Monday, August 17, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
YES, I AM 'DYSLEXIC' TOO
YES, I AM DYSLEXIC TOO
The story goes that the shy young dyslexic got married to the sweetest, most gorgeous young thing that he had ever set eyes on. On the big day he was a bundle of nerves knowing full well that he had to make some sort of speech. Years of struggling with language - speaking, reading and writing - a crushed self-concept from teasing about repeated classic stuff-ups, together with a total fear of exposing himself and his disability yet again, had him wound up, a ball of nerves.
Knowing the tactical advantage of pleasing his new in-laws, he was determined to remember to graciously thank them for their wedding present – a top-of-the-line coffee percolator – but more specifically, for their daughter, his new bride.
A quick sip of the bubbly settled his nerves, if not his balance, and he stood, composed himself, and eloquently thanked the bride’s parents for gifting him such a wonderful perky copulator.
Yes, I can tell the dyslexic stories too – and I do, to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. I’m dyslexic, I always have been, and always will be, and I live with the implications every day. Few people understand ‘dyslexia’ – most think it is a reading and writing problem. It is too hard to really explain how it has affected my life – so these days I just say “Go see the movie THE READER, everything that woman does in that movie, was as a result of her ‘dyslexia’”.
Naturally enough, as a young man I gravitated to the company of others like myself. It was only many years later that I realized that every one of us showed some of the classic indicators of a style that was later to be identified as ‘dyslexia’. As young students we ‘institutionalised’ some of the characteristics, tamed them and turned them into a code, an in-code that made light of our dyslexic tendencies – that at that stage few of us recognized. The word ‘dyslexia’ had hardly been invented (in the 1970’s) and even if we had heard of it, none of us would have laid claim to such a dubious personal label.
I mixed with a group of like-minded guys, flatting together, struggling with the education system, covering our tracks with motor-bikes and cars – and our coded language. Our cars persistently had ‘fat blatteries’, ‘tat fliers’, and ‘tappety ratlets’, and parts were often reassembled ‘fack to bront’. Getting our macts fuddled was par for the course.
Linguistic mix-ups, fascination with machinery and a struggle with academic education – looking back I now identify some of the classic signs of a young man suffering the daily impact of ‘dyslexia’.
Personally I had struggled through primary and secondary school with all the typical report-card comments; ‘Laughton could do better if he tried.’ ‘Will not pay attention in class’. ‘A dreamer’. – comments that I now recognise as being indicative of ‘dyslexia’. My school-days were confusing and hellish, and although I understood the words, I couldn’t understand the meaning of classroom instruction. I day-dreamed by day and night-mared at night, and now, 50 years later, my sleep is still commonly punctuated by those same hellish night-mares.
My difficulty with academic learning – ‘literacy’ in the jargon of educators - was masked by the fact that I was reasonably bright. The teachers could somehow sense that I was not stupid, so deduced that my lack of success was obviously my own fault – my lack of application, my lack of due attention, my lack of care.
So I covered, I strategized, I assumed an act and became cunning - to cover the fact that I was dumb and stupid. Yes, I accepted that part of me was dumb and stupid – the evidence was abundant – and yet part of me suspected that I was also astute, intelligent and perceptive. Only many years later I came to realize that the cause of all this was that I am a pictorial thinker, and as such I struggle to put my ideas into words. And yes, I struggle with reading and writing too. Thank God for lap-tops.
Like most people, I never stopped to consider that I might think differently from other people. It would be many years before I discovered that while most people think in words, I, like most ‘dyslexics’, think in pictures. The rule of thumb is, the more pictorial my thinking style, the less competent with words, and therefore the more ‘dyslexic’ I am.
As a teenager I was very shy (‘shyness’ = being dominated by the fear of being wrong, of failing yet again), but fortunately I recognized that introversion would only let this thing get on top of me, and it could predictably control my life - so I created an act of deliberate and calculated confidence, and this progressively became my style.
I learned to hide my confusion through bold and arrogant challenges of my secondary teachers, and reactions of indignation and anger to their put-downs of my efforts. At 19 I left school and enrolled at University in sheer protest, with no inkling of what it involved, or might lead to.
Acting lessons, elocution training, writing lessons, and dogged determination to achieve (otherwise known as ‘fear of failure’) finally saw me create a personality, a deliberate act, that eventually allowed the accumulation of some elements of ‘success’.
I still regard myself as a ‘non-reader’, but I have learned to write. My three Psychology degrees were achieved on the back of close observation of human behaviour, of good listening skills, (both developed in my desperate urge to understand) and these allowed me an ability to debate the content of books and research that I could never read.
Now at 60 I have an accumulated view of ‘dyslexia’. I see my picture-thinking style as being like a diesel-engined car, and word-thinkers as being like petrol-engined cars. School is a place of words and could be viewed as a petrol-station – where this little diesel ‘dyslexic’ got tanked up with petrol on a daily basis.
The result is predictable, and the child so often gets the blame. That is why I now travel the country running seminars on ‘dyslexia’ for teachers and parents and anybody who will listen.
Laughton King is a retired Educational Psychologist who is travelling New Zealand on a self-funded four year tour, running seminars for teachers and parents, sharing his insights into ‘dyslexia’.
The story goes that the shy young dyslexic got married to the sweetest, most gorgeous young thing that he had ever set eyes on. On the big day he was a bundle of nerves knowing full well that he had to make some sort of speech. Years of struggling with language - speaking, reading and writing - a crushed self-concept from teasing about repeated classic stuff-ups, together with a total fear of exposing himself and his disability yet again, had him wound up, a ball of nerves.
Knowing the tactical advantage of pleasing his new in-laws, he was determined to remember to graciously thank them for their wedding present – a top-of-the-line coffee percolator – but more specifically, for their daughter, his new bride.
A quick sip of the bubbly settled his nerves, if not his balance, and he stood, composed himself, and eloquently thanked the bride’s parents for gifting him such a wonderful perky copulator.
Yes, I can tell the dyslexic stories too – and I do, to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. I’m dyslexic, I always have been, and always will be, and I live with the implications every day. Few people understand ‘dyslexia’ – most think it is a reading and writing problem. It is too hard to really explain how it has affected my life – so these days I just say “Go see the movie THE READER, everything that woman does in that movie, was as a result of her ‘dyslexia’”.
Naturally enough, as a young man I gravitated to the company of others like myself. It was only many years later that I realized that every one of us showed some of the classic indicators of a style that was later to be identified as ‘dyslexia’. As young students we ‘institutionalised’ some of the characteristics, tamed them and turned them into a code, an in-code that made light of our dyslexic tendencies – that at that stage few of us recognized. The word ‘dyslexia’ had hardly been invented (in the 1970’s) and even if we had heard of it, none of us would have laid claim to such a dubious personal label.
I mixed with a group of like-minded guys, flatting together, struggling with the education system, covering our tracks with motor-bikes and cars – and our coded language. Our cars persistently had ‘fat blatteries’, ‘tat fliers’, and ‘tappety ratlets’, and parts were often reassembled ‘fack to bront’. Getting our macts fuddled was par for the course.
Linguistic mix-ups, fascination with machinery and a struggle with academic education – looking back I now identify some of the classic signs of a young man suffering the daily impact of ‘dyslexia’.
Personally I had struggled through primary and secondary school with all the typical report-card comments; ‘Laughton could do better if he tried.’ ‘Will not pay attention in class’. ‘A dreamer’. – comments that I now recognise as being indicative of ‘dyslexia’. My school-days were confusing and hellish, and although I understood the words, I couldn’t understand the meaning of classroom instruction. I day-dreamed by day and night-mared at night, and now, 50 years later, my sleep is still commonly punctuated by those same hellish night-mares.
My difficulty with academic learning – ‘literacy’ in the jargon of educators - was masked by the fact that I was reasonably bright. The teachers could somehow sense that I was not stupid, so deduced that my lack of success was obviously my own fault – my lack of application, my lack of due attention, my lack of care.
So I covered, I strategized, I assumed an act and became cunning - to cover the fact that I was dumb and stupid. Yes, I accepted that part of me was dumb and stupid – the evidence was abundant – and yet part of me suspected that I was also astute, intelligent and perceptive. Only many years later I came to realize that the cause of all this was that I am a pictorial thinker, and as such I struggle to put my ideas into words. And yes, I struggle with reading and writing too. Thank God for lap-tops.
Like most people, I never stopped to consider that I might think differently from other people. It would be many years before I discovered that while most people think in words, I, like most ‘dyslexics’, think in pictures. The rule of thumb is, the more pictorial my thinking style, the less competent with words, and therefore the more ‘dyslexic’ I am.
As a teenager I was very shy (‘shyness’ = being dominated by the fear of being wrong, of failing yet again), but fortunately I recognized that introversion would only let this thing get on top of me, and it could predictably control my life - so I created an act of deliberate and calculated confidence, and this progressively became my style.
I learned to hide my confusion through bold and arrogant challenges of my secondary teachers, and reactions of indignation and anger to their put-downs of my efforts. At 19 I left school and enrolled at University in sheer protest, with no inkling of what it involved, or might lead to.
Acting lessons, elocution training, writing lessons, and dogged determination to achieve (otherwise known as ‘fear of failure’) finally saw me create a personality, a deliberate act, that eventually allowed the accumulation of some elements of ‘success’.
I still regard myself as a ‘non-reader’, but I have learned to write. My three Psychology degrees were achieved on the back of close observation of human behaviour, of good listening skills, (both developed in my desperate urge to understand) and these allowed me an ability to debate the content of books and research that I could never read.
Now at 60 I have an accumulated view of ‘dyslexia’. I see my picture-thinking style as being like a diesel-engined car, and word-thinkers as being like petrol-engined cars. School is a place of words and could be viewed as a petrol-station – where this little diesel ‘dyslexic’ got tanked up with petrol on a daily basis.
The result is predictable, and the child so often gets the blame. That is why I now travel the country running seminars on ‘dyslexia’ for teachers and parents and anybody who will listen.
Laughton King is a retired Educational Psychologist who is travelling New Zealand on a self-funded four year tour, running seminars for teachers and parents, sharing his insights into ‘dyslexia’.
Monday, June 1, 2009
BOYS VERSUS GIRLS - THE GREAT READING DEBATE
BOYS VERSUS GIRLS – AND THE GREAT READING DEBATE.
The debate goes on. Ian Baldwin (Southland Boys High School) looks at the significant difference between the achievement of NZ boys and girls. He identifies this as highlighted by NCEA results, and suggests that “immediacy” in the thinking style of boys makes the NCEA assessment system less applicable for boys than for girls – suggesting that this dynamic – whatever ‘immediacy’ means - has a significant impact on the measurable performance of boys in school.
Joseph Driessen – as reported by John Hartevelt in The Southland Times – nominates parental split, the absence of dads, and the predominance of women as custodial parents, as being a causal factor in the academic gap between boys and girls in NZ schools. He suggests that the absence of dads has a more significant emotional impact on boys than on girls.
It is possible that both factors are significant, but do they really account for the apparent lack of achievement that the critics see in our male students?
Laughton King, educational psychologist, author, lecturer, and life-time dyslexic suggests that there is more to this picture than meets the eye. After a life-time associated with ‘dyslexia’, and with children with learning difficulties, he suggests that we are mistakinly looking for complex explanations to a very basic situation. In his view moves to ‘up-grade’ our education system over the last thirty years have created the very problem we have been trying to solve.
He blames the progressive emphasis on ‘literacy’, and the moves to use written assessment as the prime measure of achievement as the cause of boys apparent lack of achievement. To understand his thinking he says we must look to the nature of the beast – specifically the way boys think.
Science and academic research, he says, have finally caught up with reality, and have confirmed what generations of people have known for thousands of years – that the brains of men and women are wired differently, and are wired to allow us different, and complementary functions. That we are physically different is rudimentary, so it is not too big a stretch of the imagination to allow that we might actually be brain-wired in a similar manner. Simple design-logistics would suggest so, and direct observation would back this up – but somehow the educationists have missed the significance.
It is no longer news that women have a different brain from men. Brain-scanning research revealed years ago that women have eight, separate, identifiable language sites in their brain, and that they use them to advantage. Men on the other hand have only one such site – less identifiable, and less specific – but it is still a functional reality.
Women are wired for language, and use this as a predominating tool of life. Men on the other hand have a brain that is far more orientated to visual/spatial/dextral functions, (hands-on, practical, functional), and typically present a style that reflects this.
However the requirements of our ‘politically correct’ society may be causing our educational assessment systems to lag behind science – and reality. The NCEA results are in themselves a reasonably graphic demonstration of the differences in the male and female brain wiring, which really could be regarded as the two ends of a brain-wiring continuum.
The emphasis and style of educational assessment has changed over the last fifty years. It used to be that girls lagged behind boys in the education system, and in the early 1960s there was a range of education style that young people of both genders could choose. Those less academic, and more practical in nature went to Tech Institute and became Tradesmen. Some College students chose basic academic, others the arts, and still others chose languages - and ended up in Law or Medicine. The girls of the time had similar options and studied ‘home-economics’,‘secretarial skills’, teaching, or nursing – a heavily gender-role orientated education.
This gender stereotyped system needed addressing, and it needed changing, but the change that has been achieved may well be of ‘pendulum-swing’ nature, and now be creating the very difficulties we are seeing at the moment.
Having worked within this system for 35 years, and in particular, having worked with the casualties of the system, Laughton King suggests that although implemented with best intention, the push to literacy, the essence and the measure of modern education, has suited and benefitted the majority of our students, and simultaneously created the difficulties associated with so-called ‘dyslexia’.
Referring back to recent revelations of brain research, and recognition of thinking style, King suggests there would be value in orientainge our education system to cater for all thinking styles, and to move away from a system that accentuates one thinking style as being preferred, and more valid than others.
