One of the common misconceptions I have found in my many years of dealing with children and learning disabilities is that the term “dyslexia” is often thrown around with seeming gay abandon. Dyslexia is often used almost interchangeably with learning difficulties or learning disorders, and it seems that it is a label easily attached to any child struggling with learning to read, write or spell. Symptoms such as, “reading behind age norms,” “words apparently moving on the page,” and “writing letters backwards” are sited as key reasons for the diagnosis, and I believe that many a many a struggling child has been “given up on” by well meaning professionals because he or she is bearing that most provocative of labels. The really difficult thing is that once such a label is obtained, it is very hard to remove it!
Now, please don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that dyslexia does not exist. I have heard Professor John Stein speak on the neural basis for dyslexia, and agree with him on many, but not all points he makes. But I am not a research scientist. I am not running double blind studies. I, folks, work in the trenches, slogging away on a day to day basis with children who have learning disabilities. In practice, in real life and on a daily basis. I constantly have to deal with increasingly desperate parents who present in my office telling me that their child has been diagnosed as “borderline dyslexic.”
One of the greatest joys I have is to offer productive and attainable help for these kids and their parents. Given that vision is the dominant sense used in the classroom, and that over 80% of all information a child takes in is through the visual system, it seems logical that vision will play a huge role in learning disabilities. This does not mean that such a child cannot see the print. It means that these children do not take in and process the information correctly. They struggle to visualize, they have strained focus and eye coordination, they cannot control their eye movements accurately, they do not sequence correctly, etc.
Based on this model I am seeing children with learning disabilities improving in almost every facet of reading, writing and spelling. In my home town, with scored of schools very close by, I simply never survive in practice if I produced dubious results! Word of mouth from parents and teachers who have seen the lives of their children transformed, and their learning difficulties believed is the best advertising there is. I don’t have the cure for true dyslexia, but in my experience, the techniques we use may hold the key for many a misdiagnosed dyslexic!
As we grow we learn to control our visual systems, and we learn skills. In kids with learning disabilities, these skills are either not present, or poorly developed, and the great news is that, if we train the right skills in the right way, we will see improvement in reading, writing and spelling.
Recently I saw a lovely young girl, aged 9 years, who had been diagnosed as dyslexic and, as usual, offered little or no help other than remedial reading (which was a massive struggle). Colored overlays had helped, but only slightly, as she had very few sight words and thus could not read.
In 6 months of therapy (and one set of reading glasses), she exploded the dyslexic diagnosis in her own life. The glasses increased concentration. The therapy trained within her the valuable visual skills necessary for reading, writing and spelling. By the time we encountered my special spelling technique, she was able to learn 155 words in 4 weeks, AND THEY STUCK!
Tags: learning disabilities information