Category Archives: Listening

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Learning Denied – The Dyslexia Dilemma

Dyslexia and similar learning differences often show up in a child who appears bright, highly intelligent, and quite articulate for his age. Unexpectedly, this same child has difficulty reading, writing, and spelling at grade level.

Sadly, many of these children will go through life labelled as lazy, careless, dumb, displaying immature or inappropriate behavior, or “not living up to his or her potential.”

Why do they get these labels?

They usually score average or high on IQ tests and aren’t lagging behind their peers badly enough to qualify for specialized intervention. If you ask them questions about what they heard from you, they’ll, most likely, answer adequately, yet their written tests are atrocious.

Added to that, they often zone out, daydream, and lose track of time. It appears that they have difficulty sustaining attention to anything they’re not personally interested in.

There are also those children who are confused with right and left. Not just in terms of the direction, but also with their handedness. They may write with the right hand, but do other activities with the left. Some mispronounce words, by switching letters or transposing words, for example, saying “mower lawn” for “lawn mower.”

One sign of dyslexia that’s commonly overlooked is word-finding difficulties. This leads to trouble expressing oneself and can have a social impact on the dyslexic. They often suffer from low self-esteem, thinking that there’s something wrong with them, because they’re not like the “normal” children.

What happens to dyslexics?

As students, they are ridiculed by classmatea and teachers alike, causing them to be isolated and, by middle and high school, seek the company of peers engaged in risky behaviors like drugs and alcohol.

Everyday experiences of failure, ridicule and not measuring up to expectations, sow seeds of shame, which grow in the minds, emotions, and souls of young children who are just beginning to discover their potential and form their identities.

Dr. Gershen Kaufman discovered in his study on shame culture that people who cannot read feel the same level of shame as people who have engaged in incest.

Where do these feelings lead?

Shame and rage seem to love to keep each other’s company. For the dyslexic, school becomes a place where there’s a struggle to survive instead of a place where joy is experienced in learning.

In Dr. Kaufman’s research, he found that:

  • 35% of dyslexics drop out of high school.
  • 50% of all adolescents involved in drugs and alcohol rehabilitation are dyslexic.
  • 70% of juvenile delinquents are dyslexic.

Dean Bragonier, the founder of NoticeAbility – a nonprofit dedicated to changing the world for students with dyslexia – summarizes the statistics this way, “Some of the most creative and innovative minds are wasting away behind bars.”

It is obvious from these statistics that early identification of dyslexia is crucial. Not only is initial identification essential, timely remediation of learning disabilities associated with it is also necessary.

What is one way you can contribute to eradicating this dyslexia dilemma?

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The Skinny On Hearing… Listening… And Dyslexia – Part 1

When asked what does our ears do, many people will say that they hear.

Did you know that hearing is not the ear’s only function?

Most of the sensory energy transferred to the brain goes through the ears. They:

  • Regulate balance
  • Direct movement and coordination
  • Permit language
  • Cause us to speak eloquently
  • Make us sing in tune
  • Adjust our eyes when we read
  • Control our arm, hand, and finger movements when we write
  • Protect us from sounds we do not want to hear, e.g. sounds of our own body

In addition to all of that good stuff, the ears are interconnected with several levels of the brain and act as a double antenna through which it receives messages from the body and the environment.

So, you can see, your ears are your link to your inner world and the outside world.

What is listening?

Merriam-Webster defines it as paying attention; hearing something with thoughtful attention.

This definition denotes that listening is an active process through which we make sense of, evaluate and respond to what we hear.

On the other hand, hearing is passive – once the hearing mechanism is physically intact, sound enters the ears and travels along the auditory pathway to the brain, where the sound waves are changed to electrical signals and given meaning.

Listening, therefore, brings harmony within us, as well as in our relationships with others. When listening does not develop in a satisfactory manner, the harmony is broken and good communication is sabotaged.

Although some generate good results with sustained effort on the part of the child, many of the programs promoted as interventions for the reading difficulties experienced by dyslexics are minimally effective.

While there is efficacy in practice, considering Herman Ebbinghaus’ work on memory (without context, about 50% of what is heard is forgotten within 1 hour), most remediation programs include multiple repetitions of instruction with lots of drill and practice, without any work to eliminate underlying issues with foundational skills, like listening.

I have not read any scientific or academic research studies, which looked at improving listening as an avenue for alleviating reading difficulties, but I have my own anecdotal experience. As mentioned in my previous post, when my dyslexic daughter completed The Listening Program, her singing voice improved (the voice can only produce what the ear can hear). In addition to that, she demonstrated better attending skills. This led to increased success in learning and communication.