According to King both the research, and observational evidence indicate that where some people do all their thinking on a verbal basis, others do all theirs on a pictorial basis. These are the two extremes, and most of us fall at some position between the two, effectively being able to think in words, AND in pictures – at least to some degree. Probably few of us have ever stopped to examine the way we think, but as an educational psychologist, and as a ‘dyslexic’ person himself, he sees such an analysis as basic to the work that he does – assisting children who are struggling in our education system.
In clarifying his point, he suggests we could look at cars and their fuel system. Some run on petrol, but a few now run on diesel. If we go to the gas station and fuel up on petrol, not realizing our car is a diesel, then we have problems. But we don’t demand that every car be required to run on petrol, nor test their performance only on petrol, and when the diesel fails to perform on petrol, we don’t blame the car.
He says, change the words and look at children, their style and our schooling system. Some brains, be they male or female, are much more adept at using language as a thinking style. Others may not be quite so adept, but have sufficient skill in this regard to get through the system. Coming back to the analogy of cars, the size of the motor under the bonnet could be significant here, and those with a V8 or even a good-sized 6 cylinder will have definite advantage over those with a smaller power-plant.
That children with a more pictorial, hands-on learning style will grow to be adults who will be better suited to pictorial, hands-on professions or trades is hardly worth debating, and that those who are language orientated will do better in language-based professions.
But what might well be worthy of debate – or at least acknowledgement – is the very questionable current practice of demanding that all students be tested on the basis of language performance.
The implications he says, are enormous. He explains; Student A is a language thinker and aspires to be a journalist – a language-based (talking, reading, writing) task. Student B. is a pictorial thinker and aspires to be an electrician – a hands-on, visual and practical task. All the way through school they both have to sit annual examinations, where their understanding and ability is measured by their ability to read questions, understand their meaning, and write (in language) their answers. One, is in their natural element and can perform freely and easily. The other, like a fish out of water, or like a diesel fuelled with petrol, struggles to decipher the print, to understand the language, to understand the meaning of the question, and then to convert their visual, hands-on skills to a pencil-and-paper rendition.
For all their academic, language-based skills, student A may never be a safe, reliable, nor skilled electrician – the sheer practicalities may be well beyond their capacity. But, with all their hands-on, practical skills, student B. may never be an electrician either – the system will fail him because he is not sufficiently skilled as a reader or writer, and may fail the written aspects of the qualifying exams.
Yes, he may well be offered ‘reader/writer’ assistance – but this person can only read the question, and write his answer - they cant explain, translate or otherwise clarify, nor help him find the right words to explain what he knows so well at finger-tip level. It is still a language-based assessment system, and as such will still disadvantage him. Just more petrol in his diesel tank – and yet another way of telling him that his natural thinking system is not good enough. This he says, is the essence of ‘dyslexia’.
In his view the educational administraters and politicians have moved to ‘fix’ our education system, but have done so by progressively orientating it more and more to a language-based assessment system – inadvertently creating the very problem they are striving to avert.
The debate goes on. Ian Baldwin (Southland Boys High School) looks at the significant difference between the achievement of NZ boys and girls. He identifies this as highlighted by NCEA results, and suggests that “immediacy” in the thinking style of boys makes the NCEA assessment system less applicable for boys than for girls – suggesting that this dynamic – whatever ‘immediacy’ means - has a significant impact on the measurable performance of boys in school.
Joseph Driessen – as reported by John Hartevelt in The Southland Times – nominates parental split, the absence of dads, and the predominance of women as custodial parents, as being a causal factor in the academic gap between boys and girls in NZ schools. He suggests that the absence of dads has a more significant emotional impact on boys than on girls.
It is possible that both factors are significant, but do they really account for the apparent lack of achievement that the critics see in our male students?
Laughton King, educational psychologist, author, lecturer, and life-time dyslexic suggests that there is more to this picture than meets the eye. After a life-time associated with ‘dyslexia’, and with children with learning difficulties, he suggests that we are mistakinly looking for complex explanations to a very basic situation. In his view moves to ‘up-grade’ our education system over the last thirty years have created the very problem we have been trying to solve.
He blames the progressive emphasis on ‘literacy’, and the moves to use written assessment as the prime measure of achievement as the cause of boys apparent lack of achievement. To understand his thinking he says we must look to the nature of the beast – specifically the way boys think.
Science and academic research, he says, have finally caught up with reality, and have confirmed what generations of people have known for thousands of years – that the brains of men and women are wired differently, and are wired to allow us different, and complementary functions. That we are physically different is rudimentary, so it is not too big a stretch of the imagination to allow that we might actually be brain-wired in a similar manner. Simple design-logistics would suggest so, and direct observation would back this up – but somehow the educationists have missed the significance.
It is no longer news that women have a different brain from men. Brain-scanning research revealed years ago that women have eight, separate, identifiable language sites in their brain, and that they use them to advantage. Men on the other hand have only one such site – less identifiable, and less specific – but it is still a functional reality.
Women are wired for language, and use this as a predominating tool of life. Men on the other hand have a brain that is far more orientated to visual/spatial/dextral functions, (hands-on, practical, functional), and typically present a style that reflects this.
However the requirements of our ‘politically correct’ society may be causing our educational assessment systems to lag behind science – and reality. The NCEA results are in themselves a reasonably graphic demonstration of the differences in the male and female brain wiring, which really could be regarded as the two ends of a brain-wiring continuum.
The emphasis and style of educational assessment has changed over the last fifty years. It used to be that girls lagged behind boys in the education system, and in the early 1960s there was a range of education style that young people of both genders could choose. Those less academic, and more practical in nature went to Tech Institute and became Tradesmen. Some College students chose basic academic, others the arts, and still others chose languages - and ended up in Law or Medicine. The girls of the time had similar options and studied ‘home-economics’,‘secretarial skills’, teaching, or nursing – a heavily gender-role orientated education.
This gender stereotyped system needed addressing, and it needed changing, but the change that has been achieved may well be of ‘pendulum-swing’ nature, and now be creating the very difficulties we are seeing at the moment.
Having worked within this system for 35 years, and in particular, having worked with the casualties of the system, Laughton King suggests that although implemented with best intention, the push to literacy, the essence and the measure of modern education, has suited and benefitted the majority of our students, and simultaneously created the difficulties associated with so-called ‘dyslexia’.
Referring back to recent revelations of brain research, and recognition of thinking style, King suggests there would be value in orientainge our education system to cater for all thinking styles, and to move away from a system that accentuates one thinking style as being preferred, and more valid than others.
According to King both the research, and observational evidence indicate that where some people do all their thinking on a verbal basis, others do all theirs on a pictorial basis. These are the two extremes, and most of us fall at some position between the two, effectively being able to think in words, AND in pictures – at least to some degree. Probably few of us have ever stopped to examine the way we think, but as an educational psychologist, and as a ‘dyslexic’ person himself, he sees such an analysis as basic to the work that he does – assisting children who are struggling in our education system.
In clarifying his point, he suggests we could look at cars and their fuel system. Some run on petrol, but a few now run on diesel. If we go to the gas station and fuel up on petrol, not realizing our car is a diesel, then we have problems. But we don’t demand that every car be required to run on petrol, nor test their performance only on petrol, and when the diesel fails to perform on petrol, we don’t blame the car.
He says, change the words and look at children, their style and our schooling system. Some brains, be they male or female, are much more adept at using language as a thinking style. Others may not be quite so adept, but have sufficient skill in this regard to get through the system. Coming back to the analogy of cars, the size of the motor under the bonnet could be significant here, and those with a V8 or even a good-sized 6 cylinder will have definite advantage over those with a smaller power-plant.
That children with a more pictorial, hands-on learning style will grow to be adults who will be better suited to pictorial, hands-on professions or trades is hardly worth debating, and that those who are language orientated will do better in language-based professions.
But what might well be worthy of debate – or at least acknowledgement – is the very questionable current practice of demanding that all students be tested on the basis of language performance.
The implications he says, are enormous. He explains; Student A is a language thinker and aspires to be a journalist – a language-based (talking, reading, writing) task. Student B. is a pictorial thinker and aspires to be an electrician – a hands-on, visual and practical task. All the way through school they both have to sit annual examinations, where their understanding and ability is measured by their ability to read questions, understand their meaning, and write (in language) their answers. One, is in their natural element and can perform freely and easily. The other, like a fish out of water, or like a diesel fuelled with petrol, struggles to decipher the print, to understand the language, to understand the meaning of the question, and then to convert their visual, hands-on skills to a pencil-and-paper rendition.
For all their academic, language-based skills, student A may never be a safe, reliable, nor skilled electrician – the sheer practicalities may be well beyond their capacity. But, with all their hands-on, practical skills, student B. may never be an electrician either – the system will fail him because he is not sufficiently skilled as a reader or writer, and may fail the written aspects of the qualifying exams.
Yes, he may well be offered ‘reader/writer’ assistance – but this person can only read the question, and write his answer - they cant explain, translate or otherwise clarify, nor help him find the right words to explain what he knows so well at finger-tip level. It is still a language-based assessment system, and as such will still disadvantage him. Just more petrol in his diesel tank – and yet another way of telling him that his natural thinking system is not good enough. This he says, is the essence of ‘dyslexia’.
In his view the educational administraters and politicians have moved to ‘fix’ our education system, but have done so by progressively orientating it more and more to a language-based assessment system – inadvertently creating the very problem they are striving to avert.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
FORUM; QUESTIONS FROM PARENTS/TEACHERS
As from today (20.5.09) selected questions and answers will be posted for general information. Names will be changed for obvious reasons.
1. Beth writes that she visited her son's classroom and found it to be total chaos.
Chaos creates nightmares for 'dyslexic' children. In the first place there is too much going on for them to cope with. Then there is no continuity in all the chaos, so he cannot get any track, any sense, of what is happening. This also means that he cannot predict what is going to happen next, so he is not able to calculate how to fit in. On top of this he will be aware that some adult (teacher) is going to want something from him in all of this shambles - work output, participation of some sort - and so his anxiety levels will be huge. All he wants to do is fit in, do the right thing and succeed - and chaos will prevent all of this, and create frustration and tension - a nightmare situation for him. this child is likely to refuse school, and to have nightmares.
This teacher needs to use structures to give predictability and sequence in her classroom - a predictable routine, a visual daily time-line across the top of the whiteboard, clear, consistent verbal instruction.
2. Amy writes that she is going to have to go away for a weekend - leaving her 'dyslexic' 7 yr old behind - and he is already starting to pine!
'Dyslexic' children typically have no concept of time - and mum going away is forever! They also tend to cling to a parent who is consistent and predictable, and loss of this parent for a period is really frightening.
Suggestion; Cut a strip of corrugated cardboard and mark it into 7 sections - one for each day of the week. Make the school days one colour, and the week-end days a different colour. Now put a highliter outline around the days mum will be away, and indicate the departure and the return days. Post this on the wall, with a drawing pin in the day you are up to now. Shift this pin into the next day each morning so as to help the child see the passing of the time.
As mum leaves home on that weekend, take off your used T-shirt and give it to the child to wear to bed or to use as a cuddly, until mum arrives home again. Not only will the T-shirt smell l;ike you, but it will be embued with your energy, which will be very comforting to the child.
This works equally with pets who miss you when you are away. I talk about these ideas in my parenting book, WITH, NOT AGAINST.
1. Beth writes that she visited her son's classroom and found it to be total chaos.
Chaos creates nightmares for 'dyslexic' children. In the first place there is too much going on for them to cope with. Then there is no continuity in all the chaos, so he cannot get any track, any sense, of what is happening. This also means that he cannot predict what is going to happen next, so he is not able to calculate how to fit in. On top of this he will be aware that some adult (teacher) is going to want something from him in all of this shambles - work output, participation of some sort - and so his anxiety levels will be huge. All he wants to do is fit in, do the right thing and succeed - and chaos will prevent all of this, and create frustration and tension - a nightmare situation for him. this child is likely to refuse school, and to have nightmares.
This teacher needs to use structures to give predictability and sequence in her classroom - a predictable routine, a visual daily time-line across the top of the whiteboard, clear, consistent verbal instruction.
2. Amy writes that she is going to have to go away for a weekend - leaving her 'dyslexic' 7 yr old behind - and he is already starting to pine!
'Dyslexic' children typically have no concept of time - and mum going away is forever! They also tend to cling to a parent who is consistent and predictable, and loss of this parent for a period is really frightening.
Suggestion; Cut a strip of corrugated cardboard and mark it into 7 sections - one for each day of the week. Make the school days one colour, and the week-end days a different colour. Now put a highliter outline around the days mum will be away, and indicate the departure and the return days. Post this on the wall, with a drawing pin in the day you are up to now. Shift this pin into the next day each morning so as to help the child see the passing of the time.
As mum leaves home on that weekend, take off your used T-shirt and give it to the child to wear to bed or to use as a cuddly, until mum arrives home again. Not only will the T-shirt smell l;ike you, but it will be embued with your energy, which will be very comforting to the child.
This works equally with pets who miss you when you are away. I talk about these ideas in my parenting book, WITH, NOT AGAINST.
FORUM; QUESTIONS
3. Amy writes that she understands that boys get the wrong picture when told not to do something ('Don't run around corners') - but that surely they must get to understand that 'don't' means don't and learn to accomodate and cooperate as they get older.
Basically the answer to this is NO. Boys, especially 'dyslexic' (picture thinkers) boys see their thinking as a series of pictures. Rather than words in their heads, they have pictures. If we say 'tennis racket' they get a picture of this in their head. If we say 'no step-ladder' they get a picture of a step-ladder in their head. There is no picture of 'no', nor of 'don't'. If we say "Don't leave your skateboard on the drive" - they get a picture of a skate-board on the drive. They do hear the words, but the words themselves have little significance for them - and certainly not the significant impact that the picture does, even at an unconscious level.
Recently I went to a friend's for dinner After patting the dog I headed for the bathroom to wash my hands. As I left the room my host advised me "Don't touch the towel rail, it is very hot."
