Pallet vs. Palette. Yes, I guess I did it again… | The Embroiderer's Story

“A somewhat annoying vocabulary error..”

That is how my morning email started today.  I will assume from a well meaning individual who was trying to alert me to the difference between homonyms pallet and palette.  Unfortunately, all the emails I receive like this also have an unmistakable air of condescension to them, often filled with examples of my writing and dictionary definitions.  While my husband has repeatedly advised me to ignore these messages (as well as the good intentioned offers of becoming my editor), the thick skin I have worked so hard to develop all my life sometimes has days where the thin spots appear.

These emails/comments put me in a very bad spot.  This was not the first on the obviously important issue of Pallet vs. Palette.  As a business owner and blog writer, I certainly do not want to offend anyone by answering them in a negative way.  You read this blog as a form of enjoyment and entertainment.  Yet, there comes a point where it is difficult to continue to get them and ignore since no one who writes them can use humor to make their point, lessening the sting.  They ruin my day as hard as I try not to let them.

You see, the writers are the same people who out of their own ignorance tease my children on the playground for their reading.  The same ones whose comments make millions of American’s hide their challenges and prevent the full blossoming of their talents.  These comments become internalized as evidence of lack of intelligence or value, starting a lifelong battle with low self-esteem.  I am going to talk about this publicly because I see this everyday, have lived it, and the very existence of my work that so many of you enjoy is because of this issue.

You see, I am dyslexic.

I know what many of you are saying: “No, that can’t be”.  That is the response I get to my face when I tell someone.  And it is almost always followed by some version of this sentence:  “You can’t be, you are so smart”.  A loaded statement.  I have thought long and hard over the years on whether I would talk publicly about this.  Maybe you can understand how difficult it is to do, it is admitting to something that most see as a defect.  It is called a disability, a disease, something to be cured.  It has come up as side conversation a few times in classes I have taught.  But I have never taken the issue to the forefront.  I vacillate, as the point of this forum is historical needlework.  But it is always front and center in my mind as I write the blog and other forms of written communication.  I take an enormous risk every day in posts and when a lesson comes out in a class.   I bare myself open to the barbs, hoping that the value of the content and insights will negate any sentence structure issues or spelling mistakes that passed through the endless checks.

I recently was told by a specialist of a famous CEO who was illiterate and hid it.  When he witnessed his son go through tutoring for dyslexia, he decided to ask the same person for help.  The tutor agreed, under one condition, that he speak publicly about his challenge.  He did.  That story highlights the responsibility that those who have achieved some modicum of success in their field have to speak about their own challenges, helping to change the culture around this issue.  I shall do my bit here.

80% of the USA thinks dyslexia = low intelligence.  If they can define it, they incorrectly think it has to do with reversing letters

That is a startling statistic and defines our failed education system and the root of insensitivity.  I wrote an letter to the editor that was published in the Boston Globe recently which detailed how our education system was stilted to written word/literature based dominance.  Because of that, there is a lack of understanding of different intelligences since those who control education are dominated by one type.   If you keep up on neuroscience (isn’t that everyone’s bedtime reading?), you would know about functional NMR imaging and how it is being use to map brains during different math, logic, and reading tasks.  This research has blown open the field of ‘learning disabilities’ and turned it on its head (but has not filtered down to educators or the general public).  It gives me the confidence to speak, as I am not stupid or lazy, I am just optimized for something else important.  There are evolutionarily distinct brain structures, optimized for certain task sets that are useful in general survival.  Since humans are mammals who live in groups to support the long development time of the young, we need multiple processing types to perform the myriad tasks to survive.  No one brain can do all task types the best, we are all good at something and not so good at others.  It just so happens that the brain type that is optimized to process complex visual images (think about looking for a lion in the bush or recognizing the poisonous leaf) happens to be bereft of neuron connections that enable recognition of phonemes.  Phonemes are the basis of breaking down auditory language and converting to written language.

Maryann Wolf, Harvard Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, is the author of the highly respected book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.  In it, she describes how the current form of recorded knowledge (note, not intelligence) is a hammer developed only a few thousand years ago.  It just so happens, that the current form (unlike the earlier forms of cuneiform), is one that is intuitive to one evolutionary brain type but is a mystery to another.  This other brain type, commonly labeled ‘dyslexic’, is the one that thinks in pictures, processes images efficiently, and also processes a larger portion of the visual field coming into the optical nerve aiding observation.   This brain type also excels at logic and symbolic manipulation.  In other words, they are the people who become the engineers, builders, architects, graphic artists, artists, and entrepreneurs.  We all know that those people can’t write…don’t we?  In Boston, we have a world renowned school for dyslexics called The Carroll School (there are only a handful in a nation where around 20% of us are dyslexic).   The waiting list for this school makes you cry.  A friend of mine with a child there told me that at the first parent meeting, the principal asked the parents to raise their hand if they were a graduate of MIT or an architect.  80% of the parents raised their hands.  Stunning and makes you think.  Prof. Wolf has been interviewed in documentaries crying, talking about how this tool, developed only recently in human history, is being used as a litmus test for intelligence by current society.  She states how our most creative and brilliant children are being beaten down by their perceived “disability” and how it is a tragedy.

