We also know that a learner who has lost all self-esteem is unable to learn anything. Some refer to this as a real COGNITIVE DEATH, a situation where the learner has lost any motivation for learning. Self esteem is at the heart of the development of personality. It is a prerequisite for learning and for personal blooming. Self-esteem is fluctuant and evolves all the time. It could be compared to a barometer, which measures the intrinsic value we give to ourselves and to our ability to adapt ourselves to the external world. According to the French psychologists AndrĂŠ and Lelord, self esteem encompasses three dimensions. Self security, which develops roughly between birth and the age of two. Self perception, which develops between two and six. And self confidence which develops from the age of seven on, roughly. Self security is really the foundation for self esteem, if you do not have some love for yourself, you think that no one else can love you. Self security is related to the love we receive from our parents or guardians from birth on. It protects us from despair. It is linked to the love we have received in the early years of life. Thanks to this reserve of affection, we can adapt ourselves to the difficulties of life with more ease. That was for the first aspect. The second aspect is self-perception. It is the perception of our qualities and flaws. It is completely subjective, and it's also related to the environment and the feedback we receive from the environment. Did our parents or guardians have specific projects for us? Were these achievable? Many children are charged with the mission (objectives) of accomplishing the unconscious projects of their parents or guardians, often the ones they could not realize themselves, and report (put back) on the children. The children can become anxious, can fear to be disappointing, which gegenerates sensitivity and susceptibility. When the self -perception is negative, frustrat(ing) experiences are difficult to cope with, and anxiety is really key to this process. And negative self perception can also induce an important reliance on others. Hence the child lives for the other, his or her approbation and encouragements. He or she has difficulties to develop a home or his home project, and to know what he or she really needs and wants in life. When the self perception is positive, it becomes an inner strength, which allows the child to bear a certain level of frustration and to go through difficult experiences to achieve one's goal. Self-confidence is related to our actions, to our ability to react adequately in various situations and to make the right decision at the right moment. It is related to education, where we're surrounded by parents or guardians who would invent and realize their projects, repositing themselves when facing failures, to bloom autonomously. If this is the case, our self-confidence grows with succeeded experiences. These positive experiences reinforce self-confidence, which allow us to dare to take risks in new situations with more ease. This doesn't mean that we need to succeed all the time. As Lao Tzu has said, failure is the ground for success. Self-esteem relies on a base which is common to two feelings: the one of being recognized at school and the one of being supported effectively. You as a teacher have a central role to play so that all the children of your classroom feel recognized at school. The problem with the dyslexic child is that he or she fails repeatedly at school, especially with the written language, and can develop four types of behavior. The first one is inhibition. The child does not participate in the life of the classroom anymore. He or she creates psychological defenses in order to avoid any new suffering, and lives in an imaginary world. The second type of behavior is regression. The child always requires the attention of the parents or guardian at home, and of the professor (teacher) at school. She doesn't dare to think (for) herself because she fears to be wrong again. She or he feels incompetent at all times. The third mechanism is projection. Too fragile to face his difficulties, the child tries to ignore these. Conversely, as soon as he or she sees these similar difficulties in others, he or she will make fun of the target person, which can induce a lot of verbal and physical violence. The fourth mechanism is displacement. The child who not obtain satisfactory results at school due to his or her learning difficulties will naturally tend to get validation in other domains in which she or he is more competent. The major feeling the dyslexic learner will have to face throughout the school years is a lack of comfort, related to the fact that often he or she remain in a position of being consciously incompetent. There are in fact four stages for learning any new concept. The first stage is the one of (being) unconsciously incompetent, 'I don't know that I don't know.' The learner has no knowledge of the concept and is unaware of the fact that he or she lacks this knowledge. This is a comfortable situation. However, she or he progressively becomes aware that she or he needs to acquire some new knowledge to pursue the learning and nourish reflection. For example, if the child knows that 'e' plus 'a' corresponds to the phoneme 'ea', to which sound corresponds the association of 'e' and 'a', it is time to learn this new phoneme and it's corresponding grapheme. The second stage is the stage of being consciously incompetent, 'I know that I don't know.' The learner is aware that she or he needs to learn a new concept and that this is hard. She needs to understand it, to memorize it, to link it with prior knowledge in order to assimilate it. It is an uncomfortable phase of trial and error. The third stage is consciously competent, 'I know that I know.' Here at this stage the learner can use and manipulate the new concept with efforts and rewarding. He feels pleasure and satisfaction. The good marks confirm that he or she is acquiring the new concept accurately, which is very valorizing. And the fourth stage is the stage of being unconsciously competent, 'I don't know any more tha(t) I know.' Now that the new concept is acquired, the learner uses it even without being aware of this. The concept has become automatized, automatic. There is no more effort to provide, which is very valorizing and comfortable. The learner can now turn to watch the premises of a new learning, which is going back to the second stage of consciously incompetency, conscious incompetency. This is the phase of transfer. As far as, the written language is concerned, the dyslexic learner will not be able to automatize her or his knowledge as we have already mentioned. When she or he reaches the third stage, she will have to make much more effort, constantly keeping the whole procedure in mind to manipulate the new concept. So this is really a lack of automatization, especially with the learning of the correspondencies between graphemes and phonemes, which will induce fatigue and discouragement, and lead the learner to go back to the second stage, consciously incompetent, which is very uncomfortable and not valorizing for her or for him. Hence the negative spiral of failure appears. The learner feels incapable, stupid, and feels that she or he will never succeed compared to the other learners of the same classroom, who seem to succeed. As said before, because they have been faced with failure already, year after year, day after day,some dyslexic learners simply abandon (give up) because the effort (they need) to provide (is) so much more important compared to the others for results which do not reflect this effort. As we will see later on, dyslexic learners often display abilities which are above average. It is your role as a teacher to find out these abilities and to valorize the dyslexic learners by celebrating these abilities at all times, and as a often as possible publicly. You must do everything to avoid the stage of 'cognitive death'.
