Dispatches exposes the myths and misconceptions that surround a condition said to affect 10 per cent of the population. The Dyslexia Myth argues that the common understanding of dyslexia is not only false but makes it more difficult to provide the reading help that hundreds of thousands of children desperately need.
Drawing on years of intensive academic research on both sides of the Atlantic, Dispatches challenges the existence of dyslexia as a separate condition; but in doing so, reveals the scale and pain of true reading disability.
The programme examines the chasm between evidence and educational practice and shows that, after hundreds of millions of pounds of investment in the teaching of reading, the number of children encountering serious problems has hardly changed.
oh my God i love you i know this documentary is a bit old. but it was new to me i am 56 years old i have never seen anything about dyslexia and this has told my story to the tee. i was called names made fun of put to the back of the class by my self my self estam has been crushed what a waste i wish they under stood when i went to school. i bet i could of been much more in life. i had a ok job i was a bus driver for 38 years but i know if i was made way back when i was in school to feel better about myself instead of the class dummy. i could of been much much more thank you so much big hugs to you.
This is not the dispatches programme. Here is a link to the actual documentary: http://www.sprword.com/videos/dyslexiamyth/
Loads of the research featured in this documentary is so flawed.
I wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until I was 14yrs old. I’d spent a great deal of time in early grade school being called stupid by teachers because I wasn’t able to read at all, not even small words. They didn’t know I couldn’t read at first because when I went home, my mother would read me the book for class and I could remember all of it word for word. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t read at lesson time, but I could read the books assigned for homework. I received tutoring after school so I could catch up on work because I was so chronically ill at the time. The tutor noticed my issues with reading and decided to teach me a different way. She taught me to memorize since she knew my memory was excellent. She taught me to look how the words looks altogether and not to sound it out. By the end of the year I could read at a college lever but I still had trouble with small words; too this day, small words are still my downfall.
When I was IQ tested at Mayo clinic, they discovered I had dyslexia. They found out I could read large words perfectly, but small words were difficult. They established a lesson plan for me that would have worked perfectly for my learning ability, implementing exactly what my tutor had done to teach me to read. My junior high then promptly threw that out in favor of amber colored sheets which did nothing for me which then caused me to fall even further behind.
Even though many of my friends know I’m a quick reader, they know it’s because I practiced rereading everything so I could make sure I had read it correctly. I still need to work on public reading though, you can’t reread when reading publicly, unfortunately and you’d never know from my public reading that I was intelligent. In college I had to memorize everything I had to read in front of the class before hand, luckily I have had several teachers accepting of my learning style.
P.S. Thank goodness for spell check 🙂
awful documentary.I am 30 years old, and was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was 15. even 15 years ago it was understood that dyslexia is a communication problem in the brain. dyslexia is very real I am having to overcome it just to wright this. for example when i typed diagnosed i switched the g and the n. when the little red squiggly line I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. only after a close comparison with the correction the computer offered up was i able to see the mistake.what was going on is my brain knew that the word was “diagnosed” so i didn’t care that it was spelled “diangosed”. dyslexia is way more than a reading disorder. now with that out of the way.I have lived for 15 years knowing i am dyslexic and i have never heard of any of the treatments mentioned in this video. it seems to me that this video is discrediting treatments that never had credit in the first place. horrible documentary. not one piece of credible information on either side. this is like a documentary on snow filmed in the tropics by someone that has never seen snow.
your comment makes sense you can’t understand dyslexia really unless you have it. I was diagnosed at 8 that was the year my mother discovered that my teachers in first and second grade had failed to teach me to read all together. I believe my second grade teachers explained it as ” she’s dumb i can’t help that”. after i got help from people who knew what they were doing though i became a star student, i was reading at a college level at 14. This is a real thing and it nice to know i,m not the only one dealing with people who can’t understand it.
