Verde Exclusive Veritas Volume 1 Issue 1

Page 12

DO YOU READ ME?

Dyslexia within the Palo Alto High School community

Text by ESTELLE MARTIN Photos by JAMES POE

“C

HEMICALS LIKE DDT can accumulate in predatory birds,” Alicia Szebert says, as she teaches an AP Environmental Science lesson. She writes as she speaks, erasing “brids” and correcting it to “birds”; she does this so swiftly that most of the class doesn’t notice. Szebert is an admired chemistry and and AP Environmental teacher at Palo Alto High School. However, many of her students remain unaware that Szebert has dyslexia. Szebert says that her spelling struggles initially caught the attention of her mother, a school psychologist. According to Szebert, starting from a very young age, she would write the same word three different ways within the same paragraph. Szebert believes that her spelling skills actually have not significantly improved with age, but because she does not write on the whiteboard often, her students do not notice. Reading has always proved to be a less of a challenge for Szebert; though she was a little slower at reading and still has to re-read text sometimes, “it [reading] has never severely affected my life,” Szebert says. Szebert has been very successful throughout her school and work career; however, Szebert stresses that while her dyslexia has not greatly affected these areas of her life, others may have very different experiences. As Szebert points out, dyslexia can manifest itself in many different ways between many different people. Dyslexia is a combination of “dys,” meaning “difficult” in English, and “lexis,” meaning “speech” or “words” in Greek. The term was first used in the late 19th century and has become much more commonplace as the disorder is more extensively studied. In 2017, the California Dyslexia Guidelines were published by the California Department of Education. The document serves as a response to several sections added to the California’s Education Code in 2015, and to provide information for the identification, assessment, and supporting dyslexic students. According to Paly School Psychologist, Lara Zawacki, the typical symptoms of dyslexia include difficulty with phonological processing paired with difficulty with rapid naming. Phonological processing is the ability to break a word down into small sound units such as syllables or letters. Once a person is able to phonologically process a word, they must then register the word and retrieve it from their memory. Typically, this process takes about .2 seconds. However, “Difficulty manipulating phonics and blending out sounds, and also [difficulty] with quickly scanning print and retrieving the associated verbal label from long term memory ... are often two signs of dyslexia,” Zawacki says. Zawacki uses the word ‘fellowship’ as an example, which has the syllables fel-low-ship. Those with dyslexia often struggle with sounding out the ‘phe’ sound in their mind, then connecting that

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FEBRUARY 2018


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Verde Exclusive Veritas Volume 1 Issue 1 by Verde Magazine - Issuu