Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional spelling woes and self-esteem

DD10 understands that she is dyslexic and that spelling is one of her challenges. In the family, we have grown used to phonetically correct but technically incorrect spelling. We've talked about other family members who are successful adults who have had to face the same challenges. Her teacher this year was very supportive and DD actually made some progress in her spelling by studying patterns and self-correcting her initial attempt at a word.

DD had a play date the other day. They decided to make up their own version of charades. They wrote down different ideas for different categories. DD's lack of spelling ability was evident. One kid asked her how she could be in GT and not be able to spell. Dd responded that spelling isn't her strength but that she is good at other stuff. I thought that she handled it well.

After the kid left, DD burst into tears. She said that no one will ever look at her ideas if she couldn't spell and that people only look at her mistakes. She said that people discount her ideas because her spelling makes them think that she doesn't know what she is doing. I tried to reassure her and tell her that we'll keep working on her strengths and weaknesses. I don't feel that I responded to the core of her concerns.

Has anyone else had to deal with this question? What would you have said?

Both of my 2e kiddos have huge challenges with spelling. Neither of them has asked this specific question yet, but ds12 has asked some tough questions related to his 2e challenges. If one of my kids did ask this question, these are the things I'd talk to them about:

* Being young, being in school - those are tough years in many ways for kids with any kind of challenge such as dyslexia. They can be challenging for other kids with other challenges too, and most of us have some kind of challenge as well as some things we're good at.

* Not all adults can spell. In my family, for instance, my dh can't spell worth a darn (I wouldn't honestly be surprised if he isn't an undiagnosed dyslexic - and dyslexia does sometimes have a genetic component - if you can think of anyone else in your family who might have dyslexia and make a connection that might be something that would help for your dd to know). Not being able to spell has not *in any way* kept my dh from having a very successful career and from being very happy in life. He also doesn't have to spell in his career - like many many many adults - he uses keyboarding to write in his career and he has spellchecker always turned on. When he does have to write down a brief note or whatever and he doesn't spell a word correctly, if he doesn't know how to spell it he asks. If he doesn't know he doesn't know how to spell it he doesn't know to ask, but he also doesn't let it slow him down one bit when he finds out it's not spelled correctly - he knows that his ideas speak for themselves (strongly) and that misspelled word holds no power over the ideas. That's not something he probably knew at 10 but it's something he grew into and sometimes just letting my kids know they will grow to that point where things will no longer be felt with an impact helps them get through the here and now.

* Most importantly (imo) - after talking about how she is feeling - is to give your dd a rehearsed answer to this type of comment. For instance, when someone asks her how can she be in the gifted program when she can't spell, she could answer "I am dyslexic; I have a harder time than most kids with spelling, but it doesn't mean I'm not smart" - or whatever she wants to tell them. But having that rehearsed-ahead-of-time answer makes it easier to know what to say in the moment.

* The other thing I've done with my kids, not just when things like this happen but also just at random times when things are going ok, is to share stories of famous adult dyslexics.

polarbear

She may just not be ready to process what you're saying. Because ultimately, you can't tell her what she's really yearning to hear. At least not without being dishonest, which I don't recommend.

Looking slow/backwards/dumb isn't the same as being that way... and really, it's a problem that her peers have to figure out, not her. While this is technically true, it's also true that it's causing her real problems in the here and now.

My husband has a PhD in a physical science and spends much of his time communicating in writing. He is a terrible speller. Oh my goodness!! We can both laugh about the ways that he can mangle a shopping list-- but we're middle-aged. He says that his spelling is his revenge for my penmanship, by the way. LOL.

He felt dreadfully insecure as a child, and in that era, even teachers used spelling ability as a measure of intellectual capacity, I well recall. He was (truly) labeled globally "slow" by an elementary school teacher. Of course, technology has made life orders of magnitude easier than it must have been for our grandparents' generation. Few of his coworkers would even know about his awful spelling problems because of the way that communication tends to occur now. He never skips spellcheck, though-- he even runs his e-mails through spellcheck, and often posts on FB or message boards, as well.

People do judge others on the strength of their written communication, unfortunately, and correlate that to an estimate of the person's intellect and ability to handle complex tasks. Might not be fair, but it does happen.

As she gets older, more of those work-arounds will be accessible to her, and the problem will become less obvious to her peers. THAT, you can say with complete honesty. My husband is also extremely up-front about the problem. "I'm a terrible speller," defuses a lot of the expectation. Self-awareness is a higher-order cognitive skill, after all. Having the self-confidence to admit to one's weaknesses with such transparency also signals competence.

I'm a terrible athlete (no, really terrible). He's a terrible speller. We're both HG+ people, and we've both been extremely successful in spite of those failings.

