Why Calendars are Hard for Dyslexics, and More Listener Comments!

Hey everyone, today on Dyslexia Journey, we're going to do another episode based on your viewer and listener feedback.

Hey, we're Nick and Sonja and this is Dyslexia Journey and today we are going to cover one question and one comment that we have received from you. And before we get going here, the way that you can do the same, if you have a particular tip or comment or question for us, is you can either leave it in a comment for us down below or you can email us and our email is parentingdyslexiajourney at gmail.com and we'll put that in the description box as well.

Great, so jumping in, this is a comment on YouTube, it was a comment on our video, our interview with Darius Nandaran from a few months ago and he made a quick reference to the fact that using calendars is challenging for dyslexic people. And so this viewer, who is at Thomas Lauder 9760, commented, can you elaborate? As somebody without dyslexia, it's a bit difficult to understand what's tough about a calendar for someone with dyslexia.

I'm sure it goes deeper, but is it like you see the ninth and it's actually the sixth? Right, so great question. Yeah, it is a great question. And of course, we're somewhat limited. And so we'd love to hear in the comments, actually, anyone else's experiences with calendars and using them. But we do have our resident expert, which is her daughter. So because we can't base it for, so we're not dyslexic, so we can't base it on our own experience.

And, you know, the reason I say to put it in the comments as well is because I'm assuming that everyone's going to have a diversity of experiences here with why they can be problematic, even within some people who are dyslexic. But we're going to just tell you at least what her experience is and how she described to us what it's like and why she does not like calendars. Right. So she said her first response was, well, it's just a bunch of boxes and it's hard to tell what box you're in.

Right, right. So that's similar to when you're trying to read, kind of keeping track of where you are on the page. Right. So often a dyslexic person may be reading along and then when they get to where the, you know, the line's supposed to loop back to the start, you know, on the next line, sometimes they can have trouble finding their place. Or if they're looking back at, like, notes or trying to find something again, it's often more difficult than for someone else.

Right. And then she also said it's like looking at a chart or a graph where you have to find the word for the day. Like, say you want, like, Tuesday is up here. And then by the time you get down to, like, the third week in the month, she said you might have lost track of where you are. And so you're not sure which day of the week it is. Right. Right.

And she also has, she's very good at math, but she doesn't like working with graphs and charts in math. And I think that it's for the same reason, because it's hard to kind of, you know, when you're reading a graph, you've got your axes and you've got like your, your labels on each, on each axis. And you have to be able to sort of keep track of where you are in order to find the exact point on the graph, which seems to be challenging for her and I suspect for other dyslexic people.

And, you know, sort of the bigger picture on why, why this is, I mean, it's, it's a little hard to pinpoint, but, you know, it seems to relate to other things we've heard from dyslexic people about what reading's like in general. Things like some people sort of see the whole page, like more holistically for some people, they'll say like the letters wiggle or things are, you know, feel like they're moving around.

So, so there, again, are like a diverse way that people describe what the experience is like, but it does seem to relate to why, you know, sort of the, the things we think of as struggles with reading also can relate to something like using a calendar. Right. And then the last comment that we got from our daughter about this is that she says she prefers to just use lists for each day.

Right. So she uses a planner very successfully. And I mean, that's, again, probably going to vary from person to person in terms of what works best. So definitely if you're someone who is struggling with using a calendar, I would try different methods. Like does the planner method where you're listing things work better? Does a different actual organization of how the calendar looks work better for you? You know, maybe one that focuses more, you know, on not the whole month would work better.

I mean, there's just, there's a lot of things you could try. So I would say sort of trial and error to see what works best for you. Yep. All right. So our second viewer feedback that we wanted to cover today is actually a comment. So I'm going to read this. This is a comment from Baylog9679. I've done this my entire life, but I have trouble showing my work because I visualize 90% of it.

I'd get the right answers. But when I wrote my work out, my teacher would deduct points and say that they don't understand how I'm getting the correct answer. So that is true for dyslexics. We have heard this before. This is absolutely true that sometimes there's these leaps. It seems like to a teacher or someone that there's sort of a leap in how they're getting to the answer. So why is this? Like, why might this be true?

We're going to just talk about it a little bit. Yeah. And so definitely I've noticed this when helping our daughter with math and science, which is you're usually taught in school to approach problems from a very kind of methodical perspective, like follow the steps, step by step. And people with dyslexia seem to, that approach doesn't always work very well for them. They tend to make connections in their head that they don't write down and come up with the answer either by following a different set of steps that they've come up with on their own or by skipping steps because they're able to just make the connections that fast in their head.

Right. Right. And so, you know, that still can be a fundamentally really good understanding, right? Sometimes people who are doing the steps don't really know why they're doing them, but they've kind of memorized the steps. So it doesn't really either method can be fine and should be fine for coming to the right answer. But it can be hard to get partial credit because, you know, teachers, in an attempt to be nice if someone doesn't get the final right answer because there's a mistake along the way, do try to give partial credit.

But how can they give partial credit when it's not there for them to see? And so it is a tricky challenge because of that. Right. And teachers, I think, unfortunately, I think there's two things going on here. One is that our school systems reward regurgitation more than true understanding often. And so if teachers aren't seeing a regurgitation of the exact way they taught it, sort of proven back to them, then they become suspicious.

Not all teachers, of course, an overgeneralization. But I think there is several possible things going on. One is suspecting them of cheating. Like if they can't show their work or can't even exactly explain how they got the answer, then they're going to be suspected of cheating. Right. Whereas, in our opinion, I think this is being able to come up with the answer in a different way than you were taught shows a greater level of fundamental understanding than just repeating the steps without necessarily understanding it.

Well, although, I mean, as you can explain the steps, well, of course, that's different. So really, either way. But what can you do about it, I guess? What is a possible attempt to solve this problem of trying to get partial credit without showing the work the same way? So one thing is to try to talk to your teacher about that this is normal for a dyslexic person, that this often happens where they can't show steps and there's holistic things happening, you know, that are hard to show.

And then another possible, so some possibilities for trying to do it is to, it can sometimes be hard to explain verbally, but it is possible that if you try to talk to the teacher through as best you can, like what you were thinking and how you arrived at it, that they can hopefully tell, like that you have seeds of the understanding, or maybe you talk, are able to talk about the concepts in general of the kind of thing.

And so perhaps you could get some credit that way. Well, you know, there may be other ways as well, and we'd love to hear in the comments if anyone has any other ideas of methods that have worked for trying to get partial credit, you know, without showing work in the classical way because of being dyslexic and it's just not, the process is not happening that way. But yeah, it's a great question and it's something that really does come up for people a lot.

Yeah, keep them coming. Email us at parentingdyslexiajourney at gmail.com or if you're watching this on YouTube, feel free to leave a comment. Thanks everyone.