I stopped posting on my blog in 2012, feeling I was going nowhere. To make matters worse, I lost my blog title and could not renew my weblog. My earlier site was at www.parentingdyslexia.com.
In 2015, another student was referred to me, and I wanted to continue with my blog. To my shock, I discovered that I had lost my blog name — someone else had taken it over. Thankfully, my son managed to retrieve the old posts, and we opened a new account under dyslexiafriend.com, where I reposted the earlier articles from parentingdyslexia.com.
Since 2011, I have often wondered why so many PhDs and researchers blocked me. Was it ego? Was it the reluctance to admit that what they had been saying for decades might not be true? Or perhaps the fear of undermining their own reputations and careers built on shaky foundations? Sometimes I even ask myself whether there is a master puppeteer pulling the strings. Surely these academics cannot be so naïve as to miss the obvious: many children shut down from learning to read because of confusion created by teaching letter sounds with extraneous sounds.
Continuing from my post yesterday at Silenced for Asking Why Intelligent Kids Fail to Read, let us examine why I get blocked, why my posts are deleted, and why emails and comments go unanswered.
My Exchange with Dr. Reid Lyon
In 2015, I eagerly wrote to Dr. Reid Lyon (born 1949), a neuroscientist specializing in learning disorders and a prominent researcher on the science of reading. He was actively involved in Children of the Code. These are some of his words:
Reid Lyon
“All of these kids that I had tried to teach and who didn’t do well had by nine years of age already begun to avoid the reading process because they couldn’t do it. So, my third question was, how can we prevent it? How can we prevent reading failure from ever raising its ugly and deleterious face with these kids? How can we identify kids at risk before they ever get to school, figure out what to do and bring them right up to snuff as they come into first grade?”
“My own research program began back in the mid-70’s with the first two questions: 1) What does it take to learn to read? 2) What goes wrong when you don’t? Some of that work was informative, much of it was not. But I began to work with other groups of scientists who were studying these same questions, and along the way as my career moved forward, I was probably one of the few people in the country who had a specialization in neurobiology and developmental neuroscience and in education, if I can call the latter a specialization”.
“I noticed a couple of things: How reading or the lack of reading development hurt them. I could see even with the nine-year-olds that when they were unable to read it seemed to me that, even if I had a magic bullet, they didn’t even want to try it. They had already started to avoid print and a lot of these kids would become active and look, in a sense, different and possibly would have been diagnosed as ADD. But their attentional difficulties were just simple avoidance. They would become distractable and fidgety when they had to read. Why? They wanted to get out of it. So, that affected me, both in my head and in my heart, to watch these tender kids who have to perform in the most visible academic thing called reading and not be able to do it”.
I wrote several emails to him and finally got a reply — not from him, but from his wife.
The Reply
From: Diane Lyon <dianellyon@gmail.com>
To: luqman michel <luqmanm2002@yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, 10 August 2015, 21:21
Subject: Re: Our best to you!
Dear LUQMAN MICHEL,
We received your emails. We are on travel and cannot commit the time needed at this time to a thorough response. As you can imagine we receive hundreds, if not thousands, of emails and feel it only fair to respond thoughtfully, when time allows.
It is smart of you to reach out to many researchers for feedback, e.g. Sharon Vaughn, G.R. Lyon ....and others like:
Our Nations Reading Panel: http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/documents/report.pdf
The National Right to Read: http://www.nrrf.org/
Denise Eide's YouTube presentation: https://www.logicofenglish.com/books/uncovering-the-logic-of-english
Literate Nation: http://literatenation.org/
The Florida Center for Reading Research: http://www.fcrr.org/
Oregon Center: http://reading.uoregon.edu/
National Institutes for Reading and Reading Disorders: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/reading/Pages/default.aspx
https://www.smu.edu/Simmons/AboutUs/Directory/TeachingLearning/Mathes
Your community is blessed to have someone like you helping children develop the skills needed to be the best they can possibly be!!!!
We wish you the best in your quest,
Diane and Reid Lyon
Left with More Questions
This polite but evasive reply left me with more questions than answers. Why do researchers who acknowledge the problem — children shutting down from reading — refuse to engage with someone who has practical evidence from teaching over 80 children? Why do they point me to institutions and reports instead of addressing the core issue: wrong teaching methods that confuse children?
Is it fear of admitting that decades of research overlooked something so basic? Is it professional pride, or the politics of academia? Or is there indeed a larger system at play, where narratives are controlled and dissenting voices are silenced?
Whatever the reason, the result is the same: children continue to suffer, parents remain confused, and voices like mine are blocked, ignored, or deleted.
This post is the first in a series examining my exchanges with PhDs and researchers who, despite their knowledge, refused to engage with the most fundamental question: Why do intelligent children shut down from learning to read?
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