Since much writing is done with spell-checker available, it may be more important to avoid certain usage mistakes than to remember how to spell Mississippi. Some pairs of words that are often wrongly interchanged are

it's its
lose loose
affect effect

I think your daughter handled it perfectly. She doesn't need any more practice in handling this. Now she just needs to learn to believe the message.


My caution with this is that I have a graduate student who explains all his struggles by starting off with his dyslexia. At some point the explanation has become an excuse. I like the way your daughter explained it to her friend. She has to work harder at it. Period.


The fact of the matter is that people do judge the message based on the errors. The same grad student with dyslexia gives me stuff that's spelled wrong and lacks capitalization and verbs. At this point, though, dyslexia is his burden but should not be an excuse.

I strongly suspect that my development in elementary school and middle school could have tested out as dyslexia/dysgraphia at the time. My daughter's trials in school feel very familiar. I'm also a prof in the natural sciences. My writing has improved dramatically as I have gotten a ton of practice and I've had a few excellent mentors. I am careful with my professional writing. I take 2-3 times the amount of time to write things than my peers, not in terms of hours, but in calendar days. This gives me the opportunity to make full use of spell checkers, the MS Word grammar check (not perfect, but I've learned a lot), and professional editors. Yes, I've been known to send drafts of proposals to a professional editor. I've learned the hard way that things done in haste have spelling errors and missing words.

I've now got a reputation as one of the best writers of the faculty in my department.

My son's 5th grade teacher shared this exchange between another student and my son:

"How can you not know how to spell that? I thought you were supposed to be smart or something."

"Hey. Einstein couldn't always find his own way home, and people used to think he was dumb. No one thinks he is now, do they?"

It is hard, as a parent, to watch your child struggle. I agree with HowlerKarma, that you can't tell her what she wants to hear without being dishonest. My DD9 has similar concerns and frustrations with her mild dyslexia and dysgraphia. She has great accommodations at school, but she can't hide her spelling in group work. She does a decent job of brushing off comments, but it upsets her. What does help is knowing other kids have similar struggles. Her cousins also have learning challenges (my niece has dyslexia and visual processing disorder and my nephew has severe dysgraphia)... It is NORMAL in our family, LOL.

She saw her psychologist regularly this school year to work on her anxiety issues and she learned some great coping skills through role playing. Ultimately, she will struggle with this get whole life. All we can do is fill her toolbox with coping skills and strategies, appropriate accommodations and healthy self-esteem.

We need to set up a forum for our 2e kids. Talking with other kids who have similar struggles has been immensely helpful for my DD.

That's a good question. I almost felt that she was parroting my words but that she didn't believe them. DD is embarrassed that she was in the lowest spelling class. Part of her problem is that her vocabulary is at a much higher level than her spelling ability. She is frustrated that she has "baby words" but readily acknowledges that she can't spell them consistently in her written work.
I think that her use of absolutes is what bothered me but I couldn't put my finger on it. It had an air of hopelessness and despair. Lately, she has been labeling herself as a "failure" at anything that she doesn't do particularly well. For example, she said that she was a "failure" when she played a bad hole of mini golf. I have been challenging her on her use of that word and questioning her about why she is categorizing things that way. I don't understand why she sees herself that way, especially on something like mini golf where no one in the group is expert.

I just wanted to clarify that I wasn't advocating using dyslexia as an excuse. However, I do think that being up front about the cause behind a challenge can be freeing to children (and adults) when they are in a situation like this - basically playing/working with a small group of friends/peers. My ds12 does compare himself to other kids - most kids do. He's not thrilled about having messy handwriting or having his spelling break down during the act of writing (ds can ace spelling tests, it's the act of handwriting which impacts working memory which impacts spelling when he's writing a sentence for example), and the solution isn't as simple as work harder at learning to spell. In a situation like in the OP (playing with friends) there isn't going to be time to go back and check spelling. Telling them his spelling is impacted by dysgraphia isn't an excuse, it's a straightforward explanation.

polarbear

I have a friend who teaches advanced calculus, and her spelling is not good. She has a math brain I worked for a very successful, senior salesman for a major telecom company whose spelling was even worse. He has a sales brain I could go on and on... you get the idea. Your daughter can say "I'm not good at spelling - instead I have a ____ brain!"

Although, I do think she handled herself fine in front of her friends. What you could do is focus on making her feel better about it. Give her as many real life examples as you can of adults who have been very successful in their careers and in sharing their ideas even without good spelling ability. Also reminder about spell check, and tell her they would not have invented it if there wasn't a need for it, so she is not alone in her spelling challenges.