I washed my hands, dried them on the towel provided, and as I turned to leave the room, my left hand reached out - and grabbed the towel-rail. It was a completely unconscious action on my part, and I left the room with a burned hand, much to the mirth of my friends.
I am 60 years old, of reasonable intelligence, and had just that afternoon presented a seminar looking at 'dyslexia', and the impact of the word 'don't'. To me it was just one more example of the difficulty of living with 'dyslexia' - although on this occasion with no significant outcome.
No, it doesn't go away, and many of us never get to to really be in charge of its impact.
4. Beth writes that she understand 'hyperactivity' and the role of various 'foods' in this, but she is sick of having her beauty-sleep disturbed 50 times a night by the sudden scratching and jerking of her hubby in bed at night. She sees a similar thing in her ten year old son.
This one really pushes buttons for me, because this has been my story for all my life, and it doesn't seem to be diminishing in any way.
For me food additives are the culprit - with ice-cream being one of the worst, although beer and wine are in there too. One small helping of standard ice-cream, or one small can of beer or wine and my whole night is ruined. The effect is two-fold.
In the first case there is the needling effect. About every five or six seconds it feels as if a single needle is being gently inserted into my skin. This happens at any point of the body, and demands instant direct attention - a vigorous scratch - much to the chagrin of my sleeping wife.
I've tried to ignore it, but it drives me mad. And it drives her insane.
The other effect is what I call 'hyper-energised' muscles. In this it is as if various muscles are grossly over-charged with energy, and they then suddenly flex - extend or contract - as a means of expelling or using up the energy - again invariably waking 'she-who-matters-most' who has just got back to sleep after my last scratch.
Diet control is my only weapon on this one, and it basically means personal deprivation of anything yummy after 3.30pm. But sometimes I think "Oh heck.... In reality there is nothing much I can do about it, but understanding my body reactions makes it a lttle easier to tolerate.
Basically the answer to this is NO. Boys, especially 'dyslexic' (picture thinkers) boys see their thinking as a series of pictures. Rather than words in their heads, they have pictures. If we say 'tennis racket' they get a picture of this in their head. If we say 'no step-ladder' they get a picture of a step-ladder in their head. There is no picture of 'no', nor of 'don't'. If we say "Don't leave your skateboard on the drive" - they get a picture of a skate-board on the drive. They do hear the words, but the words themselves have little significance for them - and certainly not the significant impact that the picture does, even at an unconscious level.
Recently I went to a friend's for dinner After patting the dog I headed for the bathroom to wash my hands. As I left the room my host advised me "Don't touch the towel rail, it is very hot."
I washed my hands, dried them on the towel provided, and as I turned to leave the room, my left hand reached out - and grabbed the towel-rail. It was a completely unconscious action on my part, and I left the room with a burned hand, much to the mirth of my friends.
I am 60 years old, of reasonable intelligence, and had just that afternoon presented a seminar looking at 'dyslexia', and the impact of the word 'don't'. To me it was just one more example of the difficulty of living with 'dyslexia' - although on this occasion with no significant outcome.
No, it doesn't go away, and many of us never get to to really be in charge of its impact.
4. Beth writes that she understand 'hyperactivity' and the role of various 'foods' in this, but she is sick of having her beauty-sleep disturbed 50 times a night by the sudden scratching and jerking of her hubby in bed at night. She sees a similar thing in her ten year old son.
This one really pushes buttons for me, because this has been my story for all my life, and it doesn't seem to be diminishing in any way.
For me food additives are the culprit - with ice-cream being one of the worst, although beer and wine are in there too. One small helping of standard ice-cream, or one small can of beer or wine and my whole night is ruined. The effect is two-fold.
In the first case there is the needling effect. About every five or six seconds it feels as if a single needle is being gently inserted into my skin. This happens at any point of the body, and demands instant direct attention - a vigorous scratch - much to the chagrin of my sleeping wife.
I've tried to ignore it, but it drives me mad. And it drives her insane.
The other effect is what I call 'hyper-energised' muscles. In this it is as if various muscles are grossly over-charged with energy, and they then suddenly flex - extend or contract - as a means of expelling or using up the energy - again invariably waking 'she-who-matters-most' who has just got back to sleep after my last scratch.
Diet control is my only weapon on this one, and it basically means personal deprivation of anything yummy after 3.30pm. But sometimes I think "Oh heck.... In reality there is nothing much I can do about it, but understanding my body reactions makes it a lttle easier to tolerate.
Friday, May 15, 2009
OUR BOYS THINK IN PICTURES!
HELP!; OUR BOYS ARE THINKING IN PICTURES!
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
NEW ZEALAND LIVE OILS ARTIST
Natalie Tate Painting her People, her Country.
(click on picture to see full enlargement)
(click on picture to see full enlargement)
As a portrait, and landscape and contemporary artist of some 40+ years, Natalie brings precision and creativity to the canvas using a full range of styles, materials and techniques.
Painting from 'live' sittings, from photographic record, photo montage, historial document, or 'in situ', she can capture your family, your moment or your place - for prosperity.
Family portrait in oils on canvas painted from separate photos supplied by client or taken by Natalie. $400.00 to $600.00 per head.
At basic level, black charcoal on toned background, each head $150.
At basic level, black charcoal on toned background, each head $150.
In full oils, full colour, each head $600, with water-colours, pastels being priced between, - with top-quality canvass stretched on wooden frame adding approx $100 to the total price.
Natalie travels in partnership with Laughton King (dyslexic psychologist) and the proceeds of her work go to supporting his work, bringing information about 'dyslexia' to educators, school teachers and parents around New Zealand.
For more samples see her web-site http://www.natalieart.com/ or contact her at natalieart@xtra.co.nz
Thursday, May 7, 2009
The movie THE READER presents DYSLEXIA as a life-force issue
The Movie THE READER presents 'DYSLEXIA'as an adult daily life-force issue.
Went to see the movie THE READER last night. I hadn’t seen any reviews of this movie, so had no idea of how it is being promoted. Now I see it as the perfect complement to the Indian movie of last year, that so cogently presented 'dyslexia' as a social and learning difficulty in children. (Title eludes me). But for my money THE READER is a brilliant presentation of the impact of ‘dyslexia’ on one woman’s adult life.
So now we have the adult version.
It has WWII as a background context, and some viewers might see ‘pride’ as being a major theme. But if we change what we see as pride, to see it really as FEAR – fear of being seen to be dumb and stupid - we now see the impact of ‘dyslexia’ as a daily life issue. More than this, we see the fear of not being accepted, creating a desperate need to fit in, to comply - and yet to always remain aloof, to remain safe.
With 'dyslexics' , a life-time of struggle and failure creates a huge fear of not being 'good-enough' , of not being acceptable, and of eventually being rejected by the people we love. This creates the 'perfectionist', the 'do-gooder', the 'workaholic', the 'critic', and the person who cannot be wrong and won't accept any criticism - a person whose 'solution' to the fears in his/her life creates the very lonliness he/she is desparately trying to avoid.
I will say no more, but hope that these comments will give a context and an insight into the depth of this movie that we otherwise may miss.
In this, the movie is brilliant (as it is otherwise as well), and I would urge anybody who wants to see what ‘dyslexia’ is as an adult life-force issue to see this movie. This is ‘dyslexia’ as I know it.
Laughton King
Went to see the movie THE READER last night. I hadn’t seen any reviews of this movie, so had no idea of how it is being promoted. Now I see it as the perfect complement to the Indian movie of last year, that so cogently presented 'dyslexia' as a social and learning difficulty in children. (Title eludes me). But for my money THE READER is a brilliant presentation of the impact of ‘dyslexia’ on one woman’s adult life.
So now we have the adult version.
It has WWII as a background context, and some viewers might see ‘pride’ as being a major theme. But if we change what we see as pride, to see it really as FEAR – fear of being seen to be dumb and stupid - we now see the impact of ‘dyslexia’ as a daily life issue. More than this, we see the fear of not being accepted, creating a desperate need to fit in, to comply - and yet to always remain aloof, to remain safe.
With 'dyslexics' , a life-time of struggle and failure creates a huge fear of not being 'good-enough' , of not being acceptable, and of eventually being rejected by the people we love. This creates the 'perfectionist', the 'do-gooder', the 'workaholic', the 'critic', and the person who cannot be wrong and won't accept any criticism - a person whose 'solution' to the fears in his/her life creates the very lonliness he/she is desparately trying to avoid.
I will say no more, but hope that these comments will give a context and an insight into the depth of this movie that we otherwise may miss.
In this, the movie is brilliant (as it is otherwise as well), and I would urge anybody who wants to see what ‘dyslexia’ is as an adult life-force issue to see this movie. This is ‘dyslexia’ as I know it.
Laughton King
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
MY SEMINARS AND MY BOOKS
LAUGHTON KING - SEMINARS ON DYSLEXIA - for teachers and parents.
- AFFIRMATIONS/VALIDATIONS/REFERENCES
- SEMINAR TOUR - itinerary
- SEMINAR CONTENT
- Precise of my two books - REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER,
- WITH, NOT AGAINST, a parentinmg manual.
“As a dyslexic person myself, I have a fair understanding of the nightmare that many of these children are living through.”
“There is nothing ‘wrong’ with the child – just as there is nothing ‘wrong’ with a diesel engine – we just need to learn that it works differently from a petrol engine, and needs different fuel.
“Being dyslexic, and being academically qualified, as well as being professionally experienced, I am in a reasonably rare position. I see this as being a privilege - but it carries an obligation.
“My obligation, and my mission is simply to assist the teachers, and the parents of these children, to understand their style and their reality.
“I am currently on a self-funded, four-year tour of New Zealand, taking every opportunity I can to assist these children – of which there are probably five or more in every classroom in the country.
“Short teacher training seminars, sessions for Teacher Aides and Learning Support workers, evening seminars for parents – an introduction to a different way of viewing the child. This can make all the difference.
……………………….
Laughton King,
Educational Psychologist,
Author
Visiting speaker,
offers short seminars at your school.
Having practiced as an Educational, Child and Family Psychologist for thirty years, Laughton has now closed his practice in Whangarei, and is touring New Zealand. With his partner, oils artist Natalie Tate, he is taking his life-time experience as a ‘dyslexic learner’, and his thirty years as a professional practitioner, to the road.
From their 5-tonne mobile studio/home, their aim is to spend four years touring the country, visiting both cities and the smaller centers, with Laughton offering short seminars to local communities – teachers, teacher aides, parents and specialist educators – around the topics of learning difficulties (including ‘dyslexia’) and co-operative parenting.
Recognising that smaller communities are generally by-passed by the ‘visiting speaker circuit’ it is Laughton and Natalie’s intention to bring their skills to ‘heartland New Zealand’ in an enjoyable and economic manner.
Their proposed itinerary will bring them through the South Island in 2008/09, spending; May – July (08), the Nelson/Marlborough area,
August – February, (09) in Christchurch,
March – April, the West coast,
May – August, the Dunedin area,
September – December (09), Southland.
In 2010 they will be back in the North Island, progressively working northwards through the year.
SEMINARS
The seminars would be 2-3 hours in length (typically to teachers and teacher aides during the day), and for groups of 12 to 100 participants – from your own school, or from the wider general community. By inviting the wider community and other local schools, the seminars could become cost-free to the host school.
These seminars will involve three major components;
A. Developing a working definition of ‘dyslexia’, and understanding the difficulties in establishing such a definition.
B. Looking at the implications for the child – the child’s experience.
C. Looking at the implications for the teacher and parent.
This will allow both parents and teachers to identify the child in question, to perceive them differently, and thence to respond to them differently.
The gains for both child and adult will be marked, and immediate.
Laughton is happy to be contacted by e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
SAMPLE FLYER
OUR KIDS, OUR PARENTS, OUR SCHOOL, OUR COMMUNITY
Laughton King was a sad and lonely dyslexic kid, who hated school.
That was 50 years ago.
Now he is a Child Psychologist, therapist, author and visiting speaker
– and will be at our school to talk with parents about children,
and the way their brains tick.
TUESDAY 2nd DECEMBER 7.00 p.m.
SCHOOL LIBRARY
No need for the Terrible Twos, Ferocious Fours, or the Fearsome Fives.
No need to scream and shout repeatedly at your children.
Laughton will share from his 30 years of working with families.
He will show us the tiny changes we can make in what we do,
that will allow our children to make huge changes in what they do.
These changes will allow your child to give you the behaviour you are looking for.
Author of
‘WITH, NOT AGAINST’, and ‘REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER’
Laughton will help us understand the differences between male and female thinking, and what ‘dyslexia’ is all about. His books will be for sale on the night.
Join us for a fun, friendly and informative evening.
Contact Laughton at any time (ph 0274 171 804, or laughton.king@win.co.nz) for further articles regarding dyslexia, information regarding his books (REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST), or to discuss staff training, or parenting seminars.
(Further info available on their shared website; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm)
OTHER OFFERINGS
Laughton offers simple, brief and insightful articles clarifying many of the issues around ‘dyslexia’. These include amongst others;
1. Help! – our boys think in pictures. – a simple look at the way boys think – and learn – that sheds useful light on our language of instruction.
2. What is it like to be ‘dyslexic?’ - speaking from his own experience as a child, Laughton offers insights into the mind-space of the child who struggles with language.
3. What do you mean ADD/ ADHD? – would we continue to use such labels if we really understood what the child himself is experiencing?
4. What else goes with being ‘dyslexic’? – describing a child as ‘dyslexic’ is like describing a dog as ‘something that doesn’t fly’. There is a raft of characteristic style that frequently presents in the ‘dyslexic’ child – but which we may not recognise. More information may allow more understanding, and a lot more tolerance – on the part of teachers and parents alike.
LAUGHTON’S BOOKS
“REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER – a manual of strategies for Teachers and Parents.
- Laughton King. 178 pages. 3rd edition, self-published 2006, NZ.
