Labour MP : Dyslexia is "cruel fiction"

[kyser_soze]

I do dispute your assertion that the two are even in the same region of complexity though.

Agreed. I for one don't put Blumenthal, Oliver and co in the same place as someone like Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins, Gleick etc, even tho from a technical perspective there's probably a certain level of equivalency in where they stand in their relative disciplines.

 

[In Bloom]

And if you were to take lessons in cake baking for a week you'd no doubt be providing delicious deserts in no time. Who knows if it'd take you longer or less time to learn than someone who dropped out of maths at GCSE

Cake was mostly just a silly example that I chose because I'm hungry and I lack cake

Certainly, I could learn to produce a simple dish fairly well within a few weeks if I really worked at it, but I couldn't master the whole field of fine cuisine, or even just deserts, without a great deal more training. Calculus and quadratic equations are not, in themselves, hugely complicated, they just require a good grounding in the fundamentals of maths and arithmetic.

Just because it's not simple doesn't mean that it's not real. It's in the same category as beauty.

I'd agree that it's in the same category as beauty, both are wholly socially constructed and entirely subjective

If anything, the beauty analogy supports my argument better than it does yours, I mean, how do you say that one person is "more beautiful" than another? More beautiful in what sense? By whose standard?

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Cake was mostly just a silly example that I chose because I'm hungry and I lack cake

That sucks. My commiserations.

We can say that one person is more beautiful than another, and people can and do agree on it frequently. Even if it's down to societal norms it's still possible to say that one person is more intelligent than another and still a valid observation.

 

[In Bloom]

That sucks. My commiserations.

It's a pain that never stops hurting

We can say that one person is more beautiful than another, and people can and do agree on it frequently. Even if it's down to societal norms it's still possible to say that one person is more intelligent than another and still a valid observation.

I don't really agree that it's a valid observation just because people say it. What if somebody is great at philosophy but sucks at maths? Are they more or less intelligent than sombody who is great at maths but sucks at philosophy? How do you weigh one against the other? It's a bit like saying that somebody is "more of a cunt" than somebody else, you might think it, and you might have good reasons for thinking it, but it's an expression of nothing more than your opinion of that person, based upon subjective exerience and social norms.

 

[8ball]

I don't really agree that it's a valid observation just because people say it. What if somebody is great at philosophy but sucks at maths? Are they more or less intelligent than sombody who is great at maths but sucks at philosophy? How do you weigh one against the other?

Some people suck at everything.

And some people are total cunts.

 

[8ball]

I bet it would take less time to teach you the mechanical steps required to bake an edible cake than it would to teach someone calculus!

You're just really bad at teaching cookery.

 

[In Bloom]

Some people suck at everything.

And some people are total cunts.

Some people are arrogant losers who feel the need to do other people down in order to bolster their sad little egos.

Anyway, it took me two months to master calculus at A level. £50 goes to anybody who can teach me to cook at an equivalent level in the same period of time

 

[Bob_the_lost]

DIY

Blow £20 on a stirfry cookbook, £20 on a wok and £10 on ingredients and then have stirfry every other day for the next month. You will become a master.

 

[_angel_]

I bet it would take less time to teach you the mechanical steps required to bake an edible cake than it would to teach someone calculus!

I bet I could teach In Bloom how to make a half decent cake in faster the time it would take someone to teach me calculus!

I can learn and understand Maths, but be completely incapable of remembering any of it.

 

[kabbes]

I bet I could teach In Bloom how to make a half decent cake in faster the time it would take someone to teach me calculus!

I can learn and understand Maths, but be completely incapable of remembering any of it.

You just need six months in this man's army. SHOW ME YOUR MATHS FACE.

 

[kropotkin]

You're right about how maths is taught -- or not taught to a lot of people.. however, there are some people who are just not good at it, the same as you cannot be good at anything... this is all.

yes, but "not being good at reading or writing" seems to often get called "dyslexia".

 

[kropotkin]

I'd say there are people of high intelligence in plenty of areas who would have a hard time with quadratics --- remembering that these rely on knowing the basics (times tables) to begin with.

Some people are good at numbers/ maths and some aren't. I agree that most people can be taught to manage, though. Far more than think they can.

I do reject the notion of intelligence boiling down to some mathematical ability.

Likewise, you can get people who are very academic being absolute idiots in other ways.

If I'm right, all you are saying is that intelligence is not necessarily multi-modal: i.e. one could be great at some things but poor at others. This is fairly obvious, no?

