母亲的支持是战胜困难的动力

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Welcome to the StoryCorps Podcast. I’m Katie Simon. And I’m Michael Garofalo. We’ve got two stories in this episode. The first is a conversation from San Francisco.

10-year-old Ida Cortez is dyslexic, so she has some trouble learning to read and spell. And recently, she sat down with her mother Kim to talk about it.

What are some things that you wish people knew about dyslexia?

I wish people knew that it’s not like an illness of the brain. It’s a difference of the brain. I mean every brain is a little bit different, maybe ours are just a little bit more.

Do you remember when, when you were trying to learn how to read?

Yeah, I hated every second of it actually. But someone, as she sitting right in front of me, inspired me and helped me do it. When you were helping me read, did you ever for a moment think that I weren’t be able to?

I never believed that you wouldn’t learn how to read. But you know, I got frustrated at first. It sounds like there’s the word you just said it. Why can’t you read it again? And I didn’t understand what was going on because I knew you were so smart. And then when we talked to your teachers, and they helped us see what was going on, then I knew how to help you. But what I did worry about was whether you would ever love to read. Because I love to read and dad loves to read and we wanted you to have that.

Yeah. I do love reading and now I’m probably one of the biggest readers in my class. It’s changed a lot.

Does that affect in when you think about what you wanna do with your life?

Yeah, I wanna be um…a humanities(人文学科) teacher. And I want to help people who are dyslexic, do like spelling and reading and stuff because those were the things that were really hard for me.

Yeah. What do you think that you’ve learned about yourself that you might not have learned if you weren’t dyslexic?

That I can work hard. I can have to do something and do it. It’s not easy. It’s not easy for anyone but I can do it.

Ida Cortez with her mom Kim Wargo in San Francisco. Ida now reads above great level.

Our next story is also about living with dyslexia. This time from an adult, 34-year-old Sean Plass came to StoryCorps with his friend Blanche Podhajski and here he tells us about spending most of his life trying to hide his learning disability.