Overcoming Dyslexia by Ashley Scardace My dad is a man I looked up to my entire life and still do. He never let anything be a hindrance in achieving satisfaction in life. When I conversed with him about his literary history, I took into consideration his struggle with dyslexia and the impact it had on him while growing up. It took me sometime to realize that I have a parent who struggles with some form of literacy, which I never understood when I was younger. He has fought and coped with it all of his life, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like for him or anyone else with this impairment. Although my dad struggled with dyslexia on an emotional and intellectual level, he didn’t let it stop him from being successful in his career and as a parent. My dad had so much difficulty comprehending while reading that it cost him many years of a good education because of his dyslexia. In third grade he was prescribed glasses because “[his teachers and parents] noticed [he] had a vision problem,” but it was more than that. On the day of his graduation, he sat in another classroom completing extra credit work while “[his] mother and father waited in the auditorium” for him to get his diploma. He was held back almost more than once during his years of schooling. It wasn’t until his second year repeating seventh grade when the school finally did something about it. They put him in a class called “remedial reading,” which helped him to understand and comprehend what he was reading, something he wasn’t able to do in his earlier years of school. My dad didn’t have a spectacular home life either. His parents and older brother didn’t pay much attention to him or the issues he was having at school. His older sister was the only one who took the time to read with him and help him out, but “[he] hated that when someone read [a book] to [him] [he] understood it, but when [he] tried to read it [himself] [he] couldn’t do anything.” He told me his comprehension skills bothered him more than anything and worried him a lot. One of his accomplishments, though, was the very first chapter book he read front to back and actually “comprehended” called Dead Start Scramble, and he managed to gain a bit of self-confidence because of that. I couldn’t begin to imagine the emotional toll dyslexia has had on my father. For him to tell me, “[He] [had], and still [has] dyslexia,” was, to me, like him saying he wasn’t going to let his dyslexia control his life like it did when he was younger. During his school years,
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