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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Schools
  • Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 12:58:46 EST



> And, yes, I agree that it is way over diagnosed and schools should get out
> of the diagnosing business. However, that doesn't negate the reality of a
> problem that "some" folks have.


As I might have mentioned when this thing came around before, I had ample
oppertunity to observe this close up and for some time.

No medical person (competent, any way) will tell you that dyslexia is a
disease or syndrome like a legitimate medical diagnosis. Having seen several
hundred "cases" close up, these things emerge:

1) The supposed indicators may be entirely absent and yet the child will be
determined to be 'dsylexic'

2) The indicators are present in other children, often all of them and often
very pronounced, and they have no difficulty learning to read.

3) The supposed "blocks" to reading can (and in my expierence - always!) be
circumvented as if they didn't exist when the child is motivated and ready


Those of us in "special education" who could in a moment of lucidness see
past the "difficult for a man to understand something when is income depends
on
his not understaning it" saw clearly that what was happening is that we had
all
these children who could not read and THEN we found some of the indicators
and so it was '"Ah, so they are dyslexic, yeah, that's the ticket, it's not
our
fault at all, nor the parents', it's the dyslexia, that's it."

However, this in the day of avid if not rabid screening for all sorts of
imagined learning problems, an honest look at the data showed that while we
were
using the indicators and "diagnoses" as a basis for explaining the lack of
reading, unlike any other actual medical condidtion, using those indicators
to
PREDICT dyslexia didn't even come statistically close.

I'm not basing this on a nephew or the neighbor kid or someone I heard of,
I'm basing this being directly involved as a "professional" with hundreds of
children who where supposely "dyslexic" or whatever the malady du jour was at
the
time to explain our failure.

One of my daughters displays all the classic indicators of dyslexia the most
stark of which is that she sees figures and words backwards. Mechanically
and
invariably most numbers and letters are written backwards and the order of
words and numbers are remembered backwards. When someone leaves a phone
number
that daughter has written down, we know to dial it backwards. (and she has
all the rest as well). As unschoolers we left her alone to find her way
about
that. She was reading fluently by eight. Also, and my story is it's because
we didn't interfer with her, she can look at one of her dolls or a person,
and
recently a puppy, one time and sew, knit, or crochet a garment for them and
it fits perfectly the first time.

This is just the in the way of illustration since it is easier to say in an
e-comment than other examples might be: A componet of one of the alphabet
soup
maladies at the time was supposed to be "auditory ground figure disturbance".
That is, the child could not filter out what was being said from ANY
extraneous noise or speech. The threory being that it is constitutional and
biological and there's not the function of preference nor conditioning. I
had the
true believer teachers and the parents in my room and said I'd illustrate
that
the premise was bogus. I put the child in one corner of the room and
occupied
him with a recording (cassette tapes at the time) which should, by the
diagnosis, swamp out any other auditory stimuli. I got the teachers and one
parent
in the middle of the room and got them to carry on a vocal conversation. I
turned on a loud fan and another tape player. I went with the other parent
to
the far corner of the room and engaging her in a whispered conversation
asked,
"What does he like to do for a treat?"

She whispered "Go to Dairy Queen." I myself facing her not three feet away
could scarcely make out what she said. Her son with his back to her and more
than 20 feet away and admid quite a bit of ambient noise, swung his head
around immediately and said, "Dairy Queen!? Are we going to Dairy Queen?"

If it is a constitutional disfunction, how is it that 'Do every other math
problem' could not be deciphered in a quiet room said directly to him but
'Diary
Queen' could be heard at a whisper twenty feet away?

Like that, I and a number of collegues, went on a quest which was sort of
like the Amazing Randy's offer to give a $10,000 prize to anyone who could
demonstrate a psychic ability he could not debunk combined with pleading for
Sodom
and Gomorrah. We tried to fine one so called constitutional learning
"disability" that could not be circumvented by simply changing the
curcumstances a
little. Finding just one righteous learning disabled person would have done
it.

We never found even one.

Let me clearly define what we were after. A few years of this experiment
was while I was a teacher at the Tennessee School for the Deaf. If a person
was
deaf, they were deaf and no mistake, especially the type of auditory nerve
deafness that was much more common before rubella vaccinations were nearly
universal. If you tried to demonstrate that a deaf person could hear you (at
a
normal speaking voice, not loud enough to where they could feel the
vibrations),
you were in for a frustrations. They could not hear you when they were happy
or say, hungry or filled, tired or rested, bored or interested, no matter
their mood or family history. It didn't affect it.

But all the rest of the so called mysterious "learning disabilities" could be
demonstrated to come and go although the spiel was that they were
constitutional and hard wired.

Also there is this phenomenon:

Learning disabilities and especially dyslexia:

*occur much more often in single parent families and among children raised by
someone other than their parents.

*rarely occur among private shcool and church school children

*occur in families experiencing stress and disruption


If they are a medical-type problem, why would any of that make any difference?


Dyslexia and other so called learning disabilities are best understood as an
attempt to force a child's natural tendancy to learn their own way and in
their own time to conform to a narrow set of expectations.

You would not view your child as not fitting his shoes, would you? Do
surgery on his feet so they's fit the shoes you bought for him? Yet that is
exactly
what we do with children's education. If the child does not fit narrowly
confined definition of learning, we must per force modify the child rather
than
his circumstances even to the point of giving him dangerous drugs to force
that
conformation.




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