Because it is a evolutionary brain structure, it is also passed between parents and offspring by genetics.  One of the diagnosis screenings is to look at the parents for evidence of reading difficulties, since we can’t afford to put every kid through functional NMR.  Dyslexics pass it on to their children at a rate of 40%.  My husband and I ‘won’ the lottery, both our children are dyslexic as well.  Some will note long pauses in blog writing, those quite often parallel times where I have been quite involved in some issue about our children.  I have spent great deal of time regarding either the discovery of their ‘gift’ from me or fights with the educational establishment regarding their handling of it.  It is then that I am too angry and emotional to write.  Amazingly, I live in an area that harbors both Harvard and MIT, yet educators only see the value of the child who can read above grade level and not the one who can design electrical circuits in elementary school.  If I hear one more teacher praise their reading program because it is so ‘intuitive’ instead of acknowledging that 30% of their class needs a systematic approach or call my little engineers disabled for their ‘only’ grade level reading abilities, I think I will explode.

The entire reason I have Thistle Threads is because my children are dyslexic.  I founded it just as I was trying to have kids.  I knew that my career as a highly visible engineer would have to end as it was highly likely I would pass my ‘gift’ on and I would need another outlet that was more flexible.  My mother is the only one in the family not sharing of the family ‘gifts’ and was my tutor.  She now does it professionally for other children and I have watched her over the years and learned much on how to handle children with dyslexia.  They require allot of time and flexibility because the educational system fails them.  I spend six hours a week during ‘work time’ driving them to Orton-Gillingham tutoring or some other form of therapy to offset the comments by insensitive individuals who called them stupid in their reading group.  And because in primary school all the focus is on the written word and lip-service is paid to the areas that they excel in (science, problem solving, math, arts), I also drive them around to other experiences in these areas to enrich their sense of worth.  I recognize the other kids in their situation easily in school (they are always the kids who are the brightest and most interesting), and gather them up for engaging activities at my house.  I have taught many kids to program, build robots, do mechanics, sew, or solder.  The point is to teach them all how to maximize their gifts and off-set the negative vibes they get daily.  I once designed a summer week where we did a National Treasure hunt all over Boston.  The National Park service was only too happy to let me hide strange packages in historic places (I was really surprised they let me!).  The kids had to research history and solve riddles to find everything.  Each one of these kids was beaten down at school daily, but it was their ticket to earn a spot in my gang of fun-loving, creative misfits.  That is why every Fall I spend half my time mentoring a robotics group and will do so for at least a decade more.  My kids need it badly.  I also have a large debt to pay those who did this for me when I was young.

It is easy to identify the kid in this situation.  He/she is the one in 1st grade who is having ‘attitude problems’ or who has hit the ’1st grade slump’.  That was my cue to rush my children to testing.  A bright, happy child who is building robots at 5-yrs old who suddenly starts hitting his head on the table and crying over the school day is telling you something.  In each case, the teachers told me not to worry.  I tell other parents to ignore the teachers and go with their gut – get the child help very early and they can go on to succeed in the best university.  With girls it is way more hidden.  They are the creative, artsy girl who is really quiet and doesn’t contribute to class discussions much.  That is because she is listening intently to everything to soak it in, she can’t read it.  But she is in the corner slowly teaching herself to pattern match the words.  She is quiet and a good girl, so she is ignored.  It is the boy pacing the hall crying and not wanting to go in the reading room who is noted first.

Indiana Jones style bridge between lobes of the brain. The phonemes just fall through the missing planks. Tutoring rebuilds the bridge, but slowly one plank at a time.

