vox hiberionacum made a comment on my last post about dyslexia and archaeology that I think is interesting:
‘I wonder if there is some underlying cognitive issue at play. Always thought that the skills involved in dealing with such a condition make one particularly suited to seeing/finding patterns in material culture.’
Very similar to the idea that a disproportionate number of successful people are left-handed because they have had to overcome more adversity being left-handed. Assuming adversity makes you a more successful person. While this will not be scientific, I can answer this question from my experiences as I am one of those 1 in 10 archaeology students that has a disability. I am also one of those 1 in 50 professional archaeologists that has a disability. Though, I am in ‘that group‘ of archaeologists who does not considered my problems as disabilities.
(This is part of a series of posts on Disabilities and Archaeology- see rates of disability in professional archaeology, why is dyslexia so high in archaeology, disclosing to your employer )
Damn Doug! How Drunk Are You?
When I was 13 I had a tumor removed from my throat and in the process they had to cut nerves going to my tongue. Completely ruined my speech. There is nothing like learning how to speak again at the age of 13 and 14. Over the years it has gotten better. I no longer look like I got in a knife fight and got stabbed in the throat. My speech has improved greatly, very little slurring. However, there have been some very long term problems that have yet to go away. I can’t stick my tongue out of my mouth more than a centimeter, a minor annoyance. A bigger issue is that when I get tired my slurred speech comes back. I have had people say to me, ‘Damn Doug! How drunk are you?’ when I was completely sober. More serious is that sometimes I can’t pronounce certain words. I attempt to say something and end up with a bit of stutter, a stutter that I can’t finish. The word will be lost to me. Usually, I find a different word or wait till someone else says the word so I can mimic it. All inconvenient but relatively minor problems, except that it can be compounded by my other struggles.
The Big D
When did you learn to spell the word ‘their’? 5? 6 years old? I learned two years ago. Not sure how I did it but one day. two years ago. I could suddenly spell ‘their’. Before that I could not tell you the difference between ‘their’ or ‘thier’. Both looked absolutely right to me because I have dyslexia. Which is a catch all terms for many different problems, including problems with math. In my case it means I can’t spell to save my life.
Edit- I realise from the comments that not everyone might know of understand what dyslexia is. It comes on a spectrum and is a catch all term for lots of problems. My problem is spelling. The classic writing letter backwards is actually a very very tiny minority of dyslexics. Most of us have a wide range of different reading, writing, and math problems.
You Retarded (Boston Accent, The Departed)
I could not read till the third grade. For those of you not in the American school system that is age 8/9. Most of you will not be aware of this but if you can’t read in the first grade (ages 6/7) then you are classified as retarded, what we now call ‘special needs’.
My Mom was a reading teacher. She has a Masters in Reading and tried everything she could think of to get me to read between my 1st and 3rd grades. She would teach me to read words one day but the very next day I couldn’t read them. In desperation she finally read a book, Unicorns Are Real, A Right Brained Approach to Learning. One of the suggestions was to cover words with colored pieces of paper. I don’t know why this worked but my mom would cover a word with a red piece of paper and then I could read it. My mom said this of the whole experience, ‘Incidentally, I never succeeded with this technique with anyone else. I don’t know why. I’m just grateful it worked once & that it worked with you.’ She has taught hundreds of kids which makes my problem a bit rare.
The weird part about this all is that I don’t read like most everyone else- I don’t pronounce or really read most names. I turn words into symbols. Better than trying to explain it I will show you an example-
The sentences you probably see- Jane is from Bournemouth. Jane lives in London.
How I read it- $1 is from $2. $1 lives in $3.
I don’t readout many words. In my mind they become symbols representing stuff. In this example I have used numbers and $ but in my mind words look more like Chinese characters. Many words I read as a single character, not multiple letters making up a word. The problem with this is that I don’t actually pronounce out many of the words I read, they simply become an abstract thought. This means I have trouble speaking them because I never sound them out in my head. Combine that with my tongue problems and I have a hell of a time with speaking. Add in dyslexia and some activities, like reading aloud to someone else, is like getting my knees capped. Some words I can’t pronounce physically. Some words I have never pronounced in my life which does not help my physical problems and because of dyslexia I can’t recognize what the word actually is meant to be.
