In the previous post, I said I would answer questions about what is on your mind. So each time I post I will address a question before I tell you what is on my mind.
Question: How do you know what to write?
Answer: I hope to get questions which will lead me into my next post. I, having cognitive processing challenges and learning how to compensate, has led me into becoming a special education teacher with years of experience and now writing a book; I feel that I would like to share and perhaps I could help.
Not every child has Dyslexia
The following story is about a person who became an accomplished university professor, who had a reading difficulty.
"I'm
Jimmy. I do not have any specific identifiable language
disabilities. January of 1955, at age 17 years of age, in the last
month of my senior year in high school, I left public education and
entered the Air Force. I guess you could say I was technically a
“high school drop-out.” My mother went to the principal and
obtained my graduation certificate while I was in Basic Training. I
was not overly anxious about my lack of academic preparation. I had
no planned career counseling, no real understanding about education
and its relationship to future work. I had no academic pursuits. I
didn't know nor care what my grade point average was. I was bored with
school work and was looking forward to a new adventure. I had learned
how to relate well with people and was not afraid to leave my home on
my own. I had done so the last summer taking a farming job up in
Canada. I did not at the time realize that I simply did not have a
good preparation in the basic language skills of reading for
understanding, writing a coherent paper with correct spelling and
punctuation. I could read well enough to get a decent score on the
Air Force entrance exam to be accepted into that armed service. I went
on to be a successful airman in my four years of military service. I
earned the rank of Airman 1st class.
Experiencing
Public School
My
language skills were not developed mostly because of the lack of
teaching. In grade school I learned to “word call,” i.e., say the
name of a written word, but was very slow at this “word calling.”
“Breaking the code” was mostly taught by memory or “sight
reading” of the good ole “Dick and Jane” basal series and using
picture clues to get the meaning of the narrative. The phonetic
decoding I picked up was incidental and not from consistent,
organized teaching. Because of this lack of phonetic instruction I
was also a poor speller. Spelling for me was mostly from sight
memory.
Because
of my poor decoding skills, my reading comprehension was also slow
and tedious. After slowly reading a paragraph, I had difficulty in re
calling the meaning of that paragraph and would have to go back
several times to get the meaning. As I got into the higher grades and
had to read in the different content areas, I remember many times I
would “read” a paragraph and then think, “Now what was that I
just read?”
My
dear mother was working full time to feed and clothe our family of
four young children. She and my father were divorced when I was eight
years of age. She also went to night school at a junior college in
the evenings. She was my best “language arts” teacher. She would
correct me in my usage of language as all good parents do. I learned
to speak correctly through the everyday speaking in our home. I
learned the correct conjugation of verbs not by understanding the
tenses and persons but by experiencing spoken and listening language
in my home. Again, this is the way most children learn to speak their
native tongue.
Mom
had little time to monitor what we did at school. She left us to do
our school work. Most of the time I would bring schoolwork home and
put it on the dining room table so she would notice it. Much of the
time I never looked at my school work until I picked it up and headed
out to school.
By
the time I went into the Air Force, my math skills were as poor as my
language arts skills. Early on I learned to dislike math mostly
because of how it was presented to us. Math was taught by rote
memory. I remember trying to memorize the multiplication facts. The
teacher would have an oral drill at the end of the week. The person
who could recite that week's facts received a sucker. My best friend
who lived across the street from me was good at memorizing math. He
would always win the sucker. I never won one. When I got into
algebra and geometry, I could do the problems but in my own way. I
would always try to visualize in my mind the problem using diagrams,
visual time lines, etc. I remember taking a standardized achievement
test at the end of Junior High. When I got to High School the
geometry teacher said I had a really interesting test results
profile. I did poorly on simple tasks like computing percentages, yet
could do problems that required spatial relationships reasoning."
At this point I would like to inject a brief comment:
Although, the previous story does not express a specific challenge, it does point in the direction of a weakness in auditory processing, rather learned or unlearned as a behavior.
Exploring
the Oral and Written Language Errors
Made
by Language Disabled Children
by
Hyla Rubin
and
Isabelle Y. Liberman
Is
there a naming problem? The pattern of results indicates a problem
specifically with naming, rather than a more general vocabulary
deficit.
This is a quote by Katz, 1982;
Wolf, 1981. This is stated to be a short term memory function;
efficient phonetic coding seems crucial for both initial storage and
eventual production of language segment.
This is interesting to me,
because this has often been my problem, which has effected both the
ability to use written and oral language. It is very frustrating to
understand a concept and not be able to express it in words. I have
called it, an auditory memory problem, however knowing that it is
also associated with visual memory, because of the lack of ability to
pull the word out of visual memory. However for me it is the
auditory, which fails before the visual.
While teaching in Hawaii, I had the opportunity to work with students who could not read standard English, but look at the words, read them in Pidgin and then tell me what it meant in standard English. Wow! Anyway, I want to hear questions?
It is obvious to me that Jimmy had a visual strength and he learned to use that cognitive visual strength to learn to read. After reading this story, let us talk about it. argie.ella@gmail.com I will post your questions and if I have an answer, I will also write that here.
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