Question:
I have to the conclusion that I may have a learning disability. Needless to say it has gone undiagnosed all of these years and I don't know if I personally can say I have it or not. Most recently I was a corporate training environment and I was told by the temporary firm that placed me there that I seemed to be lost and not picking up very quickly. Alone I would not leave any great credance to this; however I have had a slurry of jobs where I have been told pretty much the same thing. I suppose I personally should take the training manual if the company allows it and let it become second nature. Of course that does nothing for the familiarity of the computer and the screens I'm supposed to become familiar with. This is why if and I admit I don't know how. I would obtain a diagnosis of what specific handicap I have and under the Americans with Disabilities act get the appropriate accomodation and keep my job. I believe that this disability has led to numerous terminations from past employers. Unfortunately never officially diagnosed and just grieving over lost opportunities.
What's your opinions???
Answer:
It certainly appears from your writing and from the description of your situation that you are dyslexic; I don't think money spent for an evaluation would be wasted. But I am not trained in diagnosing dyslexia and a diagnosis cannot be accomplished over the Internet (yet). I recommend subscribing to news:alt.support.dyslexia to see if your problems are similar to theirs.
Your problems at work are typical for dyslexics. We need to learn things from the outside-in, not inside-out as most things are presented. We learn much better when given a thorough overview of all the processes in consideration before we attempt to study the details of those processes. We then need to relate the details of everything learned to its function in the 'big picture'.
In contrast, non-dyslexics are better able to simply accept apparently meaningless information for possible use later on. Dyslexics find this difficult; we need to make sense of, and compare relationships for, everything as it is learned.
So your problem at work is typical. Non-dyslexics can easily learn and perform a meaningless task and then build on that as time goes on. A dyslexic needs to learn how the task and all the functions involved fit into the big picture, which, by the way, tends to confuse non-dyslexics.
To help overcome these problems at work you should not settle for just learning simple tasks, you should learn as much as possible about how your job fits into the big picture and how it relates to other functions. This takes a little longer and requires more work, but your performance will very likely exceed that of your coworkers. If your employer will not permit this then you are in a job that is below your abilities and can be handled by a non-dyslexic.