My basic understanding of intelligence is the ability to pick up concepts and apply them to new situations that have not already been encountered. This is the process that we have to go through to learn any new skill. Some are good at it and it can be done quickly with a minimum of instruction ('intelligent' people in that modality- like reading or maths), for some it takes longer and required more intensive instruction ('unintelligent' in that modality).

This is not surprising: being good at one thing doesn't automatically make you intelligent in any other sphere- look at all the 'educated' people you know who are, unknown to themselves, morons when you get them into areas like politics or the like.

 

[8ball]

Some people are arrogant losers who feel the need to do other people down in order to bolster their sad little egos.

Anyway, it took me two months to master calculus at A level. £50 goes to anybody who can teach me to cook at an equivalent level in the same period of time

Just making the point that you don't need to compare someone good at maths vs. someone good at philosophy, but some people are just thick.

I know that conflicts with U75 dogma but sadly becomes obvious as you get older, I think.

Cooking isn't so hard, but I wouldn't start with baking.

 

[girasol]

Seven types of intelligence:
http://professorlamp.com/ed/TAG/7_Intelligences.html

My son (who's 10) was telling me that at the start of the year they had a test to determine how each pupil in the class learns. They worked out that he's a visual learner (with Kinesthetic characteristics - but he couldn't remember the word)

When I was in school the only way I'd learn anything would be if I wrote it down, which also makes me a visual learner...

Learning styles

Visual Learner Characteristics

Visual learners are those who learn through seeing things. Look over the characteristics below to see if they sound familiar. A visual learner:
Is good at spelling but forgets names.
Needs quiet study time.
Has to think awhile before understanding lecture.
Is good at spelling.
Likes colors & fashion.
Dreams in color.
Understands/likes charts.
Is good with sign language.

 

[8ball]

. . . being good at one thing doesn't automatically make you intelligent in any other sphere- look at all the 'educated' people you know who are, unknown to themselves, morons when you get them into areas like politics or the like.

Though those people are just generally 'uneducated' in politics.

The greatest thinkers seem to be those who bring something new to the party, so I guess in a way it's not that surprising that some great mathematicians aren't great with arithmetic as most people who think like them will have been weeded out by the repetitive sum hell of primary school.

Then there are some people (angel and In Bloom could be possible candidates) who self-reinforce things they think they are bad at by telling themselves they're bad at maths/cookery/whatever. Plus as grown ups I think we get a little scared of getting things wrong, whereas kids don't care as much until the ritual classroom humiliations have sunk in.

 

[8ball]

Seems like an appropriate time for this:

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think that part of the problem really is that some people push for their kids to be diagnosed with dyslexia, because it's so hard to get proper support for kids who struggle with certain subjects unless they're classified as having some kind of learning difficulty (hence the recent emergence of the hopelessly vague MLD). I don't think that this accounts for all cases of dyslexia, but it does happen.

I agree, which is why, I suspect, we won't get very far with the issue of the dyslexia spectrum until we can map problems to specific causes, at which time it might be possible to say to pushy parents "Brian isn't dyslexic, he's an obnoxious lazy brat with clingy, over-attentive parents".
I do, though, think that it needs to be emphasised that dyslexia isn't a condition, but a spectrum of issues. For example, my nephew was "diagnosed" by an educational psych as dyslexic, but the actual problem he suffered from (words moving and shimmering on the page) was solved by colour-tinted specs. Within a month of being prescribed them, his reading age had jumped 2 years. My g-dson however, also diagnosed dyslexic and statemented, has no problem reading, but is still unable to write coherently even though he's in his teens (reversed letters, bad word order, handwriting style of a toddler etc) but can type his thoughts perfectly well.
It's a puzzle.

 

[In Bloom]

Just making the point that you don't need to compare someone good at maths vs. someone good at philosophy, but some people are just thick.

I know that conflicts with U75 dogma but sadly becomes obvious as you get older, I think.

Why is it that some people always feel the need to pretend that everybody who disagrees with them is doing it out of dogmatism? I wonder if that's an aspect of intelligence.