This very practical and helpful manual focuses on the learning difficulties that come under the ‘umbrella’ notion of ‘Dyslexia’. The author examines why such difficulties are so common in our schools - right around the English-speaking world - and before giving parents and teachers insights as to how to work usefully with these children, demonstrates what the world is like from the inside for these children.
He looks at how these children think, at how they understand the world, at the impact on their behaviour, and at what life is like for them – on the inside. He includes a biographical section based around his own personal experiences as a ‘dyslexic’ child.
In clarifying the fundamental differences between linguistic and pictorial thinking styles, and the connection between learning difficulty and behaviour problems, this book opens the way for parents and teachers to reach, and therefore to effectively teach so-called reluctant learners.
Cost: $50 plus postage.
Orders: e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Laughton King is a registered New Zealand psychologist who has worked with children and parents in schools and their homes over the last thirty years. He has published in parenting magazines all around the world, and is well-known as a public speaker/trainer. His other major book “WITH, NOT AGAINST” is dedicated to supporting positive parenting strategies.
“WITH, NOT AGAINST”
- a compendium of positive parenting strategies.
- Laughton King. 121 pages Self –published Second Edtn 2008.
Written with the busy parent in mind, this book is orientated to taking the head-on fight out of parenting, and is based on the author’s thirty years of clinical work with parents of young children.
This book is written as a practical manual, has a simple, bite-size presentation and is free from the pages of theory that commonly restrict easy access to useful information.
The book focuses on the small things parents do that make it difficult for children to comply and co-operate, and gives examples and illustrations of how we can easily work with our children to achieve happier households.
Includes; Bedtime strategies, Behaviour management, Language of parenting, Toileting, Mealtime behaviour, Arguments, use of Praise and Humour, amongst other issues that can make parenting a lonely and difficult role.
Cost: $50 plus postage.
Orders: e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Laughton King is a registered New Zealand psychologist who has worked with children and parents in schools and their homes over the last thirty years. He has published in parenting magazines all around the world, and is well-known as a public-speaker/trainer, and for his major educational contribution “REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER” – a manual for teachers and parents of ‘dyslexic’ children.
VALIDATIONS
‘We are really pleased with the interest that has been generated from your workshops… and it seems that those who attended your Gisborne sessions were very pleased, and the evaluations indicate its success.’
REAP Tairawhiti
‘One of our parents attended your course and she came back absolutely ecstatic about the info you had given her to work with her son. The changes at home are starting to already be apparent at kindergarten and she had a lot of light-bulb moments during your talk.
So thanks again’.
Lynne
‘I’ve just had a conversation with my Teacher Aide who attended your evening last night at Victory School, (Nelson) and she raved about you and your presentation.’
Pam
‘I attended thinking I was going to learn about my son, but came away with a much better understanding of my own life. For the first time it all made sense.’
Brian. Carterton
‘Hi,
Can you please add me to your database I bought 3 of your books at South Intermediate. It was an excellent evening and have already put into practice many of the things you suggested and things in our house-hold have changed already. - love the 3 minutes in the dark. Would like to know when else over the next few months you are speaking in CHCH as many people I have talked to would like to hear you speak.
Raelene
‘Hi Laughton,
Last night was great. I've been mulling over bits of it all day’.
Glenys
‘Hi Laughton,
My sister in law informed me about a seminar of yours, which she attended at Halswell School last week. From what she told me, I am disappointed I missed it. She came away inspired.I home-school my son and we are members of a couple of home-school groups. I believe your talk would be of benefit to members of these groups.’
Linda
‘Dear Laughton,
Just wanted to thank you for last night at Halswell school. This morning I have been able to find the words that clarify the benefits of our chosen multi-sensory approach to 'picture' learners and thinkers. I also feel that the petrol engine thinkers will benefit greatly from tapping into their emotional, intuitive and creative side’.
Liz
‘Hi Laughton,
Wow have you got our staff thinking. Thank you so much for your presentation on Tuesday. You have really opened the staffs eyes as to the impact our teaching and 'phrasing' of instructions really affects our children day to day. Many of the staff have commented they are coming to the community night on Monday’.
Emma
‘Dear Laughton,
Thank you so much for today. I am so thrilled that you have turned up out the blue and moved our staff to a new level of thinking. I really believe they will come in tomorrow and think more carefully about their class. I hope many other schools invite you to do what you have done for us. See you soon’.
Penny
- AFFIRMATIONS/VALIDATIONS/REFERENCES
- SEMINAR TOUR - itinerary
- SEMINAR CONTENT
- Precise of my two books - REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER,
- WITH, NOT AGAINST, a parentinmg manual.
“As a dyslexic person myself, I have a fair understanding of the nightmare that many of these children are living through.”
“There is nothing ‘wrong’ with the child – just as there is nothing ‘wrong’ with a diesel engine – we just need to learn that it works differently from a petrol engine, and needs different fuel.
“Being dyslexic, and being academically qualified, as well as being professionally experienced, I am in a reasonably rare position. I see this as being a privilege - but it carries an obligation.
“My obligation, and my mission is simply to assist the teachers, and the parents of these children, to understand their style and their reality.
“I am currently on a self-funded, four-year tour of New Zealand, taking every opportunity I can to assist these children – of which there are probably five or more in every classroom in the country.
“Short teacher training seminars, sessions for Teacher Aides and Learning Support workers, evening seminars for parents – an introduction to a different way of viewing the child. This can make all the difference.
……………………….
Laughton King,
Educational Psychologist,
Author
Visiting speaker,
offers short seminars at your school.
Having practiced as an Educational, Child and Family Psychologist for thirty years, Laughton has now closed his practice in Whangarei, and is touring New Zealand. With his partner, oils artist Natalie Tate, he is taking his life-time experience as a ‘dyslexic learner’, and his thirty years as a professional practitioner, to the road.
From their 5-tonne mobile studio/home, their aim is to spend four years touring the country, visiting both cities and the smaller centers, with Laughton offering short seminars to local communities – teachers, teacher aides, parents and specialist educators – around the topics of learning difficulties (including ‘dyslexia’) and co-operative parenting.
Recognising that smaller communities are generally by-passed by the ‘visiting speaker circuit’ it is Laughton and Natalie’s intention to bring their skills to ‘heartland New Zealand’ in an enjoyable and economic manner.
Their proposed itinerary will bring them through the South Island in 2008/09, spending; May – July (08), the Nelson/Marlborough area,
August – February, (09) in Christchurch,
March – April, the West coast,
May – August, the Dunedin area,
September – December (09), Southland.
In 2010 they will be back in the North Island, progressively working northwards through the year.
SEMINARS
The seminars would be 2-3 hours in length (typically to teachers and teacher aides during the day), and for groups of 12 to 100 participants – from your own school, or from the wider general community. By inviting the wider community and other local schools, the seminars could become cost-free to the host school.
These seminars will involve three major components;
A. Developing a working definition of ‘dyslexia’, and understanding the difficulties in establishing such a definition.
B. Looking at the implications for the child – the child’s experience.
C. Looking at the implications for the teacher and parent.
This will allow both parents and teachers to identify the child in question, to perceive them differently, and thence to respond to them differently.
The gains for both child and adult will be marked, and immediate.
Laughton is happy to be contacted by e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
SAMPLE FLYER
OUR KIDS, OUR PARENTS, OUR SCHOOL, OUR COMMUNITY
Laughton King was a sad and lonely dyslexic kid, who hated school.
That was 50 years ago.
Now he is a Child Psychologist, therapist, author and visiting speaker
– and will be at our school to talk with parents about children,
and the way their brains tick.
TUESDAY 2nd DECEMBER 7.00 p.m.
SCHOOL LIBRARY
No need for the Terrible Twos, Ferocious Fours, or the Fearsome Fives.
No need to scream and shout repeatedly at your children.
Laughton will share from his 30 years of working with families.
He will show us the tiny changes we can make in what we do,
that will allow our children to make huge changes in what they do.
These changes will allow your child to give you the behaviour you are looking for.
Author of
‘WITH, NOT AGAINST’, and ‘REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER’
Laughton will help us understand the differences between male and female thinking, and what ‘dyslexia’ is all about. His books will be for sale on the night.
Join us for a fun, friendly and informative evening.
Contact Laughton at any time (ph 0274 171 804, or laughton.king@win.co.nz) for further articles regarding dyslexia, information regarding his books (REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST), or to discuss staff training, or parenting seminars.
(Further info available on their shared website; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm)
OTHER OFFERINGS
Laughton offers simple, brief and insightful articles clarifying many of the issues around ‘dyslexia’. These include amongst others;
1. Help! – our boys think in pictures. – a simple look at the way boys think – and learn – that sheds useful light on our language of instruction.
2. What is it like to be ‘dyslexic?’ - speaking from his own experience as a child, Laughton offers insights into the mind-space of the child who struggles with language.
3. What do you mean ADD/ ADHD? – would we continue to use such labels if we really understood what the child himself is experiencing?
4. What else goes with being ‘dyslexic’? – describing a child as ‘dyslexic’ is like describing a dog as ‘something that doesn’t fly’. There is a raft of characteristic style that frequently presents in the ‘dyslexic’ child – but which we may not recognise. More information may allow more understanding, and a lot more tolerance – on the part of teachers and parents alike.
LAUGHTON’S BOOKS
“REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER – a manual of strategies for Teachers and Parents.
- Laughton King. 178 pages. 3rd edition, self-published 2006, NZ.
This very practical and helpful manual focuses on the learning difficulties that come under the ‘umbrella’ notion of ‘Dyslexia’. The author examines why such difficulties are so common in our schools - right around the English-speaking world - and before giving parents and teachers insights as to how to work usefully with these children, demonstrates what the world is like from the inside for these children.
He looks at how these children think, at how they understand the world, at the impact on their behaviour, and at what life is like for them – on the inside. He includes a biographical section based around his own personal experiences as a ‘dyslexic’ child.
In clarifying the fundamental differences between linguistic and pictorial thinking styles, and the connection between learning difficulty and behaviour problems, this book opens the way for parents and teachers to reach, and therefore to effectively teach so-called reluctant learners.
Cost: $50 plus postage.
Orders: e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Laughton King is a registered New Zealand psychologist who has worked with children and parents in schools and their homes over the last thirty years. He has published in parenting magazines all around the world, and is well-known as a public speaker/trainer. His other major book “WITH, NOT AGAINST” is dedicated to supporting positive parenting strategies.
“WITH, NOT AGAINST”
- a compendium of positive parenting strategies.
- Laughton King. 121 pages Self –published Second Edtn 2008.
Written with the busy parent in mind, this book is orientated to taking the head-on fight out of parenting, and is based on the author’s thirty years of clinical work with parents of young children.
This book is written as a practical manual, has a simple, bite-size presentation and is free from the pages of theory that commonly restrict easy access to useful information.
The book focuses on the small things parents do that make it difficult for children to comply and co-operate, and gives examples and illustrations of how we can easily work with our children to achieve happier households.
Includes; Bedtime strategies, Behaviour management, Language of parenting, Toileting, Mealtime behaviour, Arguments, use of Praise and Humour, amongst other issues that can make parenting a lonely and difficult role.
Cost: $50 plus postage.
Orders: e-mail; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Laughton King is a registered New Zealand psychologist who has worked with children and parents in schools and their homes over the last thirty years. He has published in parenting magazines all around the world, and is well-known as a public-speaker/trainer, and for his major educational contribution “REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER” – a manual for teachers and parents of ‘dyslexic’ children.
VALIDATIONS
‘We are really pleased with the interest that has been generated from your workshops… and it seems that those who attended your Gisborne sessions were very pleased, and the evaluations indicate its success.’
REAP Tairawhiti
‘One of our parents attended your course and she came back absolutely ecstatic about the info you had given her to work with her son. The changes at home are starting to already be apparent at kindergarten and she had a lot of light-bulb moments during your talk.
So thanks again’.
Lynne
‘I’ve just had a conversation with my Teacher Aide who attended your evening last night at Victory School, (Nelson) and she raved about you and your presentation.’
Pam
‘I attended thinking I was going to learn about my son, but came away with a much better understanding of my own life. For the first time it all made sense.’
Brian. Carterton
‘Hi,
Can you please add me to your database I bought 3 of your books at South Intermediate. It was an excellent evening and have already put into practice many of the things you suggested and things in our house-hold have changed already. - love the 3 minutes in the dark. Would like to know when else over the next few months you are speaking in CHCH as many people I have talked to would like to hear you speak.
Raelene
‘Hi Laughton,
Last night was great. I've been mulling over bits of it all day’.
Glenys
‘Hi Laughton,
My sister in law informed me about a seminar of yours, which she attended at Halswell School last week. From what she told me, I am disappointed I missed it. She came away inspired.I home-school my son and we are members of a couple of home-school groups. I believe your talk would be of benefit to members of these groups.’
Linda
‘Dear Laughton,
Just wanted to thank you for last night at Halswell school. This morning I have been able to find the words that clarify the benefits of our chosen multi-sensory approach to 'picture' learners and thinkers. I also feel that the petrol engine thinkers will benefit greatly from tapping into their emotional, intuitive and creative side’.
Liz
‘Hi Laughton,
Wow have you got our staff thinking. Thank you so much for your presentation on Tuesday. You have really opened the staffs eyes as to the impact our teaching and 'phrasing' of instructions really affects our children day to day. Many of the staff have commented they are coming to the community night on Monday’.
Emma
‘Dear Laughton,
Thank you so much for today. I am so thrilled that you have turned up out the blue and moved our staff to a new level of thinking. I really believe they will come in tomorrow and think more carefully about their class. I hope many other schools invite you to do what you have done for us. See you soon’.
Penny
Monday, April 27, 2009
DYSLEXIA SEMINAR TOUR OF NEW ZEALAND
After practising as an Educational Psychologist for over 30 years, I am now on a self-funded tour of NZ (4 years) running short seminars for parents and teachers - looking at the reality of 'dyslexia' and its impact on individuals and families.
