Floating letters.

"I think Zoe will always be one step ahead of the game," said Louie, a big, cuddly teddy bear of a young man and our daughter's preschool student aide. Not that we would wish any other person's child to be lacking in some way, but how reassuring to know that your three-year-old has a leg up.

"Zoe gravitates toward the imaginative play area," said Linda, her kindergarten teacher. And, of course, that would be true, I thought. Her dad is an actor; I'm a drama teacher. Given a choice between the reading corner and the costume closet, it's natural she's going to choose the latter.

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"Something's going on with Zoe. One day she'll read or write a word correctly, and the next day it's foreign to her." Zoe had been in Sooney Viani's first grade class for two months. Not all children learn at the same rate, I thought. One day reading will just click for her. Still, I remember a sinking feeling in my stomach. Zoe had been precocious about everything: learning dance steps, doing puzzles. Why not reading?

"How do you feel about reading?" I asked Zoe.

"It's pretty," she said. "The letters float."

Zoe loved school. When she got home, she would immediately line up her dolls and stuffed animals to "teach" them. The lists she made for each of her furry or plastic "students" were remarkable--a combination of letters, pictures, arrows, and lots of happy faces but no actual words.

My daughter was a fiercely-determined, tiny, sturdy fireball. Her first sentence was "My do it by the self." In second grade, Zoe was the tiniest child in her class, but she was no shrinking violet. Hers was the first hand that would shoot up volunteering to read aloud in class. When classmates would try to prompt her, she would "hiss" at them.

Just before her eighth birthday, Zoe's teacher took me aside. "Zoe's level of frustration with reading is growing," she said. "I think we need a formal diagnosis."

Mel Ginsberg, a special education teacher and clinical psychologist, as well as a friend, confirmed a diagnosis of dyslexia. He recommended a book that forever changed Zoe's life. "The Gift of Dyslexia by Ron Davis explains how people with dyslexia see the world," said Mel. "You might find it useful."

Davis, who has dyslexia, came up with a system of remediation based on his observation that the person with dyslexia is born with a strong visual and spatial imagination. People who do not have dyslexia see what is outside a window. People with dyslexia not only see what's outside the window, they automatically fill in what is behind the wall on either side of the window.

A child with dyslexia might be able to read the word elephant, if she knows what an elephant looks like but may get stuck on simple words like the or but. These are what Davis calls "trigger" words. Can you picture the word the? Like Zoe, children with dyslexia are fine until they are hit with the flat, two-dimensional world of letters on paper. Then they may spin, turn, and float the letters, attempting to see behind or underneath the word, scrambling the order of letters to try and make sense of them.

The best thing about The Gift of Dyslexia was that it affirmed the strengths of the dyslexic mind. I was able to talk to Zoe about dyslexia in a positive way. "I knew it was something," she said. "I just didn't know what." Although the book contains a course outline that can be done at home, I opted to take Zoe to the Davis Center in Burlingame, California.

Davis facilitator, Dee White, interviewed me and made it clear that they were not in the business of squelching the dyslexic imagination. "We just need to give her the skills to turn on her reading eyes when she needs to and not become disoriented," said Dee. I began to cry. I had worried that remediation would change something fundamental about Zoe.

The remediation started with establishing Zoe's orientation point. When I first heard the orientation point described, it sounded magical. When I watched Zoe learning how to find and be on point, the simplicity of it was miraculous. Zoe was asked to picture a line extending from the palm of her hand, up through her forehead and above her head. She was to imagine that she was looking down from that point above her head. When Zoe opened her eyes and looked down at a page of words, she was able to see the correct order of the letters. I was in the common room of the center when for the first time I heard my daughter reading aloud confidently in one of the workrooms. I pressed my ear up against the door and cried for the second time that day.

Six hours a day for five days, Zoe worked with Dee. Zoe shaped the letters of the alphabet backwards and forwards in clay. Once she understood with great three-dimensional certainty the correct look of the letters, she began defining the trigger words, those pesky prepositions, pronouns, and irregular verbs. Most importantly, she sculpted a three-dimensional picture definition of the word in clay. For fun, Dee let Zoe sculpt two of her favorite words: Swings and Love.

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The work at the Davis Center ended with a graduation. Each student was allowed to do something special at the ceremony. Zoe performed a dance that she had choreographed.

Once we left the center, we needed to tackle the rest of the over 200+ trigger words, a task that took the better part of a year. The change in my daughter's reading was inspiring and astounding.

Math became a problem in fourth grade. At one point during a homework session, she said, "I just have a bad brain." It was heartbreaking. Zoe was seeing her learning difference as a negative reflection of her self worth.

We signed up for the Davis Dyscalculia Correction Program, a method of remediation for math. Zoe was ten and a half.

The math program at the Davis Center also begins with trigger words. Ray Davis, our facilitator (and the son of Ron Davis), explained that linear concepts of time and space are not the same for a person with dyslexia. Zoe, he said, needed to be able to conceptualize words like time, sequence, and Zoe, 15, with her pony, Hannah order. While non-dyslexic people see themselves at a fixed place in time, a person with dyslexia seems to experience time as less sequential and more circular. Zoe left the dyscalculia program with a new found confidence in her mathematical ability. By the time Zoe entered sixth grade, as an eleven-year-old, she had a clear understanding of the challenges and strengths dyslexia affords her.

Zoe is now a high school freshman. It is largely up to Zoe to advocate for herself. She needs to make certain that her teachers are aware of her IEP (Individualized Education Plan), which entitles her to extended time on tests, and she must sometimes ask teachers to describe material in a more visual way. Zoe says that she needs to be on point during a multiple choice test but that when she has to think more creatively, answering essay questions, it is better for her to be off her point. Similarly, Zoe knows there are times when her three-dimensional "floating letters" vision is advantageous. "Like when I'm dancing or learning a course for a horse show," she says.

Zoe is doing well academically, but more importantly, she is a well-rounded young woman who shows great compassion towards people, seeing more than physical differences, embracing emotional fragility, and fully comprehending --even celebrating--learning differences. When I asked Zoe what she would say today about her "floating letters" and about the rigorous course of remediation at the Davis Center, she had this to say: "It helped me understand myself better."

It is a good life lesson for all of us: to know ourselves well enough so that we can translate the mystery of the way our individual brains function in the larger world. That which we assume to be a weakness might actually be our greatest strength.

For more information about dyslexia: www.dyslexia.com. For a list of references accompanying this article, please make request to [e-mail].

Robin Heald is the founding teacher of the Pomegranate Preschool for the Arts, in Ashland, Oregon. She has taught drama to children of all ages and used to stage manage on and Off-Broadway shows. She holds an MFAW from Spalding University with a concentration in writing for children. Robin lives in Ashland, Oregon with her husband, actor Anthony Heald, and their children, Dylan, 19, and Zoe, 15.