I listened to a YouTube video this morning featuring MIT Professor Catherine Drennan discussing her dyslexia and its advantages. Here are extracts from the video along with my comments. LINK
Catherine Drennan:
"I learned to read through the shapes of words. You see things differently when you are dyslexic, and that can be useful in certain areas. This ability to visualize and see shapes and patterns is true."
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?
Here is a comment on my post and my response.
Phillip Chipping
The Science of Reading body of science dates back 50 years with thousands of studies/researchers and millions of participants. The National Reading Panel's 2000 report showed that instruction that taught phonics made greater progress than instruction that did not focus on phonics. I'm not saying there are no other ways to teach and other ways to improve, but I know dozens of dyslexic tutors and every one of them has seen immediate and drastic improvement in children's reading ability when the method of instruction was changed to an explicit, structured-literacy, phonics-based approach. In other words, this method has been duplicated by thousands of teachers across the world and had immediate and powerful results in children's lives who otherwise could not read. The same results as what you're telling us you have with your method. Perhaps one of the reasons it's not "working" here is because most of the children who need it aren't getting one-on-one instruction. Maybe that's what makes the biggest difference.
For ‘The Atlantic's’ December issue cover story, contributing writer David Brooks argues that the nation's top schools are trapped in an outdated meritocracy system that needs to be redefined. LINK
My thoughts:
I believe David Brooks is missing the mark, yet this will be the cover story for The Atlantic’s December issue. After listening to his commentary, I have several observations:
David’s commentary:
James Cannon didn't have the right definition of human ability. For him, it was all IQ and IQ is important if you want to be an astrophysicist, it is probably important to have a high IQ but other things are more important, being curious, having a passionate drive, being a good team member, agility, knowing how to move in life so it's you're graceful toward other people. All these traits which were hard to measure got lopped off and so we not only created these Elites, this inherited cast system but it's not that competent because it doesn't select based on the real skills in society.
The following is extracted from this website with my thoughts.
By 62, David Chalk had seen it all. While David conquered the world, he never managed to achieve the only thing he always had truly wanted, To Read Fluently.
He was a popular media personality, had built his business empire, made millions, was awarded a doctorate in technology by the University of the Fraser Valley for holding the world's only true patent in cyber security and was described as having a brilliantly gifted mind.
My thoughts:
I have repeatedly said that my so-called dyslexic students are smart kids. They have done exceptionally well in schools and Universities.
Here is a
recent interview with Tom Cruise where he says that dyslexia is just a label. LINK.
The part about Dyslexia starts at minute 6.42.
Interviewer: It is interesting too that you had this problem with dyslexia when you were a child. How bad was that?
Tom Cruise: It was fascinating. Something that they wanted to put me on medication when I was young. My mother said no. Unfortunately, now in the US, they can tell you not to go to school unless you are medicated. I was fortunate that I didn’t and I did everything that I could and then when I became a Scientologist there was a study technology that Ron Hubbard developed and I started applying that and I realized that it (dyslexia) is just a label – dyslexia, attention deficit disorder- there is no science behind these things whatsoever.
Interviewer: Is it curable?
Tom Cruise: Yes, what it is, is that it is just knowing the proper tools to educate yourself.
Back in 2010 after teaching so-called dyslexic kids for 6 years I was convinced that all my approximately 20 students whom I taught during the 6 years were shut-down kids who had disengaged from learning to read due to confusion.
At that time the existing theory that had existed for more than 35 years was that kids could not read due to phonological awareness deficit.
I disagreed with that theory and wrote over 100 articles/comments that disagreed with it until it was debunked in 2017. You may read some of my articles/comments in 2010 here. LINK
Dyslexia is a learning disorder that manifests itself as a difficulty with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5% to 17% of the U.S. population.
Dyslexia is thought to be the result of neurological defect, and though not an intellectual disability, it is variously considered a learning disability, a language disability, and a reading disability, among others. Dyslexia is diagnosed in people of all levels of intelligence.
A STUDY of dyslexic adults has shown that simplifying English spellings could be one way to help sufferers.
It also confirmed that the cause of the reading difficulty was a brain disorder. Experiments show for the first time that the neurological cause of dyslexia is the same in sufferers across Europe. But the disorder appears to be twice as common in the U.S. and England as in Italy/Spain because English has a more complex writing system, or orthography, than Italian/Spanish, which are more phonetic.
French, English, Spanish and Italian adult dyslexics all did equally poorly in tests that involved short-term memory, whereas Italian/Spanish dyslexics did better in reading tests.
The head of the team, Prof Eraldo Paulesu, of the University of Milan Bicocca and the Institute San Raffale, said: "There is an argument for reforming complex orthographies to improve literacy problems in these languages. English dyslexics would have an easier life if their writing system was more regular, with more unique correspondences between sounds and print."
