@GreatLakeSailor

Thank you!

“We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ,” says John D. E. Gabrieli...

...is determining when the sounds of one word ends and the next one starts - I call it determining the "cut points". If I don't focus my conscience mind on the stream of sound it's just a stream of sound - not words. I can rewind it and replay it in my head and then catch the words. I have to do that a lot.

I also can not recognize familiar faces if even one thing has changed. Hair cut, hat, very different clothes, even seeing someone I know in a place I don't expect I have no idea who they are or that I even should know the person. This has lead to many, many very embarrassing situations and often people think I'm a stuck-up asshole. Tends to make me antisocial.

Weird thing is, without concentrating, I can identify mechanical sounds of almost any kind - errant, expected, one-off, rhythmic - pretty much anything. Quite savant-like. Math, physics, engineering is natural and easy.

Language, spelling, reading all require deliberate, conscience effort.

Well, I've just shared more than I ever have before.

@mimi

It's all so frickin complicated. And my issues are partly from living in historically extremely racist Texas.

So . . . my last high school where I was a teacher . . . we were 1/3 white 1/3 African American and 1/3 Latino. Yet only white students were identified as dyslexic, deserving of the appropriate accommodations. There was one African American student on the list, but she had just moved in from another district.

I like that you are commenting, mimi. Well, because there are so many so many ways our kids have been hurt by this whole business. Only in the last 10 years is there the science to link to the truth to really help kids. Everything else before that was horrible. I have numerous family members who suffered greatly. Breaks my heart.

are confronted with children who can't spell and read at a level the school curriculum decides they should be able to.

Being categorized as dyslexic hurts a child for life. I have not seen teachers who know how to help children, who show the signs a dyslexic kid is said to have.

I really didn't like the study you posted. I think the study stinks to heaven in its simplicity and arrogant approach.

May be I am even more angry than you are, still, after all these years. I am a parent of a child, who was diagnosed as a "child that seems to be a dyslexic, but we really can't say for sure, so we can't advise you into what to do about it". Teachers don't know the children they are teaching and the assumptions they make, say more about their own lack of understanding than about the lack of reading and spelling capabilities of the child in question. There are many different reasons why a child can have reading difficulties and it's not easy for teachers to know what these reasons are, nor can dna-based reasons easily be proven or tested.

I often wondered why people think a child is helped learning to read, when it is read to by its parents. Makes no sense to me. In Germany it wasn't something society expected parents to do. Kids were allowed to pick up books or not and not watched over or forced to read them.

Nobody in my extended family clan was read to by its parents. We all learned to read and write with the same method. All the kids developed different reading habits and writing capabilities. The school classes were homogeneous with regards to race, religion and more or less class. No multilingual or migrant's children among them. Today it's very different.

Well, it's not my subject to comment on. It always brings up memories that make me feel angry, sad and guilty.

I hope your kids are well today and coped with it.

@The Aspie Corner

Sounds to me like you have a bit of dyslexia too. The comprehension issue is because your brain isn't decoding the text. Especially an issue when you read unfamiliar words. You know what they mean when you hear them spoken.

In grad school I took a class called "Communication Theory." Lots of reading material that my brain couldn't decode. Not knowing about my dyslexia at the time, I went to an eye doctor and had my eyes checked. Vision was fine. But I just kept reading the same page over and over.

Yes . . . Amazon is evil, but I love Kindle. Helps me.

Despite people telling me I'm well spoken/read, I actually have huge difficulties reading myself, especially small print. I find myself re-reading sentences all the time and I've always had trouble with comprehension. Being far-sighted completely sucks in this regard.

My right eye is also lazy so I've always considered getting a full driver's license out of the question. Strangely enough, my peripheral vision is actually better than my central vision.

I've actually started reading ebooks because of this. Being able to change the size of the text on the fly really helps a lot. I just wish there were other options besides Amazon.