A hopeful, helpful primer from a teacher with hands-on success in dealing with dyslexia.
Debut author van den Honert shares her experiences using neurological research to teach dyslexic junior high school students how to read.
In 1973, when the first of her five children started college, the author returned to work as a substitute teacher in her local junior high in Pittsfield, Mass. After the administration found that she could handle rambunctious students, they assigned her a full-time position teaching reading to “six dyslexic boys who were climbing the walls.” She realized that she had “backed into dyslexia, clueless,” so she combed through neurological research papers. She developed teaching methods based on studies that dyslexics have “poky” corpus callosums in their brains that cause delays and other problems in “interhemispheric transfer of visual and auditory signals.” To “rewire” her students, she gave them headphones, playing a spelling exercise in one ear and classical music in the other. She also had each student hold a card over one eye while reading a column of words. Such “enhanced lateralization” techniques trained one side of the brain to do all the processing work, bypassing the hemisphere “switching” problems. Her students experienced a significant jump in their reading levels in just one year. Although the school administration was initially skeptical about her results, van den Honert went on to teach successfully at the school for 11 years, later tackling dyslexic students’ math and writing challenges. She then served as a private tutor and as a longtime member of the Pittsfield School Committee, and she’s currently the ongoing overseer of the website Dyslexia.org. Although her account here is sometimes repetitive and digressive, she ultimately serves up an effective quick-start guide for parents, students and teachers of dyslexic students. She conveys difficult concepts in a way that anyone can understand, and readers will find her championing of those with dyslexia to be truly inspirational. Indeed, readers may wish for more details about her interactions with her students, because her role in their lives hints at a transformational saga along the lines of the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver.
A hopeful, helpful primer from a teacher with hands-on success in dealing with dyslexia.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468528121
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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