Cut versus Cute, an excerpt

    Below is an excerpt from a passage I am working on from my book (rough draft). I decided I would share a little of the type of experiences I will be sharing in my memoir. This exert is about spelling. I talk a lot about spelling in my memoir, since it has been a ongoing struggle to this day. The memoir will talk about the experiences that lead to this point. The names in this passage have been changed.

Cut versus Cute

    How much difficulty could the words cut and cute give a fifth grader? Well, a fifth grader with a reading disability, a lot. Being able to recall spelling words from memory became a challenge for me. I many times mistook words for similar words. Sometimes they were common errors, such as there and their, but sometimes less common. In fifth grade, I had the hardest time telling the difference between the words cut and cute. I kept mixing them up. I would want to write a sentence like, “The dog looked cute sleeping under the Christmas tree,” and I would write, “The dog looked cut slipping under the Christmas tree.” This of course would get many laughs out of my classmates sitting near me.

    Today telling the difference between these two words seems obvious. I only need to understand the spelling pattern, but in fifth grade I could not recognize patterns in words, nor did I know that English had rules. This was the unfortunate product of learning to read and spell through memorizing lists of words. I hadn’t made any connections. To me English made no sense.

    In fifth grade, we sat in groups of four to five students. I sat in the back corner group of students near the windows. There was a boy named Danny who sat next to me for the first three to four months during fifth grade. I distinctly remember that he loved bull dogs. He would draw them every day on his notebooks and so on. He noticed one day that I wrote the word cut instead of cute.

    He leaned over and told me, “Do you think bull dogs are cute?”

    I thought for a few moments and said, “I think dogs are cute, so yes.”

    “Well, every time you think of writing cute think of a bull dog and how the bull dog is cute. Make a mental image in your head of what that sentence would look like,” he replied.

    He wrote the sentence out on a piece of paper next to a drawing he made of a bull dog. All of a sudden I was making sense of the words. From that day onward, I thought of a bull dog every time I wrote the word cute. After years it became automatic, but still from time and time I think of bull dog when I write cute.

    I think that was my first experience with multi-sensory instruction as well, from my fifth grade classmate. He used audio, visual, and a mnemonic to teach me the word cute. He would make a great special education teacher.

    After that day, I never mixed up cut and cute again.


    Also, please check out the following website about Dyslexia at the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.  Dr. Sally Shaywitz and her husband Dr. Bennett Shaywitz are doing great work in research and awareness for people with reading disabilities.  The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity