Thursday, June 21, 2018

New Help of Dyslexia: By WARREN R. YOUNG


Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981. November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest

One child in every ten has it, to some degree, often with tragic impact on his schooling and life.  It probably kept inventor Thomas Edison, General George S. Patton and President Woodrow Wilson crom coping with ordinary schoolwork when they were young.  It made Hans Christian Anderson an atrocious speller all his life, even though he became a magnificent storyteller.  It most likely accounted for the nickname “Mr. Dullard,” give a schoolboy named Albert Einstein.
The specific problem these people have in common is called dyslexia (from Greek roots ‘dys’, “difficulty,” and ‘lexia’, “pertaining to words”).  Although it is unrelated to basic intellectual capacity, the disorder causes a mysterious difficulty in handling words and symbols.  Some subtle peculiarity in the brain’s organizational pattern blocks out an otherwise bright child’s ability to learn how to read, to write legible, to spell pr. Perhaps, to use numbers.  Letters in words perversely transpose themselves, ger reversed or even topsy-turvy—“dog” becomes “god”; “b” changes identity with “d,” and may even masquerade as “p” or “q”; a sign saying “OIL” flip-flops into “710.”  Many dyslexics also have difficulty orienting themselves in the three dimensions of space, which results, sometimes, in boldly awkwardness.
Ever since dyslexia was identified late in 19th century by German and British ophthalmologists, it has been studied and debated.  Because it is unaccompanied by outward scars or detectable neurological damage, and because its bizarre symptoms vary from victim to victim, some professionals insist that the problem doesn’t really exists as a separate entity.  Educators in particular have shown a preference for herding this problem along with others under the broad, vaguely defined umbrella of “learning disabilities.”  Yet frustrated classroom teachers, agonized parents and humiliated victims know that something—something unique devastating—is there.
The late Nelson A. Rockefeller was one of lthe most eminent dyslexics.  “I often see letters and numbers backwards, “he once said, ‘or even think them backwards.”  A few lines from his boyhood diary, written when he was 11, include such revealing notations as “lunc,” “picknick Lunch,” “Uncle Harold,” “engen repar schop,” “parak”(for park), and three tries at recording the disease his sister Abby had come down with –“mealess,” “measless” and “misless.”  Rockfeller never mastered spelling.  Yet he graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College, and earned a Phi Beta Kapp key.
There was no secret cure behind Rockefeller’s success in overcoming his handicap.  The key was simply learning to cope.  Coping to him meant concentrating very hard when something had to be read; he let aides fix up his spelling and he rehearsed speeches carefully before delivering them.
Other dyslexics also achieved celebrity status by adapting to the realties of their difficulty.  Woodrow Wilson did not learn the alphabet until he was nine, didn’t read until he was 11, and was considered by relatives to be dull and backward.  At Princeton University, his grades were only fair, but his brilliant oratorical style began to blossom at the same time, paving the way for his two distinguished presidencies—of Princeton and of the United States.
General Patton had even harder sledding.  At 12 he still could not read.  It took him five years to get through West Point, and at that he made it only by laboriously memorizing his textbooks word for word.
Not all dyslexics are so fortunate, or so tenacious.  Taunted by classmates, treated as lazy, stupid or mentally disturbed by teachers and parents, humiliated by schoolwork other children do so easily; many of them not only fail miserably in class but also become filled with frustration, rage and pain.  It is liter sting to note that the telltale signs of the problem can be detected in the diary of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Trying to pin down the precise cause of dyslexia involves a number of basic riddles.  How, really, do our minds work?  How do we learn to read and write?  How can intelligent child—or even an adult creative genius—look straight at a word and interpret some of the letters backward, upside down or transposed?  Why does the problem appear to turn up three times as often among boys as among girls?  There are a dozen theories to explain dyslexia, but final verdict is not yet in.
Ever since the turn of the century, one guess has been that defective vision must be to blame.  This idea was based in part on the fact that poor readers employ inefficient eye movements.  But experts now regard faulty eye movements as the result, not the eye that learns to read.  So the question remains: what goes wrong in the brain?
Some early experts thought brain damage was responsible, since it was known that some victims of head injuries lost their reading and writing skills.  But autopsies and brainwave studies tend to rule out injury as a common cause of dyslexia.
If detectable brain damage is not the cause, shat about more subtle insults to the prenatal of infant brain?  Some studies seem to show that lead in the air, physical trauma or oxygen deprivation during birth can sometimes affect language-learning capability.  However, careful tracings of family trees suggest that the problem may more often be a matter of heredity.
A sizable body of opinion clings to the “late-bloomer” theory, which holds that for no particular reason some children simply do not mature the reading-readiness stage as early as others.
The theory that still probably comes closest to explaining dyslexia was developed many years ago by Dr. Samuel Torrey Orton, then director of the lowa State Psychopathic Hospital.  While screening mental-health problems, Orton became interested in children who not only repeatedly reversed letters of words, but also had a talent for “mirror-writing.”  Some of them could actually write better from right to leave, with letters oriented backward and in reverse order, so that a mirror held alongside would show the words as they are normally written.
Orton knew that mirror writing came more naturally than regular writing for many left-handers or partial left-handers.  Leonardo da Vinci, who was ambidextrous, often sket5ched with his right hand, while setting down notes mirror-fashion with his left hand.  Orton, an expert neurologist, reasoned that while each half of the brain controls various natural activities, only one side becomes dominant in the use of language.  If, in learning the artificial skill of recognizing symbols and translating them into words, both hemispheres persisted in taking part, they might somehow compete and interfere with each other, leading to reversed or jumbled perception.  Orton concluded that it was not being left-handed that caused the problem, since many dyslexics are right-handed; rather, it was confused or mixed dominance of the brain’s hemispheres.
But recent examination of the brain a dyslexic revealed an abnormality in the left hemisphere, which is now believed to have predominant control over the language function.  This examination is part of a long-term, systematic study, now underway, of the anatomical differences between the dyslexic’s brain and that of the non0dyslexic.  Dr. Albert M. Calaburda and Dr. Thomas L Kemper, who are conducting this study, hope to determine the causes of dyslexia so that proper therapy can be prescribed.
Fortunately, even the victim of severe, classic dyslexia can now learn, with the proper help, how to read at a decent speed and to write legibly.  But parents should be wary.  Still-unproven methods, as well as thoroughly discredited techniques, are also being offered, including everything from bouncing on trampolines and avoidance of food additives to psychotherapy and elaborate eye exercises.
The experts’ consensus is that the best solution is educational: careful, systematic, on-to-one tutoring on a regular basis to teach the dyslexic child the principles of phonics—the letter sounds that make up words.  What the dyslexic child needs is to be shown how to decode the sounds for which single letters and combinations of letters stand, and how to fit them together into words.  Since every dyslexic child’s problems are different, individual tutoring techniques must also vary.  Often, modern phonics specialists reinforce the child’s familiarity with the shape of a letter or the sound of a word fragment by putting to work more than one of his senses.  They might have a child look at a letter, say it aloud, trace its shape in the air and on the blackboard, and feel a 3-D cutout of the letter.  Once the skill of decoding (and the reverse process, encoding) is mastered, a child can read and write any word.
The encouraging prognosis for properly tutored dyslexics was firmly documented in study by language consultant Margaret Byrd Rawson.  She carefully followed a group of 20 boys with moderate to severe dyslexia, all of whom had been given structured, multi, and sensory language training, to see exactly what happened after they grew up.  All but one went to college; 18 earned degrees, then went on to obtain a total 32 postgraduate professors, on a school principal, three teachers, two research scientists, three owners of businesses, three junior business executives, one an actor, one a skilled laborer and one a factory foreman.
Not all properly tutored dyslexics no longer need fail simply because of language problem.

