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 ...
So General Patton was stupid......
and I think Churchill was too...
you can tell them, ok.
IF this is true, then one would assume that dyslexia could be corrected through special teaching methods.
Dyslexics Untie!
Thank Dog I’m not dyslexic.
I thought Nelson Rockefeller was dyslexic. He may have been stupid (but I doubt it) but he wasn’t middle class.
“So General Patton was stupid......
and I think Churchill was too...
you can tell them, ok.”
I think the subtext of this article is referring to Bush...
There are times when I do misread things. See words that are not there.
I’m not dyslexic, I just can’t lleps.
It’s terrible having dyslexia. Take it from someone who accidentally sold their soul to Santa.
DITTO!
It’s a bunch of bunk for others to feed off of via “special programs” at YOUR expense. It’s an industry designed to siphon money off STUPID PEOPLE!
Must be a lib thing then...everything is about Bush....
But didnt Bush get better grades than Algore?
Maybe Algore is a Moron...
Dyslexia, for one thing, is often linked with the style of reading instruction. Phonics is a good way to teach people to see and understand each part of the word. Rates of dyslexia go down. But Whole Language teaches people to swallow the shape of the word and then pronounce it. Rates of Dyslexia go up.
According to Professor Elliott, dyslexic university students are gaining an unfair advantage by getting extra time for their studies and many are getting diagnosed simply to get up to £10,000 worth of equipment including laptops and extra books.
University lecturers have complained about students “milking the system” by pretending they have the condition.
One lecturer who teaches in the South-East said:
“On one degree course I teach, about one quarter of the students get help with their coursework and other assistance because they have this label. You become quite cynical.”
The number of students who receive disability allowances at university has risen to a record 35,500 at a cost of £78.4million a year.
> 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.
Dyslexia is very much a real phenomenon, as is ADHD. Neither is a handicap, as both my brother and I can attest. They have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence or achievement potential. They are merely inconvenient for standard teaching methodologies.
*DieHard*
In this country, college kids will often seek a ADD or ADHD diagnosis so they can be prescribed Ritalin...which they then sell to the other college students. It’s evidently a great for “cramming” for exams, etc.
> IF this is true, then one would assume that dyslexia could be corrected through special teaching methods.
It can.
LOL...
Whatever happened to that perfect word, “underachiever”?
If I hadn’t been slapped with that in the third grade, I’d probably still be slaking off.
The reseracher has no cule about dylsexics.
Great men are not great because of the things that are easy for them, but for the things which are hard for them that they do anyway.
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.
Did Patton or Churchill ever claim to have dyslexia or any disability?
The Churchill Centre says:
“In his autobiography he played up his low grades at Harrow, undoubtedly to convince readers, and possibly himself, how much he had overcome; but in this he exaggerated.”
Everyone wants to believe that he has overcome great odds!
My son gets special, tax payer paid education for this impairmant. Thanks for your contribution.
When I was in kindergarten I had to go to a school tutor because I sometimes would read or write the letters of words in the wrong sequence. For example Was would become saw. It was never a big deal. Of course that was before they had a fancy name for my problem and realized they could milk federal dollars for it. Lots of federal dollars every exceptional student means an increase in the money allocated for FTE.
Nice compassion. Sorry to burst your superiority bubble, but such neurological symptoms as dyslexia have been tied to underlying chronic Lyme disease, and go away when the Lyme is treated.
“It’s about time someone takes on the numerous “victimization” titles like ADD, ADHD, Dyslexia and on and on and on so commonly used today.”
Wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard some parent decry, “He’s got ADD!”. Everytime the kid gets in trouble or fails, that’s the excuse these days. Sad, really.
Poor parent, front and center, right here.
My DH, SIL and FIL are dyslexic. So is my oldest kid. This was not a casual label that we slapped on my kid to get her special treatment in school. She had that tendency; her kindegarten and first grade teachers were inexperienced; and the school uses a hashed up method of teaching reading. She struggled until 3rd grade until her teacher — an older lady who used a different teaching method — tried to pick up the pieces. DD is now in the top reading group in her class and over the school year came in 3rd out of her whole grade for readign achievement.
The emotional fall-out of being considered “learning disabled” or “special ed” for an intelligent child is not worth any little breaks she might get.
She wants to be an astronaut and be one of the first settlers on the noom or sraM
Some may game the system as victims. However, dyslexia is real. While in law school, I clerked for a brilliant attorney who was dyslexic. He had an assistant who read to him and proofread what he wrote. In the courtroom, he usually won.
For legitimate treatment of dyslexia and related disorders, check out the work done by the Scottish Rite. The largest provider of services to dyslexics in the U.S., the Scottish Rite does so whether or not a family can afford to pay. A very worthwhile cause.
Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic with insommnia?
He stayed up all night wondering about the existence of dog.
Having said that, however, my husband, we think (who is now in his 50's and wasn't tested for this back when) struggled with dyslexia in school, but he's far from stupid. He's creative, resourceful, can figure out how to do almost anything.
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