Thursday, October 3, 2024

The whole universe conspires for you to achieve it.

 


Yesterday, 2.10.24,  LinkedIn prompted me to request a connection with Dr. Steve Truch.

Sometimes, I request for connections but I seldom read the profile of the members I request connections.

This was an exception and I viewed his profile and was excited to read the videos listed on his profile.

I have said several times that when you want something, the whole universe conspires for you to achieve it.

There are many things that I have done in my life where Mother Nature provided the information I required. Let me share just 3 of many.

 

i.                    I worked in an office as the finance manager. We were making huge losses in the construction of houses. One day, at a board meeting I told the members that we were taking too long – more than 2 years - to construct the houses. We had 3 phases and the general manager, a builder from Australia took more than 2 years per phase in the first two phases. After the meeting, the MD came to my room and asked me how long I thought it should take. I told him it should not take more than 10 months. He asked me if I could do it and I said yes. I had never constructed or managed any building in my life. Since taking the assignment my mind was constantly working on completing more than 100 houses in 10 months. Almost every morning while still in the twilight zone, I would come up with ideas. To cut the story short, I completed the houses in 10 months. Here are letters from my boss who is now in Brisbane, Australia. LINK

ii.                  Since 2004 I kept thinking of reasons why many intelligent kids could not read in English but could read in Malay and Pinyin. Again, Mother Nature provided answers during the Twilight Zones. The ideas in my book are all from within and no one has challenged my ideas.

iii.               What are the odds of me getting Dr. David Kilpatrick, who never seems to have time, to respond to my emails and then getting me to proofread his books? What are the chances of Dr. Joe Torgesen replying to my emails and answering my questions? Why would Dr. Richard Selznick agree to have email interviews with me? These are only a few of the experts I had discussed with.

I am saying the above as this is what Steve said in his videos: ‘I can remember pulling a journal out just a journal called nature it was just you know I just picked it out and then I just turned the page open and there was this study…’

How did that ‘just’ happen? Steve may have some other explanation but it has to be the universe conspiring to provide him what he was looking for.

You may listen to Steve’s videos. LINK

The videos are from January 2021. I have copied some extracts below.

Dr. Steve Truch’s Research​

Here is one of the salient points:

I came across a well-done study about categorizing sounds and learning to read. The authors found a causal connection that demonstrated that children who had difficulty categorizing sounds in Kindergarten would later develop problems in reading and spelling.

My comment:

Many studies have said the same thing and even after so many studies, we have Ph.Ds who are unaware of this first step to getting kids to decode. This is exactly what I have been shouting at the top of my voice since 2010 when I started my blog posts.

This was what many experts said in the Children of the Code research. 

Why are many of these research reports suppressed?

Dr. Steve Truch, Ph.D (Learning Psychology)

Years ago, while doing research for a book I was writing, I came across a well-done study about categorizing sounds and learning to read. The authors found a causal connection that demonstrated that children who had difficulty categorizing sounds in Kindergarten would later develop problems in reading and spelling. The study made me think there must be a way to treat these difficulties. I talk about categorizing sounds, phonological processing/phonemic processing and that study here:

The following is from Minute 1:

At the time and I was on I think the fourth floor of the university library, and in those days we didn't have the internet to speak of so I had to go to the actual journals and I can remember pulling a journal out just a journal called nature it was just you know I just picked it out and then I just turned the page open and there was this study it was called categorizing sounds and learning to read a causal connection this was a very well done Results study it was a double blind you know a gold standard research and so the results were very impressive so they were able to demonstrate that children who had difficulty in kindergarten with this process that they called categorizing sounds would later develop problems in reading and spelling but not math so it didn't have any influence on mathematical calculations so that's the phenomenon that as a school psychologist I was seeing all the time so this categorizing sound what Terminology exactly was that well I started to trace more studies that these two researchers from England had done and came across a terminology change so people started to call it phonological processing phonemic processing and like that…

Minute 2.30 The impressive point was that every study said the same thing. Now that just was unheard of you know because somebody finds something and then the next research is no it doesn't work like that you know so our results don't support that so this was very supportive and it was also cross-cultural so it was happening in more than just England it was happening in Australia and some of the other countries. That got me extremely excited so then of course, I said well okay so if this is a cause are there ways to treat it; are there ways to teach it?

2nd video

From minute 44 there's still that guidance that's lacking and I'm not faulting the teachers the guidance has to come from what they know about how to teach reading and they're not taught how the process works you know there are 30 to 40 years of incredible research sitting in the research stacks the teacher training institutions by and large ignore it or don't agree.

From minute 1.11 are you kidding me you know this for the first time you have clear-cut research telling you what is going wrong and what to do about it and study after study classroom based individually based small group based all that kind of stuff showing us that if you follow these principles you get far better results than if you don't for the kids who struggle it's almost guaranteed that anything that the system does by and large not.

My note: Who are the people suppressing all these research reports from getting into the hands of teacher training staff?

No comments: