Comments on: Obama Top 2 Ways You Can Fix The Education And Reading Crisis

By: Rhonda Stone

Rhonda Stone — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:14:07 +0000

Pat, you are my hero! It’s refreshing to see someone else at a podium that is important to me: (1) Visual stability and (2) Know how to learn. Both of my children struggled early on with visual instability and, most profoundly, the early struggle had an adverse impact on their desire to be classroom learners. So, where do we take this important fight? How do we rally the troops and make progress? The legacy of the nation’s former reading czar (G. Reid Lyon) is a photograph that he showed as part of his presentation at an International Reading Assocation conference. It was of a rather funny looking boy with his ears sticking straight out. Mr. Lyon’s point: We read through our ears (phonemic awareness and phonics). No kidding. Mr Lyon completely ignored visual health throughout his long tenure at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His legacy (emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics) lives on.

By: Irene Gutmann

Irene Gutmann — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:45:09 +0000

As an academic coach, I see subtle learning in students who are very intelligent. These go untreated until teen years when the students can no longer compensate and get the grades they are used to. I have also seen a combination of a subtle learning problem and anxiety that gets kicked up around that problem. When I coach a student through the anxiety, the problem diminishes, and the work gets completed quickly.

Here is an example: I have been very frustrated with my best friend who says that she can’t afford testing to see if her son has dyslexia. His father and sister have it but because he doesn’t reverse letters, she thinks he doesn’t have it. He had to leave his first college, including the football team which he loved, then lost credits at the second college. So much money and opportunity was wasted because she didn’t get him properly evaluated!

By: Pat Wyman

Pat Wyman — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:20:18 +0000

Hi Tom,

Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments.

I agree – throwing more money at this problem will not fix it – but appropriating the money
differently will -

Since all the dollars we’ve tossed, have only
resulted in the problems we have, it’s high
time to think of other, more sustainable
ways to spend them.

Helping kids read and learn are two of our
highest priorities – and I agree too, that
parents do need to be involved.

While we can’t “make” parental involvement
a must do – we certainly can help the
kids once they get to the school door – by
giving them the tools to succeed.

Pat
P.S. Congratulations to your daughter and the
spelling bee (she knows the spelling strategy
that all great spellers use -
they see the word in their mind. Phonics are
not used because few words sound as they
look in our English language.

Another good reason to teach kids how to learn.

P.P.S.
Also, reading to kids is terrific – and at the
same time, we need to teach them what all great
readers know – make a picture of the information
in your mind and brain research says pictures
are faster and easier to recall —
just think, kids can go to the movies and tell
us every little detail, yet some can read a page
and can’t recall what they read – simply
because they don’t know how to use the picture
making strategy.

A lot of this goes along with learning styles
visual, auditory and kinesthetic – school, in
its many written tests, is nearly all visual and
those kids who know how to think in pictures
have an easier time.

By: Tom Mason, M.Ed.

Tom Mason, M.Ed. — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:51:24 +0000

Doesn’t it seem dichotomous that the more money we throw at education the further we fall behind? G.W. Bush has invested far too much monetarily and not done enough on accountability. Money is quite obviously not the answer.

Locally we have failed to involve our communities in childrens’ learning.
While NCLB has begun to marginally close the gap between white and minority students, the problems we face are less about what happens in schools and more about home environments.

The most effective way to increase educational outcomes is to get parents involved as soon as children enter school. However, with many more single-parent homes than 20 years ago it is harder to involved these parents.

We must address this limiting factor as a society before educational outcomes will improve.

We have always been involved in our chidlrens’ schooling, even reading to them while they were in the womb. My 23-year-old son is an electrical engineer, my first daughter (20 YOA) double majors in Cellular Molecular Biology and Psychology, and our 9-year-old daughter was just selected to represent her class in the school spelling bee…hmmmm, who thinks this is coincidence?