Being 'dyslexic' myself gives me insights as to what other 'dyslexics' experience - in a way that most professional teachers and researchers are unable. I come from a family of 'dyslexics' - my father, my brother, myself, and my son - and so have experienced the confusion and the difficulty from a first-hand point of view.
Having lived through a childhood dominated by confusion, failure, emotional difficulty and distress, I am in a position to be able to offer insights from an experiential (not just an academic) point of view. Having also managed to complete three University degrees in Psychology then practise as an educational psychologist for 30+ years, I am able to tap into the wider experience of thousands of my clients over the years, and thus bring useful insights to others with the same difficulties through my seminars and my books.
My seminar tour of NZ is independent and self-funded, and is my personal attempt to clarify and correct some of the misconceptions around 'dyslexia'. It seems that we all see its impact, and many make 'stab-in-the-dark' postulations as to what 'dyslexia' is, and why it is, but few really understand it from the insider's, experiential, point of view.
I hear and read so many claims about 'dyslexia' that are so wrong, so misleading, and so unfair on the 'dyslexic' child and his family. Classroom teachers are in a very difficult position as they are presented with the official, academic, Education Department line on 'dyslexia' - but are left floundering with virtually nil useful, hands-on strategies to work with the 'dyslexic' child sitting in front of them.
Various authorities are still teaching that 'dyslexia' is a "literacy issue", and that outside of this domain these children are okay. This is so wrong! Others still teach that 'dyslexics grow out of it by the time they are 12 years old' - this is equally wrong as I and many other adult 'dyslexics' can testify. (We strategise, we cover, we become very cunning - but we still suffer).
So my mission is to work to put the record straight - and as anybody else who has set out to walk against the current will tell you, this is a lonely and difficult task. But a groundswell is occurring. Teachers and parents have long realised that something was amiss in our limited understanding of 'dyslexia', and they are keen to appraise a slightly different approach, apply it and see the impact.
In my seminars I do not teach or provide a 'programme', and I do not provide a 'test' for dyslexia. Other people do offer these, but I am very wary of how these can mislead and short-change everybody concerned. I do offer insights as to what it is like to be 'dyslexic'. I offer information as to the characterisitics that 'dyslexics' may present, I offer explanations as to the the behaviours that 'dyslexic' children (and adults) will typically present, and ways for parents and teachers to interpret, understand, and then work with these.
My writing also wrestles with the confusing interplay of dynamics that cause a person to appear, (or not) as 'dyslexic', and I give explanation as to the causal dynamics of 'dyslexia'.
For classroom teachers my book REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER provides 180 pages of insights, explanations, approaches and strategies that will make life so much easier for both teacher and child in the classroom. At $50 per copy this is available directly from me, (laughton.king@win.co.nz), and is also invaluable for parents wanting to be directly involved in their children's education.
For parents, 'WITH, NOT AGAINST , a compendium of parenting strategies', is designed to take the conflict out of our interactions with our children, through us, as adults, making slight changes to our language. This allows our children to give us the behaviour that we are looking for. Again, available from me at $55 plus postage.
A third book has now been published - DYSLEXIA DISMANTLED- that serves to clearly demonstrate what dyslexia really is (no it is not a reading and writing problem, as so many people claim) and how parents, teachers and the child himself can work with the dyslexia dynamics. In this book we list 61 characteristics commonly seen in dyslexic children and examine 16 common myths about dyslexia. Further we demonstrate why academics find it so hard to understand what dyslexia really is, and why there is so much resistance in the conservative education field.
Having already run 350 seminars throughout NewZealand I am now available anywhere in NZ or Australia for seminars or workshops for schools, Govt Agencies, and parents for minimal cost.
For individual schools (or rural clusters) a 2 1/2 hr staff seminar will cost $600, and a Parent Evening held in the school facilities will cost $400. Parent evenings hosted in private homes have a negotiable cost, and are becoming a popular choice.
These seminars are short and to the point, involve demonstration and humour and are appropriate for all ages. Professional trainings for groups of Social Workers, Counsellors or specific professional groups are also available.
If you as reader are interested in persuing this or in making direct contact, please e-mail me on laughton.king@win.co.nz.
Cheers,
Laughton
Being 'dyslexic' myself gives me insights as to what other 'dyslexics' experience - in a way that most professional teachers and researchers are unable. I come from a family of 'dyslexics' - my father, my brother, myself, and my son - and so have experienced the confusion and the difficulty from a first-hand point of view.
Having lived through a childhood dominated by confusion, failure, emotional difficulty and distress, I am in a position to be able to offer insights from an experiential (not just an academic) point of view. Having also managed to complete three University degrees in Psychology then practise as an educational psychologist for 30+ years, I am able to tap into the wider experience of thousands of my clients over the years, and thus bring useful insights to others with the same difficulties through my seminars and my books.
My seminar tour of NZ is independent and self-funded, and is my personal attempt to clarify and correct some of the misconceptions around 'dyslexia'. It seems that we all see its impact, and many make 'stab-in-the-dark' postulations as to what 'dyslexia' is, and why it is, but few really understand it from the insider's, experiential, point of view.
I hear and read so many claims about 'dyslexia' that are so wrong, so misleading, and so unfair on the 'dyslexic' child and his family. Classroom teachers are in a very difficult position as they are presented with the official, academic, Education Department line on 'dyslexia' - but are left floundering with virtually nil useful, hands-on strategies to work with the 'dyslexic' child sitting in front of them.
Various authorities are still teaching that 'dyslexia' is a "literacy issue", and that outside of this domain these children are okay. This is so wrong! Others still teach that 'dyslexics grow out of it by the time they are 12 years old' - this is equally wrong as I and many other adult 'dyslexics' can testify. (We strategise, we cover, we become very cunning - but we still suffer).
So my mission is to work to put the record straight - and as anybody else who has set out to walk against the current will tell you, this is a lonely and difficult task. But a groundswell is occurring. Teachers and parents have long realised that something was amiss in our limited understanding of 'dyslexia', and they are keen to appraise a slightly different approach, apply it and see the impact.
In my seminars I do not teach or provide a 'programme', and I do not provide a 'test' for dyslexia. Other people do offer these, but I am very wary of how these can mislead and short-change everybody concerned. I do offer insights as to what it is like to be 'dyslexic'. I offer information as to the characterisitics that 'dyslexics' may present, I offer explanations as to the the behaviours that 'dyslexic' children (and adults) will typically present, and ways for parents and teachers to interpret, understand, and then work with these.
My writing also wrestles with the confusing interplay of dynamics that cause a person to appear, (or not) as 'dyslexic', and I give explanation as to the causal dynamics of 'dyslexia'.
For classroom teachers my book REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER provides 180 pages of insights, explanations, approaches and strategies that will make life so much easier for both teacher and child in the classroom. At $50 per copy this is available directly from me, (laughton.king@win.co.nz), and is also invaluable for parents wanting to be directly involved in their children's education.
For parents, 'WITH, NOT AGAINST , a compendium of parenting strategies', is designed to take the conflict out of our interactions with our children, through us, as adults, making slight changes to our language. This allows our children to give us the behaviour that we are looking for. Again, available from me at $55 plus postage.
A third book has now been published - DYSLEXIA DISMANTLED- that serves to clearly demonstrate what dyslexia really is (no it is not a reading and writing problem, as so many people claim) and how parents, teachers and the child himself can work with the dyslexia dynamics. In this book we list 61 characteristics commonly seen in dyslexic children and examine 16 common myths about dyslexia. Further we demonstrate why academics find it so hard to understand what dyslexia really is, and why there is so much resistance in the conservative education field.
Having already run 350 seminars throughout NewZealand I am now available anywhere in NZ or Australia for seminars or workshops for schools, Govt Agencies, and parents for minimal cost.
For individual schools (or rural clusters) a 2 1/2 hr staff seminar will cost $600, and a Parent Evening held in the school facilities will cost $400. Parent evenings hosted in private homes have a negotiable cost, and are becoming a popular choice.
These seminars are short and to the point, involve demonstration and humour and are appropriate for all ages. Professional trainings for groups of Social Workers, Counsellors or specific professional groups are also available.
If you as reader are interested in persuing this or in making direct contact, please e-mail me on laughton.king@win.co.nz.
Cheers,
Laughton
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Article No. 3
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ADD, ADHD?
It seems to go with being a boy – being accused of being ADD, or even of being ADHD. Hardly a boy I know has not had this label thrown at him at some point in his life.
Well, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but do you get my drift? In terms of style, boys seem to have a need to be overt, noisy, physical and loud – as if hearing the echoes resounding off their environment confirms their very existence. It has even been suggested that this is how males determine and confirm their presence, their identity – the more noisy they are the more real they are. Or is it perhaps the other way around – that the more insecure they are, the more need they have to express their presence through such overt means as noise, or at least loud visual image.
Boys stomp and crash – where girls giggle and talk. Girls preen themselves in the mirror – for hours on end - while boys roar through the town, (peripheral vision glimpsing flashes of reflection in plate glass frontage), on their Harleys. Women ‘multitask’, using their exclusive endowment of eight separate cranial language-sites, like a linguistic octopus, to the confusion and oft-time chagrin of their male counterparts. And our sons get labeled ADD or hyperactive.
“Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD), is a monica often bandied around with very little close examination or understanding of what is really going on – but that is par for the course in the whole arena of ‘dyslexia’. The words themselves would suggest that the culprit has some lack of ability, or even some lack of willingness, to engage with learning activities at an intellectual level. The label is commonly accompanied by the descriptor ‘highly distractible’, but with a slight tonal hint of accusation, suggesting an element of anger or intolerance by the speaker – invariably the parent or class-teacher of the accused.
ADHD or “Attention Deficit Disorder, with Hyperactivity” becomes a double-barreled tag, additionally endowing the individual with a physical style that might match that of a cornered possum – leaping from door-handle to curtain-rail in perpetuated frenzy, or at least at levels that prevent any associate or family member any predictable peace.
Such labels, it would seem, are invented, and imposed by people who have themselves never participated in or been subject to the particular affliction at a personal level, and therefore label what they see – as opposed to what they know. From the inside the story is different.
How many senses do we have? Our various senses all operate individually and so at any one moment we may be subject to signals through our eyes, our ears, our skin, our nose, and our tongue - all signals being received simulataneously. Our eyes, ears and skin may in actual fact, each be bombarded by literally thousands of signals at any one moment. Could we ever begin to measure how many visual signals our eyes are subject to every instant? And the same goes for the ears and the skin – all this meaning that the human sensory system is receiving saturation input much of the time.
Fortunately, to protect us from burn-out, a compensatory shield is deployed where our major computer scans, sorts and prioritises the items in this sensory flood, ascribing preference and priority to a very small proportion of the available input, allowing us to select and focus, to effectively pay attention to what we regard as most important at that moment. Thank God for such an effective neurological system - what would life be like without that screening ability!
Good question – and if you want a good answer, just ask the ADD kid - because this is what daily life is like for him.
For reasons beyond our current knowledge the children we label as ADD have a significant deficit in terms of this protective screening device, and their ‘attentional energies’ are perpetually hammered by an enormous array of input that they are unable to block, sort or selectively prioritise. Every sound, whether natural or man-made demands identification and attention, whilst at that same moment every movement within their direct or peripheral vision vies for visual contact. Just watch their eyes and get a glimpse of what they are taking in.
But equally every available smell, natural, industrial or human, will be stacking up for olfactory analysis, as will the tactile interference of air movement past the hairs of his leg, the rumble through his seat of the truck beyond the wall, and the elusive itch somewhere on his scalp. Addressing those that he can, trying to ignore those that he can’t, and fighting off the intrusions of the many more becomes a seriously exhausting continuous routine for the ADD child.
ADD? Not at all. There is no attention DEFICIT here. There is rather a very clear, and equally extreme attention OVERLOAD situation that dominates his very existence. In many ways we would be better to label this child AOD, and this different understanding immediately puts question to the real value of the intentionally stimulating environment we often promote and value in our classrooms.
Impact on the Child;
The child with AOD experiences three real sets of difficulty – the first, and most obvious is a consequential difficulty in application, with a down-stream impact on learning being quite predictable. The other two are more insidious, and in themselves are perhaps even more personally crippling.
The second is the attitude of the adults in his life. The parents and teachers of this child may not realize that he is subject to an overload of input that he cannot cope with nor control, and of which they have no knowledge. With good intention they cajole him for not paying attention, for not concentrating (his energies) on the task in hand, and for being distractible. So often he is admonished and penalized for something he is completely unable to control.
The third is that he himself has no notion that he is different in this regard, and that the bombardment he experiences is not the norm. He experiences life as he knows it, and like everybody else, assumes that this is normal. It does not appear to him to be an abnormal bombardment – it is just as it has always been – it just is.
The upshot of these is that as well as having a consequential learning difficulty, he is blamed for being uncooperative by the people important to him, and he himself, in his naivety, accepts the label, the blame, and the responsibility. Anxiety, anger, a low self-concept, and eventually depression are the predictable outcomes.
And ADHD?
Hyperactivity means very high levels of activity – as opposed to ‘hypo-activity’ which means just the opposite.
The hyperactive child is more than just an intensively active child. This child moves at an unbelievable rate, is generally erratically spontaneous, and moves constantly and intrusively into and through everything. He recognizes few barriers and no sensitivities – nothing is out-of-bounds as far as his inquisitiveness is concerned. He will commonly have an explosive start to the day – eclipsing the local rooster – and will move like a turbo-charged maniac until dropping in his tracks sometime prior to midnight.
Although many are labeled ‘hyperactive’, few really fit the bill – and for this we should be grateful.
More often we have children who although excessively active, do not warrant the title, ‘hyperactive’ and certainly do not warrant medication. They do however deserve assistance, and investigation of the possible dynamics that may be causing a life-style that is as uncomfortable for them as it is for those sharing their life-space.
Many children who fall under the descriptor ‘dyslexic’ present as having heightened sensitivity to a multitude of environmental factors, which can individually, or as a group create a stressed neuro/muscular system. Identification and monitoring of these environmental factors can bring huge relief to all concerned. Typically chemicals, minerals and electrical current are the main culprits.