Have you or any of your children experienced any form of auditory stimulation?

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Dyslexia and the “Sound” of Learning

Knowledge…learning…education, fueled by literacy, are keys to success.

Traditionally, literacy is defined as the ability to read and write.

A more complete definition, however, encompasses listening, speaking, reading and writing and today, using electronic media.

The major goal of every educator and parent should be to instill in children a solid foundation of transferable skills and a life-long love of reading and learning. To stay relevant, our children must constantly update their knowledge base. Hence, the prioritizing of literacy.

Dr.Carol Flexer, professor of audiology at the University of Akron, explains the importance of literacy this way,

“Literacy is inextricably entwined with sound. Immature listening abilities and underdeveloped auditory feedback loops have a substantial impact on how children learn to read.”

Literacy is all about sound. All its components incorporate sound in some way. Children learn to speak from listening. They learn to read from speaking and to write from reading.

Although our ears are the conduits for sound, we hear with our brains. Human development studies tell us that the human auditory brain structure does not fully mature until around age 15.

When brains do not receive intact sound, it is usually due to any one or a combination of factors, which include a noisy environment, ear infection, lack of auditory experience or immature brain development. Dyslexics have trouble connecting the sounds that make up words with the letters that represent those sounds. For them, the problem is often immature brain development.

Brain development studies show that sensory stimulation can influence growth and organization of auditory brain pathways.

That is why a number of currently available programs are helping dyslexic children develop their language and literacy skills. They are able to stimulate the auditory centers of the brain with precise sound. Music listening therapy helped my daughter tremendously.

This is good news for the dyslexic community.

Does this mean that every dyslexic person who receives this type of stimulation will learn to read at the same level as his non-dyslexic peers?

No.

Just as there is a continuum in the severity of characteristics in dyslexics, there is variety in their response to various sound development programs.

As technology takes over more and more, the skills that dyslexics find challenging are on the decline, while the thinking skills needed in today’s workplace are an integral component of their strengths.

Does interpretation of sound still matter? Yes.

But let us keep things in perspective. The goal is to learn concepts and generate ideas that will serve humanity and improve society.

There’s eye-reading – print books; ear-reading – audiobooks; and finger reading – braille. Whichever method one uses to accomplish this goal, is what’s best for him.

Which method of reading do you and your children prefer?

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Perseverance: Another Letter to My Dyslexic Daughter

Letters can be very personal and are often treasured by the receiver, so I’ve penned another letter to my daughter.

My dearest K,

You have hated every minute in school and never thought you would have made it this far. But, here you are at the end of the eighth grade. Congratulations, my child!

Struggles

My heart ached every time I saw how difficult it was for you to read out loud. We would practice your scripts and Bible verses for church, until you had them memorized. But those times when you were called on suddenly, because the church leaders perceived you to be such a brilliant young lady, I was embarrassed for you, as you labored to get through the readings.

Then there was the dreaded school. Every day. I made you go even when you complained of feeling sick, because I thought you were trying to escape. Unlike your third grade teacher, you middle school teachers did not understand the challenges of dyslexia, neither did they seem to want to.

I cringe every time I think of the public humiliation you endured, dying a thousand deaths every day. My heart aches when you recall how a teacher would unmercifully keep embarrassing you for reading aloud haltingly. Or making derogatory statements when you didn’t quite process and understand her question, preferring to think you hadn’t prepared at home, when you had spent many hours doing so, and fell into bed exhausted, every night.

No wonder you preferred hanging out with the boys. Unlike the girls who sat around talking about the books they were reading, they ran and jumped and played games you could identify with and feel accomplished.

Spelling continued to haunt you. Now, even more than before considering the difficulty of the assigned textbook.

Do you recall your difficulty reading social cues and showing appropriate behavior for different places? There was that time when you were playing with classmates instead of lining up and you were punished by having the class treasurer job – the one thing you exceled at and cherished, taken away. That was very poor judgment and downright mean of the teacher.

I can only imagine the way your experiences eroded your trust in adults who glossed over the tasks you accomplished, but humiliated you for the ones you did not do because you did not know how.

Successes  

On the other hand, do you remember how you learned to find your orientation point so you stopped your mind’s eye from roaming and getting you disoriented? And the clock technique that helped you go to sleep at night and wake up in the mornings?

Then, I got you that music listening therapy program to tune up your ears and your brain and you learned that your brain is musical. As your listening improved, so did your singing voice.

When we started to travel to other countries, your eyes were opened and your mind exploded when you realized that there was more to life than the struggle at school, and more ways of expressing yourself and viewing intelligence. You were permanently changed.

