Dyslexia is a load of shite...

[Chilly]

...according to this MP.

BBC NEWS | England | Manchester | MP brands dyslexia a 'fiction'

He has a few good arguments tbh. I suspect the condition is real but we massively overdiagnose it so that shit teaching isnt blamed.

 

[Mey]

You can still be dyslexia and read, is that guy special?

 

[Chilly]

~refrains from the obvious joke~

 

[old.Tohtori]

~refrains from the obvious joke~

Bit my tongue too.

But, it's true really that modern society diagnoses everyone who has a "bad day" with the depression and every kid hwo has fun as ADHD.

Stupid really.

 

[Dark Orb Choir]

that guy's a fucking idiot, what does he know.

I am Dyslexic, that's got fuck all to do with my teachers shit methods (i re read this 4 times to make sure i did not make any spelling mistakes)

i can read, but sometimes i read things a bit wrong, i can spell but as you guys know, its not the best most of the time.

i also have dyspraxia, and potential Aspergers Syndrome (undiagnosed as yet, apparently there is only 1 person in Yorkshire that deals with adult Aspergers cases)

some would say i should have been thrown back into the bucket............

but fuck them, this guy is just spouting off to get publicity it seems

 

[old.Tohtori]

Dark, but i have to say, i have to agree that sometimes it's not about dyslexia, and sometimes people just are STUPID

Basically, people need a diagnose to avoid the real issue and are granted one too easy.

 

[Dark Orb Choir]

Bit my tongue too.

But, it's true really that modern society diagnoses everyone who has a "bad day" with the depression and every kid hwo has fun as ADHD.

Stupid really.

rofl, i said this almost 3 years ago on this very forum and got absolutely slated for it, just shows how the times have changed

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/general-2/12837-depression-7.html#post2671137

 

[old.Tohtori]

Well maybe there was a bit of a problem with the delivery of the point

 

[megadave]

I wish i had dyslexia

My brother got diagnosed with serious dyslexia when he was 19, he'd already finished his A-levels with very good results, found reading and writing etc no problem and throughout uni he got an extra grand a year free grant and 30% more time in exams. All this free stuff despite dyslexia having no affect on his life

 

[Chilly]

yer, the handouts of ipods and laptops and extra exam time galls me, especially when I know people who were scamming the system on purpose because its fucking easy to do.

 

[Trem]

kid hwo has fun as ADHD.

Stupid really.

*giggles*

 

[Poag]

...according to this MP.

BBC NEWS | England | Manchester | MP brands dyslexia a 'fiction'

He has a few good arguments tbh. I suspect the condition is real but we massively overdiagnose it so that shit teaching isnt blamed.

Pretty much.
I was diagnosed with a weird ass auditory dyslexia in the early 90s. Noone knew what it was and I had to travel to a specialist unit in Tonbridge to be properly tested for it, I was like 8 so it was all very exciting

Nothing happened over the next few years, primary school wasn't exactly hard as its all alot of repeating and its all written down which ment i was able too get around the problem and discovered that if i read something once, i pretty much never forgot it. Conversely if someone told me something, i could repeat it and 5 minutes later forget.

Here's a modern example of this. In WoW theres a fight where you have too stand on one side of the boss with 1 debuff and the other with another debuff [Thaddius]. Always I have gone on the left for the N debuff and the right for the P debuff. My new guild is reversed to this. I got told on vent which way and promptly forgot [within 5mins] the next time i wrote a little message in raid chat with arrows on it, got it right.

Somewhere along the line me hearing something didn't tie up with it going into my long term memory, but if i wrote it down or read it, it would.


Anyway, at about 13-14 I was having trouble in Secondary School due to more of the work being spoken, and then we were told too write it down later in the lesson...at which point it'd gone form my mind. My school didn't help much on this as I'd get told off if i tried to write down notes during lessons... apparently I wasn't paying attention when i was doing that, weird logic really.

Anyway, this was still when dyslexia was mostly unknown and there were like 3 specialists in the south of England for it. So every week for the next 5 years my parents would take me to another school [actually the teachers home but nm] after school on Fridays and i'd spend between 3 and 6 hours there working on other ways too remember things, mainly through notes and method memory...repeating things over and over in your head and visualising the words in my case.

During this I went from being a marginal student too a exceptional student with a high IQ, passed my exams and got press ganged by Jupitus...that bastard.


So anyway thats my story, this is was in the dark ages where dyslexia was barely understood and entirely unknown to most schools, my secondary school got there lesson on it from me.
Nowadays tho, I see dozens of people that say 'Oh yes I'm forgetful I'm dyslexic' which is bollocks, well to me it is, its not about being forgetful...its about information not being passed around your brain when it arrives in certain forms.
The same is true for spelling. When you are first taught to spell its all audio 'Repeat after me A-E-I-O-U' blah blah blah. While this is fine for 99% of people its not for for APD Dyslexics. Same is true for reading for visual dyslexics, just the inverse.

