Today I fixed someone's dyslexia.
Well, I've been fixing his dyslexia for the past year and a half, by means of teaching him the sounds of letters & letter combinations, and the specific skills of putting them together, and the necessary phonetically irregular sight words, and how to read fluently once he's got the words--in other words, by teaching him to read, despite his individual difficulties with the process.
With many of my students, though, including this one, what condition they arrive at a session in seems to be "potluck". Some days they're "on" and can learn like crazy, other days they're "off": confused, distracted, making weird mistakes on things they've previously done well on. I haven't previously had a strategy for turning an "off" day into an "on" day, although occasionally I've managed it and not been sure how.
At meowse's brother's recommendation, I recently read a book called The Gift of Dyslexia, watched him apply its techniques, and talked with him at length about it. The premise of this approach is that dyslexia arises from a talent: the ability to imagine multiple views of an object, which is really useful for things like puzzle-solving, art, and navigation, but really bad for processing flat, direction-dependent symbols such as letters. People can be taught that they are using this talent, and how *not* to use it when it's not helpful or appropriate.
I've had some trepidation about trying to apply the Davis Dyslexia Correction approach myself because 1.) it's weird, 2.), it's new to me and I have only the faintest of training in it, and 3.) as presented in the book, it takes a couple big chunks of time to do it, totalling about 30 hours, which at my usual pace (45 minutes twice a week) would take several months before I'd reached. And what child's parent is going to want to pay for 30 hours at once for a method I haven't even shown I can make work??
Anyway. I'd used some of the insights I'd gotten from the reading, demo, and conversation in a previous session, with great success.
Today was an "off" day. He walked into the school library with me and from the start was distracted, confused, eyes wandering, unable to remember letter sounds or names that he normally knows well. I could see we were going to get nowhere today, and I would only frustrate and demoralize him if I persisted. I decided this was an excellent time to experiment, since there was nothing to lose. If I could take him from "disoriented" to "oriented", it was well worth spending the rest of the session on that.
I had him do a visualization exercise with me, picturing an object vividly and then imagining it from a couple of different angles, then back to the original angle as if it was sitting in his hand. The process didn't go that smoothly and I was pretty much giving up on it working for this student, since he didn't seem to have very good visualization skills. I finished up the abbreviated version of the exercise (we probably spent about ten minutes on it), and tried him on the reading task we'd been attempting.
It was a breeze.
Despite not seeming to be working at the time, the exercise had in fact gotten his mental and physical visions pointing the same direction, and enabled him to actually see the letters in front of him in the right perspective to read them successfully.
The rest of the session went great. At the end, I coached him briefly on using the visualization technique if he's confused while reading, then went and talked with his teacher a bit so she wouldn't be baffled when he started talking about a piece of imaginary lemon cake in the middle of a reading assignment.
I can fix dyslexia.
With many of my students, though, including this one, what condition they arrive at a session in seems to be "potluck". Some days they're "on" and can learn like crazy, other days they're "off": confused, distracted, making weird mistakes on things they've previously done well on. I haven't previously had a strategy for turning an "off" day into an "on" day, although occasionally I've managed it and not been sure how.
At meowse's brother's recommendation, I recently read a book called The Gift of Dyslexia, watched him apply its techniques, and talked with him at length about it. The premise of this approach is that dyslexia arises from a talent: the ability to imagine multiple views of an object, which is really useful for things like puzzle-solving, art, and navigation, but really bad for processing flat, direction-dependent symbols such as letters. People can be taught that they are using this talent, and how *not* to use it when it's not helpful or appropriate.
I've had some trepidation about trying to apply the Davis Dyslexia Correction approach myself because 1.) it's weird, 2.), it's new to me and I have only the faintest of training in it, and 3.) as presented in the book, it takes a couple big chunks of time to do it, totalling about 30 hours, which at my usual pace (45 minutes twice a week) would take several months before I'd reached. And what child's parent is going to want to pay for 30 hours at once for a method I haven't even shown I can make work??
Anyway. I'd used some of the insights I'd gotten from the reading, demo, and conversation in a previous session, with great success.
Today was an "off" day. He walked into the school library with me and from the start was distracted, confused, eyes wandering, unable to remember letter sounds or names that he normally knows well. I could see we were going to get nowhere today, and I would only frustrate and demoralize him if I persisted. I decided this was an excellent time to experiment, since there was nothing to lose. If I could take him from "disoriented" to "oriented", it was well worth spending the rest of the session on that.
I had him do a visualization exercise with me, picturing an object vividly and then imagining it from a couple of different angles, then back to the original angle as if it was sitting in his hand. The process didn't go that smoothly and I was pretty much giving up on it working for this student, since he didn't seem to have very good visualization skills. I finished up the abbreviated version of the exercise (we probably spent about ten minutes on it), and tried him on the reading task we'd been attempting.
It was a breeze.
Despite not seeming to be working at the time, the exercise had in fact gotten his mental and physical visions pointing the same direction, and enabled him to actually see the letters in front of him in the right perspective to read them successfully.
The rest of the session went great. At the end, I coached him briefly on using the visualization technique if he's confused while reading, then went and talked with his teacher a bit so she wouldn't be baffled when he started talking about a piece of imaginary lemon cake in the middle of a reading assignment.
I can fix dyslexia.