For many bright, logical children—especially those labeled dyslexic—learning to read English can trigger a sudden mental shutdown. They sit in class, eyes open, but their minds check out. They hear the teacher but stop listening. What was once eager curiosity turns into blank resistance. This disengagement isn't laziness, defiance, or low intelligence. It's a logical mind protecting itself from what it perceives as nonsense.
I’ve seen it countless times in my work with ‘dyslexic’ students: the moment when a child is present in body but absent in mind. They hear the words, but they’re not really listening. They’re not processing. Their mind has quietly “switched off.”
And truth be told, this isn’t unique to dyslexia. It’s something all of us experience in everyday life.
Evening edition
I have so many articles on tow. I thought of posting these as a different set.
It's been over eight years since I first emailed Robert Pondiscio in July 2017, sparked by his review of Mark Seidenberg's Language at the Speed of Sight in Education Next. Back then, I was deep into my self-driven research on why certain kids—smart, multilingual, able to read in Malay and romanized Mandarin—shut down when it came to English. I challenged him on the flaws in teacher training, the wrong way sounds are taught (that dreaded "cuh-ah-tuh" blending), and how confusion leads to disengagement. He responded briefly, promised to watch my example videos (now long deleted from YouTube), but then... silence. No follow-up, despite his book-writing busyness.
When a child’s mind starts to develop avoidance of confusion then that avoidance can spill out to the confusion that is involved to learning about other things and it is this – this core deep structure of readings influence, both cognitive, linguistic, automatic processing level and at the emotional avoidance level why reading has a powerful core relation ….
In other words, we've let the kids tell us what we were doing wrong… The only one that didn't totally strike out was ITA, which was sort of like an adaptation of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
As a result of the well-documented confirmation bias, we tend to undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. We filter out inconvenient truths and arguments on the opposing side. As a result, our opinions solidify, and it becomes increasingly harder to disrupt established patterns of thinking.
Author: “However, some things are beyond a teacher’s control.You have no control over: Kids who have emotional or mental disabilities and have not been diagnosed yet.”
The following is part of a comment on LinkedIn in a forum I am participating in.
"I`m told that to be polite is important but when it harms innocent children and puts their teachers into further instructional confusion-it irritates me to no end......there is barely a whimper of "how to teach reading" in the early grades. The factory of labeling the victim is still in place, I think 99% of the problems are dysteachia brought on by outdated teacher licensing institutions!" (Jo-Anne Gross)
Since 2010 I have been saying that the majority of kids leaving school as illiterates are casualties of teaching. It starts in kindergarten where letter sounds/phonemes are taught wrongly.