But, each cloud has a silver lining in this case. Those of us who got trained to work differently earlier in life get a pretty big advantage over people who don't work the same way when it comes too working with large swaths of visual information at once, it also gives us a really good visual memory, show me a piece of paper once and I'll tell you what was on it weeks later.


Now days tho, ADHD [I have never been sure if this was ever 'real' or not tbh] and dyslexia are used as scape goats by parents and teachers who lack basic control, and by children who lack basic discipline. There's 35000 people with dyslexia diagnosed....but I bet there's millions who claim to have it.......

And this help stuff is all fine and dandy, when I needed it local gov went 'what?' school went 'ok but we have no money to pay for extra tutiton' so my folks forked out thousands upon thousands...and it paid off.
I do owe the position in life I have today to all the money they gave up for me and to the great teacher who taught me. Last line is mushy but I'd definatly not be where I am today if not for them putting the money in, me not being resigned to just failing and my teacher Mrs Todd..of Canterbury..if anyone else got taught by her :>

 

[Poag]

OK longer than intended...wall of text crits you for boredom

 

[Chilly]

that article claims SIX MILLION people with dyslexia in the UK. I find that a staggering number. It also means it will go up as adults who may or may not have it are less likely to do anything about it and get it diagnosed.

 

[Poag]

As another thing, I did check up some of my terms and the name of my type of dyslexia...back in the day it was simply 'Auditory Dyslexia'

Dyslexia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Theres a bit at the bottom about social interaction saying.

Due to fear of speaking incorrectly, some children become withdrawn and shy or become bullies out of their inability to understand the social cues in their environment

I donno...does this apply to women specifically?

I'm introverted, I rely on myself allot more than other people...maybe that makes me arrogant as well through confidence in my own abilities..I donno.

Because of literacy problems, an individual with dyslexia may have difficulty with handwriting. This can involve slower writing speed than average or poor handwriting characterised by irregularly formed letters. They may use inappropriate words when writing.

No that's how we write notes...fast...so the lecture doesn't run away from us.

This is an example of some of my notes I write for meetings

Not to bad I think?
yes I know I've spelt missing with one s

 

[Jupitus]

Haven't you got work to do???

 

[Poag]

that article claims SIX MILLION people with dyslexia in the UK. I find that a staggering number. It also means it will go up as adults who may or may not have it are less likely to do anything about it and get it diagnosed.

I find that quite interesting, the last I heard was that only about 40k people had been diagnosed with the problem, maybe there are silent adult sufferers out there who make up the bulk? Most diagnosed people tend to be young, and the bulk younger than me [I'm 25] as its picked up more in schools.

Still...millions...find that hard to believe

 

[Poag]

Haven't you got work to do???

Don't you? I can give you some if you like?

 

[Chilly]

Haven't you got work to do???

Havnt YOU?

 

[old.Tohtori]

*giggles*

Oh noes! I has dyslexia and i pray to dog!!

 

[Chilly]

ah, misquoted from the BBC although tbh its bollocks as they are taking the piss a bit with extrapolating "affected by". I know loads of people with so called dyslexia and it doesnt affect me at all in any meaningful way. I suppose its parents, teachers etc they are talking about.

from the article:
But Charity Dyslexia Action said the condition was "very real" to the 6m people in the UK affected by it.

 

[Kryten]

Fair enough, I do agree however with many of the points - many of these "disabilities", my own included, get thrown around with varying levels of treatments and pills, given various names and just basically labelling kids with these to "explain" them being the way they are.

I'd hazard a guess at around 10-20% of those diagnosed with any type of learning disability as actually having a real problem, whereas the rest will just fall into a category "Human nature". Everyone's different, if we all learned in the same way and took it all in, in the same way, education could be seen to work. We don't, and education doesn't.

 

[Zenith.UK]

I'm 36 and I've always ALWAYS had problems with 5's and 7's when they're next to each other. When I'm reading a number that has a 5 and 7 next to each other (..57.. or ..75..) I have to stop and put the effort into making sure that I'm reading it correctly.
Apparently this is undiagnosed dyslexia according to some people but I disagree. I know about it and I have my own way of living with it.

My little girl however has all the symptoms of dyslexia but the school simply will not admit it (probably because it would hurt their SEN numbers). She went to a welsh medium school for 5 years and can speak welsh perfectly, but she is almost 2 years behind her age for reading and writing in welsh (her english is FINE). The school in the end "encouraged" us to consider transferring her to an english medium school, which we did. I'm pissed off because looking back on it, the school was more interested in saving it's league table scores than helping a girl who was having legitimate problems keeping up.

