Posted on 05/29/2007 3:55:31 AM PDT by mek1959
Dyslexia is a social fig leaf used by middle-class parents who fear their children will be labelled as low achievers, a professor has claimed.
Julian Elliott, a leading educational psychologist at Durham University, says he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
One of my husbands was severely dyslexic. Being a high achiever in a field where reading wasn’t critical, he took it with his usual good humor when I LMAO watching him undergo an eye test. (You had to be there.)
Dyslexic people can be highly intelligent. They just have trouble reading. Maybe at some early point this could have been remedied, and wasn’t. Maybe not. But it’s real.
So now I’m to believe dyslexia doesn’t exist because it is poorly defined and/or isn’t well addressed by educational organizations? Then what the hell is “stupidity”? It seems to me the term “stupidity” is no less poorly defined and/or well addressed by educational organizations. I’d have to be stupid to accept such a simplistic dismissal of something as complex as dyslexia as mere middle-class self-indulgence. It also seems to me that merely dismissing dyslexia is in itself a gross self-indulgence on the part of those who don’t want to incur the extra expense of paying for individual differences in learning styles.
In Churchill case, it was cured by Churchill. He couldn’t do Latin so he did English. As for teaching methods, one problem is that most teachers can only play to the strengths of students who are most like the teacher.
The world will long remember Julian Elliott.
I am a cixelsyd, sorrry dyslexic, I also have degrees in four different engineering fields; I also stutter. I didn’t find out that I had dyslexia until my first year in college while taking a non-technical elective in psych.
Dyslexia is not a problem for me at all. OK, once I did my income taxes in reverse, but I go it fixed. Some the brightest people in history have been dyslexic. Any child with dyslexia needs only to have it explained to him and he will cope, adapt and you’ll never know they are dyslexic. Hell, they might even turn out brighter than the people who consider it a problem.
It’s just awful what they have done to reading.
The proof is what happened to basic reading rates with soldiers/draftees from World War I, II, and Korea. By the time Korea came around, illiteracy rates had soared to over 15 per cent. The only difference was the method of instruction had changed. Phonics works, which must be why it is no longer utilized??
> Dyslexia, for one thing, is often linked with the style of reading instruction.
I believe there is a whole, vast and almost untapped body of knowledge surrounding the mechanics of reading instruction. I believe we have just barely scratched the surface on how the Human minds work, and that our teaching methods to date have catered to only a few learning styles, whereas the vast majority would probably respond better to being taught by other techniques. And I’d be willing to wager that most of these “other techniques” have yet to be fully explored or even discovered. After all, much of our brain’s capability and potential is thought to be untapped.
Does a dyslexic agnostic lie awake at night wondering if there is a dog?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/speakout/mystory/add_2-24.html
Interesting article about black market sales of Ritalin on campus.
It's obvious to me that you are dyslexic. You wrote that backwards.
Dyslexia is a true impairment that affects every means of communication including reading, writing, and speaking. It is also quite rare. In 10 years of special education and reading instruction, I have taught exactly 1 true dyslexic. This child struggled in every area, but demonstrated marked intelligence with numbers. He is a high school sophomore and is taking Calculus BC this year and will have to start at the local junior college soon to keep his math going. I'd see him doing Calc III before 18. BUT, he reads at about a 4th grade level and speaking for him is obviously painful. He almost needs another language approach, one that uses numbers instead of letters.
I'm not sure what means the UK uses to come with the term 'dyslexic' but here in the U.S. it is not a federally recognized category for special education services, so we hear it in anecdotes, not in labels.
“Any child with dyslexia needs only to have it explained to him and he will cope, adapt and you’ll never know they are dyslexic”
Do you think it relates to phonics versus whole-word methods of teaching students to read?
Whole language can exacerbate many reading difficulties. The trend now is to use developmental reading which draws heavily upon the phonics base of knowledge with controlled reading and less emphasis on drills
My form often used to leave my papers written with entire sentences missing or words and letters dropped from sentences I had written. I would do the same thing when I would read. I often would swear up and and down that I had done or read everything(almost violently so, I was so convinced), when I was told I had a form of dyslexia I was enrolled into an extra class after school where the teacher would have me reread aloud over and over again until I got it right. I had to do this for 3 years. Since then I have an almost 99% correct rate of reading and writing and normally do not have to read things more than once to understand fully(whichis a key, I couldnt comprehend that I missed something, I now can comprehend that I missed something) , writing I still sometimes have fits where I continously have to read and reread and correct my mistakes. Not every dyslexia is as simple as mine though but I am bettng alot of these cases could use good old fashioned teaching of perseverence to overcome the issue.
> I’m not sure what means the UK uses to come with the term ‘dyslexic’ but here in the U.S. it is not a federally recognized category for special education services, so we hear it in anecdotes, not in labels.
In New Zealand, dyslexia has only just become recognized by our Government, about a fortnite ago.
Are you aware that Whole Language came out of New Zealand?
> Are you aware that Whole Language came out of New Zealand?
No, that’s a new one on me...
I was educated in Vancouver. ITA was all the rage back then.
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