Among the annual burst of human interest stories about the triumphs of students with Learning Disabilities, I found one about Zane Vogel, a young man who a graduated early from high school at least a year ago and is now “taking a break” from college. The story, by Lynn Taylor Rick in the Rapid City Journal (SD, US), is chockful of connections for LD Blog. Because there many of them, I’ll forego embedding an extended quote and list a few here.
- Mr. Vogel “didn’t realize that the way he reversed letters or the way he equated words with pictures was typical of a dyslexic.”—Ooopsie! Too bad that someone passed the reversals myth along to Mr. Vogel and too bad that Ms. Rick perpetuated it here.
- Mr. Vogel’s mother “suspected dyslexia. But when she asked her son’s various teachers, they dismissed the idea.”—I continue to be distressed by the way educators too often dismiss Learning Disabilities; I cannot, of course, say what actually happened between Mr. Vogel’s mother and teachers, but I’ve heard lots of stories like this. We educators have to understand that students with these problems do not simply outgrow them, parents’ concerns are worthy of careful consideration, and inaction is mistake.
- “Finally having a name for his struggles and some help meant Vogel began seeing a future for himself. ‘To see accomplished people with it (dyslexia) got me excited about school again,’ he said”—Labeling isn’t so terrible, and here is the good side of celebrity LD, a topic we’ve covered off and on here.
- “Although Vogel has come out on top in his struggle with a learning disability, he still deals with it daily.”—Learning Disabilities do not go away when formal schooling ends.
Link to Ms. Rick’s article. Take a couple of minutes to read it.
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John, that “thinking in pictures” thing is a giveaway that the child has been through the Davis Dyslexia program.
http://www.dyslexia.com/program.htm
“Dyslexic people think primarily in pictures, not words, and have difficulty learning to work with symbols such as letters or numerals. When they are confused or frustrated as children, they begin to experience distorted perceptions, such as reversals of letters, and develop life-long learning blocks that hamper their progress.”
What the “treatment” consists of:
The two major components of the Davis Dyslexia Correction program are Orientation Counseling and Symbol Mastery. Davis Dyslexia Correction always includes both of these components.
“Davis Orientation Counseling® teaches dyslexic students how to recognize and control the mental state that leads to distorted and confused perceptions of letters, words and numerals. Through a simple mental technique, the students learn to turn off the thought processes that cause misperceptions. Instead, they are able to restore their minds to a relaxed and focused state, suitable for reading and other studies. Once Orientation is learned, the student is ready to build the conceptual skills that will allow them to overcome problems stemming from dyslexia.”
I wish somebody would do a Davis debunking.