Getting a Job

David Baron has lived with moderate dyslexia all his life. As a child growing up in the 1950′s and 60′s, no one understood his difficulties with numbers. Though he never received a confirmed diagnosis of dyslexia, Baron married a Special Ed teacher 3 decades ago. It was David’s wife who put her finger on the problem: moderate dyslexia.

Open Candor

A brilliant man of many talents, David speaks with candor about his adult struggles toward furthering his education, getting a decent job, and about how his disability has affected his self-esteem.

CogniBeat: “Has your dyslexia made it difficult for you to obtain gainful employment?”

Baron: “Sure has! It has had a profound effect on obtaining employment and education. I have a great talent for the sciences and technology but can’t manage the math. There was never any point in attempting to get into these areas in a serious way. I would have taken courses in hi-tech, such as programming, but these areas require serious math proficiency. I applied for a computer programming course after I learned a bit of Visual C++ just to see if I could do it and wrote small programs. I took the entrance exam for the programming course but bombed out in the math section.

Limited Options

Years back I considered going for my electrician’s license as I’d learned electronics in high school and even got my amateur radio license at age 14, but the prerequisites for the electrician’s course includes knowledge of trigonometry. They use trig to mathematically explain only one thing—electric phase relationships—and they assume that it can only be explained that one way. I had learned phase relationships in high school in electronics classes, and to this day I can explain it conceptually so that even a 13 year-old can understand, but that wasn’t good enough to get into the electrician’s course because they presume the student’s ignorance and insist on teaching this concept with trigonometry. Because my math inability is so serious I have had very limited employment options and job opportunities throughout my life.”

CogniBeat: “How does your dyslexia impact your self-image?”

David Baron: “Periods of unemployment—of having limited employment opportunities—has meant reduced income. It’s an obvious fact I can’t contribute to the household expenses as I would like. I know we don’t live as well as we would have had I been able to work in hi-tech—if I’d had a decent ability in math. It makes me feel poorly about myself. If I had average math abilities and average conceptual abilities [rather than advanced] it would have been far better. It wouldn’t be a profound lack coupled with a serious talent that turns out to be largely limited by the lack. Since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, my usefulness with conceptual workings is correspondingly reduced due to the inability in math.”

CogniBeat: “Are you met with understanding in general society?”

David Baron: “People are very surprised to learn that I’m moderately dyslexic; they always assume that those who can speak and write fluently plus handle technological, ‘geeky’ scientific matters with ease are equally able in math. If they know about my lacks, do they empathize or commiserate? No, but then I never give people a reason to, as I always emphasize my talents and only if I have to do I admit my lacks, and those only as a matter of fact.

Few realize how a lack of math ability impacts my life financially except our family bookkeeper—my wife.”

This post has been reproduced with kind permission of www.cognibeat.com and can be seen in it's entirety at; http://community.cognibeat.com/2010/11/getting-a-job