He describes it as “a creepy robotic voice.” Luckily he’s trained his ear to listen to Kerzweil, software designed to read scanned texts.
Making up for his lost time, he’s challenged himself each year to read a little faster. Now he can read up to 175 words a minute.
Writing his papers, Kalib Demerchant enlists the help of his friends to act as scribes. He pays them a wage for their help through the Canada study grant, which gives students with permanent disabilities funds for education-related costs.
You see, Kalib Demerchant has three learning disabilities. Dyslexia impedes his ability to read, dysgraphia his ability to write, and dyscalculia his ability to calculate math.
Still, his barriers have not stopped him from quenching his need for an education. Kaleb is now a fifth year student at St Thomas University, one year away from completing an Honours in English and a major in philosophy — a heavy load for those without learning disabilities.
The largest wall in his kitchen is dominated by a large white-board. The board is covered in the erasable messy scrawls of teal — examples of philosophy questions.
Shelves display classic and contemporary literature, comics, and textbooks dominate the room. The books were collected in hopes of one day owning a personal library room.
Kalib studies by scanning each and every page of every text he reads and then listens to the words over his head-set, using a program called “Curtswell.” Undiscouraged, Kalib is an avid reader with aspirations of being an English professor in the future.
Sporting a plaid shirt and well-coiffed black hair, he grinds through with brutal efficiency, blind to the tedious process he’s forced to suffer through, just to complete his work.
While teachers at STU are “helpful and accommodating,” the educational system hasn’t always been supportive of Kalib. He spoke of his high school experience in Perth-Andover.
“I always wanted to be able to read, yet I couldn’t read. I’ve always been really good at stories,” he says, “I think that’s where it started. I liked English the best.”
But some teachers didn’t support Kalib’s passion for literature.
“At my school they treated me like I was stupid. They told me I couldn’t take courses you needed to go to university.”
His high school offered audiobooks, but didn’t know about the advantages of emerging technologies such as Curtswell.
“They always told me I couldn’t read at my school. I even had a teacher tell me I shouldn’t go to university, and that’s not right. I took [university track courses] anyways, and they made a rule now that you can’t do what I did — even though I proved them wrong.”
Kalib appealed saying that he should be allowed to take whichever courses he wants to, even if he fails them.
“That’s what I always try to tell them. I don’t care if I have to come back and take an extra year of high school. At least I’ll know I couldn’t have gone to university, right? “
Kalib doesn’t just depend on technology and perseverance to help him surpass his barriers. He’s trained his mind to process and retain information in a different way. He can’t read or keep information down on paper so he’s adapted by strengthening his memory, especially auditory memory.
Already he’s beginning to reap the benefits of his labor.
Taking this mentality and developing his memorisation skill to the next level, he’s circumvented his dysgraphia, to a certain degree, and trained himself to memorize certain whole words as if they were symbols — letting him read pieces of text he recognizes.
He found a way around oppressive teachers and frustrating bureaucracy. Now, Kalib Demerchant is finding a way around his learning disabilities, too.
