A Boys Life Recollections of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties

I am the most fortunate of beings! I went to school before progressive education tightened its grip on American education. I missed being diagnosed as learning disabled (LD), with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and perhaps with a bit of Asperger's Syndrome thrown in. Or, perhaps, or one or another of those pseudo-medical diseases the schools dream up to account for those mis-fortunates who do not fit into their narrow concept of a curriculum. I am doubly fortunate to also have Perseverance, a malady that has not yet been credited with a diagnosis. Perseverance the ability to stick to some task beyond any reasonable limits, to the point of absolute stupidity.This combination of pseudo maladies is one of the happiest recipes for life. Being an LD provided the motivation to solve the problem of teaching children to read, and solve it I did. Why am I not famous and rich? It is just that .the rest of the world is content with their 35% failure rate. We Dyslexics are likely to have a visual- spatial hunter/gatherer mind. Much of our language must be translated from glorious dynamic mental images into paltry linear speech. Words do not come naturally. It is difficult for us to achieve ease with the written word, and so we learn to be slower and more careful as we read. For us Attention Deficit folks the world always has something new to explore, or some new way to look at the old. ADD folks are eclectic, have wide interests and much more fun than the rest of the world. Being ADD compliments the Perseverance by keeping one out of a single rut into many ruts. The touch of Aspbergers makes me a little odd, and inclined to view the world a little differently.