Disability or Gift? Gifability? Disabift?: has it helped or hurt me in Archaeology or life
So those are my problems. Have they helped or hurt me in Archaeology?
Dealing
When you have issues that others don’t you quickly learn ways to mitigate them, ‘life hack’s as they were. In the field when I am filling in a context form and I hit that moment of dread- shit! how do I spell siol? soil? I have developed the technique of bad handwriting. I will purposely blur some of the letters together. Just enough so whoever is reading it can figure out what I meant but not realize I misspelled it. It is amazing how the human mind will fill in the blanks or missing parts of words.
For my stuttering speech I play it off as being ‘tongue-tied’. ‘Ah man, long day and now I am tongue tied but you know what I meant.’ For my slurred speech I stop talking. Pretty simple response. It is pretty easy to hide my speech problems.
Word processing software has been a godsend for my spelling but not my grammar. When I started high-school I was using a typewriter. Luckily my parents got a computer after my first semester because it would take me hours to type out a paragraph without too many spelling mistakes. Now there is a little red squiggly line to let me know I have miss-spelled something. Unfortunately, I can’t recognize the difference between the wrong words in a sentence so my grammar is pretty crap, as any reader of this blog will know.
Overall, I can’t see how any of these tricks have helped me be a better Archaeologists or person. If anything I semi-screw over the person who has to read my context sheets, though lots of people have bad handwriting so I am not the worst. I have had many other non-archaeology related jobs and have not found any advantages from these life-hacks.
There are silver linings to these problems.
Advantage 1
I can read incredibly fast not having to spend the time pronouncing out words in my mind and I have incredibly high reading comprehension. My wife hates it when we try to read the same thing because I will finish well before her, and she is a fast reader. She usually asks if I actually read the thing. For researching and learning the ability to read fast and understand everything is amazing. When I was tested in high school I was in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension, which puts me in a fairly elite group of readers.
Advantage 2
I have great pattern recognition and reasoning skills. When things are saved in my memory they go in attached to other facts. For example, you might read a paragraph on Charlemagne in come away with these facts:
Charlemagne is a Frank
Charlemagne lived in France
Charlemagne was alive in the 800s.
For me it is more jumbled- Frank = 800s = Charlemagne =France . This is not a good representation, at all, of what it is like in my mind. It is more a spider web of ideas and thoughts with them all connected to each other. But this web allows me to make connections. For example, I could get a question on a test that asked were the Franks lived and not know the answer. But, because in my mind I have connected Franks to France via Charlemagne I could reasonably guess the correct answer of France. Throughout high-school and University I estimate that I did not actually know between 10-50% of the answers I got right on a test, depending on the test. I did not guess or know the facts but reasoned my way though a good portion of my schooling.
Though there are some drawbacks to this way of thinking. If I read names as symbols, like I usually do than I don’t really retain the name. So I usually have to describe to people facts so they can tell me the name e.g. he lived in France, was a Frank, lived in 800, was an empire, come on you know who I am talking about.
Advantage 3
If I can’t spell/recognize difference in words than how can I read if I don’t know the words? I have picked up the ability to determine context very quickly. I can actually fill in the blanks or more precisely I can anticipate the direction that the writing is going by picking out the themes and concepts. It’s what allows my to have very high reading comprehension. I actually read themes and ideas, not words when I read.
Like an Old School Fairy Tale Curse
Having slurred and stuttered speech, dyslexia, and trouble reading has not helped me. However, my problems with dyslexia and reading (might be connected) has caused me to think in ways that most other people don’t. Read in ways that others don’t. Those skills I think have helped me immensely even if they come with a curse. In answer to Vox, for me at least, it is not the experiences but how my brain works that makes me a better Archaeologists.
I should say I have talked to others about ways they think and read and no one has had the same experience as me. Though if you have experienced what I described please do drop me a line I would love to know if there are others out there.
