Maddie Knostman sees words differently.
A self-proclaimed visual learner, she views each individual character as a symbol, each word as a shape with a larger meaning. While an ‘A’ may look like an ‘A’ to the average reader, Knostman views it as a half circle, with a line on the right side.
“That’s how I see words,” Knostman said. “A-N-D spells ‘and’, and so I see ‘and’ as a shape itself. But I see it built up of smaller shapes.”
According to her doctors, Knostman has memorized thousands of words this way, ascribing unique images to each individual character, stringing them together to create a picture that makes sense in her mind.
She is one of many students at Ohio University receiving accommodations for the condition — the most commonly diagnosed learning disability, estimated to affect nearly one in ten people across the world in some capacity. She didn't even know she had it until she visited a neuropsychologist after a soccer-related concussion in high school.
“My whole life I’ve struggled with school in general and they didn’t know why," Knostman said. "The doctors just thought I just had really bad ADHD and so I was treated for that and I just learned to cope.”
Once diagnosed, Knostman was put on a “504 Plan,” referring to Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against students with disabilities in public schools. That allowed her to participate in special study halls, take extra time on tests and receive alternative resources that helped her succeed in high school.
Now, as a college freshman studying visual communication, she has found taking notes and keeping up with a professor’s lecture to be a profoundly difficult task.
“One of the interesting things that happens is a lot of students receive accommodations in high school under different laws and that all ends once they graduate high school,” Carey Busch, assistant dean for student accessibility, said. “In the K-12 system, it’s really the school’s responsibility to identify students who may have issues and give them the testing they need to find out what to do effectively.”
Student Accessibility Services offers students like Knostman tools like LiveScribe pens — devices outfitted with tiny cameras and microphones, allowing students with learning disabilities to record lectures, which they can later play back at their own pace. The pens have a starting price of around $130, but qualifying students can borrow them for free.
“For most people, they think that all the letters of all the words move around and you can’t read words — and I thought that too, before I knew I had (dyslexia),” Knostman said. “But once I realized that I had it … I learned more about it and what I found out is that dyslexia is different for everyone.”
The story has indeed been different for Athens Mayor Steve Patterson, who explained that as a child, he had issues “experiencing words in a different order” and was “constantly being corrected” early in his education.
“I'm sitting there trying to read out loud to my parents, or trying to read out loud in class in early grade school. And the line was ‘Dick saw Jane running down the street,’ or something like that,” Patterson said. “And, for me, I kept viewing it as ‘Dick was Jane running down the street.’ There's such a broad spectrum of dyslexia. For me it was juxtaposing words.”
Growing up in the early 1960s, Patterson said he doesn’t recall the word “dyslexia” being part of the common vocabulary. Instead, students with learning disabilities were often designated to the “struggling” reading group, without the help of a specialist, which are often found in today’s schools, to provide assistance.
Though Patterson didn’t officially receive his diagnosis until he joined the Air Force, dyslexia was never a roadblock too large to overcome. He received his Ph.D. from the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Maryland, became a psychology professor at OU and served as a city councilman before being elected as mayor of Athens last year.
“I taught myself speed reading. Target the nouns and the verbs,” Patterson said. “What I really want to drive home is that dyslexia has nothing to do with someone’s IQ. It’s not an intelligence issue.”
Knostman described her experience with mild dyslexia as her doctor once explained it to her — not a walk in the park by any means, but rather a trek through stormy weather.
“We’re on the same walk, but you’re on the sidewalk that’s sunny and dry and I’m on the sidewalk that has a half-inch of snow,” Knostman said. “So over time, it’ll wear me down and I won’t be able to move as fast as you. But people with severe dyslexia are walking through three feet of snow.”
