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THE DYSLEXIA SOLUTION

Volume 3 • #9 • July/August 2004

NEWSLETTER

As my readers all know, I always recommend that a parent NOT teach the RfS program. If it is humanly possible, get a pleasant , intelligent grandma, grandpa or college coed who is an excellent reader to do the job. The reason for this is obvious-- there’s just too much emotional baggage between a “failing” child and a distraught parent for the parent to be as relaxed as a tutor. A less obvious reason is that since dyslexia is inherited, you often find that the parent who wants desperately for her child not to go through what she did, as a dyslectic student, will undertake to do the teaching.

But you can’t have the blind leading the blind, and someone who is not a good reader simply cannot do the job right, however well meaning. So aren’t you better off getting an experienced reading teacher to do the tutoring? Very rarely. One reason is that a successful elementary school teacher already “knows how to teach reading” and doesn’t want to be told to follow a method she has never tried and which is very scripted. Teachers hate scripted programs, arguing that kids differ and one method just doesn’t suit everybody.

The argument is fine as long as you are merely talking about teaching some subject to a bunch of kids. But RfS is NOT just a reading program. It is a therapeutic series of exercises to straighten out the wiring problem in the brain that is causing the inability to learn to read. Not to read. To LEARN to read. As my mother used to say, that is a gray horse of another color. This means that you must apply the treatment according to the directions, as in any therapy designed to eliminate the cause of a problem .

If your child had pneumonia and the doctor told you to give him penicillin in a certain way for a certain time, that’s what you would do. You wouldn’t decide that maybe you should give him half the dose for twice the time, or maybe add a little of Junior’s recent medicine that helped his cough, or finish up that prescription that a neighbor gave you from when her child was sick.

This is not to say that no teacher should be teaching RfS. Gym, art, music and foreign language teachers are often excellent. They like kids, never taught reading before and are glad to be told how to go about it.

Teaching tip:

Don’t give tests, quizzes, “pop” quizzes, grades or marks. This is hard for the school administration to swallow, so more on it in the next newsletter.

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