Analysis Of Joann Ellison's Essay 'Cognitive Outlaws'

When people see kids as disabled or below the average child they are automatically labeled and put off to the side because they do not have the same abilities as everyone else. In her essay “Cognitive Outlaws”, Joann Ellison Rodgers claims that children with dyslexia or other learning disabilities are not handicap and that is not how they should be defined by their mental disability but by how they perform in the classroom. She claims that the brightest minds in the world have all had some sort of learning disability. Einstein and Edison failed basic schooling and were diagnosed with Dyscalculia. In the essay “Autism and Visual Thought” Temple Grandin writes of her experience with Autism and how she thinks in pictures and not words and had to …show more content…
They have the same abilities to prosper and achieve their goals that they have for themselves. He claims that people with dyslexia automatically have an unfortunate disadvantage in the classroom because of their disability.What they often lack in mixing up letters in the words they try to spell or say, they make up for in analytical thinking, reasoning, and creativity. Sally Shaywitz, a pediatric neurologist from Yale, asserts, “‘They learn to think outside the box. . . . because they never fit inside’” (302). Shaywitz is a cofounder of of Yale’s Center for Dyslexia and creativity and claims that people with learning disabilities are more of a gift to society than most people think. They look at things with new angles and with a different look on the world. What one person with no disorder looks at a problem and solves it one way would be the complete opposite way that a person with a learning disorder would look at or solve that same issue. In a world with so many one dimensional thinkers children and adults with dyslexia or any other learning disorder are a blessing in