carlosfandango

Weekend Book Recommendations

<The Secret Life of the Dyslexic Child>

My professional responsibilities are overflowing, so I did the most sensible thing today: take a step back from work and just read. It was a way to address my instinct: to not be perpetually glued to my phone for a day at least.

I was drawn to this book because it seemed like an easy book to speed-read through, with bulleted points and prose inside text boxes and italicised portions. I notice that such clear organisation of information has been a mainstay of books written to educate people about dyslexia. It sure helped me get the gist of Robert Frank’s points in a fuss-free manner.

I think the main strength of this book is that Robert Frank is a college professor with a PhD and has learnt to cope with his dyslexia. The most illuminating part was his description of a typical day in his life. He confesses that he still struggles with spelling and writing and turns to his preferred modality (e.g calling someone) and support team (e.g. delegating tasks to his secretary) in order to get through the day. I erroneously thought that if a dyslexic person attains automaticity for a task, he won’t forget how to spell a word or forget a name. But it seems that he will experience brain freeze and not be able to do these - especially when he is sleep deprived, exhausted from expending so much energy throughout the day. Basically “mind blurriness”.

I think that my teaching has to be more holistically conceptualised. I just think of the material I want to teach. I should think about the time of the lesson and the rhythm of the student - when is he most energetic to tackle cognitively demanding tasks?

Reading his experience also confirmed my observation that people with dyslexia tend to unconsciously replace unfamiliar words with ones that are familiar to them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide any solutions. I tell my students to slow down when they read but if they are misreading words unconsciously, how do I get them to build self-monitoring and self-correcting methods into their reading so that they won’t make such mistakes? Will introducing self-monitoring methods aggravate their mind blurriness? These are questions on my mind.