I Speak of Dreams

High Achieving Dyslexics: Art Rodriguez

Art Rodriguez, 57 grew up on the East Side of San Jose, California, in the 1950s and 60s.  He had a hard-knock life, with stints in juvenile hall and the youth authority facility in Ione.  He was functionally illiterate.

Eventually, he turned his life around, started a business, and married.  His frustration with not being able to attend to his business correspondence prompted him to tackle his illiteracy in middle age.

My wife said that I was a good storyteller, so I started to write my life story, every day, 30 pages or whatever. I gave those pages to my wife. She didn't want to hurt my feelings, but she would tell me that my writing was just one big run-on sentence. I basically taught myself about periods and commas and spelling by going to night school and to the library and eventually, East Side Dreams came out of it.

Mr. Rodriguez has now published three books, East Side Dreams, The Monkey Box, and  Those Oldies but Goodies.

Introducing A New Blog: Second Chance to Live

In 1967, Craig was in a terrible automobile accident, and suffered an injury to his brain.

Rehabilitation, in 1967, was very primitive. 

Now Craig has started a blog,  A Second Chance to Live, which

will present topics, concepts and practical solutions for living life on life’s terms. Your circumstances are not meant to hold you down, but to build you up.

More on Craig's story below the fold.

Don't Bother Teaching Better, Just Pray. Now With Oil!

At Brooksville Elementary School in Florida, principal Mary LeDoux was concerned about students' performance on the upcoming state-wide testing, the FCATS.  So she and a few colleagues went into the classrooms after school, and held a prayer meeting, including spreading "prayer oil" on the students' desks.

The desks were still oily Monday morning, causing one teacher to think the school had been vandalized.

Some teachers and parents were offended, but LeDoux didn't understand why:

she found nothing wrong with what she and "four or five" colleagues did, but said staff members agreed to hold future prayer meetings off campus after she had a conversation with superintendent Wendy Tellone.

Nobody In New York Knows The Difference Between At-Home and Outside Conversations

It started here, at Overheard in New York.  (You have to read it -- my keyboard was in danger).

Then X at unaccountable talk   posted it.

Ukiah Coach Brown got it from X, and posted it, which is where I read it.

I laughed out loud.

And you should get to know X, if you haven't already.  Good reading:

                       Seventh grade in a nutshell                    

This morning, one of the Fuzzies wrote a story in which a man has sex with a broom, while a classmate at the next table wrote about teddy bears going on a picnic.

Let's just have a moment of silence for that, shall we?

Luckily, I also learned today that [some] kids have retained [some of] our teaching points on revision, because I overheard Mr. Broom's neighbor telling him "That's R-rated! She's gonna make you change it!" (During the first cycle of writing short fiction, we talked about movie ratings as a way to help us think about appropriate story content. The Fuzzies really latched onto this idea.)

In the now PG-rated version, the character dances with a broom.

I also liked the story about how her three languages other than English have just sort of been mashed up into NotEnglish.

                  

Good Think I Checked

Jumper Girl is returning from a school-sponsored trip.  Her flight was scheduled to arrive at 11:30.  Oops, flight delay.  More time for blogging.

An Excellent Column On Dyslexia

Maureen Wittman wrote an excellent article, published in The Catholic Exchange, on the realities of dyslexia.

When my husband and I discovered our son's learning disability, we were encouraged to teach our son intensive phonics utilizing the multi-sensory Orton-Gillingham methods. Such an approach (seeing, saying, touching and doing) gives the dyslexic child multiple ways to "retrieve" the phonics rules from their "filing cabinet." It is necessary for dyslexic children to learn all of the rules. They need intensive phonics as well as syllabication skills in order to surpass a third grade reading level. Look-Say and Whole Language simply does not work with them. Dyslexic children learn best when learning is structured, sequential, and proceeds from the simple to the more difficult.

Congratulations to their son who is now a happy 15-year-old and "an avid reader".

Paul Sanchez, 8 Wishes, and Stage6

Stage6 is a new online content company, claiming to be

the next evolution in digital media. What does that mean? It means we want to improve the experience for finding and viewing good media online. It means having access to high-quality video on the web that actually looks good in full screen, rather than the all-too-familiar choppy, pixilated, low resolution videos we are all accustomed to seeing online nowadays.

Stage6 is hosting Paul Sanchez's 8 Wishes video campaign to raise money for dyslexia awareness.  (Paul's blog, here)

Living with Autism: I'm A Friend of Leelo's

My pal Squid keeps a blog: The Adventures of Leelo and His Potty-Mouthed Mom.

It's Squid's life--one important aspect being the mother of: a very bright third-grade girl;  a six year old boy with autism; and the funniest toddler I know.

What she said today:

For some reason  Google is ranking this blog #11 for "Squid." That's ahead of Laughing Squid, Squidfingers, and Turbo Squid. Odd yet nifty.

While I would prefer that this site ranked within the first 50 hits for "autism" or even "autism blog," hitting the top fifteen with my pseudonym is not the crappiest thing that has ever happened to me. It also makes me less bummed over the random sliding of my Technorati numbers. Don't get me wrong--I know that people with better written and more entertaining blogs have shockingly worse rankings. But, if you wanted to link to this site or favorite it, and nudge me back skywards, I wouldn't mind ... not at all.

Below the fold, a buffet of Squid's writings on autism and life with Leelo.

The Silence of the Don

I woke up this morning sounding like Don Corleone with a cold.  Seriously, if I did more than whisper, I couldn't talk.  I feel fine -- well, maybe a sore throat, but no voice.

So I didn't go to Bad Mom's Coffee.  DANG!  Badger's new job(s) was on the talk menu.  Phooey.

I didn't get much done on the BIG list.  Someday I'm going to have to start posting the BIG list to see if it helps me with accomplishment.

In other news, Jumper Girl is in Latin America for a week.  The internets are great -- I've been getting daily emails from the trip leader.  One of the people JG was named for had a birthday today.  Happy day!

I'm working on a long post on smacking down treatments for learning disabilities that have no research base.

In other news, I thought I had a client for the parent coaching part (no, you haven't missed any installments -- I haven't been blogging about it) but it turns out that she wanted something else.

Wynford Dore Spits Chips

Update June 1 2008: Dore seems to be out of business, world-wide.  See this summary post.  My sympathies to those families who prepaid and have no economic recourse.

I am not in support of the Dore program, especially for the treatment of dyslexia. 

Dore has a post in which he is angry with people who criticize his program, and calls for "benchmarking" of products sold to those with learning or attention issues.