Dyslexia?

The letters on the board are wrong. Or, not wrong, but in the wrong places. I look again, and glance over at Patty, who cocks her head to the side.

Occuaptino.

Nope, that's definitely not an English word. I go at it with the back of my hand, and it morphs:

Occuaption.

Nope, not quite there yet. I try again:

Occupation.

Yes.

Unfortunately, this is not a recreation from my younger days. It happened today, as I taught a group of 5th graders the difference between the long and short "o" sounds. Is it possible that my time teaching kids has actually hurt my ability to spell in English? Or that it has turned me dyslexic somehow?

It almost seems plausible. As I sit here typing this, I've made more typos per line than ever before (or is it just that I'm noticing them because I'm thinking about it? AHHH METACOGNITION). It took me three tries to type the "I'm" in the preceding parenthetical. Ridiculous.

Maybe it has something to do with the inundation of facts, figures, names, places, and numbers that seems to have taken up permanent living space in my head recently: there are just too many of them, and my brain has decided to stop keeping track of silly little things like which order the letters of words go in.

Or maybe it has something to do with the constant flow of traditional Chinese characters, very few of which I can actually read, all around me, every day. After all, dyslexia is, by definition, "a reading disability that occurs when the brain does not properly recognize and process certain symbols." And my brain most certainly cannot properly recognize and process the vast majority of the symbols I see every day. So maybe it's decided that should be a uniform phenomenon for me.

We actually had a fun lesson planned today, including all sorts of TPR goodness (raise your hands over your head in an O if I say a word with a long o sound; put them in front of your shape in a U of O style O if I say a word with the short o sound), but what I remember as much as that is my absurd inability to spell.

Honestly, the kids probably didn't notice. And even if they did, they almost certainly didn't care. (If they did, let's be honest, I would have heard about it IMMEDIATELY.) They probably didn't know or care how to spell "occupation"; they only said it to gain a point for their team.

But it's my team's job to make them care, and learn. And, given that my current occupation is English teacher, my brain needs to whip itself back into shaep. Or--shape. Dang.