Saturday, February 06, 2010

Dyslexia - the hidden learning disability

Dyslexia is one of the most common disabilities. Children with dyslexia have problem learning because they have trouble understanding words, sentences and paragraphs, thus not able to spell or read as well. Let me share with you who has this disabily too :-

Leonardo da Vinci - artist, scientiest
Thomas Edison - inventor
Lee Kuan Yew - Singapore Minister Mentor
Albert Einstein - scientist
Muhammad Ali - boxing champion
Cher - singer
Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Orlando Bloom - actor
Steven Spielberg - film director and producer
Walt Disney - film producer
Agatha Christie - writer

Wow, those folks are so successful , aren't they ? When these children go to school, the teachers need to introduce intervention programmes to teach them. Their brain cannot recognize words, thus use pictures. If we need to teach them 'apple' - show them physical apple or a picture of apple - their brain will register apple. The next time when they see the word 'apple' , they actually imagine the fruit apple , and that is how they comprehend and start to learn and speak...

Likewise, if the teacher is not sensitive or aware , force the dyslexia child to read the words or paragraphs, these children will be lost , at the end, teacher will think that they are 'stupid' , 'slow' ....then the children develops low self-esteem and eventually many more problems along the way. Dyslexia children are more artistic , they are usually good in drawing , imagination - thus you can see the celebraties list above - it's unusual to find dyslexia child being an accountant :). To me, among all the disabilities, this is one of the easiest to intervene , meaning a dyslexia child if is being diagnozed early and intervention programme is introduced early, the child can overcome and be a very successful creative joy to the family and society.

Sadly, in our country - the study found that most of the people who are in jail today - most of them are with dyslexia and they were not brought up 'properly' from young , they could have been labelled 'stupid' , 'slow' , 'hopeless' for the rest of their lives and ended up in jail. Padahal, those group of folks could have been another Msia Boleh 'Steven Spielberg' .....

1 comment:

Yvonne said...

Good post. I think you are especially right about the people in jail.