When your son can’t read
-
- May
- 15
My oldest son, a junior in high school, is checking out college options these days. Actually his parents are. He is not particularly interested in reading college brochures. He can read, though. That seems unremarkable, but there was a time when we wondered if he ever would read. He had trouble reading in first grade, the second grade and the third grade, when we finally had him evaluated.
I brought him to a town house down the block from Central Park for what’s called a psycho-educational evaluation – a battery of tests that required two visits to complete. On the third visit, my wife and I got the diagnosis: Our son had dyslexia. Now dyslexia is not the worst thing to be diagnosed with. It certainly beats cancer and a whole list of other ailments. But for parents who make their living by reading and writing, it was disconcerting.
The specialist went down a list of scary-sounding findings that are common to dyslexia: auditory attention and processing difficulties; bad rote memory, and poor sequencing skills. The evaluation contained some good things, such as creativity and excellent visual-motor coordination, but I already knew that from living with my son for nearly nine years. The specialist said my son might need to go to a special school and in any case needed a multi-sensory approach to learning.
I asked hopefully if my son had a border-line case of dyslexia. She said no. I felt pretty bad when we left her office.
As we soon learned, dyslexia is an odd condition. All sorts of brilliant, creative people such as da Vinci, Edison and Einstein had dyslexia. Dyslexia is not reading words backwards, though that sometimes happens. People with dyslexia have trouble processing written words. Their brains seem to be wired a little differently. The same unusual brain connections that make reading difficult seem to be responsible for making many of these folks creative. A book called “The Gift of Dyslexia� published several years ago explored this condition.
Our oldest son certainly seemed to be creative. He amazed us with his drawing and was constantly building toys out of scraps from around the house. But then again, we are his parents and parents are supposed to be amazed by their offspring.
After we assured my son that he was OK – and that he had something in common with some very smart people – we got in touch with “The International Dyslexia Associationâ€?. From there we found a good tutor. I wish I could say it was a smooth, straight road. It wasn’t, but we managed.
(My family’s encounters with dyslexia will appear in Parents’ Place periodically)
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:28 pm by Len Maniace.
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Let him make the choice of college. i have a few friends that are dyslexic,. the big issue sometimes is numbers.
but yeah there are different forms.
glad he’s been able to compensate.
I recently learned that dyslexia and other conditions like ADD are related to neurological developmental issues. These can be successfully addressed with various neurofeedback approaches, of which LENS neurofeedback appears to one of the faster acting modalities. My son has experienced major improvements using the technique and his academic experience has really smoothed out.
i am sorry ADD and ADHD is just a label. some kids do have “issues” but if harnessed the so called ADD ADHD can make someone very creative and productive. Its all about controlling the flood of energy and emotions, albeit its not easy… but once you get a handle on it… you find you can do many things…
I hate labels…and Psychiatrists etc love to label and medicate…. even when there’s no need for it…
i believe in medication but only when its absoultely necessary..
You may be interested to know that ‘dyslexia’ does not exist in several European countries e.g Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain… The amount of ‘dyslexia’ in a country depends on two factors – the opaqueness of the spelling code and the method used to teach reading in that country. Furthermore, there is no way of differentiating dyslexics from other poor readers. What was for a great length of time the most respected and used definition of dyslexia (the ‘IQ discrepancy’ definition where reading age was considerably lower than IQ would predict) was discredited a long time ago. No credible definition, or way of sorting ‘dyslexics’ out from a group of poor readers, has appeared to take its place.
Have a look at my non-commercial website for EVIDENCE-based facts about dyslexia and how to teach reading.
http://www.dyslexics.org.uk
There was a little email spam that would go out talking about how our brains reoder words. and i you get the first and last letter of the word correct and invert other letters in between your barin fixes it.
quite interesting..
Susan in UK and everyone,
I’ve heard that dyslexia is much less common in Italy, Spain etc. What is your source for that? I’d like to know more. I guess that’s because those other languages are more predictable in their sounds that English. .
I’ve only briefly looked at your system for working with dyslexics and it seems somewhat similar with the Orton-Gillingham approach and that of its offspring. My kids learned to read this way. Though it wasn’t easy, it did seem to work. What’s your take on that?
Steve C the ‘Cambridge Research says…’ was an internet spoof
http://www.illinoisloop.org/phonicsfraud.html
Len, Wimmer(1993) was the researcher who first discovered that Austrian children have no ‘dyslexia’. ‘In countries with a straightforward alphabet writing system, where each sound is represented by only one symbol, learning to ‘crack the code’ takes about twelve weeks for all children’ (McGuinness. Growing a reader from birth p9) ’(C)hildren from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year’(Seymour/Aro/Erskine)
The Orton-Gillingham approach was for many years the best/only thing available to help children, damaged by whole-language, to read, BUT it isn’t that good in comparison to today’s genuine synthetic/linguistic phonic programmes.
I’m a remedial reading tutor and can teach any ‘dyslexic’ person to read within 15-25 hours of 1-1 sessions; no rules, no memorising words and it’s multi-sensory and fun!
There is an American programme that is similar to the one I use:
http://www.abcdrp.com/ The ABeCeDarian linguistic phonic programme
HTH.
I see many children like the boy mentioned above and we simply teach them to visualise, then visualise words or numbers (for maths). This sounds much too easy for most people and it is; it is “fast, fun, effective and . . .
well truly fantastic. The skills I learned have
transformed my child’s world of words.”
We have seen children get over dyslexia in a couple of hours so many times and are now trying to get schools to understand the power of visualisation. After all it is the way all the best spellers spell quite naturally; and it can be taught to others very quickly. The Book, Seeing Spells Achieving, documents exactly how to teach this skill, and in the summer of 2007, you will see mini-workshops popping up in all the large Borders stores in the UK.
There are also half day training session run for those who want to teach others
The very useful web-site is www.seeingspellsachieving.com
Post above – Ha
One for my Room 101 webpage I think!
http://www.aowm73.dsl.pipex.com/dyslexics/resources_and_further_20.htm
If you want something that really works because it’s based on empirical evidence, try this:
Stairway to Reading: FREE, online, remedial tutoring programme (Canadian) www.societyforqualityeducation.org/stairway.html
A one-on-one remedial reading program for students of any age who have already received some reading instruction but who are struggling with reading.
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