Last month was Dyslexia Awareness Month, but awareness shouldn’t end when the calendar page turns. I know this because I am a person with dyslexia, and I didn’t find out until I was 55 years old.
School was painful for me. I struggled in every grade and all the way through college, and I never understood why. I assumed I wasn’t as capable as the other students. Years later, in my second career teaching special education, I had a student who was diagnosed with dyslexia. I attended a class to learn how to teach students like him, and somewhere in that classroom, it clicked. The struggles I had carried for decades finally had a name. My own difficulty in school is what led me to special education in the first place. It took me until 55 to understand why.
I think of the second-grader asked to read aloud. Her classmates move through the page easily while she searches for a way into each word. She knows the answer to the teacher’s question, and she understands the story better than most. But connecting letters to sounds does not come automatically for her, so she stumbles, and someone giggles. By lunchtime she has quietly concluded that she must be stupid. That moment, repeated in classrooms everywhere, is the real injury. The difficulty with decoding words is manageable. The damage to a child’s sense of worth is not.
Students with dyslexia often work twice as hard for results that look half as good. Many learn to hide it, volunteering to pass out papers instead of reading, or acting up so they will be sent to the hallway rather than exposed. Frustration, shame, and anxiety are common, and they often go unnoticed because the child has become so skilled at concealing them.
Dyslexia is usually framed as a disability, but it is better understood as a different way the brain works. It is not a problem of intelligence or effort. It is a difference in how the brain processes the sounds within language. Many people with dyslexia are strong in creative problem-solving, spatial thinking, storytelling, and seeing the big picture. Strengths and challenges come as a package.
What makes the difference is instruction. Students with dyslexia often struggle when they are expected to learn reading by guessing at words or memorizing them whole. They thrive when reading is taught directly and systematically: connecting letters to sounds, breaking words into parts, and building up from there. Phonics-based, structured instruction doesn’t just help these students read. It shows them that they were never incapable. They simply hadn’t been taught in a way that matched how their brains learn.
Real change is within our reach. Schools can screen early, because early intervention makes an enormous difference. Teachers can be trained in structured, evidence-based reading instruction, and tools like audiobooks, extra time, and text-to-speech can be offered without stigma. Parents can celebrate a child’s strengths as loudly as they address the struggles. And all of us can stop equating reading speed with intelligence.
Let us change the story that children with dyslexia tell themselves. They are not behind, lazy, or less capable. They are thinkers whose minds work in a different direction. I wish someone had told me that at nine years old instead of 55.
The proof is all around us. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, has spoken openly about how dyslexia made school a struggle before he built a global business. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg was not diagnosed until later in life, and he has said that finally understanding why reading was so hard brought him relief. Actor Henry Winkler, diagnosed as an adult, went on to write dozens of children’s books. Whoopi Goldberg and Charles Schwab, founder of the brokerage that bears his name, have also shared their experiences with dyslexia. Each of them was once a child who was told, in one way or another, that they weren’t measuring up.
Their stories remind us what is possible when people with dyslexia are given the right support and the chance to shine. Our communities are stronger when we make room for them.
