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’.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
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.
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