On the “Story Corps” entry airing today on US National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Inez Cortez discussed what it’s like to have to struggle to learn to read and the pleasure of learning how to do. In the “A Daughter’s Struggle With Learning To Read” produced by Katie Simon, Ms. Cortez spoke with her mother, Kim Wargo, in a frank and direct manner.
Because she was highly verbal but struggled with reading, her parents sought help as early as kindergarten.
Wargo says that once she realized that Ida had dyslexia, she was able to concentrate on ways to help her. Ida began working with a learning specialist at her elementary school, as well as an occupational therapist. She worked with these specialists for about two years. By the third grade, she was reading above grade level — something she continues to do.
Some of the best parts of this brief interview are Ms. Cortez’s comments about her view of her dyslexia. It’s worth the few minutes that it takes listen to it.
Link to Ms. Simon’s story. For educators who read this post, the freely available audio probably will be a good addition to prospective teachers’ (and others’) experiences. Sadly, the Story Corps Web site doesn’t make it easy to point to an individual entry in its catalog; for a little while, it will be a the top of the listen now page at that site.
Update: By sending myself a note about the story I was able to obtain the direct address; this should be a bit more persistent than the one I posted earlier today.
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Kirk used “Learning Disability” before 1963
I was fiddling around with a new feature of Google and thought I’d test its use on a task. Having just read the only entry in the proposed canon for LD (please add to it, folks), I thought I’d search for instances of the perpetuation of the myth that S. A. Kirk coined the term Learning Disability in 1963 in a speech to the group that would become the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities (and, ultimately, the the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and of many other countries, too).
“But, everybody says that’s when he coined it, don’t they?” Not really. Some folks know that Professor Kirk and Barbara Bateman had already used the term “Learning Disabilities” in a paper published a half year earlier (and, given the delay between submission and publication of an article, they’d likely used the term at least a year before the famous meeting).
This analysis does not take anything away from the importance of the meeting in Chicago; that was a signal event, an illustration of the political clout of parents who rally around a common theme in the service of their children. That meeting was the beginning of what one might call the Learning Disabilities movement in the US and now the world. In fact, the LDA site doesn’t make the mistake about the birth of the term; it simply recounts the momentuous events that occured there and then.
Professor Bateman explained it correctly (and she should know) in her 2005 paper “The Play’s the Thing”: “The definition of LD, now controversial, was not an issue when the term learning disabilities was first introduced by Kirk in 1962.”
Anyway, I started a list of places where writers have perpetuated the myth that the term “Learning Disabilities” was introduced in 1963 at the Chicago meeting. Here are a few.
New York Times obituary for Professor Kirk.
Psychpage
2005 Newsletter of the Oregon chapter of Learning Disabilities Assocation of America.
Doris Johnson’s abstract for a plenary session at the University of Pennsylvania.
S. W. Lee in The Encyclopedia of School Psychology (p. 290).
But, I really ought to give credit to those who got it right, who didn’t repeat the misinformation. Ahhh, but that’s another entry.
Bateman, B. (2005). The play’s the thing. Learning Disability Quarterly, 28, 93-99.
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