Does Your Child have Dyslexia?

Your child may need specialized help in overcoming the handicap of dyslexia if he or she shows some of these signs: Reading difficulty; persistent spelling errors (especially misspelling the same familiar word different ways; reversed or upside-down letters, or reversed sequence of letters within words; uncertain preference for right-or left- handedness after age five or six; badly cramped, scrawled of illegible handwriting; confusion about left and right, up and down, tomorrow and yesterday; delayed mastery of spoken language, trouble finding the “right” word when talking; inadequate in written composition; personal disorganization 9losing or leaving possessions, inability to stick to simple schedules, repeatedly forgetting).
Few dyslexics show all these symptoms; and children who are not dyslexic may show some.  But a pattern of these signs—especially a reading or spelling problem—means you would be wise to get a professional opinion.  Talk with your child’s teacher, school psychologist, learning-disabilities specialists or pediatrician as soon as possible, and request a full battery of diagnostic tests.  If your child is definitely dyslexic, he or she will probably heed careful, long-range one-to-one tutoring on a regular basis.  But avoid signing up for remedial help—particularly any non-tutoring scheme—without first getting trustworthy expert advice.
For further information on dyslexia, write:
The Orton Society, inc.,
8415 Bellona Lane, Towson, Md. 21204;
Or
The Association for Children With Learning Disabilities,
4156 Library Rd., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15234,
Please enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope and a check for $1.00 to cover handling and mailing costs

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