Dyslexia: What’s The Truth About Dyslexic Children?

FastPitch ^ | July 6, 2011 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Dyslexia turns out to be a lot like the President’s birth certificate. There are a huge number of claims on each side. They can’t all be right. Either the thing is real or it isn’t.

You can find on the Internet an extraordinary number of people who talk about dyslexia as if it’s not only an ultimate reality but some sort of gift from God. (Oh, your brains may be scrambled but somehow it’s a wonderful thing because you see the world in a new way!)

On the other side, you can find people saying that dyslexia is a lie, a hoax, nothing but nonsense. I’ve seen a video of an English politician declaring flatly: “It’s a wicked excuse to cover up bad teaching.”

So what is this crazy thing that people can describe as both night and day?

First of all, there’s no question that the dyslexic kid has a reading problem. The question is whether the kid was born with this problem and brought it to school? Or did the school take a perfectly normal child and create a disability by using bad instructional methods???

The Education Establishment, of course, wants to blame everything on the kid. Hey, they complain, we can’t be expected to teach defective kids.

So this is a huge debate, with vast educational, legal, psychological, neurological, and financial implications.

My own conclusion is that dyslexia is mostly a myth.

A year ago I put a graphic video on YouTube called “The Strange Truth About Dyslexia.” Only about 4 minutes, it covers the main debate fairly well. A big portion of it is given up to quotes from Siegfried Engelmann. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFLLnRWROQ )

But in four minutes you can’t delve into all the issues. The Education Establishment wins all their victories by making everything so complicated that no ordinary citizen has a chance. So I decided to write a long, thorough analysis. Not exactly light reading, but for people involved in the Reading Wars or damaged by the Reading Wars, this article might be helpful.

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Dyslexia: The Evil Myth (a report from Improve-Education.org) -- www.fastpitchnetworking.com/pressrelease.cfm?PRID=64894 )

[humblegunner]

I was talking about doctors.

Ah, yes. Those charming folks who append a fake title to their name.

The ones who stand between people and medicine. The ones who presume to give "orders".

Aren't they great? "No antibiotics for you until I get paid!"

Never trust anyone who sports a fake title and wants to put his finger in your butt.

[chb]

My perception is that dyslexia, and ADHD for that matter, are real enough problems, but that lazy teachers use their existence as an excuse for their failures, i.e. claiming that any student that doesn’t benefit from their instruction must have a problem.

[srmorton]

Although true cases of dyslexia probably do exist, in my opinion the rise in the incidence of dyslexia can be attributed to the replacement of phonetics with the "look and say" method of teaching reading. Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It in 1955 as well as the sequel Why Johnny Still Can't Read-A New Look At the Scandal in Our Schools in 1981. I discovered these books when my twin daughters (now 30) were in elementary school and having more difficulty than I thought they should have with reading. I recommend both of these books as an eye-opening look at the education establishment in the United States.

[tophat9000]

Being dyslexia I would say the "whole word techniques" for reading (reading by recognition) is the source of the problem ...

We were not taught phonics to read or write with in school

I was always top of my class in reading but terrible in writing...

They tested me in 6th grade to figure out why and found I had a 2nt year collage level vocabulary and verbal skill

(I just picked up my mother's vocabulary who went to work at 15 as a maid but was a self taught student reading book after book ever day of her life)

...So the really was I was just reading by guessing the words by context in the sentence the letter in the word just gave me the clue to guess....

However this does not work in writing and if you have an average vocabulary it does not work very well for reading either.

[Ditter]

read later

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Yes, that’s what my article is about. I’m in the same camp as Flesch, Blumenfeld, Engelmann, Mona McNee, Marva Collins, etc. The fascinating challenge, however, is to explain why Whole Word causes so many problems.

[hellbender]

Bipolar disorder is real. We have examples of people who suffered from it long before liberalism was dominant. Such people are sometimes extremely creative and hard-working during their "up" periods, before sinking into suicidal depression. We also have clear evidence of a strong hereditary tendency in bipolar disease.

However, this does not mean that mediocre "therapists" have not started to see bipolar disorder where it does not in fact exist.

[waterhill]

“My grandfather lived in the day when being left-handed was considered a rebellious act and he was punished unmercifully for it.”

I remember my Grandma doing everything short of beating my little sister for eating with her left hand. And this was in the early 70’s.

It certainly messed with sis’s head.

She voted for o.

[antiRepublicrat]

My point was that if there is a disability you do not redefine it as a non-disability, something normal, you try to cure it. You don’t tell a stutterer that stuttering is normal, you try to cure his stuttering. You don’t tell a dyslexic that dyslexia is normal, you try to cure his dyslexia.

[srmorton]

I apologize for only reading the exerpt before posting. I just feel so strongly about this subject! I had done so well in public school and college that I trusted the school system to teach my children to read. I was taught to read phonetically and have always loved to read. My husband was taught by the "look and say" method and has always hated to read, even though he is a college graduate.

Since my girls brought home papers with some phonetic exercies on them, it did not occur to me to question how they were being taught until their teacher said that one of my girls was having trouble "decoding" a word. Since I had no idea what that meant, I began to look into it and discovered Flesh's books. It still makes me furious to think how the education establishment keep using a method that they knew was not working, just because PhDs and textbook companies had staked their reputations and careers on it!

[BlatherNaut]

“I like the way you explain dyslexia.
I’ve had it all my life, I can read in mirror image as easily as normal reading.”

Same here. My family is rife with this type of neurological wiring, and visual strengths seem to exist at the expense of linguistic ones. Math/engineering are where our strengths lie. Two of my kids are also diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder, a common underlying condition of dyslexia (identified and measured via responses to machine stimuli) but they’ve learned to adapt and succeed despite this. Another taught himself to read and write entirely backward before he learned how to do it forward (reminiscent of da Vinci’s notebooks).

There’s no doubt it’s not exactly typical, but I certainly don’t view it as a weakness.

[Mad Dawg]

There you go!

There are two questions:

(1) Does the neurological tic or cluster of tics which are loosely called dyslexia exist?

(2) Is”dyslexia” misdiagnosed, often to provide cover for bad pedagogy?

[MortMan]

Then we are in violent agreement, my FRiend.

My point is that the disability may be cured via arming the individual with the methods he or she needs to properly decode. To help the individual who suffers from dyslexia, you address the root issue, and don’t allow the issue to become an excuse.

BTW - I work with a dyslexic in a very reading-oriented field. He has adapted to the difficulty of reading, and is an effective document reviewer. That is the outcome I am inclined to agitate for.