J. B. Holmes overcame dyslexia to advance through college before quitting school to begin pursuing a career as a golfer, according to Damon Hack writing in the New York (NY, US) Times. Mr. Hack leads with an illustration of a bad shot Mr. Holmes made when practicing as a youth and connects this to his difficulty with completing school work.
Holmes’s [golf practice] sessions were born of a love of golf, but also a dread of going inside to do homework — the letters of some words would flutter around the page.
Holmes, a rookie on the PGA Tour, said he thought he was dumb. His parents went on the premise that he simply was not concentrating.
The extract I’ve included here illustrates both the good and the not-so-good in Mr. Hack’s story. The good? That’s the latter part that sets up this important point: Mr. Holmes’ problems were not because he was dumb or didn’t pay attention.
The bad? The implication that reading problems cause or are caused by perceptual problems, by distortion of letters and words. Later in the article this notion is furthered by quotations attributed to Amy Craiglow, Mr. Holmes’ academic counselor at the University of Kentucky. Ms. Craiglow said that Mr. Holmes was helped by exercises that encouraged him to visualize meanings for words and by placing “diagrams, stickers or note cards around a room and picturing the words in space.”
As well-intentioned and heart-warming as stories such as this one may be, they set us back in our efforts to provide a clear, accurate picture of Learning Disabilities. There may be cases in which visualizing images associated with printed words may actually help people with reading problems, but I suspect that they are few—probably fewer than 1 in a 100,000 dyslexics, I’d guess. Help is more likely to come from systematic, explicit instruction in learning the mapping between print and spoken language. Each report of a mysterious, magic-key solution to dyslexia dilutes the potency of what we know provides the best hope for treatment.
Link to Mr. Hack’s story (free registration required). Meanwhile, congratulations to Mr. Holmes for overcoming his problems and succeeding.
Over on EBD Blog there are several entries that might have shown up here. This is a list of five posts that have, at the least, some reference to Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder. If either of its two readers came to LD Blog looking for discussion of ADHD, I hope these cross-references (in chronological order) help her or him.
Over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz Ditz has another entry on how writers too often make a hash when writing about disabilities. Read it here.
Liz Ditz found an article by Doug Worgul, a journalist for the Knight-Ridder syndicate, that is unusual because it portrays dyslexia accurately. The article is brief and, thus, neither breaks news nor has a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, but it is nice to read something that doesn’t make me grimace. Unlike so many articles in the popular press, Mr. Worgul doesn’t perpetuate myths (e.g., people with Learning Disabilities have counter-balancing gifts), report misinformation (e.g., reversals are a characteristic of dyslexia), or tout sham remedial methods (e.g., Irlen lenses).
Link to the post in I Speak of Dreams and a link to Mr. Worgul’s article.
Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) used the old famous-people-with-Learning-Disability bit as a lead for an entry in its blog that is part of the company’s public relations campaign (AKA “advertising”).
What do Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill, and Alexander Graham Bell have in common?
Learning disability.
TIS is a software development company with headquarters in India that creates simulations and games and transforms traditional print content into more technically accessible formats. Other than a few instances of pandering to the public, TIS claims to develop “end-to-end solutions that screen and identify children with learning disabilities, and offer remedial action as well as a tracking system to monitor their progress.” Sounds good, no?
Could be good, but who knows? As evidence, TIS offers endorsements by various agencies and companies. I’m not ready to accept those data as strong evidence. Show us the data!
As one or two of the three readers of LD Blog may know, I have a fondness for technology in education, having fiddled with it for the better part of 20 years. Still, I harbor skepticism about technologies that claim to correct Learning Disabilities. Usually the products are misbegotten examples of quizzing with gratuitous feedback (bronx cheers upon error, fireworks displays for accurate answers) or superficially sensible sequences of activities that supposed to address underlying processes (e.g., deducing the sequence described by a series of objects). I am certain there are better things available, but I don’t know enough about them. (My much-admired colleague Mable Kinzie has led a graduate class on developing learning games; I should investigate the work they produced.) Whatever they are, we need to see the empirical examinations of their effects. Show us the data!
Neither the TIS blog entry nor a PDF document describing the products provide data.
The good news, according to the blog entry, is that TIS supports a local (a) hospital by performing systems analyses and programming data management activities—excellent use of technology!—and (b) employees running footraces (7K, halfathon, and marathon) to raises funds for Learning Disabilities.
Liz Ditz has been busy over on I Speak of Dreams. Check her entries on
License plate
By the way, I’ve routinely thought that one of the greatest advantages of invented spelling is in aiding one’s ability to read vanity license plates. Otherwise, it’s only good for assessing phonological awareness and first drafts.