NCB-IDA Spring 2004 Newsletter: Belt It Out, Hawk 'Em In

Belt It Out, Hawk 'Em In:
Grander, Louder, Richer, Fiercer, Fancier, Faster
by Priscilla L. Vail, M.A.T.

When Ethel Merman played Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, she and her leading man packed the house with their daily duke-it-out: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better. She could belt it out and she could hawk 'em in.

In the field of language arts and the dyslexias today, we hear the rivalry of similar claims for guaranteed success: factions promise grander, louder, richer , fiercer, fancier, faster. What's a parent to do? What's an educator to use? What's a student to trust?

Our field invites new discoveries because our needs are great as well as immediate. Parents anguish, kids struggle or sink, teachers try and sometimes quit. Our field is also vulnerable. We succumb to illusions of academic alchemy as we long for a quick fix. The auction fever of today's marketplace and our cultural habit of instant gratification are moving their combined contagion from commerce to home life and to education.

Many products and services will be genuinely helpful, some are the promising but as yet unproven commercial applications of work-in-progress, others are market explorations of profit-seeking educational opportunists, and, of course, a few are outright fraud.

Wisdom dictates we keep asking three questions about new methods and materials:

Do they work?
Do they last?
What gets put aside during the commercial courtship and honeymoon?

Question 1. Do they work? These days, education is politically hot, the economy is booming, new products are proliferating with the ping of popcorn in a microwave and new, reputable brain research is vaulting old barriers.

To make good judgments, we need to crystallize our understanding of how the dyslexias singly or in combination, can disrupt intake or output in the major functions of language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Language develops in ongoing spirals of growth. We need to measure its robustness at successive levels to know where to help.

Pre-schoolers need to develop such pre-reading skills as phonemic awareness, enjoyment of stories and recognition that pictures are symbols for objects. The latter lays groundwork for the later acceptance of letters as symbols for sounds and words, which are, in themselves, symbols for objects, people, or feelings.

Elementary students need to understand that words are made of sounds arranged in preordained sequences which are then visually represented by letters, that letters make words, that words make sentences and questions, that sentences and questions make paragraphs, that paragraphs are vehicles for intellectual journeys, and that intellectual voyages take us through kingdoms of our choosing.

Middle school children reinforce the links joining reading with comprehension, sorting, filing, retrieving, reasoning and expression. Reading to learn now that they have learned to read, they harness a multitude of systems: visual, auditory, motor, memory, emotional, and metacognitive, all the while tapping and increasing their conceptual inventories.

Building on these foundations, high school, college and graduate students, as well as those of us who have finished formal education but are still learning, absorb through listening and reading, express through speaking and writing, and organize ourselves and our thoughts through Executive Function. Delight and proficiency in language, which we might call "eulexia", requires intricate interplays among complex systems.

The disruptions and obstacles caused by the dyslexias seldom come singly. More often they are interwoven in idiosyncratic patterns. Thus, to hunt for single factor etiology and pursue single silver bullets is to aim for only a sliver of the target.

Looking at new and touted suggestions in addition to asking Does It Work, we must ask "work on what", seeing products for their purposes as well as their promises. Many promise the speed of Germanium guaranteed to make yesterday's Pentium look like snail mail. Some, akin to academic Olestra, promise the joys of fat without arterial damage, but may also cut off nutrients and cause uncomfortable side effects. Others, simply claiming to cover such structural elements as sound/symbol correspondence and syllabication, are a kind of verbal Viagra, which enhance mechanical prowess without embracing meaning.

Question 2. Do They Last? When I was in 8th grade, my math class learned how to "do ratio." Playing a string game of Cat's Cradle on an analogy grid, we swung the pair of outside numbers to the inside spaces. Shown the procedure, I could "do ratio" with the best of the lot but it was only a parlor trick I mastered to please my teacher and get a few good marks. I flunked the unit test because I forgot the stunt. A well informed teacher can teach a student to recognize single symbols or a collection of words but unless the information or techniques, old fashioned or electronic, are both useful and used they vaporize.

Question 3. What Gets Put Aside During the Commercial Courtship and Honeymoon? Students and adults alike have finite amounts of attentional energy, which we apportion as requirement demand. Each activity from soccer practice to zit inspection, takes its share. For many over programmed kids today, their shares are allocated (or overspent) before the day even begins. In deciding to commit energies in new directions, we need to budget for the time involved in the courtship of discovering and exploring what is new, the honeymoon of implementation, and then the reality of assessment. Bundled together, these are considerable. If they force a lapse from the tried and true, or an abandonment of what we know can work, we are taking a sizable risk on behalf of those very students who trust our judgment and our help.

Am I recommending we avoid new ideas? No. But let's not jettison previously successful methods, materials and training in favor of those which dazzle simply because they are new or because they have the inverted commercial appeal of being ultra-expensive. Three cautions:

Skepticism and personal experience bond at the notion that any single remedy works for every single person. My index of suspicion soars when a program promises that all children will progress from A to B in X time. After all, what sucker would buy an over the counter nostrum for thinner thighs in thirty days to look good in a one size fits all bathing suit?
My protective hackles rise at urgings to sign up today - while the supply lasts. Threat of scarcity is just an old marketing trick.
I resist coupling the words instant and miracle. There is no short cut, and miracles come in many sizes and tempos. Solid, independent access to the four dimensions of language is the real miracle, one, which unfolds gradually, circling in spirals of learning, interweaving and embracing mechanical skills, intellectual exercise and aesthetic awareness.

Belt it out and hawk 'em in? Grander, louder, richer, fiercer, fancier faster?

Caveat emptor.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the Dallas Branch of the International Dyslexia Association.

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