Free The Dyslexic Advantage by Brock L. Eide Page B

organization. The following is an essay that Max wrote at age ten, which he entitled, “The Derte road.”
    This trip we whent to bary my Grate Grandma on this dert road. So when we got on the road in are fourrunner my teeth were chattring but they stoped when we got on the bumpy port. It was 13 miles in to the drte road so I just relaxed . . .
    We met Max shortly before his eleventh birthday. While the “numbers” from our testing mostly confirmed what others had found, our interpretation was somewhat different. We identified his challenges with reading and writing fluency, spelling, syntax, rote and working memory, focused attention for auditory-verbal material, processing speed, sequencing, and organization, but we also found many of the wonderful strengths that individuals with dyslexia often show. Max showed tremendous spatial and nonverbal reasoning powers, his understanding of math concepts was amazing, and his ability to interact knowledgeably on a wide range of complex scientific subjects was extremely impressive. We were also struck by the intellectual “flavor” Max displayed as he approached his work. He showed a charming naïveté and inventiveness on many tasks that children his age usually dash through without even giving a thought, so although his work was slower it was often more creative. Max also made many interesting observations that showed how his mind was reaching out to probe the connections between ideas.
    We also discovered several important details about Max’s family. Max’s father has a Ph.D. in chemistry, and his mother has a degree in biochemistry—both high M-strength fields. Max’s mother also has dyslexia-related processing traits and talents. Although she struggled with reading and writing as a child, she now works as a medical writer. Both of Max’s maternal grandparents were also scientists, and Max’s great-grandmother has often remarked how much Max reminds her of his grandfather when he was a boy. Perhaps “family resemblance” provides a better explanation for Max’s “intense” interest in drainage and erosion than autism, since his grandfather spent his career as a professor of geophysics at UCLA.
    Ultimately, we made several suggestions to help Max in areas where he still struggled, but we also explained that in the most important respects Max was right on target for his development—that is, for the kind of late-blooming growth and maturation that children display when they combine dyslexic processing, outstanding M-strengths, and procedural learning challenges.

M-Strengths and Development
    We’ve shared Max’s story because we want you to see what dyslexic children with impressive M-strengths look like while they’re still developing—before their mature talents are fully apparent. While it’s enormously helpful to look at the childhoods of successful dyslexic adults, sometimes the perspective provided by hindsight can make their successes seem almost inevitable—as if their challenges weren’t really so severe, and they were never really at risk of failure. Somehow these stories can lack the power to convince us that the slow, awkward, inarticulate, inattentive, and dyslexic early elementary child before us might actually have a chance to become one of the great engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, inventors, surgeons, or builders of the twenty-first century. Yet this is often unquestionably true.
    We constantly meet skeptics who respond by pointing out that not every child will become an Albert Einstein or an Isaac Newton. This is true, but even Einstein and Newton didn’t look like “Einstein” and “Newton” in second grade: Einstein was remembered as a slow, uncooperative child with a nasty temper who repeated everything he said (echolalia), while Newton was remembered as a simpleton whose only apparent use was to make small wooden toys for his