Doug's Archaeology 
dover1952
August 14, 2014
Well, Doug. I hardly know what to say. ADHD exists on a continuum, but I was not aware that dyslexia exists on a continuum wherein different people can experience it in different ways. In terms of your own personal experience, the explanation you provided was enormously enlightening. I might also add that it was courageous. You overcame your disabilities so well that I would have never even noticed them just from interacting with you electronically for the past couple of years.
I think one of the fundamental problems with assorted disabilities and impingements is that people are ignorant about the true nature of such disabilities. I will admit that my ignorance of dyslexia was great and probably still is. It is obvious that you found ways (and still find ways) to overcome its effects and do excellent work. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the keys to humanizing and reforming archaeology is for us archaeologists to understand that many of us have assorted disabilities. Rather than label someone as weak and undeserving of a seat at the table of archaeological discourse, maybe we need to try another word: “understanding.” We all seek to understand the past. Maybe we need to spend more time understanding ourselves and each other. Maybe we need to understand that there is a difference between irresponsibility and a disability. If we learn the nature of disabilities, we will also learn that they can be overcome. And maybe archaeologists who are wary of human weakness have preached far too long in classrooms about the overwhelming importance of interpersonal human understanding and social cooperation as key human adaptive mechanisms but have failed to understand that they too are part of the great human play on the world stage—and that they need to “practice what they preach” within their own tribe.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
August 14, 2014
Aye, there are versions of it that only effects numbers so math is very hard for some people. The reason we don’t know the actual number of people with dyslexia, it is somewhere between 2%-14%, is how you measure it. It is estimated that very difficult cases are only 1%-4% and most everyone else has a very minor case. The writing of letters backwards occurs in only the tiniest group. I have problems with spelling. Speaking of which I should add this to the post.
You would be surprised how forgiving most people’s minds are of mistakes. Spelling, mismatched words, etc. many people will read right over them if they are not focused. If you go back you will see the signs but unless you know what you are looking for ….
I agree on all accounts except I am not sure disabilities can be overcome. They can be mitigated but they never go away, except in rare cases.
dover1952
August 14, 2014
Point well taken. I really meant “mitigated.” Maybe I have “diswordselectia.”
dover1952
August 14, 2014
P.S. Glad to meetcha!!!
Z
August 14, 2014
Hi, I’m also an archaeology student with ‘disabilities’ (in quotes because I don’t see them that way either). In addition to ADHD, as a child I used to have facial twitches (probably a mild form of Turretz, but never specifically diagnosed for any disorder) – I’ve been hopping on and off different meds from when I was very young until a few years ago to keep them under control. After phasing out the meds, they’re completely gone (yay!) While this doesn’t effect me as an archaeologist too much, except for some residual social awkwardness from being ‘different’ earlier on, I also have dysgraphia – another communicative disorder similar to dyslexia. Whereas dyslexia has to do with the input side of communication, dysgraphia has to do with output. This effects me in more noticeable ways. For one, when writing I have to sound things out subconsciously, and when seriously writing for long stretches I actually mutter every word I type. I usually don’t get a lot of work done in my shared office, instead opting to work in crowded places. I also have terrible handwriting, except when I write very carefully.
I also have this kind of associative way of conceiving ideas. I link together a bunch of associated ideas in order to get at an overall solution. I think that this has helped me see how ideas tend to be grouped or suitable for each other, to see a ‘bigger picture’ in a nearly intuitive way. However I have a hard time converting these ideas to an A -> B -> C stream of logic, which makes explaining these overall ideas in a reductionist way very difficult. I’m also not very good at doing math problems that require this step-by-step process, but I love more conceptual math (thinking about algorithms and formulas and such). This has also made memorizing very detailed chronologies and cultural histories a tremendous pain because of the very minute differences in terminology that better suits a step-by-step way of thinking (type site vs. diagnostic feature named after the type site vs. cultural entity named after the diagnostic feature, all intermingled in space and time, while also accounting for modern debates over tiny details that occur in a very linear yet backwards looking fashion – complete craziness!).
