Eide is very interesting, with a cautious note about how unresolved issues surrounding dyslexia will impact on the kids later on.
I have a friend who always insisted he was dyslexic - yet he would relate in detail the plot of a story he had read (boring you to tears in the process by-the-way. I am thinking of a particularly long journey on the London Tube where I foolishly asked a simple question about the film 'Dune'. Well, I got whole chapter and verse for nearly an hour. Dyslexic?)
I am always surprised to see how so many giftedness tests have 'reading' or 'reading at a certain age' being signs of gifted people. Can't have been many gifted people around before the advent of the written word about 5000 years ago then :-)
Perhaps some people just hate reading, some love it.
This is not to say I don't have issues with my little'un. I LOVE reading and always have. Little'un wouldn't think of picking up a book. Perhaps he finds it tedious/boring. He is way ahead in intelligence and understanding than I was at 10 y.o., and I was classed as very bright.
How do kids get their info. these days. How well do they negotiate reference books, the internet.
As Homer might have said, wondering where all the people who used to sit around the fire listening to him telling stories had gone might have said - "since books came along, story-telling ain't what it used to be". Well, we have videos and DVDs, CDs, audiobooks and TV and BluRay. Story telling has evolved and the idea of getting info from reading may one day seem as arcane as chiselling the shopping list on a clay tablet in cuneiform does today :-)
Show your kid Cosmos by Sagan, or Jim Khalil on Chemistry, or Eureka (physics - Youtube) and you kid might be like little'un and know more about science in 5 hours than you managed to glean in 5 years at High School poring over books. He might actually grasp quite complex scientific concepts - like Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits which my son's teacher is quite proud to know nothing about! Same is true for history - you in the US are lucky to have Ken Burns. Same is true for literature) If they fire his interest he might just want to get stuck into the paper himself.
We live in a visual, instant info. age. I'm not saying I like it, because I don't, but it is just the way it is. Maybe we have to adjust the way we see or evaluate non-readers? Dunno
Just rambling I'm afraid.
maybe you kid just needs to find the right book "get the fire going"?
By the way, are there any online dyslexia tests available? Might help?
Last edited by Raddy; 07/03/10 11:22 PM.