 

[Bahumat]

The teaching method he mentions (according to wikipedia) is only taught in UK so his comparison to other countries may have flaws.

 

[Bugz]

If I have problems with maths, do I get extra time? ;d

 

[Damini]

Meh, the guy is talking some sense and some total crap. As someone who is dyslexic it does piss me off when someone is obviously a bit slow, and it's all blamed on them being dyslexic. I'm only mildly dyslexic, so it's not like it's thwarted my life, but it is off putting when you see someone licking plug sockets and writing with the pencil upside down, and someone will whisper "Dyslexic...". Maybe they are, but really that's probably the least of their problems. All it means to me is recognising that there are some ways I can't do things, and so I need to create a work around. For example:

Taking notes in lectures would end up with an abstract wall of disjointed words, so I avoided courses with a high lecture ratio.

Being given directions I can only store a maximum of two directions, so I have a GPS.

When sorting out my taxes, I write the months of the year on each of my fingers, so if the receipt says 6/6/08 I make the number six with fingers and see that it's June. And yes, I know I only have ten fingers but November and December are easy to remember. Just putting my receipts in chronological order will take me a day, when I'm sure most people could do it in an hour.

Someone taught me that my left hand makes an L (when I was like 20!) and it changed my life Tragic but true.

Reading can be a bitch, especially if I'm tired or if the material is dull or technical, so no plot line to follow. The words compete for attention on the page, like looking at a grid made of orange and green squares, and so if you're knackered it's literally like chasing words. So I just don't read when I'm tired.

I don't know anyone's phone number beyond my home, and my parent's home, and my mobile because I lose it so often. Thank god for mobile phone contact lists. The same applies for birthdays - I know mine, and Jeebus because of the presenty goodness, and Kenny's. Facebook is a bit handy for giving me advance warning.

I can't fill out forms, and it actually makes me really stressed and I regress back to being an anxious temper tantrumy child (probably flashbacks to when I filled in an entire exam of multiple choices on the wrong piece of paper) so when paying in cheques or applying for things I always get someone to help me. It's not particularly cool, and I hate doing it, but it's better than the alternatives. I've actually not claimed on my health insurance before just because the forms scared me too much (I know, weak.)

There's loads of other things. Some I had already worked out alternative routes for before I was diagnosed as dyslexic, and some I worked out once I knew I was dyslexic and could stop bashing my head against a wall trying things again and again and berating myself for being a retard when I couldn't learn my time tables/fill in forms/put things in alphabetical order and so on...

I've no doubt it's over diagnosed, and I feel the same about ADHD as well, but for those of us that are dyslexic and don't sit around poking dead animals with sticks and dribbling, I feel a bit offended by that guy.

 

[SawTooTH]

A guy on the BBC was saying that Dyslexia is really a Catch-all term for many different problems so Im not sure that its a good label.

Im sure its often used inappropriately.

 

[ECA]

Bunch of spastics.

 

[Dark Orb Choir]

it's called Scope now eca

 

[Dukat]

I found out I'm dyslexic when I was very young - cluttering my speech was my the main symptom but I also had trouble with things like letter swapping - my spelling and grammar would be above average for my age, only I'd consistantly swap out letters ike b's instead of d's etc.

For some reason I seem never to have been given proper support for it - in primary school it was "just me making a few silly mistakes in otherwise good work". In highschool I received 'support' in the form of having to fill out dotted words like the handwriting lessons you used to do in primary school - it was akin to lines.

After that I kept quiet about it, and found out after I finished my higher national that I could've been given a shedload of grants if I'd have piped up.

I dont know. I've never reallly seen it as an excuse for being dumb - for me dyslexia is a gift. It means I've had to work twice as hard to do something someone else doesnt really have to think about, while it means I might have taken a while to become established academicly, it means that the amount of time and effort I've had to put into doing things more efficiently just to get by has payed off tenfold because I can now do things alot of people my age struggle with without really thinking about it.

I struggled with confidence - I always remember dreading class assembly's because I'd be forced to say something and I'd always mess it up, and for a long while I think it did make me introverted and shy, but now that I'm over that, my confidence has rocketed to the point that people notice and openly comment on it.

All of that isn't really relevant to the thread though I guess I just wanted to put that as a background to what I'm now going to say:

The statement the MP has made is bollocks. Dyslexia is something that can be seen in the make up of the brains of those who have it. Saying it doesnt exist purely to attack teachers shows a pretty worrying level of stupidity for someone who is supposed to be a member of parliment.

Yes, I do not disagree that it might be overdiagnosed. Yes, he's probably right about teaching methods being shit in alot of cases. None of that chances the fact that calling for Dyslexia to be "dustbin of history" is stupid.