MP says dyslexia is "cruel fictional disorder"

[luchog]

All I can say is that that the classrooms were oases of peace and quiet back then. No moralising,please do not jump to conclusions.

Amazing how quiet children will be if you beat them enough.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're actually learning anything. Except that acting out will get them beaten.

Wonder how many functional illiterates those "oases of peace and quiet" turned out.

 

[borealys]

I've been through the whole word vs. phonics debate a couple of times, and my own two cents are these-- most kids will figure it out regardless of which technique you use. Some kids will learn more easily with one style than the other, but in general, they'll spot the phonemic patterns without being explicitly taught in any real detail, and they'll learn to recognize whole words without having to sound them out every time. A lot of kids these days end up, one way or the other, exposed to both methods anyway. I don't see why the two approaches have to be mutually exclusive.

When a child has a learning disability, though, the program has to be tailored to their needs. If a child has trouble with the phonological processing aspect of reading, they need to be taught phonics, because they aren't going to get it on their own. If a child has difficulty perceiving the string of letters as a whole word, that's what they need help learning to do. It's a poor teacher who has only one teaching style in his or her arsenal.

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

This politician is severely mistaken. Dyslexia is a real disorder and there is plenty of solid evidence to attest to its existence.

That it's occassionally overdiagnosed or blamed for poor performance- arguably- doesn't make it "fictional", any more than fictional Nigerian millionaires spamming your inbox discredit the existence of actual millionaires in a country called Nigeria.

It existed in plenty of people in many different cultures before it became widely known; the idea that it's a modern Western idea is ridiculous.

 

[mender]

Amazing how quiet children will be if you beat them enough.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're actually learning anything. Except that acting out will get them beaten.

Wonder how many functional illiterates those "oases of peace and quiet" turned out.

Amazing how much children can learn when they're not running around screaming. Being loud and obnoxious doesn't help their education but it also interferes with all the others in the classroom.

How do I know? Other than personal experience in those bad old days of discipline, directed learning, marks based on what children knew and not how they "felt" about themselves, and kids being held back if they didn't learn the material necessary for the grade, I listen to my wife, an excellent teacher who is hampered by the pampering and pandering that goes on - and that's the parents - tell me about all the lost time in her classroom that is spent on things other than the actual education of the students.

What do you get when discipline is not allowed in schools and actual learning takes second (or third) place to feeling good about themselves? You get a generation of uneducated, undisciplined semi-adults that think that attitude is all they need to succeed in life. And they have plenty of attitude; unfortunately that doesn't make up for a major lack of aptitude.

The first half of the problem is a system that doesn't educate. The second half is a system that has no means of weeding out teachers who shouldn't be teaching.

My skeptic bells are ringing.
How did you measure her 'reading speed' before the 15 minute lesson? And after?
Did she read a passage aloud? Did she read a passage silently? Was it the same passage?
All sorts of variables come into play.

Had you been there in the car you would have witnessed it as well. It wasn't hard to tell the difference. She was (and is) a very bright girl that was struggling with reading. She didn't have a method to help her translate the letters on the page into words that she knew. Once I showed her a method for doing that, she started reading words rather than guessing at them. The time needed for her to read a passage went from "not able to", to sounding the words out correctly as she came to them and reading slowly but continuously. The actual speed difference was quite a bit more than double and the comprehension and appreciation level also. She also wasn't taught to write properly and was "special" until the next grade when that teacher "fixed" the problem that she was having. After that, she quickly went from the special ed status to being so far ahead that she was given other work during the writing sessions.

My alarm bells are ringing if you haven't been able to help children get over some of their learning barriers. I've taught in elementary and jr high as well as at the adult level and have seen this epiphany quite a lot (experienced it personally too on a number of different subjects). It is extremely rewarding to see the light go on and a problem area eliminated by the right teaching method.

 

[kerikiwi]

My alarm bells are ringing if you haven't been able to help children get over some of their learning barriers.

I am not sure what makes you say that, unless you think that my skepticism about 15 minute or overnight fixes means I have not been able to successfully teach.
You would be wrong. I have seen great progress in children but never in 15 minutes or overnight.

 

[bruto]

In my 35 years plus of teaching children to read better ('better' because there is no can read/can't read line) it is an exceedingly uncommon event. I would go so far as to say an unknown event.
I realise it was anecdotal. Which is why I treated it skeptically.

