(1069) Seminar

I once paid five dollars and attended a seminar held in a paediatrician's office in Silver City. Of course it was a community service project, both for the organiser and the speaker from Kuala Lumpur.

The speaker is the mum of two dyslexic children who paid dearly to equip herself with a method that starts with the letter "O". Please google for dyslexic teaching methods and you would probably find it. I have heard that it was internationally endorsed and quite popular in all the commonwealth countries. That I heard from my friend who joined the Dyslexic Association. Don't ask me why I was not a member, perhaps because I was 200 over miles away for the vital years while my children were growing up. Now that I am here, there is no urgent need to learn more. After all, one does not meet a dyslexic person often.

That particular method taught that the teacher should not teach a to z in order. She gave very credible reasons why one should teach the letters that cannot be inverted in any way first, then we are to proceed one by one the remaining letters in a particular order. It was mind boggling. But as she puts it, she tried for years to teach her two precious special children the alphabet, it did not work. But with this method, they mastered the entire alphabet within a week.

It is important to teach writing in the air, in big strokes. Papers don't seem to work well with some children. Somehow the huge strokes, repeated many times, help the brain to retain the muscle and directional stroke memory better. I can imagine this method would help the 11 year old child I met in Washington DC many years ago. He was diagnosed at age three, his mum acquired a Master's in special education to teach him. He went to a special school that charged more than the tuition in Harvard University then in the nineteen eighties. This particular child had the perfect recall, he records every word he heard with no effort at all. Yet at age 11 he did not know too many letters of his alphabet. It was frightening, his disability was not visible at all, and he was not a retard.