The Dyslexia Educational Network (DEN) is the world's first broadcasting company for dyslexia. DEN broadcasts worldwide at DyslexiaEd.com. Founder Robert Langston has dyslexia, is a parent of a dyslexic child and has authored of two books about his experiences with dyslexia in school and life.

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Dyslexia Educational Programs

Dyslexia Educational Strategies

Dyslexia Educational Psychologist

Transcript:

So we’re protecting my self esteem; we’re protecting my intelligence; getting tested for what I know…. So far what do we have? We have oral testing, untimed test, separate classroom. Well this next one happened in college – alternative class list for foreign language. Alright I’m at the University of West Georgia, right, and had been there for five years. I’m feeling pretty successful. I had gotten into college, you know, despite all these other things. With these accommodations I was able to score high enough on my SAT test to actually get a score to go to college, you know. So this is translating to my… my testing, you know – my standardized testing. I was able to take my regents test, as a sidebar note, untimed, in a separate classroom with a reader and I was able to score high enough to pass out of college of my own volition because of the way they were meeting my learning style and learning need. The problem was I wasn’t going to learn a foreign language. I was having enough problems with English and now we’re going to have to…. And you know back then – before any foreign language teachers jump on me and say ‘we do it different today Rob’, cause I know you do – but back then what they did was they took the English language, they taught you to write the written language from the English language, then they asked you to speak the foreign language from the written foreign language. Right. I’m not going to be able to do that. I’m on my fifth year of college. I’m excited; I’m blazing trails; I’m making differences that I never knew possible. And then I asked Dr. Anne Phillips, she said ‘I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I don’t know what we’re going to do about the foreign language requirements.’ So what do I do? I learned from my mom, go straight to the top, right. So I go to the dean of students and I walk in there. ‘I’ve been here five years. These are my grades. I’ve been doing wonderful. You know, everything’s going great but I got the foreign….’ Sorry Rob you won’t receive a diploma from this university. So now I’m thinking, ‘five years I’ve put in here.’ Now why am I keep saying five years? Tool me seven years to graduate from college. Was it because I was slow and lazy and dumb? No actually I had to take the caseload that I could handle. Right. I had to understand that this is what it’s going…. I only found one course, my entire college career – and that was by accident – because I actually would withdraw...  cause see my important thing is who’s the teacher teaching me. So if I had a teacher that I liked and would work with me, I knew I would keep them, but I had to take the course for a little while to know. Well you’ve got a withdraw date, right. This one teacher was… I’m talking about… was a charismatic teacher. The problem was his test didn’t match with how he was teaching. He loved his subject and he kept me inundated everyday but the fact of the matter is when the first test came it was impossible for me to pass it because he had… what he was testing me on was never covered in the class, right, as much as he loved the subject. So I wasn’t able to withdraw him, not understanding his testing style. So that’s the grade… the only class I ever failed in college. So I went seven years and this was including every summer but one. I only took two quarters off in seven years. One was to recruit for the college and two was to… I actually just took a year off in the… I mean a quarter off in the summer cause it was getting to be too long, too hard on me. So I’m five years into this and at this point I hadn’t taken a quarter off yet. And now I’m told I’m not going to graduate. Sorry Rob you just going… that’s… your diploma’s done. Right. So I go back to Dr. Anne Phillips which is what – my partnership, my support group. And I go to Anne and I say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. You know they’re saying I’m not going to graduate.’ She sad ‘well let’s get your mom on the phone.’ You know, cause that’s what we do, right? So we call mom up and mom says, ‘okay well we need to get... Join DyslexiaEd.com for full broadcasts and transcripts.