FISH DON’T CLIMB TREES: A Whole New Look at Dyslexia: Understanding and Overcoming the Challenge, will completely change your outlook on a so-called learning disability. Chances are you will end up wishing you had dyslexia.
Sue Blyth Hall, Tedx Speaker March 2021 is the author of FISH DON'T CLIMB TREES: A Whole New Look at Dyslexia: Understanding and Overcoming the Challenge, Enjoying the Gift. As a Davis Dyslexia Correction(R) Facilitator of 22 years, she has worked with wonderfully, learning-able individuals and listened to so many incredible stories, all of them inspiring. She felt the need to share these stories with the world, and so her book was born.
The theme of both her book and her talk is that 'Everyone is learning able IF they are enabled to learn in the way they were born to learn.' Her son's learning challenges led her to discover THE GIFT OF DYSLEXIA by Ronald D Davis. At the end of his one week Davis(R) Dyslexia Correction program, her son told her, "Dyslexia is like a wound, in the past they gave me band-aids for it, now I can heal it myself." Any mother who heard their 10 year old utter those words would do what Sue did. She trained to be a Davis Facilitator. During her training her eyes were opened to all the amazing talents that develop alongside the challenges, and she was delighted to discover that she too had dyslexia.
There are 5 components to her book: the story of her son and herself; how a Davis(R) program unfolds; stories from her clients; how the current education creates learning challenges and a suggested new paradigm for education. One of her students, Cole Wisdom, then 14 designed the cover and it has been flying off the shelves all over the English speaking world ever since. It is available as an e-book, but Sue's dream is to have it as an audio book because not surprisingly, few dyslexics actually love reading. Sue herself does not enjoy reading which made editing her own book a difficult and lengthy experience.
Seven years after its publication she was standing on the TedxBearCreekPark stage (now TedxSurrey), on the round red carpet. She was delighted to see that the stage designer had created three trees to her right - tailor made for her talk because her opening line is "Albert Einstein, pretty smart guy, said 'Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will grow up its whole life believing it is stupid". She goes on to explain that we have an education system which is build for the 'pc' computers and dyslexics are the 'apple mac' computers - there is absolutely nothing wrong with either computer, they just run on different systems. Both computers are perfectly capable of carrying out the same tasks, they just do it their own way.
Sue believes that once this dynamic is highlighted and understood, the education system will bring about the small but far reaching changes which are necessary to allow every child entering school to have an Equal Cognitive Opportunity. They are entitled to this. We can no longer sustain a system that creates these learning disability labels. It is not acceptable for children to enter school with a learning difference and leave with a learning disability label. The change is happening and we are all part of that change.
Fish Don't Climb Trees: https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000009286590/Sue-Blyth-Hall-Fish-Don%27t-Climb-Trees
Tedx Talk entitled Dyslexia: Enable the Learning Difference | TEDx Bear Creek Park, https://youtu.be/cPX-RYBkCow,
https://www.fishdontclimbtrees.com ; https://www.positivedyslexia.com ; https://www.thewds.org .
