Free The Dyslexic Advantage by Brock L. Eide Page A

academic knowledge and skills on his own. He needed to be explicitly taught.”
    Through the end of first grade Max made little progress in reading, math, or writing. He seemed to have a hard time staying focused. He also struggled to retrieve words and information from memory. His kindergarten and first-grade teachers found that he seemed to learn much better one-on-one than in a large class, so Max’s mother decided to homeschool him for second grade.
    One-on-one, Max slowly began to learn. Although he still required frequent repetitions and refocusing, by the end of second grade he was reading—slowly—and his writing began to take off (though it largely left his spelling behind). The following is a response he wrote to the question “Tell me about going to the [Seattle] Science Center”:
    we went a long wae and thin we wint in sid. And we qplab [played] with the ecsuvatr [excavator] and thin we trid too pla with the tic tac toe mushen [machine] and thin we wint too the bug thing and thin we wint too the binusho [dinosaur] thing and thin we wint toe the ecsuvatr and thin we left.
    Outside of school, Max found plenty to occupy his time. When he was a toddler he became fascinated by wires and circuits, and as he grew older he developed a sophisticated interest in electronics. He especially liked experimenting with small-scale power generation, using sources like solar, wind, and water to generate electricity.
    Max also developed a deep interest in nature, and he loved to spend time in the woods surrounding his home near Seattle. Max laid out a nature trail on his family’s property, but as many Northwesterners have learned, he soon found that “walking” plus “woods” equals “wet feet.” So Max began to install an elaborate series of drains to remove the standing water that collected across his trail. He also built bridges over the spots he couldn’t drain. Max’s drainage project was remarkable for a child not yet ten years old. Not surprisingly, it did draw remarks—from psychologists.
    When Max was in fourth grade his mother took him to be evaluated for his difficulties with schoolwork. The psychologist diagnosed ADHD. This seemed plausible given Max’s problems with auditory-verbal working memory, distractibility, and lack of focus for schoolwork. However, the psychologist was also concerned by Max’s “intense” interest in electronics and drainage, his focus on solitary pursuits, and his difficulty talking with—and like—other children. So in addition to ADHD, the psychologist diagnosed Max with Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. As one of his recommendations, the psychologist suggested that Max take social skills classes.
    Although Max’s mother questioned the Asperger’s diagnosis, she agreed that Max needed to improve his social skills, so she took him to see a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Fortunately, the SLP understood that social skills consist largely of complex rules for behavior that have been learned and practiced until they’ve become habits. Under the SLP’s supervision, Max was taught social skills in a clear and explicit manner, and he practiced them during structured interactions with another child until these skills became automatic.
    Max continued to improve both socially and academically. Between ages seven and a half and ten his reading vocabulary shot up from the 35th to the 98th percentile, and his math calculation rose from the 45th to the 99.9th. However, he still showed the lower Working Memory and Processing Speed scores that we typically find in our “young engineers.”
    At that point, Max was making great strides in most areas, though his reading comprehension and fluency lagged behind his conceptual abilities, and his writing remained slow. He also made frequent errors in his writing with spelling, conventions, sentence structure (syntax), and