Being a highly-functional (THANKS MOM!) dyslexic is tremendously exhausting.  The point of Orton-Gillingham or Wilson tutoring is to build the neural pathways missing to make language decoding through phonemics or phonics possible.  (I once explained dyslexia to my oldest son by the diagram above – he immediately understood and stopped talking about killing himself because he was stupid).   A recent paper presented at a neuropsych conference showed by functional NMR that it was possible to re-circuit by using this methodology.  The blood flow in the brain could be altered to mimic that of a literature based brain type in children when reading.  For those of us who didn’t get this type of tutoring, but yet have learned to read at a high level (albeit at a lower fluency), we developed a get around that uses twice as many lobes and a longer path length (right to left side and back).  I think that continual research will show that we learned to recognize words as images and process them that way.  That is why writing and reading is just exhausting for me.  I drink caffeine all day long when I write to combat fatigue, a trick taught me by a specialist.  I work much harder than someone optimized for it and I also don’t have the rules to rely on that my children are learning to use to cope.  I still can not understand the small bits of words – which contributes highly to my inability to recognize homonyms and spelling mistakes.  Phonics makes zero sense to me, as does most of what my children’s tutors tell me about where they are in their progress.  I smile and parrot it back to my mom for interpretation.

I made it to MIT, but not without a great deal of very, very hard work.  My dad would come into my room at 1am and tell me to put my homework away.  I had been done with the bulk of it for a long time, I was always working on the spelling words or foreign language (the scourge of all dyslexics).  I would write a spelling word on the paper to fill it.  Sometimes 200 times, trying to burn the image into my memory enough so I could bring up that image like a movie the next day so I could pass the test.  That was the only way.  Then it was promptly forgotten.  By ninth grade I was so exhausted that I had mono for six months and missed most of my freshman year.  That was when I gave up being perfect for other people.

School was painful, even though I seemed on the outside to excel.  The other kids knew my language difficulties and the dichotomy of their perspective of my success in other areas with their knowledge that people who can’t spell are stupid made for a bad situation.  At MIT at least I was among my own, a great relief.  I was brought to my knees though, by a professor who was working in Materials Archeology.  I loved how she had fused her love of history, anthropology and materials engineering.  I wanted to be her.  She knew that and my intention for graduate school.  The day I got a paper back from her with the scrawl in red “If you think you are going to grad school with writing like this, you have another thing coming” was a defining moment.  I was crushed.  No one had ever told me that I couldn’t write.  Not even in high school; I went to a small school in a farming area of the country.  Fortunately my parents raised a child who took comments like that and instead of dumping a dream, said ‘how dare you? I will show you how wrong you are’.  GRIT…something I hope to instill in my kids.

I spent the next 12 years learning to write. I searched out mentors in grad school and at my workplace who were willing to take the time to edit my work in detail and write next to it the rule I needed to follow.  I can’t thank them enough.  Writing my dissertation was ever so painful but necessary.  A ‘glutton for punishment’ was the words my advisor said when I decided to take a job as an research engineer who would have to write some twelve 40-page proposals a year.  He knew I could find a way to avoid my challenges, but I preferred to improve so it wouldn’t hold me back.  We had a good laugh and decided I would learn by fire.  Some of you will say (and do) that I haven’t learned yet.  But you have no idea where I have come from.

Age is great and gives you wisdom.  You really understand yourself, can accept your faults, and decide to work on them so they become faint enough not to overshadow your contributions.  There are many films out there (a great one played this year on HBO) where prominent dyslexics are interviewed and asked if they would change it.  They universally say no, not for millions of dollars or anything in the world.  They wouldn’t erase the pain they went through to give up the incredible strengths that this brain structure gave them to succeed.  These are the abilities that allow me to remember the image of every sampler or casket I have ever seen.  To look at an embroidered jacket and see that the vine pattern is the same as on a nightcap in a different museum.  It is like having a huge iPhoto database in your head with pattern recognition software constantly running.  The coping mechanism of building paths between the left and right hemispheres makes you think in multiple dimensions.  It makes you ‘think different’.  That is why dyslexics are overrepresented as entrepreneurs.  Another reason for this: since the 1st grade you have had to learn to fail and pick yourself up again and again and work even harder.  Failure is something you have come to terms with long ago, so business risk is a natural thing to engage in.  They are also the most likely to fuse two fields into something new.  When I pick up the auditory cues of someone with a reading ‘disability’ (there are some), I gravitate to that person.  They are the movers and shakers.

I take on new challenges as a point of pride.  Those of you who hear me lecture may be surprised to find out that it was only five months ago that I read in public for the first time in my life.  In high school the only class I ever skipped was the day I had to read out-loud.  I was so internally embarrassed that I decided to memorize so I could become a public speaker.  So recently I planed to give an hour talk on embroidery at CHS and the amount of genealogy required made it impossible for me to memorize it.  I was terrified.  While I am a silver tongue (something that comes with dyslexia), reading out loud is fraught with potholes.  My husband makes fun of me because I avoid certain books at bedtime.  Anything with dinosaurs is a no-go.  I can’t decode the words and they changed them from when I was young so I can’t guess either.  But I figured that I make my kids do it for therapy, I might as well step up to the plate myself.  It took two weeks of writing to match my natural cadence and then hours of practice so I knew the stumble words and where they were.

