On the morning drive show for Richmond (VA, US) radio station WRVA, listeners were saddled with the burden of listening to me miss chances to restate the “Not Lazy and Dumb” message. Thanks to Jimmy Barrett, the morning host for WRVA, and his staff, I was invited to comment on whether dyslexia was a “fig leaf” for “stupid” in an interview about Professor Julian Elliott’s recent comments pushing that message.
Continue reading ‘I missed oppotunities’
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Liz Ditz, who maintains I Speak of Dreams where she takes a sensible approach to Learning Disabilities, has a daughter whom she calls “Jumper Girl” (because the daughter sometimes competes in equestrian events). If my calculations are correct, today Jumper Girl has a graduation ceremony. Jumper Girl had and continues to have learning problems, but she got some sensible therapy and has persevered. Now’s she’s arrived at this important marker of achievement.
So, here’s some congratulations for Jumper Girl and her mother. Way to go!
(And, if the ceremony is tomorrow, you can carry them over to then.)
Over on The Clay Experience (AKA: Unintelligent Design) Clark Bartram often has interesting posts about his experiences as a pediatrician. Last April he posted a gripping recounting of one of those experiences. It’s the story of an emergency Cesarean Section delivery that includes this account of his working with the just-deliverd child. He’s working his way through a standardized set of steps to ensure the neonate lives:
I did this for 30 seconds with no response. The heart rate was steady at just over 60 beats per minute [should be 100] and the child lay before me blue, silent, and still. I’ve never wanted to hear a child cry so much in my life.
I know that one can’t predict precisely from birth events, but descriptions such as this one make me apprehensive about the future for children who make it through such events.
Link to Dr. Bartram’s full account of this story.
Despite the fact that I’ve plied this theme frequently, I found this humorous:
I realized I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Professor Robert Dougherty and colleagues at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA, US) reported that differences in the fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain are correlated with competence in phonological awareness. They examined the corpus callosa of 49 children using diffusion tensor imaging and related measures of reading to the differences in the features of the structures that they assessed.
Continue reading ‘Temporal-callosal diffusivity’
Full funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is again before the US Congress. Pretty much bi-annually since the landmark law was passed over 30 years ago, there have been efforts to make the US federal government live up to its promise to fund 40% of the special education costs. This year, there are a few active; here’s a sampling:
Continue reading ‘IDEA funding’
High-achieving dyslexics
I was just searching for an example of the value that individuals with dyslexia contribute to societies, so I turned to Liz Ditz’s I Speak of Dreams, because I know that she’s kept closer tabs on that topic than yours truly. She doesn’t seem to have a tag for the topic, though; so, I jumped over to Google and searched for the phrase “high-achieving dyslexics” at her site.
Sheeeeeesh! The search returned 102 hits. Way to go, Liz!
Back to this article….