 

[In Bloom]

I agree, which is why, I suspect, we won't get very far with the issue of the dyslexia spectrum until we can map problems to specific causes, at which time it might be possible to say to pushy parents "Brian isn't dyslexic, he's an obnoxious lazy brat with clingy, over-attentive parents".
I do, though, think that it needs to be emphasised that dyslexia isn't a condition, but a spectrum of issues. For example, my nephew was "diagnosed" by an educational psych as dyslexic, but the actual problem he suffered from (words moving and shimmering on the page) was solved by colour-tinted specs. Within a month of being prescribed them, his reading age had jumped 2 years. My g-dson however, also diagnosed dyslexic and statemented, has no problem reading, but is still unable to write coherently even though he's in his teens (reversed letters, bad word order, handwriting style of a toddler etc) but can type his thoughts perfectly well.
It's a puzzle.

TBH, I think that it's not necessarily useful to label people in terms of disabilities when it comes to this stuff. If somebody has trouble reading or writing, then the first priority should be to figure out why that is and what can be done to help, rather than treating that person as thick or lazy until such time as a syndrome can be identified that fits the particular problems they present.

Writing has always been difficult for me as well, somewhere between my brain and the hand holding the pen, things tend to go a bit wonky

 

[scifisam]

Well, I've had quite a few students who had problems with reading and writing, and some had a diagnosis of dyslexia, while some didn't. It's definitely not used as a blanket term to cover difficulties with the written word.

Some people with dyslexia are helped by strategies as simple as printing work on coloured paper, or putting a coloured plastic sheet over the pages of books - it stops the words from swimming around the page as much as they do when they're black letters on white paper. That, surely, indicates that their difficulties are caused by them processing the written word differently, not by them being too thick to learn.

WRT maths, my daughter's leapt ahead due to me working with her at home, but that's not just due to the way I teach her. It's due to a variety of reasons, one of which being that she's just much more willing to learn stuff from me than she is from anyone else.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Some people with dyslexia are helped by strategies as simple as printing work on coloured paper, or putting a coloured plastic sheet over the pages of books - it stops the words from swimming around the page as much as they do when they're black letters on white paper. That, surely, indicates that their difficulties are caused by them processing the written word differently, not by them being too thick to learn.

As I said, my nephew's problem was solved by him being prescribed some yellow-tinted glasses. He used some of his savings to buy decent frames and is well-pleased. Not only can he now read without hassle, but he doesn't get lost any more (a big problem for him previously if he hadn't memorised a route)!

 

[ViolentPanda]

TBH, I think that it's not necessarily useful to label people in terms of disabilities when it comes to this stuff. If somebody has trouble reading or writing, then the first priority should be to figure out why that is and what can be done to help, rather than treating that person as thick or lazy until such time as a syndrome can be identified that fits the particular problems they present.

People should never be written off like that even if they are thick and lazy, until you've ruled out all other possibilities.
I also take your point about labelling, but it's an unfortunate fact that our education system doesn't seem able (and is sometimes unwilling) to help until people have labels attached to them.

Writing has always been difficult for me as well, somewhere between my brain and the hand holding the pen, things tend to go a bit wonky

That's why I love typing stuff on a word processor etc, you can review before committing yourself to print, and people can't see your seven attempts to spell "receive" properly.

 

[scifisam]

I also take your point about labelling, but it's an unfortunate fact that our education system doesn't seem able (and is sometimes unwilling) to help until people have labels attached to them.

Unfortunately, when you have thousands of kids going through one school, seeing half a dozen different teachers a day (plus learning assistants and the like), labelling is a necessary evil. If I'm told a student is dyslexic, for example, it helps me know what kind of work to give them when I first teach them. It helps me to plan my lessons, including reading texts out loud or using visual stimuli more than I'd need to if I didn't have such students. It's not ideal, but it helps.

If I continue to go by the label over time, rather than what the individual student needs, that is a problem - and that's one of the reasons for learning assistants working with individual students across different subjects, because it's just not possible for every subject teacher to get to know every student well enough - and it really, really helps when a new teacher or cover teacher is in.

With exams, too, you can't accommodate every students' needs, but you can accommodate some of them by applying labels. 'This student is dyslexic, therefore he might need a scribe.' The examiner will never have met that student, so they can't evaluate them as a whole person.

Human minds tend to categorise everything, anyway. We don't look at an item and see a collection of atoms - we see a table. Same with people: we never just see 'a human being,' we categorise them constantly - student, teacher, mother, bus driver, male, female, old, young, etc.

 

[8ball]

Why is it that some people always feel the need to pretend that everybody who disagrees with them is doing it out of dogmatism? I wonder if that's an aspect of intelligence.

Why is it that some people can't read threads?

Dyslexia, perhaps.