Traveling gave you an opportunity to see what you learned in books come to life. You observed firsthand, different cultures, food, governments and ways of life. Theory was now real.

Added to that, our extended family dynamics allowed you to ask any question and get an answer, without making you feel stupid.  

You have worked so hard and so diligently.

I continue to be very proud of you.

In spite of the challenges you encountered because of dyslexia, you courageously plowed ahead and conquered them.

You are getting better, every day.

Today, you graduate with high honors.

You deserve every moment of your celebration!

Now, on to High School. I’m in your corner and you will succeed!

Love,

Mom

What positive experiences can you reinforce in your child to counter the struggles they experience, every day?

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From School Dropout to Founder of the Virgin Group – A Dyslexia Success Story

“I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests.” ~ Richard Branson

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson was born on July 18, 1950, at Blackheath, London. His father was a barrister and his mother a flight attendant. His academic performance was poor. He was always interested in becoming an entrepreneur, so he dropped out of school at age 15, to start his first business…a magazine named Student. Listen to this interview in which he credits dyslexia with helping him.

He founded the Virgin Group in the 1970s. In 1984, he started Virgin Atlantic Airlines. In 2004, he founded spaceflight corporation Virgin Galactic, based at Mojave Air and Space Port, for the SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane designed for space tourism. Today, his group controls more than 400 companies in various fields.

Having faced a lifetime of failures, Branson noted, “I suppose the secret to bouncing back is not only to be unafraid of failures but to use them as motivational and learning tools.”

Branson learned he was dyslexic as an adult. In one of his many interviews, he counseled, “Never give up… Fight, fight, fight to survive.”

Talking about dreams, he says, “If your dreams don’t scare you, they are too small.”

Do you have a dream that scares you?

Have you asked your children (dyslexic and non-dyslexic) about their dream lately?

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Decoding Dyslexia – Decoding the Mind

When most people consider dyslexia, they think it is just about struggling to read. What is often missed is that there is also a speech processing component involved.

If parents and teachers are aware of initial warning signs of dyslexia, early intervention with research-based remediation can be used to help these children.

It is easy for observers to label children who confuse letters like b and d as dyslexic while missing those who struggle to link letters with sounds.

When I worked in a public school district as a speech-language pathologist, many teachers complained that some of their students were unable to recognize, much less manipulate, the sounds in words – a process (phonological decoding) that is unconscious and automatic, but still an integral part of reading.

Knowing that I advocated for screening and helping dyslexic students, they were quick to tell me about the students who confused letters, not realizing that letter reversals are common to all students up to grade one, but although perplexed and frustrated with the students who were unable to hear and process sounds, they never linked their difficulty with dyslexia.

Whereas speaking is a natural outgrowth of listening and associating with speaking adults and older children, reading must be taught. However, it requires some prerequisite skills. The child must somehow recognize that spoken words are made up of sounds, or else the work that letters do becomes mysterious.

The reading brain network uses mechanisms from the speech and language brain network. Because of that, atypical speech in young children is a red flag for atypical reading and also dyslexia.

So, parents, when you read Dr. Seuss’s books and nursery rhymes to your children and they have trouble with the rhymes and wordplay, take that as warning signs and have your child screened for dyslexia. You can read more about the connectedness in the phenomenal human brain here.

Did you know that children who demonstrate difficulty with speech, like mispronouncing long words, or transposing phrases, words, and syllables when speaking could be dyslexic?

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3 Weaknesses of Dyslexics and How to Compensate for Them

Have you ever experienced frustrating moments while helping your dyslexic child with homework and wished there was a quick fix?

When my daughter was in kindergarten, her teacher would send home vocabulary and spelling words to learn. We would spend hours going through those cards until she appeared to know the words. To my horror, when she brought home the results of her end-of-week quizzes, most of those words were incorrectly spelled on her paper.

As the school year progressed, my exasperation mounted. KC would verbally spell the words correctly to me at home but write them inaccurately at school. Looking back, with the knowledge I have today, I should have asked her teacher to give her oral spelling tests.

Here are 3 weaknesses I identified in my daughter, and what I did about them.