So everyday, I challenge myself and try to keep a thick skin.  Often there is panic that no one but a select few I work with know about.   When handed the dry-erase marker to draw a new concept at a company I am consulting for.  My mind races.  I excel at visual images to break down a large, complicated concept.  But sometimes I have to write words to point out bits. The pen has no spell-checker, and technical words can be hard.  I can’t cut and paste the word off the board into Google to look for it when the checker fails on my mangled jumble of letters.  There is no dictionary in the room to run to.  I can’t call my husband down the hall to give me the right spelling of a homonym.  And I don’t have time.  Time.  It takes me easily three-four times as long to write anything than a ‘normal’ person.  I use humor and lots of it while standing there at the board.  Denigrating humor.  It is key to walking out of the room with my head up and not turning three shades darker.  Sometimes there is a person who is talented at writing/spelling in the room and they just don’t get the cue and they pick on me.  Often they just can’t conceptualize what it would be like to not be able to see the difference and they just keep at it, expecting that if they point it out several times I will somehow get it.  Why wouldn’t I, that is all it takes for them.  I bite my tongue, repressing the urge to use my strengths in other areas to purposely make them look like an idiot in front of the group.  I know what it feels like, so I don’t.

Somehow in this culture it is ok to point out to someone that there must be some way that they can correct every mistake in the written word.  Well, we all know they are stupid if they can’t, don’t we?  Since it comes so effortless for these people, they haven’t actually tried all the means out there.  But they are just sure there is a way and keep beating on that.  Speech recognition (don’t harp on me for that.  I KNOW that technology backwards and forwards).  Grammar manuals.  Spell checkers (WordPress has the worst ever).  At some point I just have to let go and accept some mistakes with my time being fractured between actually getting stuff done, taking so long to write, getting over my procrastination because it is painful, and working with my kids to deal with their own challenges.

So I apologize to those who were looking for a different topic this morning.  I write this not to solicit negative comments about people who send me notes  (I will delete any you post, I hate that about the internet) nor do I want pity.  I do hope that those who have contacted me on my spelling or word use will continue to read this blog.  The note just pushed me over the mountain top I had been hanging out on for several years.  I speak to this issue when I am in small groups, but needed a bit of goading to talk about it ‘on the record’.  So I thank the emailers for prodding me.

I wrote this because someone who is reading this blog today will read it to a spouse and that person will feel a bit better and might speak out themselves.  Or a grandmother will put her foot down and get that grandchild into tutoring.  Or maybe a scientist will go find a local Orton-Gillingham tutor and ask them if their students would like to see the robots they are developing, inspiring an inventor of tomorrow.  A mother will decide to trust her gut and demand her child gets tested before they get so behind that the child can never catch up.  Maybe you are a teacher, never realizing how your comments have crushed children.  Maybe you heard a parent call their boy lazy, and you bring this blog up, prompting them to take a new look at a child who is unrecognized for their difficulties.  Hopefully, when someone brave challenges the curriculum at the local school, you won’t make snide comments under your breath about kids who can’t read and will support the debate instead.  Maybe, just maybe I add another ripple to the pond and help it grow to a wave of change.  It riles me to no end to see children whose awesome potential is being squashed by ignorance or bias.  I can tell you stories to curl your hair.

So please don’t send me any more ‘helpful’ emails letting me know.  I know.  BUT you are allowed to send me missives if they describe the drinking game you and your guild have devised over my grammar foibles.  Maybe some betting pool on how many semi-colons I can screw up in a lesson (hope you win!).  I am sure the creative of you can come up with the best run-on sentence I could use in 50 words or more to describe a casket.  Maybe you can chip in and buy me a vowel.  Please laugh with me and not at me.

I know from daily experience that some of you will canonize me for bravery.  Maybe half will emphasize.  I hope a few of you will change your opinion and celebrate the talents of some children you have contact with who are hurting so bad in school.  They are not stupid.  They are forced to suffer through reading instruction that is optimized for only a portion of the population.  It will haunt them their whole life until we change our mindset.  It contributes to crippling our rapidly changing economy as they are the ones who would found the innovative companies of tomorrow.  They are the ones who ‘Think Different”.

Then there will be those, who I have encountered so much in life, for whom any mistake in the written word is inexcusable.  They will still chalk it up to my stupidity and laziness.  And I will resist making fun of them for not knowing the difference between a potentiometer and a microchip by sight in a some complex circuit diagram.

Duh, it’s so obvious to everyone, isn’t it?

Tricia

P.S. I have added allot of additional reading links for those who are interested or suspect that they have family members who could benefit.