What the experts never told you about preventing dyslexia

Saving Jack and Jill – Learning Disabilities

What the experts never told you about preventing dyslexia

                In medicine, the Chinese focus on prevention while westerners focus on treatment. Unfortunately, we focus on learning problems much the same way. Prevention of most learning disabilities is possible and so much more effective than treatment after the fact.

I hate to admit that one of the most embarrassing times in my life was when the elementary school notified me that my 4^th-grade son needed to stay after school twice a week for remedial reading class. How could I, the early-reading and gifted-child expert, have a son who couldn’t read on grade level? He was struggling with comprehension and spelling. What a wake-up call for me! I had been too busy with my career to notice my son’s lapse.

                After a couple of months of school tutoring, he hadn’t improved much in reading comprehension, so I pulled him out of the after-school classes and fixed it at home. My son didn’t really have a learning disability; what he had was perfectionism and impatience.

He was too impatient to take the time to sound out big words, then upset if he didn’t get them right the first time. The teacher’s “help”, as is often the case, was to tell him to guess at the word based on context. What a confusing, horrible method, yet pretty universal.

                So what was the fix? I realized that too much sight-reading at school had trumped the preschool phonics lessons I had given him years ago at home.  I simply started having my son read chapter books (no pictures) out loud to me. We started with an Animorphs series book, which has a higher vocabulary.

When he came upon an unknown word, I had him take the time to break it up into smaller syllables and sound out each separately, then string them together. If he still didn’t recognize the word, we discussed its meaning. In only a couple of sessions, my son started choosing chapter books from the library and reading all by himself at home. His spelling also began to improve.

                We are still working on his writing because he doesn’t have the patience to get his ideas down on paper, easily. But he will. One thing I noticed, that the schools missed, is that my son has a disconnect somewhere in his brain between having a thought and writing it down.

He could tell me about his last-night’s dream, but he couldn’t write it down as a story for me. Something got lost in translation. The schools thought he was just lazy or stubborn. His IQ is above average, so no one realized he has a problem.

                Thank goodness for “mothers’ intuition.” I got out my Flip® video camera and taped my son while he told me about his dreams. Then we played the video on our TV. My son watched and listened to himself tell the story, sentence by sentence. I would pause the video after each sentence and have him write it down. It worked really well! I suppose a tape recorder might help, too, if no video is available.

                Recording my son and re-playing it, helped make a connection in his brain for him to get his ideas down on paper. Basically, we slowed down the thought-process for him, and bypassed the frustration of forgetting things before getting them translated through his hand onto the paper. We could re-play anything he missed. It worked well, and he began to feel successful with writing.

                Another frustration for my son was that he is a slow, tedious writer. He is a perfectionist and is too careful with forming his letters. The video allowed him to write at his pace without losing the thoughts in his head. It also kept him more focused because we could re-play parts if he was distracted.

In the past, the slow act of writing could itself be a distraction for him, then a frustration with a lost thought. In school he would often crumple up his papers and quit. Teachers assumed he was having a “bipolar moment” and missed the word-disconnect between his ears, eyes, brain, and hands. We are teaching him cursive writing to overcome this.

                What parents do now may determine if their child’s learning disability is a stumbling block or a stepping stone. My son would have never thought of a solution on his own, which is why direct-instruction from adults is so important (and why some of the “unschooling” movement’s ideas don’t sit well with me – more in Vol. 6 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!).

For a child, twenty minutes with a parent can mean more in cognitive improvement than six hours with a teacher, as shown by Hartman Rector, Jr. (Vol. 11), and others. Parents need to be involved, whether their children attend public, private, or home school.

                We will discuss the paradox of resource class later in Vol. 9 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! In short, sight-reading and public school remediation classes often destroy self-esteem without much progress. Kids don’t let each other be too smart or too stupid without teasing.

And commercial remediation such as Kumon® or Sylvan® can cost parents an arm & a leg. Why should they have to pay to fix what schools do to their children? They already paid their school taxes!

As researcher Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld says, “Dyslexia can be artificially induced in school (by sight-reading),” and “Dyslexia: the disease you get in school.”

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