  1. Reading – She confused words that were visually similar e.g. saw and was, most likely because she had difficulty telling left from right, and in the English language reading always goes from left to right.
    • First, we talked about the meaning of the words then used pictures to activate the visual word form area in her brain.
    • So, we looked at the picture of a saw and talk about it.
    • Since there is no picture for was, she would use modeling clay to spell the word, then create a clay sculpture to represent the definition. That way, she produced her own image, which I directed her to take a picture of with her mind’s eye.
  2. Spelling – She seemed to memorize words based on their shapes. KC was unable to hear individual alphabet sounds, then match them to the letters and combinations of letters in words.
    • I found or generated creative ways of spelling words that incorporated the meaning of the word. Jennifer’s video here helped me, as she demonstrated this visual conceptual method.
    • For multi-syllabic words, I told little stories, for example, I told her that separate has a rat in it. She never spelled it wrong after that.
    • When I discovered music listening therapy, I enrolled her, to wake up the auditory pathways in her brain.
  3. Time-keeping – KC seemed to frequently get stuck in the moment, generating one idea after another and a series of What-ifs? Needless to say, time ran away leaving her way behind in her chores or whatever activities she was supposed to engage in during a particular period of time.
    • After talking about the importance of timeliness, we sat down and agreed on a solution to her tendency.
    • We placed a check-off list for chores on the refrigerator with completion times included.
    • I taught her a 3-step strategy:
      • Write her desired goal on paper. (Meaning and intention were the objectives here, not spelling)
      • Generate an action plan
      • Make a schedule that included all the steps of her plan, and follow it.
    • She still creates and uses schedules, today.

Thinking back to the quick fix I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I’ll tell you this – quick fixes serve a purpose, but they don’t bring lasting solutions. Addressing the problem head-on and brainstorming with your child, will bring workable results.

What has been your most frustrating moments while helping your dyslexic child with homework?

Or, what stories have your friends told you about their children’s academic challenges in elementary school?

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5 Strengths of Dyslexics and How You Can Effectively Use Them

In my letter to my second-grade dyslexic daughter, I highlighted ways she excelled, in an effort to offset her teacher’s list of her weaknesses. She is not the only one with gifts that, if built on, can propel the dyslexic to success in life.  

Did you know that 35% of entrepreneurs, 25% of CEOs, and over 50% of NASA employees are dyslexic? This is not by accident.

Here is a shortlist of 5 advantages someone identified with dyslexia has over the person who is not. These strengths combine to make them extraordinary in their chosen field of work.

  1. Strategic Thinking
    • They think outside the box and can look past the details to the big picture.
    • They are innovative and original in their thinking.
    • They offer unorthodox, fresh ideas that result in solving problems.
  2. Analytic and Intuitive
    • They are able to understand the deep meanings of stories that are read or told to them.
    • They are able to read between the lines.
    • They are able to take apart complex ideas or concepts and simplify them, thus strengthening their problem-solving ability.
  3. Creativity
    • Their keen sense of curiosity and strong interest in life feed their very active imagination.
    • They use their imagination to create an extraordinary view of the world, which often results in them →
    • Birthing lucrative ideas.
  4. Exceptional Spatial Processing and Knowledge
    • Their outstanding picture-thinking ability allows them to move around and fit things perfectly into spaces.
    • They are able to process 3D objects in their mind, making them good in areas like graphic design, architecture, and photography.
    • They have excellent visual memory for details in print and the environment.
  5. Increased Level of Empathy
    • Their ability to perceive the feelings of others, coupled with a genuine desire to alleviate pain and suffering gives them a deep level of understanding of another person’s plight.
    • Perhaps this heightened degree of empathy is an outgrowth of their experience as one who thinks and learns differently.

Children with dyslexia tend to be consumed with what they cannot do and totally miss the areas in which they outshine their reading peers. If you have or know a parent with a dyslexic child, make it your duty to build their self-esteem by consistently emphasizing the areas where they excel. Show them that you believe in them.

In your association with dyslexic children and adults, what exceptional skills have you noticed?

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5 Myths About Dyslexia and Reasons to Discard Them

If you’ve ever asked a dyslexic child what’s the most common thing he has been called; what is the most frequent scolding received, he’d probably tell you, “Lazy – you need to work harder.”

Like any other thing that is not understood, there are some commonly held myths about dyslexia, many of which are untrue. The people who believe these myths range from store clerks to school principals.

Let’s look at 5 common myths:

1. Parents are told, “Your child can be fixed.” Inherent in this statement is the belief that dyslexia is a medical condition that can be cured. We even find some dyslexics who believe this myth, say, “I used to be dyslexic.” There is nothing to be fixed and once a dyslexic… always a dyslexic.

Although with time, for some dyslexics, their reading ability, as well as some of their other challenges improve, their way of thinking will always be characteristically different from their non-dyslexic peers, giving them an advantage in reasoning, problem-solving, comprehension, concept formation, critical thinking, general knowledge, and vocabulary.

2. If one is dyslexic, he should hide it from others. There are so many children who go through their school life feeling ashamed that they are not like the others. As a consequence, they seek to find unusual, and sometimes dangerous, ways of drawing attention away from their weaknesses to something they believe others see as a strength.

