Dyslectics learn to watch their 'bs' and 'ds' - (Full text for Easier Reading follows)

Full Text (for easier reading) :

Lessons with Billy, Dicky and Christina
From ANDREW STONE

BRISBANE - "Dave was one of Christina Alexander's best pupils. He was 19 and had just dropped out of a University science course.

Physics and maths were his best subjects, but when it came to spelling and writing essays he was hopeless. Dave, like the rest of Mrs Alexander's students, is dyslexic.

"He was a wonderful boy. When he came to see me he was down in the dumps. He was working in a dreadfully boring shop and he was so keyed up and frustrated," she said.

"We worked on the books and within eight weeks - an outstanding performance - he was writing and spelling words without trouble for the first time in his life."

Christina Alexander is a former teacher. She left classrooms six years ago and plunged into the special problems of dyslexia.

With Ian Ottley, an artist, she has published three books for dyslectics. They are big and colourful and can be pulled apart and the pages stuck on walls as posters.

Mrs Alexander takes in some pupils and posts out her books to dyslectics in other parts of Queensland or interstate, where the pupils' families work through the books with them. She claims to have not had a failure among the 90 families who have used the books.

Experts disagree about dyslexia, its causes and effects. Some authorities maintain about 25 per cent of the population are affected in one way or another. More boys than girls suffer from dyslexia, and it appears to run in families.

At the simplest level, it means people see signs saying "stop" as "spot" or they confuse figures such as 0 and 1. These are often written 1, 0. Reversal of words and figures is common with dyslexia. Often the letter b replaces d and vice versa because, Mrs Alexander says, dyslectics "don't know which side to put the stick on."

For a dyslectic, information becomes scrambled and confused. Mrs Alexander says her books, which pupils trace and read aloud as they use them, somehow help to "put everything back into sync" because the difficult alliteration and awkward sentence construction makethem try harder to understand what the books depict.

She is currently teaching 16 students, aged between six and 19. Education psychologists initially examined the pupils to find their specific problems.

"Many of these kids are just desperate to express themselves. They often arrive depressed and withdrawn. Their peers at school sneer at them because they can't cope," Mrs Alexander says.

Her pupils trace over phrases like "Dicky is dusty and dithers and disowns his own and other people's dishwashing after dinner" or "Billy's beautiful balloon shaped baby bomb."

Beside the text are Ian Ottley's remarkable drawings: "They are misleading. The student is driven into the text because he wonders what is going on." Mrs Alexander explained.

"We've deliberately made it that way. It's not easy. It's not a sugar-coated pill."

After approaching, and being rejected by, educational publishers, Mrs Alexander set up her own publishing company, Turkey Tracks Press. "They (the publishers) wanted to reduce it to A4 size to fit the K Mart stands," she said.

"They weren't interested in keeping quality. I didn't think the books idea would work if I left it with them."

She prints her titles on a copier in her work room. A neighbour and former printer set up the machine, which turns out a dozen or so books a night depending on demand.

Dave, the boy who learned to spell and write essays in eight weeks, was her fastest pupil.

"That was a bit like shock treatment," she recalled. "One boy took two years. But when the pupils find they can read and spell and write without tripping up - then it's a magic moment."

The books are available through Turkey Tracks Press, P.O. Box 134, Kenmore, 4069, Queensland.

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