Living With Dyxslexia
The Davis Method claims a high rate of success in teaching dyslexics to read.Accolades for a method of correcting dyslexia have been rolling in from parents desperate to help their children. Support for The Davis Method is largely anecdotal, but to these parents, The Davis Method is nothing short of miraculous.
Bob can only speak from results he's seen with his own 13-year-old son, Matthew. Prior to taking a week-long workshop, Matthew suffered terrible blows to his self-esteem because of his difficulties reading and writing. His parents were helpless as he raged inside.
Dyslexics, the Davis people say, have language difficulties, but are gifted and bright in other ways. Ron Davis, who founded The Davis Method in 1982, was himself a severe dyslexic with a genius-level IQ. There are now 177 learning centers around the world teaching the method. Proponents claim a 98 percent success rate in helping dyslexics to read and write.
The Davis method involves two parts. The first — Orientation Counselling — establishes a stabilizing focal point for the "mind's eye," the vantage point from which the mind perceives the senses (except for taste).
It is a point from which vision, the dominant sense, establishes a viewpoint, like a camera in the mind when one is reading or imagining something. A dyslexic's mind, does not have a stationary focal point. Looking at a letter or word, Davis says, "is like a helicopter buzzing around, doing surveillance on a building. This is the disorientation function hard at work, trying to recognize the object."
The optimum location for this mental viewpoint or mind's eye is a few inches to a foot above and behind the head on the centerline of the body. Focusing the mind from this orientation spot shuts off the distorted perceptions of dyslexia, he says.
He believes the dyslexic's brain becomes confused and "disoriented" by certain triggers — commonly letters of the alphabet, punctuation, and words that don't have picture associations, since dyslexics are highly visual. In this state of disorientation, a dyslexic might see "cat" written forward, backward, upside down and floating in space from various perspectives, then pulled apart and re-assembled in every possible configuration. In their conscious minds, the word might just be a blur or blank.
The dyslexic's dominant way of thinking is visual and non-verbal. The speed of thought is 400 to 2,000 times that of "normal" word-based thought. We normally think at about 150 words a minute or 2.5 words a second.
The second component of the Davis Method is called Symbol Mastery, a multi-sensory approach to learning letters, words, numbers, punctuation marks and math symbols. It involves creating the letters, in 3-D, from clay. To a dyslexic, a word has three parts — what it means, what it looks like and what it sounds like.
Davis clients work in clay with "trigger" letters and words that cause disorientation, words for which there are no accompanying pictures of meaning. There are 217 such words, such as: a, about, also, am, can, do, get, have, just, other, their, and the. Clients create a scenario, showing that word in action. "The" might have a person pointing to a definite thing. "And" might show two things with a sculpted "and" between them. It's very difficult to distinguish the learning process from the creative process in dyslexics. If they create something, they learn it.
The Davis Method is not without its critics. The 98 percent success rate is not well documented. The Davis Method is expensive. Many education professionals prefer scientifically supported programs, most of which are based on the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching reading. It's a structured, systematic phonomic approach, taught bit by bit in a sequential way. This approach also uses a multi-sensory approach, incorporating visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile senses. The major difference between Orton-Gillingham and The Davis Method is the Orientation Counselling and The Davis Method does not teach phonetics.
Meanwhile, Sandy, a special education teacher, is witnessing the results of The Davis Method in Daniel, a new Grade 4 student. After what she has been told and seen of his previous academic and social history at school, she is putting her support behind the Davis approach, with a teacher's assistant helping the student 40 minutes of each school day with trigger words. "All I can say is I'm aware he used to have severe behaviour problems and low self-esteem and needed to be home-schooled. But he's fitting in nicely this year. His Mom, the teaching assistant and the childcare worker who'd worked with him before he took the workshop, all conclude that his turn-around has been amazing," says Sandy.
The worse thing for children with dyslexia is to have to sit still and concentrate. The thinking process is speeded up beyond the norm and their sense of time, balance and motion is distorted. Since they feel like they're moving on the inside, they have to move on the outside. Children have been diagnosed with ADD and ADHD may be suffering from this distortion which makes it very difficult for them to sit still. In extreme cases, they can feel nauseous.
As far as many are concerned, it's not a learning disability. The information is just not presented in the way that they need it and the information isn't out there. It's critical that we provide our teachers with information on how to teach reading, that we go forward and not lay blame.
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