“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.” (Charles William Elliot)
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The Advertiser’s Ross Tyson, in a recent editorial, wrote about the difficulties Jason Carty faced as a child suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia.
One of my most challenging tasks as both teacher and teacher librarian over many years was to support students who simply could not read, could not comprehend the printed page. They might just as well have been reading Chinese.
It is incredibly sad to read of students like Jason who found school a lonely, often isolating and bullying place.
While from one perspective a library was an agony for those unable to understand the printed word, it was often their refuge, their place of safety and support against the loneliness of the playground.
Jason is speaking for thousands of students, now adults, who never mastered the art of reading at school.
There is a lack of understanding as to why some students simply cannot unjumble and decipher words.
Whole doctorates have been written on the subject, but basically every child who enters a school has the capacity to read, but somewhere in that complex neural system in the brain there is a glitch.
Understanding how a child learns to read is an incomplete science. Dyslexia is one diagnosis but that isn’t the whole answer.
There are many children for whom that diagnosis is not the answer. Those children remain sidelined both at school, the workplace, and something as simple as acquiring a licence to drive.
There are no easy answers and neither teachers nor schools have the resources or expertise to always find the answers...hence we have the Jasons of this world, who are excluded from participating in the richness that reading brings to our lives.
Children who cannot master the written word are handicapped, particularly as they now must read ever more complex information from computer generated programs where language is even more detailed and sophisticated.
Imagine a young Jason, happily beginning school, long shorts or short longs, bag too heavy, hat too large, excited with his new world, only to find school more and more of a nightmare as he realises he is slipping further and further behind his classmates.
Reading Jason’s story is very humbling, because teachers could be judged as having let him down. However teachers are not trained in the complexities between brain function and reading ability.
It requires very specific testing and teaching to resolve reading difficulties, particularly a diagnosis like dyslexia.
Equally it requires very specific testing by experts to detect other problems preventing children from understanding the printed word.
Ross Tyson quoted author Frederick Douglass ‘once you learn to read, you will be forever free’. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
It is so much to Jason’s credit, and others like him, that they and their families have persevered with finding answers to this puzzle called ‘reading’, and that for some the answers can be found and the breakthrough happens.
I have a long held belief, as do many educationalists, that one cannot start early enough to read to a child. You can start the day your child is born. It’s not the only answer but it’s worth doing.