2023-11-22 20:08:46
When the teacher called on the children to read aloud one by one, Dahlia Ibrahim felt a tightening in her stomach. The closer her mission got, the faster her heart began to beat. Her classmates glided through the texts effortlessly, but the letters danced jumbled together in her own head.
She tried so hard to keep up: First of all, deciphering the syllables and having the person sitting next to her say difficult words. At least it got easier with homework. Dahlia began memorizing entire essays. Nevertheless, the many spelling errors not only should have been counted, they should have made educators take notice.
A big problem in German schools is that doctors don’t have access. And that teachers often mistake medical problems for educational ones. Children like Ibrahim are regularly labeled as stupid or lazy at school, even though they suffer from a developmental disorder called dyslexia. Because her brain works differently, she couldn’t learn to read like others.
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This is often evident from the testimony. For example, if it says that spelling was not assessed as a partial performance. Three former high school graduates filed a lawsuit against this note. On Wednesday, the Federal Constitutional Court made a ruling: In principle, the procedure is permitted. It is the forced outing of a restriction that most of those affected are ashamed of in their childhood and that they try to hide from their employers as adults. “For a long time I thought I was just not that smart,” recalls Ibrahim in a video call.
The ruling will have a major impact because dyslexia is one of the most common neurobiological developmental disorders in school-age children. About two to four percent of children are affected by combined reading and spelling difficulties; eleven to 17 percent have great difficulties with one of the two. Gerd Schulte-Körne from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich heads the clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry. He often sees the serious health consequences of patients here, long before they are noted on a high school diploma.
Not being able to learn to read means a lot of stress. “The body often reacts to psychological stress with a stomach ache or headache. Many children no longer want to go to school.” One in three young people experience psychological problems. In addition to fears surrounding writing and reading, social anxiety disorders or depression can develop.
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It would often help if you explained to them early on that there is nothing wrong with them. In children, the brain works completely differently at crucial points in the network of nerve cells, explains Schulte-Körn. One shows how different Study from his house, in which electrodes recorded the brain waves of 58 children with and without dyslexia while they were asked to read words that sounded the same, some of them made up.
An example: The word series “hat”, “Müzze”, “Müppe”. Children with the disorder recognize, process and differentiate words much more slowly. In order to find the sound that matches a letter, several steps take place in the brain within milliseconds. First the eye perceives the shape, the optic nerve travels and sends the image to the visual center at the back of the head.
This processes the information further and sends it within the brain to the centers responsible for language behind the temple. And right here, on the last part of the route, there is a problem with dyslexia. “Children with dyslexia cannot easily connect sounds with letters because these pathways are changed and communication does not work,” says Schulte-Körne.
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Since they have difficulty distinguishing between sounds, dyslexics write down letter combinations that sound similar or leave out parts. Even into adulthood, those affected mix up individual letters, leave out words or guess them. And before her eyes the lines, arcs and dots blur, they also slip in the line.
There are other abnormalities: According to the researcher, the left hemisphere of the brain, where linguistic sounds are differentiated, is less active in children with a spelling disorder than in their peers. That’s why they made a lot of mistakes and tended to write down fragments of a word.
“Then only two letters are correct,” explains Schulte-Körne. The affected children always read particularly slowly: “By the time they get to the end of the sentence, they have already forgotten the beginning. What is read is hardly processed and the content is therefore not understood.”
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Altered genes are often behind the changes in the brain: a research group led by the University of Edinburgh has discovered so far largest study on the subject 42 places in the genome, which are often altered in people with dyslexia. Some of these are also involved in other developmental disorders, such as delayed language development or cognitive impairments.
And there are genetic links to attention disorders or hearing problems. “The hereditary proportion is between 50 and 70 percent,” estimates human geneticist Markus Nöthen from the University Hospital of Bonn.
He warns against hasty conclusions: First, more large, global studies are needed to identify all genetic factors, and then the functions of the identified genes should be examined in detail. It’s exactly what Nöthen is currently doing, with blood or saliva samples from dyslexics.
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Whatever the outcome, one thing is already clear: people with dyslexia simply work differently when reading and writing. The impairment will accompany people throughout their lives and will not disappear through “a lot of practice”. Some federal states have therefore introduced compensation for disadvantages: the children then get more time in exams or their spelling is not assessed. In return, the reading and spelling disorder is on the certificate.
This is exactly what has become a bone of contention in Bavaria. Three men who graduated from high school in 2010 see themselves as having been discriminated against by the comment on their certificates and have sued the authorities. During the trial, they made it clear how much the comments restricted them in their professional lives.
“Everyone reading this can only think that the applicant is too stupid and terrible for everything. It’s as if we were given a stamp saying: Be careful, do you really want to hire me?” Her feeling fits one Opinion poll on behalf of the career network LinkedIn in the USA, Great Britain and Germany: According to this, most people hide their dyslexia at work, only a quarter of those surveyed openly discuss their own disorder.
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Education and pressure to perform
The Federal Constitutional Court justifies its decision to enter the certificate with the fact that there must be “transparency about the academic achievements actually achieved”. As a small consolation, the judges treated other recognized disabilities just as poorly: Any type of limitation that leads to partial evaluations must be mentioned in the certificate.
Dahlia Ibrahim’s dyslexia was only diagnosed two years ago. The now 34-year-old had already been in her professional life for a long time. After school, she started working as a store manager for a large luxury fashion company, and ten years later she started her own business as an art director. “In the artistic field, neurodiversity is a good thing: I think visually and come up with different ideas,” she says. Ibrahim is convinced that her creativity is linked to her dyslexia.
She still fears the looks of people she tells about her dyslexia. “There is a stigma attached to it, I get a label. Many people treat me differently.” Even some friends don’t know that Ibrahim is dyslexic.
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But when she started an office job as an event manager in Munich eight months ago, she felt transported back to her school days: Suddenly she had to write emails, read out loud, and take notes. She asks her boss to check messages and uses spell-checking tools. Ibrahim is exposed. But the boss doesn’t see her disorder as a problem. Together they formulate a note for the email signature. In the video call she reads almost fluently:
I cannot guarantee my spelling. I am a person with dyslexia. Because I want to work independently, I don’t have my emails proofread before I send them. I stand for more tolerance and acceptance. I would therefore like to be open about dyslexia.
These lines take a lot of pressure off Dahlia Ibrahim. “That way, everyone knows everything straight away, and no one is surprised about mistakes or strange wording,” she says. That would have saved her a lot at school. What would help? Probably not references to testimonials. Ibrahim says: Enlightenment.
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