The sustained physical function of the human body is a product of an harmonious interaction of two major physiological systems – one being chemical, and the other electrical – together being major factors in our neurological functioning. Each individual person has slightly differing needs in both respects, and any maladjustment has the capacity to impact on the way the individual will operate.
As with motor vehicles, some people are highly tuned, and hence highly vulnerable to variation within their system, and others are so low-tuned that nothing seems to impact on their performance at all. Too much or too little of anything ranging from trace-elements, through vitamins, minerals, proteins, sugars, to foreign chemicals (as in preservatives, flavouring chemicals etc), to foreign electrical impulses, can push a child well beyond their own ability to cope.
Chemicals and Minerals
Foreign chemicals and minerals can enter our diet in a number of ways;
- they can be entirely natural and be present in our natural foods (salicylates in apples, feijoas etc for example).
- they can be natural but be presented in unnatural ways (dried fruits having a changed sugar form, or squeezed juices having sugar concentrates out of balance from that of the raw fruit).
- they can be natural, but not naturally in our food chain (aluminium powder in our town drinking water, or lead in tin packaging).
They can equally be present as part of our food preparation process, (chemicals used to ripen bananas), or be remnant from cleaning processes (chlorine in cleaners), or be present as additives to preserve, colour, flavour and ‘stabilise’ our food. (Your local naturopath or nutritionist could tell you much more than this.)
As part of their heightened sensitivity, many ADHD (perhaps that should now be AOHD) children will present as having food allergies, or at least food intolerances, with dairy and wheat products (gluten) being the two most common.
We frequent our supermarkets and buy our foods in good faith, with a predominating attitude that “they wouldn’t give it to us if it wasn’t good for us”. Few people stop to consider the poisons they regularly put into their own body – or actively provide for their children – under the guise of ‘food’. Few consumers realize that the sulphides and sulphates that are a common ingredient in our canned and bottled fizz, act like a brick on the body’s accelerator, and bolt-cutters through the brake cable – producing what is arguably the first significant, chemically induced, mind-altering experience in the young child’s life.
Electrical.
And then there is the electrical side of our mechanism – the entire nervous system.
That our modern life-style involves a multitude of electrical and electronic gadgetry is readily recognized – but what of the impact of electrical radiation?
Consider the battery in your wrist watch, and the radiation from your cell-phone, your kitchen micro-wave, TV and computer, or the alarum/radio beside the bed. What of the ever-present current from your electric blanket (even though it is turned off), your home meter-board, and the sub-station or transformer on the street. What about stray radiation from the local cell-phone tower and microwave relay station? All of these may be draining your own energy, and wrecking havoc with the delicate internal balance of your child, making it impossible for him to regulate his activity or his behaviour.
In this case, is it at all appropriate for you to berate your child, or to punish him in an attempt to change his behaviour? – to punish him for something that may be well beyond his control?
And medication? Is it legitimate to add yet another chemical ingredient to the environmental cocktail of poisons your child is experiencing, in the form of a ‘medication’ to calm and regulate him, and do you include these in the ‘must be good for us’ category?
As author, psychologist, ‘hyperactive’ child/become highly energetic adult, this 60 year old psychologist of 30+ years experience in working with such children, urges a responsible examination of the possible dynamics of each individual child by those primarily charged with their safe-keeping – you, the parents.
Take charge of the child’s environment, so he can take charge of his own behaviour.
Laughton King Psychologist www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm July 2008
laughton.king@win.co.nz ph; 0274.171.804
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ADD, ADHD?
It seems to go with being a boy – being accused of being ADD, or even of being ADHD. Hardly a boy I know has not had this label thrown at him at some point in his life.
Well, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but do you get my drift? In terms of style, boys seem to have a need to be overt, noisy, physical and loud – as if hearing the echoes resounding off their environment confirms their very existence. It has even been suggested that this is how males determine and confirm their presence, their identity – the more noisy they are the more real they are. Or is it perhaps the other way around – that the more insecure they are, the more need they have to express their presence through such overt means as noise, or at least loud visual image.
Boys stomp and crash – where girls giggle and talk. Girls preen themselves in the mirror – for hours on end - while boys roar through the town, (peripheral vision glimpsing flashes of reflection in plate glass frontage), on their Harleys. Women ‘multitask’, using their exclusive endowment of eight separate cranial language-sites, like a linguistic octopus, to the confusion and oft-time chagrin of their male counterparts. And our sons get labeled ADD or hyperactive.
“Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD), is a monica often bandied around with very little close examination or understanding of what is really going on – but that is par for the course in the whole arena of ‘dyslexia’. The words themselves would suggest that the culprit has some lack of ability, or even some lack of willingness, to engage with learning activities at an intellectual level. The label is commonly accompanied by the descriptor ‘highly distractible’, but with a slight tonal hint of accusation, suggesting an element of anger or intolerance by the speaker – invariably the parent or class-teacher of the accused.
ADHD or “Attention Deficit Disorder, with Hyperactivity” becomes a double-barreled tag, additionally endowing the individual with a physical style that might match that of a cornered possum – leaping from door-handle to curtain-rail in perpetuated frenzy, or at least at levels that prevent any associate or family member any predictable peace.
Such labels, it would seem, are invented, and imposed by people who have themselves never participated in or been subject to the particular affliction at a personal level, and therefore label what they see – as opposed to what they know. From the inside the story is different.
How many senses do we have? Our various senses all operate individually and so at any one moment we may be subject to signals through our eyes, our ears, our skin, our nose, and our tongue - all signals being received simulataneously. Our eyes, ears and skin may in actual fact, each be bombarded by literally thousands of signals at any one moment. Could we ever begin to measure how many visual signals our eyes are subject to every instant? And the same goes for the ears and the skin – all this meaning that the human sensory system is receiving saturation input much of the time.
Fortunately, to protect us from burn-out, a compensatory shield is deployed where our major computer scans, sorts and prioritises the items in this sensory flood, ascribing preference and priority to a very small proportion of the available input, allowing us to select and focus, to effectively pay attention to what we regard as most important at that moment. Thank God for such an effective neurological system - what would life be like without that screening ability!
Good question – and if you want a good answer, just ask the ADD kid - because this is what daily life is like for him.
For reasons beyond our current knowledge the children we label as ADD have a significant deficit in terms of this protective screening device, and their ‘attentional energies’ are perpetually hammered by an enormous array of input that they are unable to block, sort or selectively prioritise. Every sound, whether natural or man-made demands identification and attention, whilst at that same moment every movement within their direct or peripheral vision vies for visual contact. Just watch their eyes and get a glimpse of what they are taking in.
But equally every available smell, natural, industrial or human, will be stacking up for olfactory analysis, as will the tactile interference of air movement past the hairs of his leg, the rumble through his seat of the truck beyond the wall, and the elusive itch somewhere on his scalp. Addressing those that he can, trying to ignore those that he can’t, and fighting off the intrusions of the many more becomes a seriously exhausting continuous routine for the ADD child.
ADD? Not at all. There is no attention DEFICIT here. There is rather a very clear, and equally extreme attention OVERLOAD situation that dominates his very existence. In many ways we would be better to label this child AOD, and this different understanding immediately puts question to the real value of the intentionally stimulating environment we often promote and value in our classrooms.
Impact on the Child;
The child with AOD experiences three real sets of difficulty – the first, and most obvious is a consequential difficulty in application, with a down-stream impact on learning being quite predictable. The other two are more insidious, and in themselves are perhaps even more personally crippling.
The second is the attitude of the adults in his life. The parents and teachers of this child may not realize that he is subject to an overload of input that he cannot cope with nor control, and of which they have no knowledge. With good intention they cajole him for not paying attention, for not concentrating (his energies) on the task in hand, and for being distractible. So often he is admonished and penalized for something he is completely unable to control.
The third is that he himself has no notion that he is different in this regard, and that the bombardment he experiences is not the norm. He experiences life as he knows it, and like everybody else, assumes that this is normal. It does not appear to him to be an abnormal bombardment – it is just as it has always been – it just is.
The upshot of these is that as well as having a consequential learning difficulty, he is blamed for being uncooperative by the people important to him, and he himself, in his naivety, accepts the label, the blame, and the responsibility. Anxiety, anger, a low self-concept, and eventually depression are the predictable outcomes.
And ADHD?
Hyperactivity means very high levels of activity – as opposed to ‘hypo-activity’ which means just the opposite.
The hyperactive child is more than just an intensively active child. This child moves at an unbelievable rate, is generally erratically spontaneous, and moves constantly and intrusively into and through everything. He recognizes few barriers and no sensitivities – nothing is out-of-bounds as far as his inquisitiveness is concerned. He will commonly have an explosive start to the day – eclipsing the local rooster – and will move like a turbo-charged maniac until dropping in his tracks sometime prior to midnight.
Although many are labeled ‘hyperactive’, few really fit the bill – and for this we should be grateful.
More often we have children who although excessively active, do not warrant the title, ‘hyperactive’ and certainly do not warrant medication. They do however deserve assistance, and investigation of the possible dynamics that may be causing a life-style that is as uncomfortable for them as it is for those sharing their life-space.
Many children who fall under the descriptor ‘dyslexic’ present as having heightened sensitivity to a multitude of environmental factors, which can individually, or as a group create a stressed neuro/muscular system. Identification and monitoring of these environmental factors can bring huge relief to all concerned. Typically chemicals, minerals and electrical current are the main culprits.
The sustained physical function of the human body is a product of an harmonious interaction of two major physiological systems – one being chemical, and the other electrical – together being major factors in our neurological functioning. Each individual person has slightly differing needs in both respects, and any maladjustment has the capacity to impact on the way the individual will operate.
As with motor vehicles, some people are highly tuned, and hence highly vulnerable to variation within their system, and others are so low-tuned that nothing seems to impact on their performance at all. Too much or too little of anything ranging from trace-elements, through vitamins, minerals, proteins, sugars, to foreign chemicals (as in preservatives, flavouring chemicals etc), to foreign electrical impulses, can push a child well beyond their own ability to cope.
Chemicals and Minerals
Foreign chemicals and minerals can enter our diet in a number of ways;
- they can be entirely natural and be present in our natural foods (salicylates in apples, feijoas etc for example).
- they can be natural but be presented in unnatural ways (dried fruits having a changed sugar form, or squeezed juices having sugar concentrates out of balance from that of the raw fruit).
- they can be natural, but not naturally in our food chain (aluminium powder in our town drinking water, or lead in tin packaging).
They can equally be present as part of our food preparation process, (chemicals used to ripen bananas), or be remnant from cleaning processes (chlorine in cleaners), or be present as additives to preserve, colour, flavour and ‘stabilise’ our food. (Your local naturopath or nutritionist could tell you much more than this.)
As part of their heightened sensitivity, many ADHD (perhaps that should now be AOHD) children will present as having food allergies, or at least food intolerances, with dairy and wheat products (gluten) being the two most common.
We frequent our supermarkets and buy our foods in good faith, with a predominating attitude that “they wouldn’t give it to us if it wasn’t good for us”. Few people stop to consider the poisons they regularly put into their own body – or actively provide for their children – under the guise of ‘food’. Few consumers realize that the sulphides and sulphates that are a common ingredient in our canned and bottled fizz, act like a brick on the body’s accelerator, and bolt-cutters through the brake cable – producing what is arguably the first significant, chemically induced, mind-altering experience in the young child’s life.
Electrical.
And then there is the electrical side of our mechanism – the entire nervous system.
That our modern life-style involves a multitude of electrical and electronic gadgetry is readily recognized – but what of the impact of electrical radiation?
Consider the battery in your wrist watch, and the radiation from your cell-phone, your kitchen micro-wave, TV and computer, or the alarum/radio beside the bed. What of the ever-present current from your electric blanket (even though it is turned off), your home meter-board, and the sub-station or transformer on the street. What about stray radiation from the local cell-phone tower and microwave relay station? All of these may be draining your own energy, and wrecking havoc with the delicate internal balance of your child, making it impossible for him to regulate his activity or his behaviour.
In this case, is it at all appropriate for you to berate your child, or to punish him in an attempt to change his behaviour? – to punish him for something that may be well beyond his control?
And medication? Is it legitimate to add yet another chemical ingredient to the environmental cocktail of poisons your child is experiencing, in the form of a ‘medication’ to calm and regulate him, and do you include these in the ‘must be good for us’ category?
As author, psychologist, ‘hyperactive’ child/become highly energetic adult, this 60 year old psychologist of 30+ years experience in working with such children, urges a responsible examination of the possible dynamics of each individual child by those primarily charged with their safe-keeping – you, the parents.
Take charge of the child’s environment, so he can take charge of his own behaviour.
Laughton King Psychologist www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm July 2008
laughton.king@win.co.nz ph; 0274.171.804
Saturday, April 25, 2009
What is it like to be 'Dyslexic'?
Article No. 2
“Tell me, what is it like to be dyslexic?”
That’s a good question and it makes me think – because being dyslexic is normal for me, I’ve always been dyslexic, and I don’t know any other way. I don’t know what ‘normal’ really is.
For years I thought I was ‘normal’- although perhaps a little stupid, or maybe just ‘dumb’. I knew I was always a little behind the eight-ball, I didn’t understand what the teacher was talking about, and couldn’t ‘pay attention’ to the classroom situation - but with enough effort, huge concentration, and a degree of canny strategizing I got through.
Being ‘dyslexic’ is usually associated with having reading and writing difficulties, and that is certainly the case for me. Eventually, somewhere round about my tenth birthday I figured I had mastered the art of ‘reading’ and became an avid reader - for the next three days. Finally I gave up exhausted, having read my first book five or six times – up to page six – and eventually realizing that although I could read, and say each word, I had no idea what they meant, or what the book was about. Now as an adult I will happily dig your garden or mow your lawn in preference to reading a book.
