My Dyslexia by Philip Schultz

Author:Philip Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

7

WHEN I WAS TWENTY AND A COLLEGE STUDENT IN San Francisco a therapist told me that given my obvious intelligence I should be able to understand something easily enough. I can still feel the weight and taste of each word: given my obvious intelligence.

My intelligence?

At the time I was living in an attic room, caring part-time for an autistic boy in return for my room and board. I bussed dishes in the school cafeteria while serving as a teaching assistant to two of my writing teachers. My desire to overcome this image of myself as a member of the Dummy Class carried me though these times. I told myself one way or another I would be a writer, a good one, the same way I’d taught myself to read. With much to prove, I felt deliberate, stubborn, determined, and maybe even a little crazy—who else but the crazy expect so much from so little, ignore the odds of playing against a stacked deck in favor of—Billy’s dictum—going headlong or not going at all? Yet never once did it occur to me that I was intelligent.

“Do you really think that—that I’m intelligent?” I asked her. She hadn’t given me any tests—how did she know for sure? There seemed to be so much proof to the contrary.

Later, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, fearing I would fail a required linguistics class and not get my degree, I tried to get out of the class by seeking as an exemption the Old and Middle English classes I’d taken as an undergraduate. The professor, a kindly man nearing retirement age, possessed of a much admired ironic disposition (his class was mysteriously given at 8:30 a.m., providing him with the occasion to quip: “I go to bed late, but not that late!”), smiled as I made my pitch in his office. He’d obviously heard my arguments many times before. Interrupting my plea, he suddenly asked what a phoneme was. “If you don’t need to take linguistics, surely you know what one is, Mr. Schultz.”

I failed high school Latin twice, survived two years of college French with C-’s by memorizing the text and never going to class, a semester of German (quitting mid-term), a number of Old and Middle English classes (which I passed only because I loved the wonderful poetry the gifted professor sang aloud in class and didn’t mind memorizing it), and one semester of a logic class. I’d come into contact with phonemes and probably would’ve come up with an acceptable version of the right answer (which is what he expected: an acceptable answer that would allow him to grant me the exemption) if it weren’t for the anxiety his question caused me. I assumed my not being able to answer meant that I was not intelligent, and that this was exactly what he was trying to demonstrate. I ran out of his office before he could offer me an exemption. He later explained in a note he was only attempting to let me know that linguistics was of some importance to a writer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.