wanted to like Jack Horner’s “The Extraordinary Characteristics of Dyslexia.” As a teacher, I usually respond really positively to people who take learning disabilities and are able to extract strengths from them. Therefore, I was really on board with someone who wanted to talk about how he had pushed through a dyslexia diagnosis and zero college degrees to great intellectual success. Unfortunately, by the second page of his essay, he’d lost me. According to Horner, people who have dyslexia, “…think outside the box precisely because [they] have never been in one. [Their] minds are not clogged up by preconceived ideas acquired through excessive reading. [They] are, therefore, free to have original thoughts enhance by personal observation” (419).