‘Dyslexia’ is about language, and about not being able to do language well. Difficulty with ‘reading’ is only one part of being dyslexic – but let’s explore that for a moment.
As a ‘dyslexic’, I know that words are the things that come out of your mouth – and into your ears. The things in books, or in the newspaper are not really words at all – they are just pictures of words, they are things to remind you of the words that you can say and hear. The really hard part is that they are made up of squiggles, black marks on white paper – and these things have no recognisable resemblance to anything real at all – and especially not to whatever it is that they are meant to be referring to.
What I mean is, whereas the Chinese symbol for ‘mountain’ actually looks like a mountain, the squiggles called ‘letters’ bear no similarity to a high hill at all. This might not be a problem to you, but I’m ‘dyslexic’, and that means that I think in pictures, and with these ‘letter’ things, I don’t get the picture at all.
I don’t know what you see when you open a book, but the first thing I see is flashes of lightening jumping all over the page. When my primary school teacher asked what I meant, I drew a line where the lightening went, and she said that it followed the gaps between the words down the page. I said ‘yes, this is the same as the ladders in ‘Snakes and Ladders’, and my eyes always slide to the bottom’.
The same teacher asked me why I like to draw a line around my page, and I told her it is not a line, but an electric fence – like on our farm – to stop the words, and my eyes, from wandering off the page. I was not allowed to draw my lines on school reading books, and that made reading too hard - the words wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to work them out, and they kept jumping from one line to another. The teacher put a blank card under the line I was reading, and that helped – but they wouldn’t let me do it at College.
Now as an adult with my laptop I can finally write (neatly what’s more) because the computer puts all the bits in the right place, the letters and the words in the right order. I know I can’t get a computer to read for me, but the interesting thing is, comics work really well for me, because all the pictures are there and I can see exactly what the message is. I can even ‘read’ the words in comics – and this is because they are all in square letters or capitals, which people like me find easier to understand.
What about ‘writing’ for the dyslexic?
Yes, this is hard too.
The first reason is because ‘writing’ always seems to involve words, but that is obvious. What is not obvious is that to write words you first have to choose words to write. What if you don’t have any words in your head? Yes I have plenty of ideas, memories, fantasies and creations – but I see them, in pictures, and I cannot readily find words to represent them. In my head my internal video screen might show a pack of frenzied Chihuahuas terrorizing the police in the city, and I write on my page “The little dog…” then give up in disgust and frustration.
The other main reason for writing being hard has got something to do with our tendency to carry what I call a ‘residual left-handed-orientation’. Normal people don’t often realize that most tools are designed for right-handers (most of our population), and don’t really suit left-handers. They certainly don’t realize that this is also the case with the letters of the alphabet, and with the direction we read and write in – which is all designed for right-handers. Apparently the Phoenicians designed all this – with no consideration for the lefties in the population. I’m not saying that all dyslexics are left-handed, but most that I have met can quickly identify a left-hander in their immediate family tree.
Being a lefty (it used to be called ‘cack-hander’ which is an insult to the Indian people as well as to the lefties – you can work this out for yourselves) isn’t so bad in itself these days, except that lefties naturally go from right to left across the page, and we naturally draw our circles in a clockwise direction – and this is in reverse from what our reading system demands. So we spend all our educational life having to do our reading and writing in reverse-gear. Great.
So what is it like to be dyslexic? Well, we think in pictures, we chase words around the pages of books, and we have trouble finding any sensible connection between squiggles on paper and real things they are meant to refer to. And this all happens in perpetual reverse gear. For us,
school is not cool.
So you think in pictures?
Yes, I think in pictures. You say “dog”, and I get a picture of a dog in my head. You probably do the same – and that doesn’t make you ‘dyslexic’. You say “fiction” and you probably know what it means – but I just look at you funny because I can’t get a picture of that word. I can’t draw a simple picture of what it means. I also can’t get a picture of “respect”, or “tidy”, or “behave” or lots of other words that parents use, so I have only a very hazy idea of what these words might mean – but parents and teachers keep asking me to do these things. They probably don’t realize how hard this is for me. I want to please them, but they won’t or can’t understand – they just think I am being un-cooperative.
So dyslexia affects behaviour too?
Yes, it affects behaviour too. I often don’t understand instruction, or what people want of me. They know what they mean, but the words make no sense to me. It’s even worse when they say “Don’t…..” then put a picture of me doing something in my head. They do this with “Don’t slam the door”, and “Don’t spill your drink”, “Don’t be late” and lots of other hypnotic commands. When I comply with the pictures they give me, I get the blame, and I am told that I am bad and a trouble-maker. I see that there is no picture for “Don’t” – can you see this? Can you understand that they blame me for following their instruction as best I can? Really it would be better if they told me what they do want – not what they don’t want.
They think in words – I think in pictures. This is a bit like petrol (words) and diesel (pictures). They put petrol in my diesel tank and I can’t make it work – I can’t learn and I can’t cooperate.….but I get the blame.
Now let me go back to the question: What is it like to be dyslexic? What goes on inside my head? What do I think? Do I think? Really the answer has to be “No”. I’m not really sure what ‘think’ means. You have a petrol brain that uses words to think with. In my head there aren’t any words, and there aren’t really any thoughts. I have eyes inside my head that have lots of pictures going through them, like lots of videos, all at once. Some of these are now, some are from in the past – and some are from the future, all at once. Some are ‘true’ and some of them I create – but I can’t tell one from the other, they all look the same. You say I have a good memory, but really this is only for pictures.
When someone asks me what I am thinking I can’t answer. The first reason I can’t answer is that I can see about 6000 things in my videos at any one moment – so which bit shall I talk about? It is easier to just say “Nothing”. The second reason is that there are just pictures in my head – and feelings. ‘Telling you’ means using words, and I’m not good at that. I often end up wanting to share, but can’t find the words – or use lots of wrong words – or far too many words, too fast. And then I get growled at.
The worst is when I say words, and people hear them – but I used the wrong words that don’t say what I mean. But people say that that is what I said, so it must be what I meant. More than this, can I ask you, please, please don’t ask me how I feel – that is just too hard.
And while I’m on the subject, when you want me to learn something, or to understand something, telling me with words is not the best way to go – show me, walk me through it, and I will have a far better chance of understanding and giving you what you want.
So what is it like to be dyslexic?
It is like always getting it wrong. Being ‘bad’ when you are trying to be good. Being always in the dark and thinking that you must be dumb and stupid. Finding things hard when you are told that they are easy. Like working yourself to exhaustion, then being told you are not trying hard enough. Like wanting to please your parents and teachers, but just making them angry. Like being unable to share your ideas usefully with other people, and of not even knowing how you feel. Like being too scared to try, because you know it will only lead to failure – again. Like living a daily nightmare where everything is out of control, and being too scared to sleep at night because of the horrendous nightmares that haunt you under cover of dark. The anxiety, the fear and the insecurity is horrendous – it’s overpowering and depressing, and it doesn’t go away, even when you get older.
Thank you for your questions, and for your interest, but I almost wish you hadn’t asked.
Laughton King July 2008
Psychologist
www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm laughton.king@win.co.nz 0274.171.804
“Tell me, what is it like to be dyslexic?”
That’s a good question and it makes me think – because being dyslexic is normal for me, I’ve always been dyslexic, and I don’t know any other way. I don’t know what ‘normal’ really is.
For years I thought I was ‘normal’- although perhaps a little stupid, or maybe just ‘dumb’. I knew I was always a little behind the eight-ball, I didn’t understand what the teacher was talking about, and couldn’t ‘pay attention’ to the classroom situation - but with enough effort, huge concentration, and a degree of canny strategizing I got through.
Being ‘dyslexic’ is usually associated with having reading and writing difficulties, and that is certainly the case for me. Eventually, somewhere round about my tenth birthday I figured I had mastered the art of ‘reading’ and became an avid reader - for the next three days. Finally I gave up exhausted, having read my first book five or six times – up to page six – and eventually realizing that although I could read, and say each word, I had no idea what they meant, or what the book was about. Now as an adult I will happily dig your garden or mow your lawn in preference to reading a book.
‘Dyslexia’ is about language, and about not being able to do language well. Difficulty with ‘reading’ is only one part of being dyslexic – but let’s explore that for a moment.
As a ‘dyslexic’, I know that words are the things that come out of your mouth – and into your ears. The things in books, or in the newspaper are not really words at all – they are just pictures of words, they are things to remind you of the words that you can say and hear. The really hard part is that they are made up of squiggles, black marks on white paper – and these things have no recognisable resemblance to anything real at all – and especially not to whatever it is that they are meant to be referring to.
What I mean is, whereas the Chinese symbol for ‘mountain’ actually looks like a mountain, the squiggles called ‘letters’ bear no similarity to a high hill at all. This might not be a problem to you, but I’m ‘dyslexic’, and that means that I think in pictures, and with these ‘letter’ things, I don’t get the picture at all.
I don’t know what you see when you open a book, but the first thing I see is flashes of lightening jumping all over the page. When my primary school teacher asked what I meant, I drew a line where the lightening went, and she said that it followed the gaps between the words down the page. I said ‘yes, this is the same as the ladders in ‘Snakes and Ladders’, and my eyes always slide to the bottom’.
The same teacher asked me why I like to draw a line around my page, and I told her it is not a line, but an electric fence – like on our farm – to stop the words, and my eyes, from wandering off the page. I was not allowed to draw my lines on school reading books, and that made reading too hard - the words wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to work them out, and they kept jumping from one line to another. The teacher put a blank card under the line I was reading, and that helped – but they wouldn’t let me do it at College.
Now as an adult with my laptop I can finally write (neatly what’s more) because the computer puts all the bits in the right place, the letters and the words in the right order. I know I can’t get a computer to read for me, but the interesting thing is, comics work really well for me, because all the pictures are there and I can see exactly what the message is. I can even ‘read’ the words in comics – and this is because they are all in square letters or capitals, which people like me find easier to understand.
What about ‘writing’ for the dyslexic?
Yes, this is hard too.
The first reason is because ‘writing’ always seems to involve words, but that is obvious. What is not obvious is that to write words you first have to choose words to write. What if you don’t have any words in your head? Yes I have plenty of ideas, memories, fantasies and creations – but I see them, in pictures, and I cannot readily find words to represent them. In my head my internal video screen might show a pack of frenzied Chihuahuas terrorizing the police in the city, and I write on my page “The little dog…” then give up in disgust and frustration.
The other main reason for writing being hard has got something to do with our tendency to carry what I call a ‘residual left-handed-orientation’. Normal people don’t often realize that most tools are designed for right-handers (most of our population), and don’t really suit left-handers. They certainly don’t realize that this is also the case with the letters of the alphabet, and with the direction we read and write in – which is all designed for right-handers. Apparently the Phoenicians designed all this – with no consideration for the lefties in the population. I’m not saying that all dyslexics are left-handed, but most that I have met can quickly identify a left-hander in their immediate family tree.
Being a lefty (it used to be called ‘cack-hander’ which is an insult to the Indian people as well as to the lefties – you can work this out for yourselves) isn’t so bad in itself these days, except that lefties naturally go from right to left across the page, and we naturally draw our circles in a clockwise direction – and this is in reverse from what our reading system demands. So we spend all our educational life having to do our reading and writing in reverse-gear. Great.
So what is it like to be dyslexic? Well, we think in pictures, we chase words around the pages of books, and we have trouble finding any sensible connection between squiggles on paper and real things they are meant to refer to. And this all happens in perpetual reverse gear. For us,
school is not cool.
So you think in pictures?
Yes, I think in pictures. You say “dog”, and I get a picture of a dog in my head. You probably do the same – and that doesn’t make you ‘dyslexic’. You say “fiction” and you probably know what it means – but I just look at you funny because I can’t get a picture of that word. I can’t draw a simple picture of what it means. I also can’t get a picture of “respect”, or “tidy”, or “behave” or lots of other words that parents use, so I have only a very hazy idea of what these words might mean – but parents and teachers keep asking me to do these things. They probably don’t realize how hard this is for me. I want to please them, but they won’t or can’t understand – they just think I am being un-cooperative.
So dyslexia affects behaviour too?
Yes, it affects behaviour too. I often don’t understand instruction, or what people want of me. They know what they mean, but the words make no sense to me. It’s even worse when they say “Don’t…..” then put a picture of me doing something in my head. They do this with “Don’t slam the door”, and “Don’t spill your drink”, “Don’t be late” and lots of other hypnotic commands. When I comply with the pictures they give me, I get the blame, and I am told that I am bad and a trouble-maker. I see that there is no picture for “Don’t” – can you see this? Can you understand that they blame me for following their instruction as best I can? Really it would be better if they told me what they do want – not what they don’t want.
They think in words – I think in pictures. This is a bit like petrol (words) and diesel (pictures). They put petrol in my diesel tank and I can’t make it work – I can’t learn and I can’t cooperate.….but I get the blame.
Now let me go back to the question: What is it like to be dyslexic? What goes on inside my head? What do I think? Do I think? Really the answer has to be “No”. I’m not really sure what ‘think’ means. You have a petrol brain that uses words to think with. In my head there aren’t any words, and there aren’t really any thoughts. I have eyes inside my head that have lots of pictures going through them, like lots of videos, all at once. Some of these are now, some are from in the past – and some are from the future, all at once. Some are ‘true’ and some of them I create – but I can’t tell one from the other, they all look the same. You say I have a good memory, but really this is only for pictures.
When someone asks me what I am thinking I can’t answer. The first reason I can’t answer is that I can see about 6000 things in my videos at any one moment – so which bit shall I talk about? It is easier to just say “Nothing”. The second reason is that there are just pictures in my head – and feelings. ‘Telling you’ means using words, and I’m not good at that. I often end up wanting to share, but can’t find the words – or use lots of wrong words – or far too many words, too fast. And then I get growled at.
The worst is when I say words, and people hear them – but I used the wrong words that don’t say what I mean. But people say that that is what I said, so it must be what I meant. More than this, can I ask you, please, please don’t ask me how I feel – that is just too hard.
