Wouldn't it be wonderful if schools included all of those areas?

I'd like to put another caveat to your well-rounded education. This system will truly understand and accommodate dyslexia (reading issues of all flavors), dysgraphia, color-blindness . . . and might include light sensitivity and other conditions.

Last month my son finished his GED testing. We pulled him out of public school at the beginning of 6th grade. He was still a non-reader at that point and the school had no means to accommodate him. What would have happened to him had he stayed?

For both he and his sister, reading was not useful until the end of 7th grade and that was still limited to subjects of interest. As most of you know, dyslexic people cannot do phonics well, or at all, and words are stored as pictures in a different part of the brain. When enough word pictures are stored, then you can read. Both children are good readers now.

They are a minority of the population, but still a large minority. When I was last a teacher, I counted 53 of my 114 students who had issues with dyslexia. That's 46 percent. They could not follow written step-by-step instructions well. (Nor can I.) However, in the computer lab where I taught, if I showed them the skills, handed them a document, and said "reproduce this document," they could all do it.

So there is this large part of the population who cannot read-to-learn, especially in the lower grades. Their brains are not ready to do it. There is no magical reading program that I know of that will help them memorize these word pictures. It seems to eventually come from exposure. The much-touted Orton-Gillingham method deals with phonemes and helps with phonics physically, but does not guarantee words are stored in memory. I am of the opinion that teaching reading to dyslexic children in the lower grades is a waste of time. They have to have exposure, but it needs to be understood it's just not going to happen until their brains are ready. So they need accommodations. It's the story that is important after all, not how you come by it.

My daughter had a third-grade teacher who read "Overcoming Dyslexia" by Dr. Sally Shaywitz and followed it. This teacher taught her how to manage dyslexia and since my daughter did not have dysgraphia and could do well in math, she became an A student. The stress and anxiety became too much in high school, so she went the GED route as well and started college at 17. She had fun for 2 1/2 years studying art, music, theater, business, and drafting. Now she is going back to major in environmental science. She and my son will start college classes in January. He would like to be a history teacher.

It was a pretty big job to make sure my son got his k-12 education. He worked hard and scored high on the GED tests. What about kids whose parents are not retired educators? What do they do?

Plus, it is a trend to expect children to accomplish more younger and younger. When I was looking for materials to use (we mostly used Khan Academy which is excellent and free), I thought . . . "these third graders are never going to remember this stuff!" I am even opposed to the dual-credit thing. My last principal told me his daughter graduated with a teaching certificate in agriculture at age 20. He told her, "you are going back for your masters and not teaching high school ag at age 20!"

After the kids go back to school, I am thinking about asking our local school counselor if I could come and talk to the elementary teachers. I think if they understood that they have smart kids in their classes who aren't going to be able to read, it will help them accommodate those children.

Thanks for the OT!

in management skills that focused on what the instructor claimed were the three types of learning pathways: visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic. It gave me some pretty decent insights on the team I was managing at the time. But what I really enjoyed was applying those concepts to try to gain some insights into myself. When I took their little sorting quiz, I scored almost dead in the middle of the triangle, with equal weight on all three items. I consider myself really fortunate to have that gift.

I found that music is the best way to think about it. I can read music perfectly well, but it basically annoys me to have to mess with it. I'd rather hear the music to reproduce it. And once I go through the physical motions enough to commit it to muscle memory, I can reproduce it very nicely. The paper then becomes irrelevant very quickly. On the other hand, I know musicians who are slaves to paper. They can sightread anydamnedthing and play it beautifully. But without the paper, they are lost, and improvisation just doesn't come naturally. Their inner musician doesn't sing the notes to them- they see the patterns on the paper and their fingers know how to do it.

A lot of musicians fall into that side of the triangle that joins the visual and the kinaesthetic, as a result. That's very much like the folks you describe above, where the word-pictures have to build up enough to allow reading comprehension to occur. You can lecture a person all day long who falls on that axis, and they will get little out of it. The auditory path just isn't their preferred/primary input mechanism. If I personally am out of the center of the triangle, I'm closer to the auditory-kinaesthetic axis. That is why I prefer hearing-doing, and why I really enjoy musical improvisation. My wife gets so pissed at me for that, because she prefers seeing-doing: she is a brilliant vocalist and can sight-sing flyspecks, but ultimately she feels that she needs the paper to define the musical path.

These concepts also apply to how I read text. I see the words on the page or screen, but what is actually happening in my head is that my inner narrator is *speaking* them to me. I don't really feel that I see the words as such. But that nice dialog that I always have going with the voices in my head translates them for me, and they get into my noggin as if I was actually hearing them spoken. That was a downright startling realization.

The folks who have the most difficult time are the ones who fall into the corners of the triangle, where only one of the paths really works for them. The purely-kinaesthetic types have by far the hardest time of all, because they have to be physically *doing* something to learn from it. Trap them immobile at a desk and talk at them, and they will become bored and disengaged very quickly. In a management sense, sometimes the best way to communicate with a primarily-kinaesthetic learner is to say "Walk with me", and give them the task of keeping up with you physically while you try to engage the less-preferred visual or auditory path (whichever works best for them). These are the folks who, once they've physically performed a specific task, master it quickly. It's the doing of it that matters, not the hearing or seeing. In musical terms, they are generally called "drummers". (;-)

This is really a fascinating and incredibly complex topic, and one size most definitely does not fit all. What a cool OT!

Note to the humor-impaired: am drummer, primarily. Don't hurt me...

A couple of things I felt I had to add.

Everybody needs to learn empiricism as a basis for everything else and it needs to be refined and enhanced as they get older and older.

Everybody needs to know how to wire a switch, electrical outlet, light socket and lamp, but not everybody needs to know how to build a radio or fix a TV. Everybody should be able to frame a shed, but not how to make a guitar or piano.

My dad once said, and I'm sure it is true, if you learn to weld, you'll never starve, especially if, at some point, you buy your own torches. Still seems to be true today.

be well and have a good one

But education in the US is sorely lacking. The purpose is to insure a compliant rather than thinking population. I worked for years on school reform. If I was education tsar I would begin by allowing each community to design their curriculum similar to the 8 year study. I've always been a proponent of in school businesses. Some schools build computers, others run a copy shop, some build things like picnic tables and shed for sale. We all learn better by doing, and students should be doing real things.

Buy in is essential, Teachers, Students, and parents need to cooperatively work on creating a learning organization which fits their unique community. The idea of a one fits all school design is absurd. It is a bottom up rather than top down approach which is needed.

My 2 cents.