Posted on 07/07/2011 12:15:33 PM PDT by 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 )
My opinion is that we have a growing trend of creating false medical conditions to relief people of personal responsibility and to many times help enrich different industries like the pharmaceutical industry. Bi-polar, ADD, dyslexia, etc….
Dislexics UNTIE!
Dear BDP,
OF.
Ironically, the real cure is to read every classical novel ever written and writing a lot of essays. Also, learning to type helps.
That's it. Pretty simple really; but, our society is f*ing lazy that we'd make excuses rather than push a child to break a easily fixed "disability".
Ironically, the real cure is to read every classical novel ever written and writing a lot of essays. Also, learning to type helps.
That's it. Pretty simple really; but, our society is f*ing lazy that we'd make excuses rather than push a child to break this easily fixed "disability".
Why is it so difficult for people to understand that the wonderfully complex human brain may well have several different modes/methods/manners of processing information such as the writen word. Dyslexia would them simply be the effect of someone who was taught to try and use the most prevalent method of decoding, which appears out of order to their brain?
Most dyslexics can read, but have to modify their approach to perceiving the written word to account for the difference in their decoding method.
I am not a doctor - but this seems awfully logical to me.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question the truth regarding the condition(s) called Dyslexia. Have we become so sanctimonious that we cannot bear to be questioned?
How about Autism, ADHD, etc.?
Just askin’.
Being dyslexic myself, I have to vehemently disagree with you that the “condition,” as you call it, doesn’t exist. I had it before it became popular to have it. So don’t paint with such a broad brush. My grandfather lived in the day when being left-handed was considered a rebellious act and he was punished unmercifully for it.
Ugh - I do NOT blame dyslexia for my typos - they are my own creations, and I am darned proud of them!!! ;-P
Dyslexia is provably real. The world has millions of such people. In some countries entire categories/classes of people simply can't learn to read. There's obviously a genetic complement.
I think you are referring to the disease where people imagine they have pink threads coming out through their skin. Now that's imaginary.
Agree 100% creating false medical conditions to relief people of personal responsibility.
Never trust somebody who pretends to have a title and wants to put his finger in your butt.
Doctors are over rated. Do you have opinions about things you don't do for a living?
Yes? Then your question is stupid.
Do you have any Master’s Degree???
Do you have a condition that causes you to repeat punctuation marks?
No,m then you don’t know what you are talking about.
Nom nom nom!
I have relatives who suffer these illnesses
I'm sure you have some very interesting relatives.
How come we never question physical diseases, like cancer etc???
Uneducated people question mental conditions because it’s inconvenient for them, and their love of money.
Again, if you have no Master’s Degree in this area, not a doctor or have never dealt with anyone with any of these conditions, you do not know what you are talking about.
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.
And the great thing about alzheimer's is that you get to meet new people every day.
I would suggest that dyslexia is both real and gradated. That is, it can not only be a matter of degree, with few children being profoundly dyslexic, and some being somewhat dyslexic, and most children being a little dyslexic at times, following the standard distribution (bell shaped) curve; but it can also be confused with other, non-clinical neural conditions.
To start with, dyslexia is probably noticed at first with spelling errors that aren’t spelling errors. That is, a student sees a word, say “cat”, and knows what a cat is and how to spell it, but writes it down as the word “act”. And not just with that one word, but consistently, if intermittently, with other words as well. This is a good indicator that only a small part of their brain is making a mistake.
But why should dyslexia be in the first place? Lots of possibilities. It could have some basis in how the eyes track in western writing, that is from left to right and top to bottom; instead of languages that read from top to bottom, like Chinese, or right to left, like Hebrew.
Or, also likely, it could be some lesser version of synesthesia, where the senses overlap producing odd sensory interpretations, like “seeing music as color”, and “hearing temperature”. Some 60 varieties of synesthesia are known, and there are likely more.
Unusual neurological conditions are in fact so widespread that it is difficult to describe how a “normal” brain behaves.
But the effects of more serious dyslexia appear to be common, typically a learned aversion to reading. Reading is difficult, and as such becomes unpleasant. Which could explain why there are so many non-reading, if literate, adults out there.
What seems to back up the related conditions situation is an experiment for a related reading problem called Irlen or Meares-Irlen Syndrome (aka scoptic sensitivity syndrome). Australian researchers discovered that children could quickly overcome this reading problem with just color tinted, clear glass lenses.
In function, Irlen might seem to be like dyslexia, but dyslexia doesn’t respond to this therapy at all, so is now a quick diagnosis. And to further indicate that dyslexia exists as a separate syndrome, there is no placebo effect with tinted lenses. That is, a dyslectic gets zero benefit, knows it, and says so.
There are several excellent sites for children with Auditory Processing Disorder , which is one of the leading causes of dyslexia, and while there is little doubt that the source is neurological , there are many coping trchniques that a person can adapt that allow them to function, learn, read and participate in society. But to suggest this is all the school's fault and if only they had taught phonics , or whatever else youre trying to peddle, thats nothing but simplifying BS. Im certainly no fan of the public schools , but that is Scientology-like nonsense.
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