Read Scientific American March 2002!

Thanks, Victoria!
For posting the information.
I zipped out to B&N and picked it up.
My eldest two children were taught whole
language and thank goodness they survived it!

Anne

I’m a little afraid to read it, yet I know I can’t hide my head in the sand. I’ll go pick it up. Thanks for posting that info! :-)

Be brave!

Scientific American can be a little intimidating. But I’ll let you in on a huge secret — even us science types rarely read the whole thing, you know. Everybody likes the 50-100-150 years ago section and the letters. Most people take a look at the puzzles and occasional humorous articles. But for the serious articles, we all have our own specialties. I will cheerfull admit that my brain turns off after the second paragraph on microbiology and I fall asleep over military and rocket technology. Buy it when it has a good social science article and read the parts you like.

True story: I was a single parent until my daughter was nine. In Grade 4 her teacher told the kids to go home and cut ads out of magazines so they could do a project on advertising techniques (a *wonderful* critical reading exercise.) Daughter politely raised her hand and said “Miss ____, all the magazines we have at home are my mommy’s Discover and Scientific American, and I don’t think she’d like me to cut them up.”
(I congratulated her for politeness and making teachers jaws drop to the floor, and bought her some newspapers to use.)

It _never_ fails that when any of my children need a magazine to
cut up I have always purged the lot of them the week before.

Anne

Hi Victoria,
Actually, it’s not that I’m intimidated by science, I’m more afraid of the negative things I’ll learn about my son’s “differences.” I’m really worried about what the future holds for him. For example, the other day I received a packet of information from the school for parents of 6th graders. It was a large folder titled “Parent Tool Kit” and it’s intended to help parents talk about alcohol and drugs with their children. I glanced through it and one of the things I noticed was a statistic saying that a large percentage of children with LD experiment with drugs and alcohol (they are in a higher risk group). Another stat I read said that a large majority of adults in prisons have undiagnosed (or diagnosed) LDs.

It’s these negative statistics that worry me. And yet, I do need to be aware of them so that I can try and do my best to make sure my child doesn’t become another number.

These guys might be a little less likely to confuse correlation w/ cause and effect. There are lots of stats that say that kids who don’t learn to read “on target” don’t catch up — but to me, that doesn’t mean we should start them all earlier. It could just as easily mean that some kids are wired to start later — but since the school system has imposed their own timelines on them, the lack of good teaching is the cause of a significant number of those failures to catch up. I’ve also taught kids who will probably never *want* to sit down and read for a few days at a time, whether it’s a personality or a skill issue == but others really did become avid readers. Perhaps not breakng speed records, but avid nonetheless. And then there are the Fannie Flags and Stephen Cannells and Octavia … is Butler her last name? … who are dyslexic but end up earning a living writing — and you know they are readers, too.

I know these statistics and I have seen friends of mine really struggle with LD kids as teenagers. I think a large part of it is the way self-esteem takes a beating. For me, these stats are motivation to do everything I can to help my 9 year old LD son both to learn and keep his self-esteem intact.

Beth

I do think a lot of these bad oucomes come from people giving up on kids too soon.

I’m presently teaching a 62-year-old man reading and writing. He is picking up, although it’s real work to keep him on task — I think he may have started out as ADD. But he is teachable.

Giving up on a kid at age 8 and consigning him to the slow track is in my mind criminal.

I have taught high school and tried to teach junior college, and keep coming across two classes of young adults: some who have not got a clue what learning is and who have been trained to go through the rituals to get the next gold star and certification — these get a huge chip on their shoulders when the expectations change and they are told they have to achieve a real-world standard; and some who have given up on themselves, are sure they are stupid, and expect to have things watered down and made easy — these fold up at any sign of a challenge. Unfortunately the junior colleges, who need increaing enrollments to keep building and keep jobs, bought into the “anything that makes them happy” approach in the 1990’s, so now we’re seeing the failure level at university transfer and job application time. What do you do with a twenty-year-old student who is *surprised* that you want to see “ed” and “ing” endings and capital letters and periods? Who passed this kid through twelve years of schooling??