Instead of bending over backward to keep your child’s dyslexia a secret, it would serve you and him better to tell people about his challenges and enlist a crowd of supporters, at the same time, help him find ways to build and rely on his strengths.

3. Dyslexic children are lazy, retarded, or stupid. In spite of the legal change in educational terminology from “mental retardation” to “intellectual disabilities,” most teachers associate the dyslexic’s reading difficulties with retardation of his mental faculties. Their comments and labels of the child filter down to the normal students, who wait for their time on the playground to call their classmate stupid or a retard.

I once worked with a teacher who thought and let all the staff members know, that it was unfair to the normal students to let the slow children have more time to complete their assignments or give any other accommodation, for that matter. They needed to stop being lazy and work up to their potential.

Instead of adopting the teachers’ perspectives, seek to have the appropriate accommodations and supports provided in school, so your child can have the motivation and energy to participate like the other children. Often times, the child who is dyslexic works two to three times harder just to keep up with his peers.

4. Using non-text ways of learning is a crutch. Many times, teachers and some parents believe that if a child uses a different method of acquiring the needed information, it will interfere with his learning to read and, over time, become a crutch.  

When you think of it, there are three ways of accessing information:

  • Eye reading (text-based)
  • Ear reading (audiobooks)
  • Finger reading (braille)

Being dyslexic is not a flaw, in the same way being blind is not considered one. Similarly, receiving accommodations to support his strengths and help him build on them is not a crutch.

5. It is best for the child that he not know he’s dyslexic. Regularly, parents and teachers decide not to tell the child he’s dyslexic. When he eventually finds out, he assumes it is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about and concludes that he is stupid.

For many children, finding out that they are dyslexic will be relieving. Like Steven Spielberg, it will be, “the missing puzzle piece.” Knowing that their struggle is not restricted to them and there’s actually a name for it, makes them happy.

When left unchecked, not only will these myths be false, but sometimes they could be harmful to the child. Full disclosure of your child’s dyslexia opens the door to learning and success.

What myths have you heard or held about dyslexia?

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Perspective: Teacher vs Dyslexic Student

Do you know anyone who is the parent of a dyslexic child? If you do, you’ve probably heard about the tears and heartache they have to deal with at home. Every. Day.

Little Suzie comes home, dejected, discouraged, and disheartened, with yet another heart-break story. At the end of which the tears flow, with outbursts of, “I don’t want to go back to school,’ punctuating the sobs.

Unless you have witnessed a scene like this, you won’t understand the palpable fear and abject horror that engulfs some of the most brilliant children, because their teacher didn’t see things the way they did, and ridiculed their answers in class.

As I write this, a TikTok video comes to mind. Perhaps you saw it too. And maybe, it was created for humor, but it immediately brought the plight of our dyslexic children to the top of my mind.

A father was working through a mathematics problem with his daughter. He starts by saying, “I’m explaining to you. Why are you not understanding?”

Then he proceeds to state the math problem, “I have 5 apples. I take away 2. How many apples do I have left?”

The little girl repeats while counting on her fingers, “So you have 5 apples. You take away 2. So you have 2 apples.”

Raising his voice, he repeats, with his hands in the air and fingers spread out, “I take away 2. Five… I take away 2 (curling down the thumb and index fingers). Count my fingers.”

Crying, the girl says, “I don’t know, then. You say you took 2 apples, so you have 2 apples, Papa.”

In exasperation, the father raises his arm and exclaims, “Where are you finding these numbers? Five…I take 2. What’s left?” Then rubs his forehead.

He proceeds to count out 5 apples (3 red and 2 green) while placing them on the table. One, two, three, four, five apples. Grabbing one green apple with each hand, he says, “I take 2 apples. How many do I have?”

“You took 2, so you have 2 apples, Papa.” The tears are flowing now.

Thus the scene ends with the father frustrated and upset, and the child crushed and crying.

Although this may seem humorous to some, it is a lived experience for many dyslexic children. Non-dyslexic parents, ignorantly, explain concepts to their children over and overusing the same words and illustrations, not understanding that the abstract language they are using is causing confusion and disorientation in the child’s mind. The more confused and disoriented the child becomes, the less likely she is to process and comprehend what you’re trying to teach her.

When teachers are unaware of possible differences in perspective from that of their students, and hammer away to get their point through, they may instead birth a hatred for school.

After all is said and done, the main goal of teaching must be to instill a love of learning, rather than to require that concepts be grasped in exactly the same way as the teacher.

Has your child suffered, similarly, in school?

Did you have any unpleasant learning experiences as a child?

To view the TikTok video, click here: https://bit.ly/33yGEtN