remember things that I need to know for
the test. This week I started working with a tutor and so far it is
going good. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can handle this
situation any ideas would be appreciated.


Thanks

Trish


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Tracee Storms
Coldwell Banker Endsley & Asso.
331 E. Main Street
Turlock, CA 95380
209-669-9000 (work)
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hello


Yesterday I got back my humanities test in class I did ok, but not
good. I am very mad about the grade I got on the test, I could have
done much better. The test was read to me and I had the extra time
for the test as well. My main problem seems to be my reading
comprehension and trying to remember things that I need to know for
the test. This week I started working with a tutor and so far it is
going good. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can handle this
situation any ideas would be appreciated.


Thanks

Trish

Shelli,

Probably from everything that I saw.

Carol

Shelli <merk4@...> wrote:
So far, the cheapest I've found is $200.00 on ebay (brand new). Is that about
the cheapest I will find?
Shelli

   ----- Original Message -----
   From: Carol Threet
   To: dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com
   Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 2:56 PM
   Subject: Re: [Dyslexia Club] what is that thing that reads words?





   Also, go to a search engine and type in The reading pen and it will pull up a
bunch of areas with better prices for this pen on some of the websites.





   Carol







   Shelli wrote:
   Does anyone know the name of the thing that you scan words with and it reads
them? It is kind of like a pen I believe. I want to check into it more and can't
remember the name of it.


   [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

So far, the cheapest I've found is $200.00 on ebay (brand new). Is that about
the cheapest I will find?
Shelli

   ----- Original Message -----
   From: Carol Threet
   To: dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com
   Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 2:56 PM
   Subject: Re: [Dyslexia Club] what is that thing that reads words?





   Also, go to a search engine and type in The reading pen and it will pull up a
bunch of areas with better prices for this pen on some of the websites.





   Carol







   Shelli wrote:
   Does anyone know the name of the thing that you scan words with and it reads
them? It is kind of like a pen I believe. I want to check into it more and can't
remember the name of it.


   [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks Carol. That's it!
Shelli

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carol Threet" <c_threet@...>
To: <dyslexiaclub@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 2:41 PM
Subject: Re: [Dyslexia Club] what is that thing that reads words?


The Reading Pen II

2048 & navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE')>=0) W= W.substring( 0,
2043)+"&tu=1"; document.write('');}wtl_Tag5_119048();//-->

Product options:
  The Reading Pen II $269.00 The Reading Pen Basic $269.00 Memory Extension
Kit - 4 MB $69.95  [input]



"The Ultimate Portable Reading Tool" is a fully portable, pen-shaped scanner
& audible dictionary designed for:

. people with reading difficulties, such as dyslexia, from grade 2 through
adulthood
. middle and high school students, to build large vocabularies for college
entry exams



Products Advantages and Features:
Features the ability to scan word or line of text, repeats words out loud,
shows definition of words (contains American Heritage Dictionary). Includes
2 AAA batteries, earphone and operating manual. Easy to learn---in about 15
minutes, reader can learn functions for independent study, in and out of
classroom.

Specifications:
. Captures text within seconds (over three times faster than our original
Reading Pen)
. Improved accuracy
. Displays and speaks dictionary definition
. Single word/Full line scanning
. Large character display
. Reads words aloud
. Recognizes 6-22 point size text, bold, italic, underlined, inverted text
Scans left to right, and right to left
. Displays syllables
. Spells words out loud
. Keeps a history of scanned words
. An Opticard lets you input text manually
. Adjustable for left and right handed users
. Ergonomic 6" x 1 1/2" x 1", lightweight - 3 oz.
. Contains over 200,000 definitions from The American Heritage® College
Dictionary, Third Edition Copyright © 1997, 1993 by Houghton Mifflin
Company. All rights reserved.


Comes complete with:
. User Manual
. Quick Reference
. Card Carrying Case (plastic) with Opticard
. Earphone
. 2 "AAA" batteries


Warranty
This product is warranted against defects for 1 year from date of purchase.




New Product!
Reading Pen Basic

The Reading Pen Basic Edition is a fully portable self contained, assistive
reading device that is designed specifically for school age reading levels.
Featuring American Heritage Children's Dictionary and Children's Thesaurus,
it provides a simple and easy way for people with reading difficulties,
learning disabilities or dyslexia to get immediate word support when they
are reading.

. Scan a single word or complete line of text
. Recognizes printed fonts (6-22 point), bold, italic, underlined and
inverted
. Speaks and spells words, sentences, definitions and thesaurus
. Displays dictionary, Thesaurus entries and syllabication of words
. Easy access to dictionary or Thesaurus
. Scans in either direction for left or right-handed use
. Recgnizes over 240,000 words featuring the American Heritage Children's
Dictionary and Thesaurus
. Defines words within the definition for added clarity
. Ability to block access to the dictionary and Thesaurus for use during
exams
. Keeps a history of the last 80 words scanned for easy review
www.enablemart.com
Hope this helps,

Carol


Shelli <merk4@...> wrote:
Does anyone know the name of the thing that you scan words with and it reads
them? It is kind of like a pen I believe. I want to check into it more and
can't remember the name of it.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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---------------------------------
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    To visit your group on the web, go to:
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    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





Yahoo! Groups Links

Also, go to a search engine and type in The reading pen and it will pull up a
bunch of areas with better prices for this pen on some of the websites.





Carol







Shelli wrote:
Does anyone know the name of the thing that you scan words with and it reads
them? It is kind of like a pen I believe. I want to check into it more and can't
remember the name of it.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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---------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links

To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dyslexiaclub/

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
dyslexiaclub-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





Yahoo! Groups Links









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