I'm sorry you've never seen it. Perhaps I should clarify, if it wasn't clear from my initial post (and then I'll stop derailing here from the dyslexia subject). For one thing, the school I was going to, in Detroit Michigan, was abysmal. Truly awful. I will not go into details but it was really more like a holding pen and hall-walking institution than a school, and other true stories I've told of my experiences there have been greeted with incredulity as well. Let's just say that if there is a nadir of education, this was pretty close if not right there. In addition, I was, believe it or not, a pretty smart and very verbal kid, and my parents were well educated, both at various times in their lives college teachers, and I learned early to speak well and had an unusual vocabulary which made me the butt of some teasing by contemporaries. I have always been more verbal than visual, a DOS rather than Windows sort. The teaching at the school was unsuccessful for nearly the whole class. Virtually nobody in my class learned to read well in first grade, and so much time was wasted on this and on other nonsense that there was NO math or arithmetic taught at all. Children depending only on that school for their education did not learn to add, or even to count, in first grade. My sister taught me arithmetic, or I'd have been woefully behind when we moved to another state the next year.

I mention all this because my situation was not that of someone reading badly who was being taught to read better. I was not reading at all. Perhaps I would have, eventually, but at that stage in my life, I lacked the visual organization to recognize whole words accurately. I could not tell the difference between "father" and "funny," because I had not been taught that a word was a phonic construction whose letters conveyed information. Even though I knew the alphabet by rote, reading was taught as if a word were a picture assembed out of letters arbitrarily chosen, and I could not make sense of it.

You may not, in your profession, be running into kids in my situation, because, as I say, I was not having trouble reading, reading slowly, or reading badly. I was unable to understand the rationale of words, and I could not read them at all. Imagine, if you will, a six year old being shown two random quadratic equations, and being told to memorize that one of them means "Spot" and the other means "funny." That's what I was seeing. When I was handed the phonic key, it really was revelatory, like a magic wand. In my case there really was a "read/no read" line. Once I had the key, I realized that I could read any word I could pronounce, and any word I could read I could spell, and any word I could spell I could write.

I don't remember exactly how long it took, but I know that between the beginning of Christmas vacation and Christmas of that year I learned to read, and it was an often-told story that my parents used the front page of the New York Times as a test for my ability to work out words I knew but had never read, as well as to guess at words I did not know at all. I remember being slightly embarrassed on Christmas, when I opened one of my presents, a pocket watch, and misread the word "dial" as "dail" and asked what is a "radium dail?" It was a family joke that I would misread "dial" but not "radium."

So much for my anecdotal detour. I've seen other kids learn to read all right with whole words, or with "key word" teaching, and am pushing no agenda. I was just not a whole word kind of kid, and luckier than most of my classmates in having good teachers at home.

 

[mender]

I am not sure what makes you say that, unless you think that my skepticism about 15 minute or overnight fixes means I have not been able to successfully teach.
You would be wrong. I have seen great progress in children but never in 15 minutes or overnight.

Well, it certainly was a dramatic change for my daughter. I hope that you get to experience a similar improvement with a student someday.

 

[Dancing David]

Amazing how much children can learn when they're not running around screaming. Being loud and obnoxious doesn't help their education but it also interferes with all the others in the classroom.

Well, here is the US classroom 'management' is a real issue.
First, off different kids come from different households, different expectations and norms.
Second, kids are exposed to different socialization experiences in preschool, day care, stay at home or in home day care settings.
Third, some kids seem to be less able to control themselves in a highly stuctured situation.

As a caveat, i was shocked when is started to work in schools, I am a child of the sixties and seventies. Even in a 'bad' school , the 'bad' kids showed more respect than they did today. Of course about a fifth of my graduating class dropped out senior years as well. And a 'race' riot occurred when i was in seventh grade.

Also the expectation for school nowadays are incredable. Kindergarten requires much more self control, social skills and academics skills then it used to. The day is very structured, expectations are high and you should already now your letters, numbers and be a pre-reader.

Now there are many factors that play into this and much of it has to do with self sorting by socio-economic status.

Expectations of behavior in house holds vary widely (especially for boys), in some house holds there is no 'horse play' allowed. In others shoving , hitting, taunting are the expectation. it really depends upon the people in the house and what they are like. Especially if mom is at work and older brothers and 'cousins' are around. These behaviors are a real draw back in a current kindergarten class.

Preschool, large well run day cares and some in home day care settings are very good at the social and academic skill building. Some are not, some in home day cares are basically a riot.

Academic pretraining varies a lot as well. In some houses the kids watch Sesame Street, they are read to and taught their letters, they are encouraged to do things like sit still for an hour while they watch a movie. In others they watch all sorts of TV (Jerry Springer), they are exposed to frequent swearing and confrontations and who knows what.

Then there are the kids who have none of the skills, they are not 'well socialized' they are used to being the little king or queen of the house, they have never seen a book, they have watched 'Training Day' and 'Scream' a number of times and they think that pro-wrestling in the height of culture. They are not used to having to be polite to others, get along with others, follow a schedule, they don't know their letters or numbers. And often they have different expectations than others. They can say cute little things like "Whats up nogger?", and "I'll beat you ass".

On top of this, there are the ones who really have emotional and other biological issues.