I also stutter sometimes, and I’ve noticed that it usually occurs in situations where everyone stops and looks at what I have to say (yes, it happens once in a while xD). I know the final point I want to make, and my tongue can’t keep up with the pace of my thoughts. I usually have to pause and detour to a new sentence or idea to fix this, but this isn’t an ideal solution because then I never get to the same point I initially hoped to make. I think this is an effect of dysgraphia, amplified by sudden anxiety.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
August 14, 2014
Thanks for commenting Z. Yep- dates are the bane of my existence. I too have anxiety which probably has to do with being ‘different’ early on. Thanks for letting me know that you too have a kind of associative way of conceiving ideas. Glad to know there is someone else out there.
Kayt
August 14, 2014
For me, the dyspraxia has led to imposter syndrome x 100… I wasn’t diagnosed until my late 20’s and for all of my school and university career, people were telling me I would do better if I tried harder (’cause my work was scruffy, done at the last minute, never neat and tidy). My UG tutor was baffled as I was the only one of his tutees (sp?) that routinely did better in exams than coursework. I explained this was because my coursework was effectively all done under exam conditions (i.e, in about 3 hours, on the day it was due), but marked like I had spent 2 weeks in the library. I put it down to me being ‘crap’, ‘lazy’ or ‘not as clever as everyone keeps telling me I could be if I could just figure out how to do better’. Getting the diagnosis helped, a lot. It took away a lot of the guilt and let me research coping strategies, and gave me a path to articulate my particular issues (task breakdown – I see a giant terrifying thing and can’t figure out how to start), and ask for specific help. I got my PhD submitted in 3 years, 1 month and 1 week: not bad for someone who’s organisational skills can be legitimately characterised as pathological.
Interestingly, I find this means I have some strong advantages when helping students. Because the act of planning a piece of work has to be something very epxlicit and deliberate for me (rather than instinctive), I can pass on that skill to students struggling with organising their thesis. I also have a strong appreciation of how different people’s learning styles can be. I am very much someone who learns by doing. I have tricks for finding alternative ways to present information, such as drawing how neighbourhood filters work, rather than giving equations, when teaching image processing.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
August 14, 2014
At the University I taught at, all grading is supposed to be anonymous. Which, in my opinion, is one of the worst possible setups for helping and identifying issues with students. I have graded several papers that either needed English as second language help or some sort of learning help. However, because the way it was set up I could not feedback to the students any sort of tailored suggestions because that would break anonymity. I could give somewhat crap advice like- go to the learning centre but could not say- ‘hey I think you might have a particular problem please come and see me about it. We can work out strategies to help you with your writing.’
Aye, visualization is huge for me. If you can put it on a map or a figure I can figure it out instantly.
Glad your experiences are helping others.
These Bones Of Mine
August 14, 2014
Disabift is now my favourite word 😀 Great article as ever Doug and thank you for your personal insight, I’m glad you are tackling the subject of disability in archaeology more eloquently then I ever could!
Lorraine
August 15, 2014
Troll, Troll, Troll
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
August 15, 2014
Well Lorraine, while I might not like your trolling I respect the fact that you took time out of your day to comment on my blog. I realize you might not be a regular reader of this blog and so not aware that this is part of a series of post on disability and archaeology. Probably in that context it would make more sense to you and you would not have felt the need to troll.
Thank you for reading and commenting anyways.
Best wishes.
Lorraine
August 16, 2014
I honestly don’t know WHY I commented Troll, Troll, Troll on your blog… I’m kind of embarrassed about it. I’m very sorry you post and blog doesn’t merit it. I happen to love archeology, and I’m just getting familiar with the word TROLL in Facebook. It’s not a good thing.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
August 16, 2014
You my want to check your account- it might have been hacked.
Lorraine
August 16, 2014
Actually I may have been trying to comment about Trolling on the blog above it or below it in my Reader. I caught myself doing that once before but caught myself.
Lorraine
August 16, 2014
By the way I have ADD myself, and create many typos that I sometimes for to edit out of a comment or post. I have to see my hands type.
Lorraine
August 16, 2014
See I left out the addition of “get” in the word “forget”! Ugh!