Be careful who you call brainy

I am writing this on behalf of all dyslexics everywhere and especially on behalf of those who have failed exams because of not remembering facts, names or times tables.

Continue Reading 1 comment December 18th, 2006

Why a cure for Dyslexia?

Last week a parent gave me yet another web site address to investigate; yet another web site and yet another group of people claiming to cure dyslexia.

Why would you want to not be dyslexic? Why on Earth would you want to be normal when most normal people are well – ordinary.

Continue Reading Add comment December 18th, 2006

What’s in a name? Dysgraphia and Dyscalculia

Last week I had (yet another) mother phone me because her child had been diagnosed as having “Dysgraphia”.

“Can you help my child?” she asked. I’m used to this now and I always say, “first I would have to assess the child to establish what causes his problems”.
“He’s got Dysgraphia she repeated.” And she had every right to expect that this was a good and useful diagnosis, after all she had paid over $300 for it.

But in fact labelling a child as “dysgraphic” is not a useful diagnosis because it tells us nothing about how that child learns or how best to teach that child.

Continue Reading 20 comments December 17th, 2006

The Autistic Spectrum – Autism

Autistic people appear not to have “input filters” in their brains so that everything they hear and think bombards their brain. Their problems seem to stem from the fact that they cannot cope with all this information. Visual images bombard their thinking so fast that they are not always consciously aware of the separate images and can work out solutions to complex problems without knowing how they came to the solution.

Their thinking may, therefore, becomes intuitive rather than conscious. They appear to be extreme visual thinkers and have great difficulty with concepts and ideas that they cannot visualize. They often have trouble reading words known as “content words” –for example “of”, “it”, “which” and “than” because they are unable to visualize these words. They also find phonics difficult and learn by remembering the look of words rather than the sound. The brain of an autistic person is crammed full of images which are being manipulated, rotated, flipped and broken down all the time. This can cause emotional or mental problems and autistic pupils are prone to obsessive disorders.

Continue Reading 8 comments December 17th, 2006