My Way!

Friday, 22 January 2010

Category - Campaign news

First News My Way! ambassador Henry Winkler talks about living with a learning challenge 

To my surprise I carved out a career as a children’s author.

It’s a surprise because, for years, I struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia. It is still hard for me to imagine my name even appearing in the same sentence as the words “author” or “book”, even though I have just finished writing the 17th novel in my series of Hank Zipzer: The World’s Greatest Underachiever, with my partner Lin Oliver. The books are funny stories about Hank, a resourceful fourth-grader – who just happens to have dyslexia.

When I was growing up in New York City, no-one knew what learning challenges were. So, I was called “stupid”, “lazy”, told that I was “not living up to my potential”. On the outside, I became the class clown but felt that the person inside me was invisible to others. How I was seen on the outside did not reflect how I felt. I didn’t think I was stupid. I did not want to be stupid.

I also knew from the age of seven that I wanted to be an actor, but wasn’t even allowed to do most of the school plays because my grades were so low. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t allowed to take part in extra-curricular activities at all.

In fourth grade, with my self-esteem round my ankles, I kept thinking: “I guess I am stupid.” When you’re young and you keep hearing that about yourself often enough, you start believing it. I couldn’t work out why this was happening to me. My parents came from Germany. They could do mathematics in their heads, they learned English and several other languages. My father could insult me in every one of them! So why was I stupid?

I wanted to be in the top 10% in my class but, instead, I was in the bottom 3% academically in the whole of America.

I struggled in every single subject except lunch. (I could eat a tuna sandwich better than anyone in my class!) Mathematics was out of the question. When I got change from buying something, I had no idea whether it was the right amount so I just trusted a lot. Reading was slow because my eyes wouldn’t track the words properly and I would leave some out. Spelling was something only other people could do.

The headmaster of my high school said: “Son, I want to know why you are not achieving.” I said: “That makes two of us.” He sent me to a psychiatrist who told my parents that the problem was that I had to learn to focus. Hooray! Problem solved. I went to the stationery shop and got myself loads of blue and yellow highlighter pens. I highlighted every word in my book so I could focus on them. And it still looked like Greek to me! It got harder and harder to keep up with the guys at my school. I used to take a glass of water and sprinkle drops of it on the pages of my books so they looked used.

I have clear memories of one teacher in my life that saw beyond the struggling student to an intelligent, creative boy that was in the same body. He was my music teacher, Mr. Rock, and he was the only one who believed that I would achieve something. He was an adult who was quiet enough to see the actual human being in front of him and not who other people told him what to expect. He is now a character in my Hank Zipzer books.

All my life, I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was until I was 31…

When my stepson, Jed, started showing signs of difficulty at school, we had him tested. Everything they said about him was true about me, too. Suddenly, I had a name for what was different about me. I wasn’t stupid, I wasn’t dumb. I wasn’t lazy. I WAS trying to live up to my potential. I HAD DYSLEXIA. And dyslexia is not an intellectual disability. It occurs at all levels of intelligence.

I finally defined dyslexia for myself: You spend a third of your time trying to figure it out. You spend a third of your time trying to figure out why you CAN’T figure it out and
you spend a third of your time trying to cover up your shame and humiliation.

So, when my agent first suggested that I write children’s books about my dyslexia I told him that I could never do that. It took two years before I decided to give it a go and agreed to meet with my co-author, Lin Oliver. Now we’ve written 17 novels. It’s amazing what you can achieve by putting one foot in front of the other. You don’t even know what you can do until you try. Never say never. My self-esteem is up around my collarbone now.

I tell every child who will listen that, just because they learn differently, it does not mean they are not brilliant. Their job is to figure out what their gift is and give it to the world.