And while I’m on the subject, when you want me to learn something, or to understand something, telling me with words is not the best way to go – show me, walk me through it, and I will have a far better chance of understanding and giving you what you want.
So what is it like to be dyslexic?
It is like always getting it wrong. Being ‘bad’ when you are trying to be good. Being always in the dark and thinking that you must be dumb and stupid. Finding things hard when you are told that they are easy. Like working yourself to exhaustion, then being told you are not trying hard enough. Like wanting to please your parents and teachers, but just making them angry. Like being unable to share your ideas usefully with other people, and of not even knowing how you feel. Like being too scared to try, because you know it will only lead to failure – again. Like living a daily nightmare where everything is out of control, and being too scared to sleep at night because of the horrendous nightmares that haunt you under cover of dark. The anxiety, the fear and the insecurity is horrendous – it’s overpowering and depressing, and it doesn’t go away, even when you get older.
Thank you for your questions, and for your interest, but I almost wish you hadn’t asked.
Laughton King July 2008
Psychologist
www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm laughton.king@win.co.nz 0274.171.804
Thursday, April 23, 2009
DYSLEXIA AS A DAILY LIFE ISSUE
Whilst still struggling with the technology, and all the terms and language associated with Blogging, it is my intention to set up a base of information that will be useful to school teachers, parents social-workers and to 'dyslexic' people themselves - a clarification of the issues of this confusing thing called 'DYLEXSIA'.
I am 'dyslexic'. All my life I have been 'dyslexic', and I realise that I will always be so. We do not grow out of 'dyslexia', it cannot (and does not need to) be fixed. There is nothing wrong with the 'dyslexic' person - they have a perfectly intact manner of thinking, it is just a little different from the thinking style of others.
Being a University trained Psychologist (three psychology degrees), and having spent my entire professional working life (I am now 60) working with 'dyslexic' people, I have written two books around these issues, and am part-way through my third. To be simple and direct, my take on 'dyslexia' is very different from that of most other people - and my mission is to provide useful information to those people struggling with the daily issues of 'dyslexia'.
Progressively, via these pages (and as I manage to get assistance dealing with the technology) I intend to publish sections of the manuscript of my next, as yet unpublished, and untitled book .
All feedback is welcome.
For today, I have interviewed myself, as an overview statement, an outline of what "dyslexia'
really is about.
Article No. 1.
HELP!; OUR BOYS ARE THINKING IN PICTURES!
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
I am 'dyslexic'. All my life I have been 'dyslexic', and I realise that I will always be so. We do not grow out of 'dyslexia', it cannot (and does not need to) be fixed. There is nothing wrong with the 'dyslexic' person - they have a perfectly intact manner of thinking, it is just a little different from the thinking style of others.
Being a University trained Psychologist (three psychology degrees), and having spent my entire professional working life (I am now 60) working with 'dyslexic' people, I have written two books around these issues, and am part-way through my third. To be simple and direct, my take on 'dyslexia' is very different from that of most other people - and my mission is to provide useful information to those people struggling with the daily issues of 'dyslexia'.
Progressively, via these pages (and as I manage to get assistance dealing with the technology) I intend to publish sections of the manuscript of my next, as yet unpublished, and untitled book .
All feedback is welcome.
For today, I have interviewed myself, as an overview statement, an outline of what "dyslexia'
really is about.
Article No. 1.
HELP!; OUR BOYS ARE THINKING IN PICTURES!
The headlines are emotional, sensational and repetitive, ‘our boys are failing’. Irrespective of how often we hear it, the message is none-the-less upsetting for anybody with a direct or indirect interest in children, the education system, or our future; our boys are not succeeding satisfactorily in their elemental academic learning.
Acknowledging that issues of academic failure on the part of our younger generation, particularly of our boys, is a journalist’s paradise-playground, the harsh downstream realities, so currently evident in our youth subculture, and so predictable from the evidence to date, raises concerns fueled by emotions ranging from love to fear.
Although recorded history shows clearly that there is nothing new about this situation, our current ‘progress to perfection’ mind-set leaves us little room to sit in complacency while the evidence dances so vividly before us. The education system is failing our little boys, somewhere, somehow. Our little boys stand to become big boys, and at this rate our big boys stand to become big problems – or at least enough of them stand in such a way as we see them as being a problem.
Although the reports persistently tell us there is a problem, they just as persistently fail to indicate where and how the problem lies, and fall glaringly short in terms of any suggestion or indication as to what might be done about it.
As a little boy who experienced such difficulties at school, and who ran perilously close to becoming one of the problematic youth, psychologist Laughton King believes he can shed light on the situation. He claims the explanation is as dynamic, yet as simple as the difference between petrol and diesel.
In his seminars and his books he reminds parents and teachers what happens when we inadvertently put petrol in our diesel car – the engine goes sluggish, overheats, then finally fails to perform. This, he says is what happens when we fail to recognize that many boys under the age of 12 years think in pictures.
He smiles when I look quizzically in response to this statement, as if expecting or indeed predicting my confusion. Thinking just happens – doesn’t it? Few of us probably ever bother to stop and think about thinking, let alone ponder such deep-and-meaningfuls such as how we might think. By way of explanation he gives a thumb-nail description which in essence hi-lights major differences between the way in which most males and females think. He describes girls and women as having a much greater natural skill – and a much greater tendency – to think in words. Boys and men on the other hand, he says have less skill in this arena, but correspondingly more skill in thinking in pictures. This he says explains a lot of the differences in the way men and women operate, and consequently a lot of the difficulties the two experience in communication. This part is familiar ground for most of us.
Despite our gender prejudices, this difference in style of thinking is not just a matter of personal obstinacy, but more a product of the different wiring systems that we have. He talks of ‘masculine’ wiring systems and ‘feminine’ systems, and neurological research that indicates that the feminine system involves up to eight separate centres for language processing (but few for spatial relationships), and that the masculine system has a solitary (and sometimes very lonely) centre for language processing, but has more processing space dedicated to the kinesthetic, tactile and spatial functions.
He points to the obvious – little boys are all touch, crash and go, where little girls are more physically reserved, but talkative in their style. He points to the more obvious – the café where we met for this interview has two or three groups of women talking with varying degrees of animation, and one solitary man hunched over his laptop. Through the window and across the way we see eight large motor-cycles parked outside a café-bar, and their red-and-black leathered owners – the current version of ‘middle-aged-gentlemen’ – sitting quietly with their bikes and their beers in the sun. Their bikes do the talking – or should it be, ‘their bikes make the statement’. Admittedly two women accompany the men, but Laughton draws my attention to their upper-arm tattoos, and with a wordless gesture suggests that I take this into account. What I notice is his distinctly male communication style – gesture, not words.
‘And the relevance to education, and educational success?’ I ask.
“Excuse me for generalizing”, he starts, “but after working with children – mainly boys – with learning difficulties for over thirty years, I feel it is reasonably safe to suggest that up to the age of about 12 years, most boys think predominately in pictures.” “Girls tend to think in words, almost in sentences, creating ‘straight-line’ or a linear thinking style which really suits our schooling system. Our schools are full of words – reading, writing, listening, talking etc – and girls lap this up, with words being a fuel to their thinking. It makes teaching the ‘feminine’ brain a piece of pie.”
He pauses, and a flash of pain passes his eye, “- but for many boys it is different. To varying degrees boys think in pictures. I call them ‘Diesels’. This is a function of their brain wiring. Words are just not a significant part of their system. Their fuel is different, their brain is different, their style is different, and as parents and teachers we need to know this.”
I listen to him speaking, and note the change in his own language, his shorter sentences, as he obviously reflects on personal experiences.
“Consider the teaching staff at your local primary school – primarily female?” Yes, in my case exclusively female, and I pre-empt his next question by acknowledging, ‘All very adept in their language skills.’
“What if they were inadvertently – with the best intention – putting petrol into these little boys’ diesel tanks?” “What I mean is, what if the words they are using were making little sense to the boys – what if their ‘masculine’ wiring system meant that they simply cannot make sense of the words – the language – that their teachers (and parents) are using?”
He invites me to draw a picture, a picture of the instruction “Hurry-up” – one of the most common instructions given to children. “If boys think in pictures, what is the picture that comes up in their head that will tell them what ‘hurry up’ means?”
I’m not much of an artist (more of a word-smith really) and he grins when he sees my rendition of someone running. “Nice picture of ‘run’, but I really wanted a picture of ‘hurry-up’”. Eventually I’m obliged to acknowledge that there is no specific picture of ‘hurry-up’, and he pushes his point by suggesting I draw ‘quickly’, (can’t do), or the instructions ‘tidy up’, (equally can’t do), ‘Put your gear away’ (still can’t do).
‘Enough of this, what should we be saying to boys’, I protest.
On his invitation I find I can draw “Put your bag on the hook behind the door” – it’s a bit like a comic strip, but any pictorial (diesel?) kid could comprehend my efforts there. Similarly the instruction “go brush your teeth – run” fits nicely into picture form, and I am beginning to think of my own family early-morning rush and some changes that might happen very soon.
“That’s ice-berg number one – and there are lots more like it that sink many of our little boys, and severely deflate the self-concept of many others. We tend to call these children ‘dyslexic’ because we see that they are having trouble with language – reading, writing etc – and we tend to think that there is something wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly well formed diesels (picture thinkers), and they don’t need fixing. They also don’t need more petrol squirted into their engines – and unfortunately most of our remedial assistance approaches involve just that – more petrol.”
“What they do need is a basic understanding of their natural style, acceptance of their pictorial processes, and for teachers and parents to take this into account. Let’s stop blaming the victim. We need to change us, and what we do, rather than trying to fix the children”.
This is his mission as he moves around the country with Natalie, his portrait-artist wife, in their five ton mobile home. Currently in the South Island, they have dedicated several years to personally visiting most towns in New Zealand, visiting schools, running seminars, and introducing parents and teachers, social workers and policy-makers to what he considers to be one of the most commonly misunderstood social dynamics of our time.
The implications are horrendous, he says. Firstly it cuts so many of us out of successful education. This has a huge impact on the self-concept of a large proportion of our male population. This in turn is reflected in our use of drugs and alcohol, our physical and mental health, our employment dynamics, our incidence of domestic violence, our incidence of split families, our attitude to authority and the law, and directly to our prison population. His passion is obvious.
Our discussion goes on and on, and I learn the impact of negative language (Ice-berg No. 2) and can now clearly see the hypnotic effect when I tell my four-year-old son ‘Don’t use the front door’. My blaming the child now seems so unfair, and I begin to wonder about the label ‘Oppositional Defiance Disorder’.
Ice-berg No. 3 emerges as a series of school rules (e.g. ‘Respect other people’s rights’) which simply cannot be transcribed in pictorial form, and which therefore completely elude the pictorial child’s understanding. A sense of sadness floods me as I suddenly realize who it is who repetitively stands in front of the Principal for breaking the school rules – yet again – and I see a completely new causal connection between learning difficulties and behaviour problems.
Ice-berg No. 4 appears as a complete difficulty when it comes to ‘creative-writing’ in the classroom. So many of these children have a wonderful creative fantasy - which presents itself in pictorial form. They have a head full of pictures, but no words – there is nothing for them to write, because you can’t write pictures. For the person who thinks in words this is so hard to comprehend, and they just see the child as lazy, or unmotivated.
And here comes Ice-berg No. 5. The parent or teacher really wants this child to succeed, and so ‘remedial help’ is arranged. Done with the very best intention, so often this is more petrol for the poor little diesel, and he struggles to comply but ends up failing yet again. Whereas in the past he has been motivated to achieve, now his repetitive failure takes its toll and he becomes motivated to self-preserve – so he withdraws his co-operation and his effort. ‘If I don’t try, I can’t fail’. For his efforts he is tagged as ‘unmotivated’, and with ‘an attitude problem’.
Ice-berg No. 6 is apparently more like an ice sheet, and consists of a whole raft of further dynamics that predictably accompany the ‘dyslexic’ condition. These include a tendency to food intolerances, or even food allergies, a social lonliness born of other children’s intolerance and teasing, an inability to filter-out distracting stimuli (often called ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder, but really an Attention Overdose Disorder), a tendency to reverse direction in both reading and writing, speech and language difficulties (the butt of further teasing), and an inability to think before he speaks.
No. 7, predictably like the polar ice-cap, covers all and takes the form of a major lack of self-confidence and anger that often pervades the rest of his being. This then can either preclude any subsequent personal success, or in some instances creates such a powerful sense of purpose and determination that nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of achievement and success – what ever that means.
‘Is it all bad?’ I ask, recalling some reference to dyslexia as a ‘gift’. The look he returns is tolerant, but barely so. “No, it’s not all bad, but it can seem that way. At 58 years I still regularly have nightmares about my primary schooling. Before we start singing the benefits of being a diesel motor let’s start by getting clear about what a diesel motor is, how it works, and getting really clear about the fuel we put in it.” He pauses, breathes out then adds, “I guess that’s my job”.
I leave the café and our interview with a mixed sense of despondency and guilt, gratitude that I was never one of these, and a determination to join up and present as clear a picture as I can through the words of my profession. Yes, I have a lad of my own, fortunately not dyslexic, but certainly one who leans toward the pictorial.
Laughton’s books contain insights for teachers and parents. He is adamant that they do not contain programmes for the ‘dyslexic’ child. He avoids this approach on the basis that each child has a different presentation – and different needs, and that the teachers already know how to teach. He is convinced that the parents and teachers are already concerned and motivated. They just need insights as to how these children think, how they feel, how they react, so that we can reach them and then teach them. Then we may better work with them – not against them. Hence the titles of his two books; REACHING THE RELUCTANT LEARNER, and WITH, NOT AGAINST.
Laughton is pleased to be available for contact via his email; laughton.king@win.co.nz
Web; www.natalieart.com/ontour.htm Ph; 0274.171.804
Laughton King July 2008
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