I don’t think you understand what they are saying. There is a lot of credible information here such as brain scans and dyslexia experts. It was the experts that came up with dyslexia in the first place, they are the ones who diagnosed you. This is a strange time to stop trusting them. Dyslexia is not more than a reading disability. But with the difficulty in reading, since our society relies on reading so much, other things start to be effected.
I don’t think you understand what they are saying. There is a lot of credible information here such as brain scans and dyslexia experts. It was the experts that came up with dyslexia in the first place, they are the ones who diagnosed you. This is a strange time to stop trusting them. Dyslexia is not more than a reading disability. But with the difficulty in reading, since our society relies on reading so much, other things start to be effected.
“It was the experts that came up with dyslexia in the
first place, they are the ones who diagnosed you. This is a strange time to
stop trusting them. Dyslexia is not more than a reading disability.”
I don’t think you understand what they are saying. They are saying people with learning difficulties struggle to read, and tend to be clumsy etc. Reading
issues is a symptom of dyslexia not the be all and end all. Just as a runny
nose is a symptom of a cold. A cold is a virus, dyslexia is an information and sequencing issue and covers many more bases than just reading.
Reading and spelling are issues that rear their ugly heads for dyslexics most
in school, but this doesn’t mean it’s the ONLY issue. Speaking, memory,
sequencing events, bad sence of direction and many more things are a daily issue for every dyslexic.
You are being incredibly ignorant and arrogant here, don’t mouth off about something you don’t actually understand that someone else has lived the whole life.
I smell bullshit. I think that there is something more complex going on with the phenomenon called dyslexia. My father was dyslexic, and I inherited a little of it, though I have never had problems with reading or writing, I seem to live in those subtle this sounds hidden within words. But I have definitely experienced the flipping and disordering of words. I think dyslexia was mis-characterized as a visual problem in this documentary, whereas it appears to me to be a cognitive problem.
I think that the real problem here is that the state has a monopoly or megalopoly on the education system, which results is the students and their families having little recourse when educational programs fail.
If the parents were hiring private educators, and found that their children were not learning, they would simply be able to fire the teachers, and hire another one. The end result would be that the “best” ways of teaching would rise to prominence as a matter of resource efficiency.
Now, here we have a failed education program provided by the state, being challenged by a propaganda program also being generated by the state. Now, you don’t smell something fishy there?
at lest some one thinks like me
Two things. Obvious you didn’t pay attention when watching the documentary because it specifically says that dyslexia is only a visual problem in some cases (which is undeniable because some people actually see words backwards).
Secondly: Contrary to your name, you do not appeal to reason and obviously do not believe in true anarchy. You propose that everyone has to pay for their own education? That’s ridiculous and would remove all social mobility. Children with parents who don’t care about education would not be educated.
Ok here we go.
I am 38 and I have dyslexia, I could babble on about my history of
frustration and constant struggle in school and university but I will not bore
you all with it. I found the documentary frustrating but all so informative and
feel its good that people are trying to figure it out. What I got from that
documentary was that it’s the way we are being taught and that science and
schools have to come together to tackle this. So this prompted me to send out this info the work of Ronald
D. Davis is so spot on! I just did his program called The Gift Dyslexia and his
teaching method really worked for me. It’s a lot work and I am still working on
it. He understands that dyslexics learn in visual 3 dimensional way and that is
how our minds work. The mind’s eye has a hard time with 2 dimensional is always
looking for the 3rd. So he show you how to change your perception so the mind
stops looking for the 3rd. He also show how to use your also lets visual
mind to help you learn. As soon as
I started doing it, it was like the world had open up to me and I could
possible learn to-do any thing. Well I would like to think that but that is
exaggeration but what did do is it made me excited and understand my self and
my mind and how I learn. Once we know how we learn then we can implement it in
to out every day life. To learn this at early age would be amazing! I feel that
all those children that loose hope could find hope in doing this course and
show them that is possible learning and retain the information. I also believe
all people of all abilities could learn from this way of learning and that all
schools should teach using this method. Please read this book you will find it
mind opening and liberating http://www.dyslexia.com/bookstore/giftbook.htm.