When Children Learn Differently: ‘Outsiders’ Guaranteed To Bring Unique Contributions to the World

I have been trying to teach myself graphic design out of a book. It is slow going. Learning things that have many parts combined with abstract ideas take me much reading, re-reading and re-re-reading.

I can learn more easily it seems if there are applicable pictures of whatever the learning is… and living poeple actually moving their eyes and hands to make the expert motions so I can see how the body does these things… and follow it with my body in a similar manner…

In what little I know about graphic design right now, I know that I love color and perhaps like you too, I experience color viscerally… some colors can make me swoon literally, the color is so pure…

but others… well, I think you know what I mean… there are kryptonite colors in this world. You have to stay away from them. They make you weak… and not in a good way.

My goal tonight was to begin to make a series of posters for special needs children and adults… People who see differently and hear differently, have visionary intuition in one or many ways, and thereby perceive differently than mainstream society. I want them to know the strength in their gifts, gifts that the culture still too often says are deficits. I want them to know while they are young that they are whole.

And for those grown to adulthood who have never known and still suffer feeling they are nothing, for them too, to know the real wonder of their gifts.

So here is the first poster. It is about dyslexia, an odd set of ways of seeing and apprehending, that for me as a child, wired me into wanting to read from right to left …and backward thereby…

instead of reading left to right and forward… like ‘normal’ folk. Reading in the ‘wrong direction’ was as strong a ‘need’ to read that way, as say being right-handed or left-handed is. It’s a strong preference, and to read or use the ‘wrong’ hand to write, just does not feel right.

I could also read upside down and backward… far faster than reading forward and right side up.

You might say, what the heck kind of gift is that??!! And in asking that way, you would be kinder than many when I was growing up, who gave up on me, saying I was ’slow’ and nothing could be done… or ‘lazy’ or wasn’t ‘applying myself…’

One skill that comes from reading backward, wrong direction, upside down, is being able to see the letters as beautiful shapes rather than as making words… tall towers with widow’s walks around the tops (t’s) and a pregnant woman leaning protectively over her baby in her belly (lower case ‘a’– oddly learning as an adult that ‘a’ stood for alpha, ‘the beginning’ …I thought perhaps my child sight and mind has understood this by assigning to the letter ‘a’, the spark of life in a sheltered pregnancy).

Many other letters were creatures with tails and paws, and ‘m’ was a horse leaning down to eat grass… with an invisible rider causing the horse’s back to swag in the middle… and so on.

…So by the time I was seven, I was inventing alphabets made of intricate colors and animals that I saw in the ocean of black squiggles as I struggled to learn to read. My creatural alphabets were not exactly appreciated because I was having such trouble learning basic printing and cursive… remember the Palmer penmanship method, anyone? pages and pages of what looked to me like bales of barbed wire. Writing practice was one of the most deadly dead endeavors I’d ever undertaken in my life.

But cha-know, we’re Catholics, and that was the style back then in the backwoods, the good nuns by gosh would see us through no matter how dim we seemed to be.

It wasn’t until I was way grown up that someone told me what I was doing as a child, was inventing fonts and typestyles. Something that grown ups did after they had gone to school to learn such.

So, at least by some people’s lights, I have been inventing fonts and typestyles all my life, the most recent one being a Greek-lightning bolt font, called ‘Zeus’ … for writing phrases of meaning that ’strike’ the mind and heart in a certain way.

I would never count a ‘backward’ child out, never say a child who excels in chasing the rabbits, but not in cracking calculus… is down for the count and out… rather I’d encourage all to take a far closer look and catch the child in what brings them joy… what calls their hearts… those are the real clues to learning how differently some of our species are set down on this earth…

children with work to do, business to take care of, talents to hone… contributions of heart and soul to make… hopefully without being forced into learning against natural comprehension for twelve or more years of the child’s one’s wild and precious life.

Above, I made a thumbnail for you of the first poster about special learning needs so you can double-click on it, and then the picture will enlarge to full size.

The little block of type to the lower right isn’t in Cyrillic.

But, It is upside down and backward, the way I used to see blocks of print on the page…

until one amazing day, one miraculous day, when I discovered…

well you read it, decipher it, and you’ll have some idea by doing so how hard it was to learn to read… but also you will see what treasure I came across…

something that has sustained me– has sustained many of us– all our live-long lives.

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CODA, and if the block of type to the lower right is too hard to read/ decipher, I’ll put the ‘translation’ up tomorrow for you, first thing. Right now it’s 3:48 am, and this AfterMidnight Blogger has to go get some serious zzzzs.

*Also note, Attribution in poster is Basho, but similar came from Isa and also Mizuta Masahide. The quote I put there is a paraphrase I used in a book I wrote to illustrate one of the only goods that can come from not good at all.