BOOK REVIEW; FIVE STARS
The Dyslexic Advantage (Revised and Updated) Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain by Eide, Brock
This book is about the kinds of individuals who are diagnosed with dyslexia: the types of minds they have, the ways they process information, and the things they do especially well. It’s not a book about something these individuals have. It’s about who they are.
We call these abilities the dyslexic advantage. While these features differ somewhat from person to person, they also form recognizable patterns—just like the different musical works of Mozart are distinguishable from one another, yet recognizably the work of the same composer.
Overlooking the talents that mature individuals with dyslexia characteristically display is like trying to understand caterpillars while ignoring the fact that they grow up to become butterflies.
EXCERPTS;
One day at work she was standing by her office window staring serenely out at the mountains while trying to let her mind “ease itself around a problem.” Her CFO walked by her door and looked in. All he could see was one of “his people” staring out the window, so he snapped at Sarah to get back to work. Sarah calmly replied, “You work in your way, I’ll work in mine. Now stop interrupting me.” Sarah later wrote of this episode: “What this CFO didn’t know was that staring into space is precisely how we work. It is our capacity to throw our brains into neutral and let connections assemble, that makes it possible for us to see connections that others can’t. We relax into the work.”
In this book that we’ve stated that tight mental focus and attention can inhibit creative connections.
I found that the evidence very much supported the idea that dyslexia is an exploratory specialization, which is oriented toward seeking the unknown.
Very bright dyslexic students may get by in the general classroom but fail to keep up in gifted or accelerated programs due to an inability to keep up with reading demands; or they may get by on a day-to-day basis, only to have their reading problems derail them on tests that are taken under time-limited conditions.
Poor outcomes are better interpreted as an indictment of our current failure to support there will still be students who do not read up to grade level (and many more who do not read up to the level of their general cognitive ability) by age nine, and we are currently failing to provide good educational alternatives for these students. It is also a serious mistake to conclude, as many somehow have, that reading progress can be achieved only up to age nine. This misunderstanding creates a “countdown to doomsday” mentality for reading instruction that is as misleading as it is harmful. The following egregious example, which appeared in a newspaper editorial, is one of many we could quote: “Children who do not learn to read and write by the end of third grade are likely doomed to school and life failure that can often lead to drug use and criminal behavior.” It is true that poorer outcomes of various sorts are statistically more likely for those who have not learned to read at grade level by age nine. However, these poor outcomes are better interpreted as an indictment of our current failure to support late-reading dyslexic learners than as proof of an inherent connection between poor decoding at age ten and an aptitude for social deviance. It is simply not true that students who have not learned to read by age nine cannot be successfully educated, even if their reading remains problematic. In fact, nearly all of the successful dyslexic persons profiled in this book did not read at grade level by age nine, and many could not read at all until well after that. Several of the most brilliant people profiled in this book have told us privately that they have still never read a single book cover to cover. Others like Vince Flynn and Kevin Horsley were well into their twenties before they tutored themselves into becoming skilled and voracious readers” and in Kevin’s case, the author of a book on speed-reading. And students like Jack Laws and Blake Charlton cited their dependence on text-to-speech readers and recorded books to keep up with reading. Simply providing better access to such assistive technologies for students who do not yet read as well as they think can prevent under performance due to an inability to access information from texts. As important as it is to improve reading ability, there is simply no good reason to deny access to assistive technologies for students whose performance is being hindered by their lack of skilled reading.
The primary difference is simply that for the dyslexic students, it is often a matter of success or failure, rather than a mere learning preference.
View my author's page on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment