Through My Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

homeschooling provided. My parents were able to design the structure, schedule, and content however they wanted. During the sports seasons, they could shift the bulk of the workload to earlier parts of the day so that we didn’t have a conflict with any afternoon or evening practices, games, or other activities. If they had to, they could also move studies to a different day altogether.
    The flexibility with travel and sports was convenient, but the real success of homeschooling came from the fact that we were actually learning. Mom set the curriculum, and she could tailor her teaching to the needs of each of us. She used games or whatever methods were necessary to reach us and get the lessons across—a freedom she took full advantage of. In our house, school could be happening at any moment—even at meals—so you always had to be prepared. She’d put different placemats at various times at our places around the table—United States presidents, the periodic-elements table, state and world capitals—and we would be challenged to learn everything on our placemat before the others could. Everything with us always had to be a race or a competition; Mom knew that and used it to enhance our learning process. We even had manners contests.
    Of course, as my parents would eventually find out, those placemats gave a decided advantage to Peter and to my sisters, Christy and Katie. My dad had long known that he was dyslexic, but it still took a while before my parents recognized that Robby, too, had dyslexia. By the time I came along, it didn’t take them long to spot it in me as well. The fact that I was still struggling with reading when I turned seven was probably a pretty good clue that something in my head was working differently and that I had dyslexia.
    Simply put, my brain processes things differently than most people. It’s the same for my dad and Robby. All three of us are kinesthetic (or tactile) learners, meaning that we learn best by doing. My most effective learning style is not particularly visual, so I don’t ordinarily retain as much simply from reading about something. I’ve heard others describe the feeling as reading when they’re tired and looking back at a page, knowing all the individual words and yet not being sure what the page was about. That often happens to me in the normal course of reading anything, whether I’m tired or not. Therefore, I learned to use other ways to supplement my reading to make sure I learned all that I should.
    Mom was always great with it. She had seen how things like this could stigmatize children and adults—into feeling that somehow they were less than, or not as smart or capable as, others. She had seen it in society, in schools, and in other settings, and she was determined that this would not be the case for her children. She explained to Robby and me that our dad has great intelligence as measured through his IQ score which is off the charts, but he just has to learn in a different manner. Through Mom, we learned and believed that it had nothing to do with intelligence, but was just the way our minds processed the information before us.
    She helped me realize that dyslexia wasn’t a disability, just a difference. My learning skills and information-processing abilities mean that I’m predisposed to learning much more quickly from “walk throughs,” which football coaches love to have anyway, where the players literally walk through the plays they will want to execute during the game, and walk through them at a slower speed than actual live-game or practice situations.
    Dealing with our dyslexia with wisdom, Mom not only affirmed that we were wonderful creations of God, with our God-given intelligence and abilities, but she gave us the confidence to learn as well. When subjects came more quickly to me, we could breeze through them, but if they were more of a struggle, we would slow down to focus on them. It was the same with each of my siblings—we were each able