Que Sara Sara

“Hyperlexia is when a child starts reading early and surprisingly beyond their expected ability. It’s often accompanied by an obsessive interest in letters and numbers, which develops as an infant.‌ Hyperlexia is often, but not always, part of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD).” Oct 25, 2021- web MD

I met all my milestones as a kid. I started reading early, say 3 or 4ish, and was reading Little House on the Prarie books by the time I entered kindergarten. However, as well as being autistic, am ADHD and dyslexic. This meant that even though I could read and comprehend what was going on in the stories just fine, I didn’t read out loud well, I often lost my place while reading and had to restart, and because I was a bit slower because of letter spaces (I had a hard time seeing the difference between if a word was long or two words as some books had the space between words more narrow). I would get lost in the way the set of words fell on a page of older readers because I could see a cascade of words that all ended with “r”, for example. I would see faces in my periphery or other shapes. I still have some of these problems. It makes my eyes very tired, my brain very tired, and I still have problems with reading chapter books out loud.

But, give me a children’s book and my facial expressions come alive! I do the voices, I am animated, and the kids usually love it. But I digress…

When I reached first grade I had a nasty teacher that not only believed in corporal punishment (hit my hands with a wooden ruler… it was 1984), but she said I couldn’t read. She put me into the lowest reading group she had. It was embarrassing. I would read ahead, then wait for others to slowly catch up. I was bored to tears. I would go home “sick” a lot. I hated school. I was 5/6 years old and I hated school. The teacher had a meeting with my mother, my mother telling her what I was reading at home, and the teacher not believing my mother, kept me in the low group. I was in the low group my whole elementary and middle grade years. I hated the books at school I had to read. I picked out higher books from the school library, but was told to put them back.

By high school it’s a wonder that I set foot in the school library at all. But, it was the mid 1990s and we didn’t have internet to do our school work, so in order to do research papers we had to go to the library. I also had a study period in there a few semesters.

At home though, I read voraciously. Lots of money was spent on teen books. I spent a lot of time at the public library too. I escaped the world I hated for the book world and read every teen vampire book out there, then on to the adult books.

I developed a love for writing too, and did very well in my creative writing class. Regular English classes could be hard because the books were boring, and the teach would ask about metaphor, foreshadowing, and things I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. And why does it matter that the 10th character, who appears once, was wearing a green sweater. What does that have to do with the price of peas in Paris?! Nothing! So why put it on a test? Stupid stuff like that to see if I was “comprehending the story.” I could tell you what was going on in the book, but that stuff was stupid to me and if it didn’t mean anything to my autistic brain, it didn’t stick.

I read a lot still, and read on a tablet now. Sacrilege?! Not when you have reading disabilities. I can control the size of the font, the spacing between words is uniform, and the letters are a decent size. Small print of mass market adult paperback books is a silent killer. Very hard to read. I think that might be why I read a lot of teen books and adult books, but with a more teen-sized font.

Teachers, whatever you do, don’t tell a kid they can’t read because you may squelch any fire that they built to try. This goes for any age.