We often hear that teaching a child to read is simple. In theory, it is: you teach them the sounds the letters make, and then you show them how to blend those sounds together to form a word.
Simple, right? But as any parent or educator of a dyslexic child knows, simple is not the same as easy.
it has a "shut-off device" that rejects new ideas
once a primary belief or ideology gets in.
Between 4–7 September 2026, I had a series of exchanges on LinkedIn with Dr. Karen Faulds, an educational consultant and assessor in the UK. I am preserving the discussion here for posterity because it illustrates a recurring problem: when entrenched practices are defended despite stagnant outcomes.
75% of total views in January is from the US.
For a better view, click on the two images on this page.
From October to November, there were no less than
2,000 views per day from China. This was surprising as the Chinese from
Mainland China don’t have access to overseas blogs. Before that, I hardly had
any views from China. This could be because of my several posts on Pinyin taught
wrongly in China. You may read one of several of my posts here. LINK.
Since November 2024 I started tweeting incessantly in response to Tweets by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.
Advocates
for dyslexia persist in asserting that individuals with dyslexia face a
literacy issue. How stupid does one have to be to believe this nonsense?
Those who benefit from this narrative often block me on social media.
Consider this for a moment:
How did David Chalk manage to read in just 11 days at the age of 62?
Why was he unable to read until then?
What led David Corcoran and Tom Cruise to leave school as functional illiterates?
How did they learn to read after their formal education ended?
Yesterday, 9.12.21, I read a tweet by Reading Reform Foundation of UK as follows:
@RRForg
The British Dyslexia Association (BDA) is challenging the Department for Education's promotion of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) - the technical code knowledge and skills for word recognition of the Simple View of Reading. Dr Marlynne Grant responds: http://rrf.org.uk/2021/12/08/res
