Do I have a LD

Hello,

I’m posting here because I’m wondering if – perhaps – I might have some sort of learning disability and (more importantly) to learn how I might correct the problems that I’m experiencing.

Before I describe my symptoms (and the reasons that I suspect that I may have some sort of impartment), let me tell you about myself. I’m not the sort of person anyone would suspect of having a learning disability. I’m highly intelligent and have always been successful in school. I graduated high school with a 3.86, scored a 31 on my ACTs, and tested in the 99 percentile on the pre-SATs. I’m musical and artistic. I’ve played cello semiprofessionally and do professional web design on the site. I’m skilled writer and hope to be published some day. In the midst of all this, I’m a high school Algebra teacher – I’ve taught chemistry, physics, and philosophy as well. In grade school, I was scoring post-high school in reading since third grade, and in almost all categories from 4th or 5th grade on.

I’m not writing this to brag: I’m writing this to provide context. In the midst of all this apparent success, I’ve noticed a few areas where I’m profoundly weak. I have the talent to hide these weaknesses or laugh them off, but I feel as if I’m being by my continual compensation.

As I said, I always test well in reading and reading comprehension. Yet I’m terrible at reading aloud. I stumble over simple words, skip lines, mispronounce words that I’ve seen a million times before. In fact, mispronunciation is a common theme. I cannot – for the life of me – sound out words properly. It seems as if they always come out wrong. I can recognize them in books but I cannot seem to pronounce them.

A pristine example would be the word “novel” – for years I pronounced the word with a long ‘o’ sound instead of the ‘ah’ sound. Even now I have to stop myself from pronouncing it incorrectly – and it takes me several moments to determine which pronunciation is the correct one… each and every time. When I was a child – that is, older grade school – I was convinced that the American Civil War was the Silver War. That’s how I read the word, it took me a while to discover the proper name and only because I deductively concluded that “Silver War” made no sense, since I could find no evidence of silver as a motivator.

Again, this is despite my large vocabulary and reading skills – my mother has a tape of me as a three year old talking about my being “enamored” with Scooby-doo! My dad, I’ve noticed, also has trouble with pronunciation. He continually makes mistakes pronouncing the same words, and has for years.

I have trouble understanding people, at times – especially when there’s the burble of conversation around me. Just today, a student asked me a question – and I couldn’t understand the word he was using. It’s not that I couldn’t hear him. (I don’t think I’m deaf!) The word reached my mind as gibberish. I had to ask him to speak the word three or four times – and ultimately had to deduce what he was saying, since I never really understood him. It often happens not only to single words but to entire sentences. Perhaps this happens to everyone; I don’t know. But it happens frequently enough to me to be worrisome… and, not only that – someone can pronounce a word to me (a name, perhaps), and within a few moments I’ll pronounce it wrong – or forget it!

Pronouncing foreign languages is very difficult. My mind feels like it “freezes” – like I’ve hit a barrier and I cannot proceed past it. The word sits there. I know what it means, but I can’t make the sound without a great deal of effort – and generally it comes out with the accent in the wrong place or a sound pronounced incorrectly.

In speaking, I find myself repeating the same word multiple times in the same sentence and struggling to connect the feeling of what I’m saying with the actual words. (“Let’s look over this problem because this problem is a problem for many of you.”) I have trouble explaining myself, verbally. Give me a piece of paper (as you can see) and I’m much better off.

It seems as if I’m functioning reactively, using my analytical skills to compensate for these flaws. I’ve always been more of a skimmer than a reader, despite my comprehension skills. It’s very difficult for me to slow down and read in a linear fashion. It gets overwhelming. I tend to skim and pick out key words and make the logical connections for myself – slowing down and letting the author make the connections is very difficult for me. If I slow down and try and read, I get lost and confused. But if I go quickly and hit key words, my comprehension increases. It’s all very odd. (Obviously, this only works for simple material – more complex material becomes overwhelming.)

I’m hoping that someone here can provide me with a bit of insight as to what’s going on! I feel (when reading, thinking, and talking) as if I’m facing a bottleneck – like I’m trapped in my own head and that (despite all appearances) I’m compensating so much that I can’t use my skills to do more then survive. I know that I’m surviving at a higher level than most and perhaps I shouldn’t complain. But I feel trapped by my own head! – and more effort doesn’t help me. Trying harder to pronounce things properly doesn’t help. I need help!

Any thoughts about whether I’m struggling with a learning problem and what that might be would be helpful – as well as methods for resolving the problems I’ve been facing. Sorry for the length!