Perception, Perception, Perception

So it would appear I have discovered that blogs can be somewhat difficult at times. I spent hours last night and again today writing my latest post. Unfortunately, for me, when I went to press the publish button, not only did it not publish, but I was told the page was not accessbile. Of course when I finally got back to my post it was gone. So here I go again.

Perception is everything when it comes to reading successfully. It's not what the eyes see, it's what the brain thinks that the eyes see.

There was lost of candy in the dish so I told the kids to help themselves.
The little boy looked for the lots puppy in the park.

How many of you thought the third word in the first sentence was lots?
How many of you thought the seventh word in the second sentence was lost?

If you did, then blame your perception. You most likely saw the correct words, but because of the surrounding words your brain may have perceived something different.

Here 's another example I use with "my kids": smile limes miles slime
Now the question is; how many words have the same letters? If you said all of them, congratulations, you're right. You would be amazed to know how many of my students did not recognize that all the letters were the same. Again the culprit is perception. It's not that the students don't see all the letters, it's the fact that their brains have not been programmed to pay attention to all of the letters in each word.



In the study of learning there is the concept of figure/ground. Figure is whatever the brain needs to pay attention to and ground is the background stuff that is not as important. Now imagaine that you're trying to learn to read and you are taught with a method that teaches you to memorize words, but you are never given a method of decoding the words yourself. You are taught that you don't need to look at every letter on the page. You are taught to look at the shape of the words instead of the letters themselves. You are taught that little words are not important. You are also taught that if you don't know the word just guess.(If you're new please read earlier post to discover why this is so harmful) So in other words you have been taught with a method which basically tells you everything that your brain should be recognizing as figure is ground. Is it any wonder why a third of every classroom is reading below grade level?

There are some students who are natural born readers and they would learn to read successfully no matter what you did.(Fortunately I'm one of them) But please remember that the students who are not natural born readers are not lacking in intelligence. (Some of these "natural born readers" have trouble putting their pants on one leg at a time. Fortunately I'm not one of them. Please understand I am not trying to be insulting. I am, however, trying to point out that some people, who some would consider to be highly intelligent, are not necessarily successful in day to day living.) They need to be taught in manner that will successfully program their brains to recognize what should be considered figure and what should be deemed ground.

As an example of how harmful it can be for a student to be taught incorrectly let me share what happened yesterday with my little hockey player (please see earlier post). He was learning a new "Word Pattern" card and he was reading words across the page. When he came to the word "notches" he immediately said "notices". Now ask yourself how can you get "notices" out of "notches"? It's easily done if you haven't been taught to look at every letter on the page. He simply saw the first three letters and guessed the rest by using a word he knew. Do you have any idea how frustrating that was for both him and me? It's really difficult to reprogram the brain when the missprogramming is being constantly reinforced by the education system.

Well time is flying and I'm getting extremely paranoid about the possibility of losing all of this writing so I will pray and hit the publish button. Please remember if you visit my blog I would love to get your comments. Signing off for now, but you just know I'll be back.