And now a days we don't just kick them out of schools and tell them not to come back. Which is better but frustrating. These issues pervade all of education.

 

[Old man]

I'm sorry you've never seen it...

So much for my anecdotal detour. I've seen other kids learn to read all right with whole words, or with "key word" teaching, and am pushing no agenda. I was just not a whole word kind of kid, and luckier than most of my classmates in having good teachers at home.

I concur. My own experience was similar ('though my school definitely was NOT abysmal). I have almost no memories of not being able to read. I was a 'sickly' child, and was pretty much taught to read by my paternal grandmother (who had taught in a one room rural school house before the war). She spent a lot of time reading to me, and I really wanted to read for myself. I'm sure she taught me phonetics, although I'm pretty much a sight reader now (my 'dyslexia' tends to involve mixing up syllables). I was certainly reading at the 6th grade level during grade two, and high school level in grade three. I can barely remember when words were just 'marks on paper', and I'm sure I went from that to 'reading' in just a month or two. Same thing with simple math. I remember my dad trying to teach my sister (she may have 9 or 10 at the time) how to make change. I couldn't believe that she didn't understand him. I would have been 5 or 6 at that time.

Oddly enough, although I attended all of the music classes that I was required too during grade school, written music is still 'just marks on paper', to me.

Also, I can't understand people when they spell out words. I can get most common three letter words, some four letter words, but beyond that, I'm pretty much a pre-schooler! I think that's partly because I learned to read so fast that nobody spelled words out for me! (I can't alphabetize, either )

 

[luchog]

Amazing how much children can learn when they're not running around screaming. Being loud and obnoxious doesn't help their education but it also interferes with all the others in the classroom.

There's a huge difference between children who are "running around screaming" because they are simply undisciplined, and children who act out of frustration because they're simply not able to sit still, cannot concentrate, and are unable to grasp the material at the same speed and using the same methods as the majority of the class. I had a brother who was learning-disabled, and for most of his life my parents to your attitude of "more beating"="more learning". It wasn't until a teacher finally recognized his disability and enabled him to obtain resources and techniques that he actually managed to start learning at a more normal rate. He still had difficulty, since my father still tended to deny the existence of learning disabilities less blatantly obvious than Down's syndrome; and remained of the "any failure to learn is a disciple problem best solved with corporal punishment", school.

What do you get when discipline is not allowed in schools and actual learning takes second (or third) place to feeling good about themselves? You get a generation of uneducated, undisciplined semi-adults that think that attitude is all they need to succeed in life. And they have plenty of attitude; unfortunately that doesn't make up for a major lack of aptitude.

And what you get when you deny the existence of subtle learning disabilities is a whole lot of functional illiterates.

 

[mender]

And what you get when you deny the existence of subtle learning disabilities is a whole lot of functional illiterates.

I feel badly for your sibling. I have also taught learning disabled, including Down's syndrome kids, and discipline also was an important part of the classroom experience. It doesn't sound like your father was using discipline in an appropriate manner, so I can understand your sensitivity to abuse of that.

Not having kids running around and screaming does help the rest of the class progress in their education, allowing a higher number of them to get good marks and not end up as disfunctional illiterates. I didn't say that it was a cure-all for learning disabilities. Separating the discipline problems from the learning problems helps both groups to higher levels of achievement.

Not having the ability to handle the behavioral problems and also not being able to weed out bad teachers are two major problems in today's school system. Nothing is perfect but it is frustrating to see pop psychology taking control of our schools.

 

[iiwo]

Some fascinating stories here!

I was also precocious as a reader. I remember distinctly asking my mother on a few occasions what sound various letters made--particularly similar ones such as "M" and "N". This was in kindergarten. We spent most, if not all of the fall learning the letters, one or two a week.

At Christmas I picked up a book and read it aloud. I mixed up a few words, but I had been able to make the connection between what I was learning (the letters) and what I was seeing (the words). As we had not yet had a reading lesson, my mother was rather astonished. I had to take the book to read to my teacher in January. It was a first grade level book (we still have it) and I did not read perfectly, a few similar words got swapped around and I'm sure I stumbled in a few places.

It was not 'fast', but it was reading. It just clicked. By second grade I was reading on a middle school level, and (US) high school by fourth grade. Some of the ideas were still beyond me, so I didn't read extensively at high levels until my philosophical understanding caught up. But it happened. By now my peers have mostly caught up, but I still score in the 90th percentile on reading speed and comprehension tests. (This is assuming the text is a subject I'm familiar with, or fictional).

I don't know how to explain it--it just sort of all came together. It was the same with reading sheet music. I was following along on a song sheet one day and "bam!" it hit me what the dots were for, after which it was a simple matter to assign each dot position to its key on the piano.

