E-X-C-U-S-E

I don’t mean to offend.

There will always be students we can’t help—and plenty of reasons for that, but every time a teacher blames a child for struggling with reading basics, a bell rings in the underworld:  No matter how much blame a child deserves due to disruptive behavior, general intellect, low reading aptitude, insufficient linguistic stimulation, short attention span, or whatever, blaming the child doesn’t help because it doesn’t change anything that matters:  For every child who isn’t capable of learning to read under your current teaching circumstances, you will have another one that is virtually identical next year—together with similar, possibly awful—teaching circumstances.

I once had a student who stopped progressing.  Li’l Johnny made every conceivable reading error after two years of potent instruction.  Li’l Johnny appeared perfectly normal in every other respect.  I don’t think he will ever learn to read, but based on the issues he had, I made a change to the reading curriculum I was working with.  I’m pretty sure the curriculum got better.  Would that change have been enough for Li’l Johnny?  Probably not, but a curriculum can always be improved if no one objects.

Change is good—but probably against the rules.

It’s awfully hard to make useful changes in an environment where it seems like you must ask permission for every improvement.  The committee which chose your reading curriculum hypothetically chose the very best one.  Therefore, any change you make, is hypothetically detrimental.  Improving your teaching is hard in an environment where the district or principal changes the reading curriculum just as you are getting the hang of it.  It’s hard to teach in a noisy classroom filled with echoes bouncing off cinder blocks.  Even if you make changes, your bosses might not pay attention to what you say about the results.  It’s just another form of support you probably don’t have.  I hope you do get a chance to implement and test your ideas.

The Original Meaning of “Dyslexia”

In books and movies, characters have “arcs” as they wrestle with the slings and arrows of outrageous plots.  The meaning of dyslexia had an arc too.  Nothing important changed after dyslexia became a thing, but to make a point, “dyslexia” used to refer to a visual processing issue—a disorder.  In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I gathered it was fairly rare.  In order to diagnose a child with dyslexia, you had to be a narrowly specialized neurologist or ophthalmologist.  You needed special equipment & training.  Back then, teachers weren’t qualified to diagnose dyslexia.

In 1970, dyslexia hadn’t been invented yet.  I mean, it wasn’t an available condition.  I mean—you know—people weren’t aware they could have dyslexia.  Gradually, the meaning of dyslexia evolved.  People looked at the word’s Latin roots.  They said “dys” meant difficulty and “lexia” meant words.  Dyslexia soon meant “trouble learning to read.”  Teachers knew that a lot of their reading students were having trouble.  Therefore, the children were dyslexic.  Problem solved!  We won’t blame it on the teaching environment, the culture, or the curriculum.  It’s the kid.  Teaching reading has always been hard:  In the new world of the 1700s and 1800s, a “Man of Letters” was a highly respected individual.  The expression hints at how rare they were.

The Supposed Symptoms Of Dyslexia

In 1980, dyslexia referred to a condition which caused students to see letters backwards or upside down.  Dyslexics had trouble reading from left to right.  They might say the middle or last letter first.  In one memorable article, a student said he might read “picnic” as “nicpic.”  Dyslexia was instantly associated with b-d confusion, then p-q confusion, b-p confusion, and so on.  Here’s a list of dyslexia symptoms I grabbed from an… advertisement—on the web.  We shouldn’t trust ads, of course.  Below, I added three extra symptoms that I’ve observed while teaching reading to low aptitude students (in blue).

1. 1. Delayed speech – not talking at all by 1 year.
   2. Mixing up the sounds or syllables in long words such as “aminal” or “busketti”
   3. Constant confusion of left with right
   4. Late establishing a dominant hand
   5. Difficulty learning to tie shoes
   6. Trouble memorizing address, phone number, or the alphabet
   7. Can’t create words that rhyme
   8. Trouble recognizing rhyming words.
   9. Trouble distinguishing between vowel sounds.
   10. Trouble producing accurate vowel sounds.

Was dyslexia ever a real thing?

Well, I don’t know.  I’m not a neurologist.  I don’t study the visual cortex and any miswiring that may crop up there.  There are certainly some fairly rare ophthalmalogical and neurological issues that afflict some children.  Here’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of: These symptoms are very common.  In the list below, I added the green symptoms.  They’re often mentioned in this context.

