Photo by Katherine Rountree
The first-grade teacher put magnetic letters on the board and asked Piper what it spelled. She couldn’t read it. It was her name. That’s when the teachers “definitely knew that something was wrong.”
Piper Otterbein is a second-year accessory design major from Orange County, California. And she has dyslexia.
It wasn’t until six years after this magnetic letter incident, however, that she was diagnosed. Until then, she was put into special classes for the subjects she struggled with. A teacher would call Otterbein out of one class, away from her friends, to go into another. Classmates would ask questions. Some would call her “sped,” a derogatory term and abbreviation for special education. And her class size went from 20 or so to two or three.
“I was in classrooms with people with severe disabilities…drooling, bouncing on bouncy balls, and then I was sitting there…and people are just trying to like teach me how to read,” she said.
What would take her classmates 30 minutes would take her two hours to complete.
But Otterbein didn’t want to be in these classes. She wanted be with her friends, or “just feel like you’re normal.”
In seventh-grade, after years of these classes, she was diagnosed with dyslexia and graduated from the smaller classrooms. She was then allowed to return to “normal” classrooms.
The National Center for Learning Disabilities says 2.4 million kids are diagnosed with learning disabilities and receive special treatment in schools, representing 41% of all special education students. A learning disability in reading, dyslexia, is the most prevalent.
Dyslexia abounds with misconceptions. A common thought is that the learning disability is simply the switching of letters or reading of words backwards.
“People always just say ‘so, you see stuff backward’ and I’m like ‘no.’ I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
For Otterbein, her dyslexia manifests in even more common ways. She couldn’t recite the alphabet until the 5th grade. And she has to count her multiplication tables on her fingers, and even then it’s tricky for her. But her dyslexia has given her a platform to speak from.
In high school she gave a TEDx talk on her learning disability. No notecards, no teleprompter.
“It was terrifying.”
To prepare, she met with a speaking coach. She memorized a 7-minute speech in a month. And she received a standing ovation.
Video by TED
“And the best part was the feedback after,” she said. “I got letters and emails and constant phone calls … the best part I thought was the mothers who had children with dyslexia.”
Otterbein’s mother and younger brother are also dyslexic.
“I knew how much my parents struggled. So to be able to tell them that it’s going to be OK, that was amazing,” she said.
Otterbein will always be dyslexic. It’s not something you’re cured of, but it’s not something she is as sensitive to now as was when she was younger.
“One time somebody found my grocery shopping list in my car and they just about died laughing. And they were like ‘is this really how you spell? Why?’” she said. “And I’ll just have to say to people, ‘Can you read it? I don’t know how to spell anything.’”
Now at SCAD, her studies don’t give her as much trouble. She turns in projects, not essays. And she’s passionate about her work.
“The second you feel like you’re doing what everyone else can do and sometimes even better … it just changes your whole mindset,” she said. “This is the first time I can bring all of my stuff to class and think ‘wow, I have the best thing here.'”