I am trying to come up with a good hypothesis of what makes some people faster learners (of reading) than others, but they are all rather weak so far. I suspect this is because there are so many variables involved: latent potential, teacher skill, amount of critical information made available to the student, method of presentation, ability of student to process information (the point of the OP) and more. Studies would be a real pain to construct, but might produce some interesting results.

ETA: I should change my claim of "no reading lessons". We may have learned things such as "cat", "dog", "boy", "mom", "dad" but nothing more than three or four letters. The book I read had shepherds, angels, donkeys and other things related to Christmas.

 

[Travis]

Both my father and I have the type of dyslexia where things get scrambled. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I accidentally wrote my name as "Tarvis" and not know it until someone points it out.

The idea that this is "fictional" greatly upsets me.

I should point out that I never had reading comprehension issues and was always competent in my writing outside of the letter transpositions. Now competency in my "thinking" is another issue entirely.

 

[Elaedith]

I teach four higher education students who grew up in Nigeria. Three of them have been diagnosed as dyslexic. All of them are literate.

 

[iiwo]

Both my father and I have the type of dyslexia...The idea that this is "fictional" greatly upsets me. ...

I'm not, but I couldn't agree more.

 

[Dancing David]

Not having the ability to handle the behavioral problems and also not being able to weed out bad teachers are two major problems in today's school system. Nothing is perfect but it is frustrating to see pop psychology taking control of our schools.

About as frustrating as reading unsupported assertions about 'pop psychology taking control of our schools' on an Internet forum.

 

[mender]

About as frustrating as reading unsupported assertions about 'pop psychology taking control of our schools' on an Internet forum.

Sorry about the lack of support for my assertion. That is only based on my observations as a concerned parent, the sibling of a pop psychologist, the years of watching how that sibling's behavior and achievements compared to my other sibling's more conventionally raised children, comparisons of my wife's teaching methods and success rate with educating students against the pop pyschology methods used by her peers, and of course my own interactions with students and their comments and concerns about getting an adequate education in today's school systems. Quite a few more things as well over quite a few years but I won't bore you by listing them as well.

Evidence like how our education system manages to prepare our children for real life and actual careers as compared to other countries is a matter of public record. I'm sure that you have been educated well enough to do some investigation of your own. A good story about the general state of things and possible future outcomes is "Higher Education" by Charles Sheffield.

Not sorry for having brought it to everyone's attention.

 

[Dancing David]

Sorry about the lack of support for my assertions. That is only based on my observations as a concerned parent, the sibling of a pop psychologist,

So you are afraid to use normative language as well, what degree and style psychology does your sibling have? If you can avoid continuing appeals to emotion.

the years of watching how that sibling's behavior and achievements compared to my other sibling's more conventionally raised children, comparisons of my wife's teaching methods and success rate with educating students against the pop pyschology methods used by her peers,

Cna you get any more vague, where , when , what methods? What are the demographics of the area?
I am sorry that your school ditrict doesn't use metrics. My schools district is trying very hard to go from 17% in NCLB for african americans to 48% is three years. The goal is 75% and more. What are the stats for your schools district?

What kind of pop psychology are you talking about, vague appeals to emotion do not a coherent argument make.
So far you just seem to be venting.

What methods are you saying do not work try naming them. Stop the appeals to emotion.

One teacher does not a nation wide trend indicate.

and of course my own interactions with students and their comments and concerns about getting an adequate education in today's school systems. Quite a few more things as well over quite a few years but I won't bore you by listing them as well.

Evidence like how our education system manages to prepare our children for real life and actual careers as compared to other countries is a matter of public record. I'm sure that you have been educated well enough to do some investigation of your own.

Not sorry for having brought it to everyone's attention.

So far just personal opinion , maybe based upon a limited sample and you expect me to do your research. Figures.
Try to dealing with the specifics and then we can talk. Keep vague to protect your notions or join the discussion.

What level of state funding do your schools receive, what level of local tax support do they have. What demographic mix do they have?

What students feel they won't get an adequate education? What is the demographic of them and the school district, what grade are they in?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Our son has been diagnosed with double-deficit dyslexia. He has the usual phonological deficit, which has been greatly helped in the past year and half by taking a full-time class in high school using the Wilson program. Basically, they start over teaching phonics from the beginning. His grade school did not teach phonics, but instead used the whole language program. Luke mixes mirror-image letters, has trouble with the number line (left/right), has to use a trick* to remember < vs. >, and so forth. He can't spell much at all, although that is also improving.

The other half of double-deficit dyslexia has to do with naming speed. If you show him arbitrary symbols, it takes him longer than most people to name the symbols.

~~ Paul

* < looks like L, for "less."

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

While driving to visit her grandparents, I stopped by the side of the road and started her on phonics. In fifteen minutes her reading speed doubled. End of her problem.

Could you perform that miracle on my son, please?

~~ Paul