Doing Their Best

Just when you thought it was safe to come back to the blogosphere, I'm back! It's been a few weeks since I posted anything. I was occupied with an unrelated issue, which unfortunately, has been resolved unsatisfactorily.

Did you watch the Olympics the last few weeks? I certainly enjoyed watching the athletes do their best for their countries. I don't know about you, but I've been going through a bit of a with-drawl the last couple of days. For two weeks there was something worth watching on T.V. Now we're back to the same old drivel.

Speaking of doing your best, wouldn't it be nice if the education system encouraged our kids to do their best? Even better it would be nice if they would equip the chidren with the tools they need. Now you have to know that I'm leading to another anecdote.

During my hiatus from the blogosphere I started working with a new student. She's 15 years old and in grade 10. The sad thing is she's barely reading above a grade 7 level. She's lovely and intelligent and she was beginning to get extremely frustrated with her inability to succeed when writing a test. In fact that's why she was referred to me. She was told that her struggle was "test anxiety". Text anxiety my great aunt Fanny, how are you supposed to successfully write a test on a grade 10 level when you're reading at a grade 7 level?

Her results quickly revealed that the reading method used to teach her was (yep you guessed it) Whole Language. When reading the words on the test she was fine until she came to a word she had never seen before. When that happened she was completely stymied. She couldn't even try to figure out the word, in fact it never ocurred to her to try. She would just pass on word after word until she came to one she recognized. When I told her the results of her test she was disappointed, but when I explained why and that we could improve her reading she cheered up.

Through the perceptual tests we also discovered that she is dealing with scotopic sensitivity which makes it difficult to read black print on a white page. When I placed a coloured overlay on the page it was much easier for her to see it. She also has cross dominance which may or may not be affecting her ability to read a page left to right.

We've only had two sessions to date, but I can tell that her reading is going to improve quickly. But now I'm back to the same old question. How was she allowed to get in this predicament in the first place? Why does the education system insist that it's psychologically harmful to fail a student, but refuse to see the psychological damage caused by continually passing a student from grade to grade when they haven't acquired the skills needed to pass?

Before I finish my latest diatribe I want to talk about one more pet peeve. This is for anyone who has attempted to teach a child to read. Please stop telling students to look for words inside words. It does not work and in fact makes it more diffecult to read. For example one of my students was trying to decode the word "moped". Now you would think that it would be a pretty easy thing to do, but his first response was to say "mop" because he had been taught to look for words inside words. Instead of using the "word pattern" to decode the word he fell back on the method he had been taught by the education system. It's been my experience that using this method causes more frustration than anything else. It all goes back to the same thing I've been saying over and over,which is you can't read successfully if you don't look at every letter on the page in the order it is written on the page.

Well it's now 1:30 in the morning and I've run out of things to say for now. But you know I'll have much more to say next time.