1. 1. Delayed speech.
   2. Trouble learning to read,
   3. A tendency to read letters out of order,
   4. A tendency to confuse b and d,
   5. Constant confusion of left and right,
   6. Mixing up the sounds or syllables in long words such as “aminal” or “busketti”
   7. Late establishing a dominant hand,
   8. Difficulty learning to tie shoes,
   9. Trouble memorizing address, phone number, or the alphabet,
   10. Trouble creating rhyming words,
   11. Trouble recognizing rhyming words, and
   12. Trouble distinguishing between vowel sounds.
   13. Trouble producing accurate vowel sounds.

Consider symptom 5, confusion of left and right.  I didn’t learn which hand was my right hand until I was about 10, but I learned how to read between 1^st grade and 2^nd grade—over the summer break.  My wife is confused about left and right in two languages.  Taking driving directions from her is tricky, but she can read—in two languages.  Mixing up sounds in long words?  I thought that was normal.  It’s certainly cute.  Sure, “delayed speech” is probably correlated with poor reading outcomes.  I’ll say this:  If a mother told me her child was late in talking, I would suggest her child should start reading instruction equally late.  Unfortunately, that’s not the way our education factories work.  Every reading beginner I have ever taught had all the green symptoms.  Even high aptitude students display the blue symptoms for short periods.  Am I to believe that all children are born with dyslexia?

One reference on the web said this:  Dyslexia affects one in ten Britons and one in five Americans.  That’s strange.  Why would dyslexia be twice as common in the U.S.?  Isn’t it possible that half of those Americans are not dyslexic?

I would approach any diagnosis with skepticism.  Instead of blaming a condition, focus on what you can do to minimize confusion, improve the tools you work with, and improve your teaching environment.  Why not cover a wall with acoustic foam or used carpet?  Obviously, a company that’s advertising instructional services has incentives to make up reading disorder “symptoms.”  So do teachers, principals, and school districts—whenever they’re talking to bosses or parents.

Dyslexia symptom number eight is “difficulty learning to tie shoes.”  What does tying shoes have to do with reading?  I admit there could be a correlation.  For example, if I met a retiree who didn’t know how to tie his shoes, I would be a bit surprised if he was a skilled reader.  Reading requires three skills….

• • instantaneous letter-sound recall,
  • rapid blending of letter sounds,
  • from left to right.

Every one of those skills is hard for most children to learn.  Should we test kindergartener shoe-tying ability anyway?

Every reading beginner I’ve ever taught had the green and blue symptoms above, especially the green ones.  If you want to call beginner syndrome “dyslexia,” go ahead, but you shouldn’t think of it as a disorder—because it’s normal for beginners.  If a child has these symptoms, he is a reading beginner.  All beginners read letters out of order.  All beginners skip letters when the word is too long.  All beginners have trouble with consonant blends.  All beginners develop d-b confusion, but it disappears as soon as they have learned to read from left to right consistently.

Some students have much more trouble producing accurate vowel sounds than others.  Over time they get better.  Initially, children read letters out of order.  Gradually they get better.  Children with b-d confusion get better, but it takes several grades with typical curriculum.  If we can cure dyslexia with teaching, maybe it was never a neurological abnormality in the first place.  If good teaching can “cure” dyslexia without drugs or surgery, isn’t it possible that bad curriculum can aggravate it?

A neighbor of mine was a first-grade teacher.  She was shocked when I told her that half of her district’s children were reading below the third-grade level at the end of third grade.  If you teach kindergarten, ask a first-grade teacher what he or she is observing in the students you passed on to him or her.  Ask second-grade teachers what problems they’re seeing.  How many of your school’s 4^th graders are weak readers?  One shouldn’t assume that the reading problems seen at his or her grade level evaporate in later grades.  Don’t be the retired teacher who gets shocked at the dinner party.  If a problem takes a long time to go away, it’s causing teacher frustration, boss disappointment, parental anger, and child frustration.  That frustration could cause a teacher to quit.  It could cause a child to give up or rebel.  If there is a persistent problem, everyone should be looking for ways of suppressing that problem and looking for the causes of that problem.  By abolishing problem causes, we can prevent problems that are hard to fix.